Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. They end by saying, ``We believe that the Federal minimum wage can be increased by a moderate amount without significantly jeopardizing employment opportunities. A minimum wage increase would provide a much-needed boost in the incomes of many low and moderate income households. Specifically, the proposed increase in the minimum wage of 90 cents over a 2-year period falls within the range of alternatives where the overall effects on the labor market, affected workers, and the economy would be positive.'' This is a conclusion of the 100 top economists in the United states. To bring a special perspective to this discussion, the gentlewoman from North Carolina would like to speak on the question of rural poverty and minimum wage is the way of life in most rural areas. People struggle to even make the minimum wage, so I am sure that whatever applies to rural situations and rural poverty is certainly involved in this whole discussion of the minimum wage. I yield to the gentlewoman from North Carolina [Mrs. Clayton].

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina for joining me. I will conclude now with a reading from the article that I have read sections from for the last 3 weeks. That is the article that appeared in the New York Times on September 3, the Sunday before Labor Day, by Lester Thurow. Lester Thurow is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his opening paragraph still applies as we go toward this budget reconciliation, this budget reconciliation which will corporatize the power of the corporations of America. The budget reconciliation will freeze us into situations where corporations are going to be paying even less of the percentage of the total tax burden than they pay already. The budget reconciliation is going to freeze us into a situation where nothing is being done or said about the more than $300 billion that we have already spent as taxpayers to bail out the savings and loans swindle. Nothing is said about trying to force the financial community to somehow repay some of those funds through some kind of tax policy, maybe a surcharge on banks and on accountants and lawyers, all of the people who were involved in that big swindle of the American taxpayers. Nothing is being said. The things that are not said are very important. Nothing is ever said on this floor about this great tax swindle, how over a period from 1943 to 1995, the tax burden of corporations dropped so dramatically in proportion to the tax burden borne by the families and the individuals out there. I agree with the Republicans. We need to tax cut. The tax cuts should come for individuals and families. At the same time, we need to get rid of the deficit and balance the budget by raising the taxes that are paid by corporations. That all takes place within an atmosphere that is described best by this paragraph from Lester Thurow's article in the New York Times. Again I quote: No country without a revolution or a military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp shift in the distributions of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of American men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have the majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing. I think that is a very profound statement. It very powerfully describes the situation that corporate America has generated in America. We can take some tiny steps toward correcting our economy, toward making our society more workable, by agreeing to increase the minimum wage by 90 cents from $4.25 per hour to $5.15 an hour. That is what is being proposed, and that is the bill before us sponsored by minority leader Gephardt. I am a cosponsor of that bill. The President has endorsed that bill. That simple step, I urge all Democrats to get on board and take that step. We only have a little more than half the Democrats who are now sponsoring that increase in the minimum wage. Is it any wonder that the Republicans are treating the increase in the minimum wage with great contempt? And they have stated that they will not allow a single, 1-cent increase, in the minimum wage. Justice demands that on this anniversary, 57th anniversary of the minimum wage law, that we go forward and understand that this is just a tiny step that every lawmaker, every decision maker in Washington can take, not only for working people but for our overall economy. Let us increase the minimum wage. Let us support the increase in the minimum wage bill now.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this bill takes us back to a time when the elderly expected to live in poverty sooner or later because of mounting health care bills they could ill afford to pay. Thirty years ago, with the swipe of a pen, President Johnson erased such fears of impoverishment, working with a Democratic Congress to overcome a hostile Republican minority. Our Government made a solemn promise to our senior citizens back then, but now the new Republican majority is proposing to break that contract with our seniors and make them live in fear once again. The $270 billion that the Republicans propose to cut from Medicare will buy them their $245 billion tax cut for the rich, $51 billion of which will go directly into the coffers of large corporations. It is sad that the Republicans' priorities are so upside down. If they were to reduce corporate subsidies by the same percentage as the budget as a whole, as called for in the budget resolution, they would need to take $122 billion over 7 years from the pockets of the Fortune 500 fat cats freeloaders. Obviously, that won't happen. Instead, America's seniors will pay $400 more in premiums each year by the year 2002. My home State of New York will lose $25 billion--$650 million from my district alone. And these figures don't even begin to tell the horror story that will result from the Medicaid cuts the Republicans will inflict upon the American people next week. Those cuts will be neatly buried in the budget reconciliation package, as the Grand Old Party removes the final shreds of dignity that the poorest of the poor have left. Deep cuts in Medicare will expel seniors out of nursing homes or bankrupt their families who will have to pay for $40,000 a year nursing home bills . Not only will seniors be forced to pay more money for fewer services, they also will have to give up their own doctors as they are herded into HMO's. Finally, many hospital officials have predicted that up to 25 percent of all hospitals could close their doors because of these Republican Medicare cutbacks. Mr. Chairman, I am submitting for the record a chart showing the billions of dollars that hospitals, nursing homes, and home health care agencies in my district will lose so that my constituents can see the negative impact that Republican Medicare and Medicaid cuts will have on the quality of health care services they receive. [[Page H 10376]]

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the amendment offered by the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling]. I want to express my appreciation to the distinguished chairman of the Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee, Mr. Goodling, and to the chairman of the Subcommittee on Work Force Protections, Mr. Ballenger, for their willingness to seek consensus with the ranking member of our committee, Mr. Clay, and myself on this legislation. I also want to acknowledge the efforts of three gentlemen from California, Mr. Miller, Mr. Berman, and Mr. Fazio. The efforts of all three gentlemen have been instrumental in the development of the amendment before us. The legislation before us is a compromise. Those of us who have sought to represent the interests of farm workers have had to make difficult concessions. Nevertheless, unlike the bill reported by committee, the amendment before us also contains important provisions to ensure that H.R. 1715 reflects the interests of farmworkers as well as growers. Among other provisions, the amendment provides for notification of farmworkers of their rights under State workers' compensation laws, tolls the statute of limitations while State workers' compensation claims are pending, and enhances statutory damages for certain egregious violations of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers Protection Act. I refer my colleagues to page E1943 of the Congressional Record of last Friday, October 13, in which the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling] placed a definitive explanation of the amendment before us. I fully support the amendment of the gentleman from Pennsylvania and believe this legislation now merits the support of my colleagues. I urge the House to suspend the rules and pass H.R. 1715. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller].

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from California [Mr. Fazio].

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from California [Mr. Berman]. (Mr. BERMAN asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the state of emergency continues. You have just heard some of the brightest and most decent human beings in the Congress make a long statement about Medicare and health care funding, and neither one of them admitted that Medicaid will cease to be an entitlement under their bill. Millions of Americans who are now covered right now by Medicaid will no longer be covered as a result of the legislation that they want to pass. They have not admitted that we are the only industrialized nation, we are the only industrialized nation other than South Africa that does not have universal health care coverage of some kind, are not moving in that direction. We were moving in that direction with Medicaid coverage for the poor, but they are going to take away the Medicaid entitlement. They say that we are going to be happy when we see the package. Americans will be happy when they see that less people are covered as a result of this legislation than were covered before. We are going backward and we should be happy. There is a state of emergency that ought to be recognized here. Nearly half a million dedicated troops were here in Washington yesterday. Unfortunately, they had no commanders to tell them about the state of emergency. Unfortunately, no one told them to concentrate on the place where the real battles are being fought. They do not understand were the real battles are taking place. They do not understand that the state of emergency directly impacts on their lives. They came, they are engaged, and I hope they will remain so. I want to discuss tonight how they must be energized and informed and directed to become a part of defending themselves [[Page H 10136]] against the big guns that are aimed at them and their way of life. Nearly half a million dedicated troops were in Washington yesterday. Nearly half a million young black males marched yesterday. But they were not told the nature of the war they are in and the danger they face, and they were not told how best to engage the enemy. I want to talk about how they must engage the enemy. First I want to just describe what happened yesterday. I want to use the language of some of the editorials and columnists who have commented on it. In the Daily News of New York City, the Daily News language I think was very sensitive to what happened. I quote from the Daily News editorial of today, October 17: The pain of generations of hope denied brought a sea of seekers to Washington. They came seeking solutions to the problems that divide them from the rest of the nation and from themselves. From the cold of early morning to the setting of the sun over the Nation's Capitol, they stood patiently, admirably, listening, waiting for words to heal them, to inspire them. Most waited in vain. But the power of their presence was so strong that it captured the attention of a nation. The power of their presence was so strong that it captured the attention of the nation. I think it is important to note that these dedicated young men who came, according to one poll that has been taken, came for many different reasons. Unfortunately, too few of them came to Washington, the capital of power, and understood that not only could they capture the attention of the Nation but they could do more. They could have focused in on some of the emergencies that exist right here in this legislative hall. We are going to have a vote this Thursday on Medicare, Medicaid. Nobody talks about Medicaid very much, but Medicaid is part of the package, too. There is going to be a huge cut in Medicare. That is horrible. We want to stop that cut. I do not think we have the votes. It is going to pass the House with that huge $270 billion cut over a 7-year period. More than $180 billion will be cut from Medicaid. And Medicaid will no longer be an entitlement. Right now it is an entitlement. In case people do not know what entitlement is, entitlement, in summary, is the Federal Government saying that you as a citizen of the United States have a right to this particular benefit if you qualify for it. It is a means-tested entitlement. It is not like the farm subsidies or cash subsidies in the farm program. No matter how rich you are, you are entitled to your cash subsidy for the growth of tobacco or peanuts or whatever. Medicaid is a means-tested entitlement. You have to profess you are poor. You have to prove you have great need before you can qualify for Medicaid. And Medicaid is as close as we have gotten in this country to coverage of the poorest people with some kind of health care plan. We are like South Africa in that we do not have any effort going forward to move toward universal coverage. So, even that which exists already under Medicaid will be taken away. And the only hope that is being held out is in the Senate where the great debate in the Senate is, they will leave the entitlement in place for pregnant women and children. They will leave the entitlement in place for pregnant women and children. They can get Medicaid. But the young black males and all the other poor males of America, you will not be entitled to Medicaid, no matter how you qualify. If you have an accident on your job, the likelihood is that you will be in a situation where you do not have health care coverage because so many of the kinds of jobs that these young black males will have or young males entering the work force are not jobs where you have a health plan. There is no health plan. So young males are in jeopardy in terms of not only accidents on the job, which there might be some relief in terms of workmen's compensation, but they are in jeopardy in terms of other kinds of illnesses. They are certainly in jeopardy in terms of the violence that takes place and I have seen by visiting some hospitals where they have convalescing people who are receiving therapy, large numbers of young men who are the victims of gun shots, gun play, and other kinds of violence that have partially disabled them, not only black men but white men also. Violence often causes young men to need a great deal of health care, very expensive health care, also, health care for people with great disabilities. So they have the guns aimed at them. Speaker Gingrich has said that politics is war without blood. So I do not hesitate to use the analogy of guns. Politics is war without blood. While we dillydally these few days, it is very slow around here, not much happened on the floor today. We had a few votes, we had a few suspensions discussed, but the guns are being maneuvered into position. Those guns will be aimed at the programs that have been put in place over the last 50 years, programs which are compassionate and programs which seek to help poor people, people who qualify because they are poor and they need help. We have all kinds of programs in America which help people. We have programs that help people that have been victimized by earthquakes, and they do not have to have means tests, does not matter who it is. People have been victimized by floods. There is no means test necessary to get government assistance. There are those victimized by drought or by hurricanes. There are ways to get help without means tests. So we have a humane society in many ways that extends help, but we are saying for people who are in dire need of help because their health is a problem, ``We are going to cut it off. We are not going to have the Federal Government stand behind that. We are going to dump it off on the States.'' And the States have already made it quite clear that there is a minimum amount that they are going to offer in terms of additional help beyond what the Federal Government provides at present. The big guns are aimed at the young men who were here yesterday. The earned income tax credit benefits poor families. It is a way to benefit working families. It is a way to reward people for working. We say we want people to go to work, and the earned income tax is one idea that brings to life the notion that people should be rewarded for work, but that is going to be cut, too. The gun is aimed at the earned income tax credit. The guns are aimed at job training. We understand there are a lot of people being thrown out of work. There is a change in the industrial situation, and companies are changing in terms of technology. Downsizing, streamlining is taking place. I have talked about this before, and the only answer to it is in this transition period maximize the amount of education and job training so that people can recycle themselves, be helped to recycle themselves, but job training has been cut, too. Job training has been cut by $5 billion by this Republican- controlled Congress. Job training programs cut, education programs have been cut, by $4 billion. The guns are aimed at the young persons who were here yesterday, and they did not hear anybody really focus on how important it was for them to understand and to rise up in very concrete, nonviolent, political ways to defend themselves. Summer youth employment; many of the youngest youngsters there qualify for a summer youth employment program which has existed since the Great Society programs were created by Lyndon Johnson. Every summer minimum-wage jobs are available for 25 to 30 hours, and youngsters who are given those jobs and given some kind of training and prepare for the world of work as well as help to earn, allowed to earn, some money to go back to school, and I know from direct experience many of them end up contributing to their very poor families from the meager amounts of money they make in the summer youth employment program. That is zeroed out. The summer youth employment program, it is not just for men. It is for women, too, for females, too. That is zeroed out. It will exist no more as a result of legislation passed by this Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The Senate, I think, have pretty much followed suit. I do not know of any effort to revitalize it. Title I, direct education program, Federal money flowing into the schools which have the younger sisters and brothers of the males who came here yesterday. Their nephews and nieces and their children [[Page H 10137]] are in those schools. Title I is the only Federal program that helps elementary and secondary schools all across the Nation, and we have cut that by $1.1 billion, which is one-seventh of the total amount. Those young men and their families are targeted by the guns that are aimed at them, and they did not realize it. We must get to them and make them understand that there is a state of emergency and they must be involved in the fight to reverse this state of emergency. Their survival is at stake. The crime prevention programs that were passed in the last Congress are on the chopping block. There is no more crime prevention of any significance in the bills that were passed by the Republican-controlled Congress. There are more prisons in greater amounts, and there are harsh regulations which force prisons to focus primarily on punishment and not on rehabilitation, but the young men who were here yesterday were not told about these changes. Drug treatment is out of the window. Nothing of significance is going to happen with respect to drug treatment. The funding is no longer there. One in three black males now are somewhere in the criminal justice system, either in prison, on parole, or probation, or under some kind of court supervision, one in three black males in America. A few years ago it was one in four. When these statistics came out, everybody was shocked. One in four black males in America are in the criminal justice system somewhere. Now it is one in three. In a few years will it be one in two? There is nothing to stop us from moving in that direction. But not much discussion of that took place yesterday either. We have to deal with the one in three right here. There are bills on the floor in the next 2 weeks dealing with the prison system directly. The Sentencing Commission has recommended that we stop the discrepancy between the sentencing for people that have crack cocaine and those who have powdered cocaine because large numbers of blacks, females, and males, are being imprisoned for the possession of crack cocaine when more expensive and larger amounts of powdered cocaine, which are generally the choice of richer people, more affluent people, middle-class people, more white people; those persons are not sentenced in the same harsh way that those who have crack cocaine are. The Sentencing Commission has recommended a change, but the Republican- controlled majority does not want to allow that change to take place. The Sentencing Commission sees it as being the only just way to go, but that kind of justice is not accepted by the Republican majority control in this House. The men who came yesterday are in serious trouble. They are in jeopardy, and they had some sense of the fact that they are in jeopardy. But men everywhere are in trouble, and too often they do not know it. Large numbers of men are in trouble, large numbers of families are in trouble, and I hate to continue to be repetitive and quote this article by Lester Thurow, but it is the best summary. It drives straight to the heart of the matter that you are going to find anywhere. Lester Thurow's article that I quoted several times in the past month is an article which appeared September 3, in the Sunday, New York Times just before Labor Day, and he was talking about the state of the working man in the world, not just in America. That article began with a statement that no country without a revolution or military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp shift in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing. I read it because it needs to be read over, and over, and other again. Now here is some parts I have not read and emphasized before. Let me just tell you how Lester Thurow brings this all together and focuses on families and focuses on males. Quote another paragraph that I have not read before although I have entered this entire article into the Record: Wages of white men are falling slightly faster than those of black men, and the young have been clobbered. Wages are down 25 percent for men 25 to 34 years of age. Median wages for women didn't start to fall until 1989, but are now falling for every group except college-educated women. The pace of decline seems to have doubled in 1994 and early 1995. This is Lester Thurow, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a recognized expert in this area of manpower, the economy, technology, et cetera. He has testified innumerable times before Congress in various committees. Let me just quote two more paragraphs: Thiry-two percent of all men between 25 and 34 years of age earn less than the amount necessary to keep a family of four above the poverty line. Thirty-two percent of all men between 25 and 34 years of age earn less than the amount necessary to keep a family of four above the poverty line. Now he is not talking about black males, just black men. He is talking about American men, 34 percent of all American men, black and white. To continue quoting Lester Thurow: Using the language of capitalism in today's economy children have shifted from being profit centers to being cost centers. To support them parents have to be willing to make large economic sacrifices. Now listen closely. Men have a strong economic incentive to bail out of family responsibility since, when they do, their real standard of living rises 73 percent, although that of the family left behind falls 42 percent. Listen carefully. I will repeat it. He is not talking about black males or black men only. Men have a strong economic incentive to bail out of family responsibility since, when they do so, their real standard of living rises 73 percent, although that of the family left behind falls 42 percent. To continue Lester Thurow, I quote: ``Whether it is fathering a family without being willing to be a father, whether it is divorce and being unwilling to pay alimony or child support, or whether it is being an immigrant from the Third World and after a time failing to send payments to the family back home, men all around the world are opting out. The Japanese seems to be the only exception,'' quoting Lester Thurow. Men all over the world are opting out under the pressure of not having enough wages to take care of families. Let me just repeat the last paragraph. Whether it is fathering a family without being willing to be a father, whether it is divorce and being unwilling to pay alimony or child support, whether it is being an immigrant from the Third World and after a time failing to send payment to the family back home, men all around the world are opting out. The Japanese seem to be the only exception. The men who came here yesterday came, and it was advertised as a day of atonement. From the very first this march, called by Louis Farrakhan, it was Farrakhan's march, spoke of a day of atonement for the sins that have been committed against black women and families, a day of atonement for the sins that have been committed. The men came to deal with taking personal responsibility, and that is very important. That is very important. Nobody should minimize the importance of men and women, human beings, taking personal responsibility. The problem is that in this world there is a government responsibility that is also very much tied to what happens to individuals and what happens to families, and to oversimplify, not understand, that you must change the way your government operates in order to be able to take care of your family, that it is child neglect not to be involved in the political process, it is child neglect and family neglect not to exercise your responsibilities as a citizen and try to change the policies of your government. That has to be understood. Medicare and Medicaid are not individual responsibilities, except the way they utilized, and the way individuals pay taxes into a system which helps to support Medicare and Medicaid. But you cannot have your family taken care of properly, with respect to health care, by yourself, no matter how much you reform and change your own lifestyle, which is highly desirable in many [[Page H 10138]] cases, and I am told that the men who came yesterday, the police have remarked that rarely have they seen such an orderly group, such a purposeful group, such a group that was intent on making a good impression, so great things will happen as a result of those individuals who came yesterday. I expect there will be personal changes that are very important. However, to ignore the Medicare emergency, ignore the Medicaid emergency, to have the leaders not really focus more on the earned income tax credit, the job training, the summer youth employment, the title I cuts, the crime prevention cuts, the drug treatment cuts, to not understand that the economy is shaped by forces that are beyond the control of individuals and families, and to not address the fact that Government policies at this point are at the root of the problems being faced by families and their inability to cope, in many cases. My evaluation of the Million Man March is mixed. Many people will wonder why I am going out in praise of the young men who came. I agree with the sensitivity expressed by the Daily News editorial, that their intent was magnificent and they came for good reasons. The overall impression is a good one, that made a Martin Luther King on the conscience of America. I am one of the people who did not support the march. I did not endorse the march. I did not participate. Today, after proclaiming that it made a good impression on the conscience of America, I still have no apologies for not participating. The young men who came, came for various reasons. I know, because I have talked to dozens of them over and over again, over the past 3 months. They have told me. I would summarize by saying the greatest percentage of them came in order to be a part of the positive energy of so many black males gathered in one place. They wanted to be a part of the positive energy. They wanted to bond with their black brothers. They did not have a political agenda, unfortunately. They also did not have an agenda to support Minister Louis Farrakhan in his endeavors. They were not interested in a philosophy of isolationism. They were not interested in a separatist philosophy. They were not interested in anti-Semitism. The great majority of them did not have that as an agenda. As a member of the leadership, I could not participate because I knew very well the danger of supporting an activity which is led by a minister, Louis Farrakhan, who refuses, basically, to change his agenda. Let it be clearly understood that I am pleasantly surprised and quite happy and optimistic about the fact that there was a moderate statement made, a moderating statement, a conciliatory statement made, about moving toward unity, about sitting down with people that the Nation of Islam has had differences with, about sitting down with the Jewish community. I think all of that should be applauded. I think it is a great step forward. Blessed are the peacemakers. All of us should look forward to wanting to move through those kinds of hurdles and get over bigotry, racism, and any kind of religious condemnation or anti- Semitism. We should all want to do that. I applaud that, and am happy that it happened. We have to see, however, how it develops. I did not support the Million Man March, but I respect those leaders who did participate. I consider myself a follower of Martin Luther King, who has taken a totally opposite approach to Minister Louis Farrakhan. Martin Luther King preached integration, not isolation, not segregation. Martin Luther King preached love, Martin Luther King preached moving forward in a positive way to overcome the difficulties of this society. Yet, when he died, he was planning a poor people's march on Washington, so economics was also a concern of Martin Luther King. That agenda that he had was awesome. Segregation was the major problem. He had gotten around, on to economics, and dealing with a change in the way America does business and the way it treats people, black people in particular, economically, only because he had had to go through such a rigorous agenda on segregation and the violation of civil rights, so it was not because Martin Luther King did not understand the need to address basic problems such as jobs, businesses, and sharing in the great American economy. I am a follower of Martin Luther King, the way of Martin Luther King, not a way of isolationism or hate or bigotry. There were others who were also followers of Martin Luther King who chose to join the march and participate, other leaders. I certainly think all the young people who participated are not in one category, and there is no question about their choice. I think the leaders who participated, there is a slight philosophical difference between me and them in terms of those who are followers of Martin Luther King and felt they had to participate and feel that there is a danger in following an isolationist leader, a leader who preaches hate, segregation, et cetera. I respect them, and I do not consider myself as having a monopoly on wisdom. I went through several stages in reaching the decision that I should not participate in the Million Man March. The Congressional Black Caucus considered whether it should endorse the Million Man March. At that time I led the opposition. I was in favor of issuing a statement by the Caucus which said: We welcome all marchers. We certainly want to encourage maximum participation in this political process. We welcome more letter writing to Congressmen, we welcome lobbying, we welcome more petitioning, and above all we welcome more demonstrations and marches. The Caucus would issue that agenda. For that reason we developed an 11-point program. I offered to the caucus an 11-point program which summarized what is going on here in Washington that all black people ought to be concerned about, which part of this war without blood affects them, which part of this effort to remake America impacts on black people. If you look at the list that I drew up, the 11 points, I think it is pretty well covered there. I made that argument and I lost. The overwhelming percentage of Caucus Members voted to endorse the march. We do not deal with the numbers and that and so forth, but suffice it to say an overwhelming percentage endorsed the march, and I felt I had to respect that decision. I certainly was not going to go out and campaign against a decision in the Caucus when I had participated in the debate, in the process, but I did tell people that I was not going to participate. When I was confronted with numerous young people who wanted to participate and other people who wanted to participate, I listened to their arguments and I came to the conclusion that the best recommendation was, to those people who wanted to participate and who had reasons for participating which had nothing to do with a day of atonement for the sins committed against black women and their children or families, they wanted to go for other reasons, of the dozens that I talked to, at least one-quarter of them wanted to go for religious reasons, and they identified with the Nation of Islam's religious agenda. Another one-quarter did have some political agenda. They understood that Medicare was under attack, that Medicaid was under attack. They understood that programs which had benefited the black community for years were about to be destroyed. They wanted to be a part of the march in order to protest that. At least half of them had no agenda, politically or religious. They wanted to bond with the million men who came. They wanted to be a part of the positive energy. Given that agenda, I respected it. I told everybody that if they go, they should go and carry their own banner, to say what they are in the march for, give out their own leaflets. I even offered leaflets to people which had the Congressional Black Caucus 11-point agenda. I came to that conclusion, and verbally made that statement to individuals who asked me. I made the same statement to many press people who called. However, it became obvious that the march was too big, the issues were too great, to just make verbal statements. I prepared a draft of a written statement, and was about to issue that draft last Thursday when several new developments took place that made me revise the draft. My draft, first draft, said that I understood from talking to young black males in my community, I understood from talking to black males in general, that large numbers of people would come and large numbers [[Page H 10139]] of people who could not come to the Million Man March yesterday wanted to come. I understood their sentiments, and I hoped that with the momentum of the occasion, I hoped that having that many young black males who felt that strongly about their presence being important in Washington, would make Minister Farrakhan rise to the occasion. I said in that statement that I hoped that he would renounce all anti-Semitism, all isolatonism and hostility toward the idea of one world, and the fact that the black community cannot exist alone. I hoped that he would abandon the philosophy which endangers the black community, that philosophy which makes it appear that somehow blacks can exist alone; no other group has attempted to exist alone, but somehow blacks can go it alone and be hostile toward traditional allies. We do not need allies. History hear clearly shown, a number of studies have shown, that minorities above all need allies. In order for minorities to survive, they must have allies. Studies have shown that no matter how good a minority may be in terms of measuring up to the standards of the majority, the majority will inevitably, if the minority does not have some protection, turn on the minority. It is not a matter of how good you are and how you measure up to the standards that are set by the majority, the minority is always in danger. The Jews in Germany excelled in many fields, so envy took over and they were in danger, as they were in the inquisition in Spain. There were a number of occasions where the excelling and the measuring up to the standards of a given society did not please the majority. They found some other excuse. There are blacks who think that what you have to do is measure up to the standards set by whites, get an education, raise your moral standards, do all the things that middle-class America says its values, and automatically the race problem will go away, automatically being a minority will no longer be a problem. That is not what history bears out. If you do that, you will be an object of envy, and the same racism will be there, because majorities behave in that way toward minorities, usually. Usually there is some demagogue who comes along and takes advantage of the fact that there is a minority, and they can use that minority and the persecution of that minority to galvanize the majority. Minorities are always vulnerable, for that reason. Either you are condemned and treated with contempt and labeled as inferior, as the Bell Curve does, and a number of other respectable scientists and philosophers are attempting to do, and that is the excuse for the oppression of the minority, or you are too rich, too talented, and taking too much of the resources, and therefore, you must be persecuted, so minorities are always in danger. Only a philosophy which says we are going to continually reach out for allies, we are going to continually try to be less of a minority, and continue to integrate into a larger society of what I call the caring majority. There are people in the world of all colors that we want to identify with, people in the world of all religions that we want to identify with. They label themselves. They become a kind of caring majority that must be joined. I have used the word ``barbarian'' here many times, and I have had people here recently tell, me ``You are as hostile and militant and uncompromising as some of the people you criticize.'' I use the word ``barbarian'' and I have defined it every time I use it. I say there are high-technology barbarians running the majority here. They are in control. I have defined it, not as the Romans defined barbarian. The Romans defined barbarian as anybody who was not a Roman. I have not defined barbarians in that way. That is a racist definition. I defined clearly, barbarians are people who have no compassion. They cannot empathize. They have no feeling for anyone except those in their immediate family or their immediate friends, but they cannot feel or have compassion for other people. That is a barbarian. I have defined high-technology barbarians as people who are very bright, people who know how to use communications, modern communications media, people who have computers and know how to use computers, people who have gone to the best colleges. Those are the people who I call the high-technology barbarians. It has nothing to do with color. There are black high-technology barbarians, there are white high-technology barbarians, there are Jewish high-technology barbarians, there are Protestant, Catholic high- technology barbarians. I define people by conditions they have control over. We are not born a barbarian. We can become a barbarian as a result of our own actions and our own attitudes or our own philosophy. Nobody is a barbarian because of the color of their skin or the religion they happen to have adopted. They are barbarians because of their attitudes. When they are public officials and in powerful places, they are dangerous barbarians. So Mr. Speaker, I want to make it clear that my use of the term is not a racist definition of everybody who is not black, or everybody who is not a Baptist, a Protestant, a Christian. I clearly label barbarians as those who have no compassion, those who would sit and make policies which disenfranchise from health care millions of people and not have any feeling or any compassion in the process. Those are barbarians. Let me just continue, Mr. Speaker. My first draft appealed to Minister Farrakhan to rise above his own prejudices, his own past agenda of isolationism, and segregationist strategies. I said in that draft that I hoped that he would do that. And then, 3 days before the reports began to come out about the charge of bloodsuckers; that Jews were called bloodsuckers. And when an explanation was sought, it was expanded to not only Jews but Koreans and Arabs and everybody in the black community who takes money out of the black community are bloodsuckers. It looked as if there would be no opportunity to have Minister Farrakhan on the podium rising above the occasion, so I rewrote my draft and did not make an appeal that would look stupid. I want to enter the entire statement for the record, Mr. Speaker. The statement is labeled ``Statement of Congressman Major Owens on the October 16 Million Man March sponsored by the Nation of Islam''. The statement was issued on Monday morning, October 16, 1995. It has an attachment, which is called ``The fight for the CBC and caring majority agenda''. The 11 points that I talked about before, in which I said the Congressional Black Caucus should put out as reasons to march, are attached, and I want to enter the statement in its entirety, but let me just read from the statement in a few areas to clarify what I have just said. My statement on the Million Man March begins as follows: In my activist bones there is something that makes me always yearn to support a demonstration or a march. Certainly, given the vicious unrelenting attack on public policies which benefit the majority of Blacks, there is an urge to applaud any non-violent action that makes the Gingrich hi-tech barbarians a target. As a manifestation of massive people empowerment a march on Washington by the Caring Majority could be very much in order and long overdue. But the October 16th march is not a Caring Majority march. Is Minister Louis Farrakhan's march focused on the current outrages of the Washington Republican majority? Is the anger of this march targeted at the pending legislation which will eradicate the entitlement of all poor children, including Black children, to receive Aid For Families with Dependent Children? Are the voices of the organizers denouncing the proposals to eradicate the entitlement for Medicaid? Are the idealistic youth headed for Washington being told that they should vent their rage on those who have cut billions of dollars from low-income housing, job training, education and other vital programs? Unfortunately in most march organizing circles the answer to these questions is ``No''. Despite my activist instincts I refuse to participate in the October 16th Million Man March because the agenda of the March is purposefully shrouded in contradictions and conflicting messages. As a leader and elected member of Congress I can not endorse and engage in an activity which has leaders who loudly call for ecumenical and united action, but who thrive on autocratic planning and decision-making. I can not agree to blind and unconditional unity with those slogans and platforms have consistently been reckless and divisive. I cannot support a major statement by a group whose continuing isolationist posture and separatist strategy pose a long-term threat to the survival of the African American community. [[Page H 10140]] Those who want to participate should not be denounced or even discouraged. I have talked to several dozen young men who are planning to join the March. One quarter of them clearly see the March as a religious affirmation experience. Approximately one half see it as an opportunity to ``bond'' with males and be a part of a massive generation of ``positive energy''. One fourth state that they are going in order to personally protest the ``political situation''. Given this obvious intense desire to participate, my advice to these young men has been: If you go carry your own banner and give out your own leaflets to state the reason you are there. This March is a golden opportunity to send a powerful message to America. But this March is Minister Louis Farrakhan's March. His picture has been on every recruitment poster. Farrakhan will determine who speaks and for how long on the program in Washington. This assemblage in Washington could have been Farrakhan's golden opportunity. It could have been a golden opportunity. I did not know at that time what would happen. Fortunately, nothing terrible happened in Farrakhan's speech, buy nothing was done to eradicate some of the policies that have been clearly set forth in the past. I am optimistic. I am willing to wait. I hope that the few things that were said in the spirit of conciliation will go forward. In another part of this statement I say that one problem that is a major problem relates to the fact that as the march progressed, I am quoting from the statement, ``As the march progressed,'' and this happened at a church in Brooklyn. The speech was made by this gentleman. ``As the march progressed, Khalid Muhammed continued to view the march as primarily a religious march with the date chosen to be as near the birthdate of the Honorable Elijah Muhammed as possible. For him this march is still primarily ``a day of atonement for the sins of black men against black women and their families.'' This was taken from a newspaper article which quoted a speech made by Mr. Khalid Muhammed in a church in Brooklyn. Leadership by an unrepentant Khalid Muhammed emphasizing the presence of Black men in Washington for the purpose of ``atoning'' for their sins is the one certain way to guarantee a dangerous and harmful message from this massive March. Speaker Gingrich and his hi-tech barbarians will welcome such a ``confession'' by Black men. This ``atoning'' validates the repeated Republican attacks on the Black community. If the sins of Black men are the problem, then 232 years of slavery and a hundred years of brutal oppression after slavery are not part of the problem. If the collective sins of Black men are the major problem, then government policies which have denied economic development to the great cities and generated long-term unemployment for Blacks are not a significant part of the problem. If the collective sins of Black men are the primary problem, then there is no need to fight the eradication of the entitlement of public assistance for poor children. There is no need to fight the proposals to end the entitlement to health care through medicaid. If sin is the primary problem then government policies and actions have almost no role to play in the struggle to rebuild African American Communities. Sin is the province and responsibility of religions, ministers, churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and other similar groupings. Government only causes confusion and division when it mixes with religion. Not sin, but public policies, government laws, rules, regulations and actions must be the primary concerns of elected officials and other secular lenders. No one should ever underestimate the role of personal morality in human affairs. We know that individuals are ultimately the masters of their own fates. But it is the duty of government to facilitate human and family positive development. Government and public policies must always strive to remove as many obstacles to ``life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'' as possible. The Nation of Islam should not oversimplify the problems of our complex society and allow those in power to wash their hands and forget the problems they have created. Instead of the Congressional Black Caucus endorsing a primarily religious march which had a planning process and an agenda which the Caucus could not influence, I urged the members of the CBC to issue its own agenda for action and invite all interested groups to march and fight for this Caring Majority Agenda. In the final analysis time, intellect and energy spent denouncing the actions of others represent resources not being most effectively used. Let us leave the Nation of Islam to crusade with its religious focus on sin. It is for us, the Caring Majority, to define ourselves not merely with words but the mass actions. From coast to coast, throughout this nation, Manifestations of Empowerment must be organized by the Caring Majority with high visibility, and a powerful focus. With representatives from both sexes, all races and ethnic groups, all religions and creeds; in unison with all who care about the expansion of freedom, jobs, justice, and health care, the Caring Majority must move beyond October 16th and seize the initiative. And, as a climactic statement to those in Washington who want to ``remake America'' for the convenience of an oppressive elite minority, the Caring Majority must convene its own assembly of one million persons on the mall in Washington. We shall overcome! The important thing is now that almost a half million young black males were engaged. I hope they stay engaged. There were some positive things that were recommended by Minister Farrakhan. He told them to go back and join organizations, join churches, adopt one person in jail, register eight voters, pledge not to commit violence themselves against anyone, pledge not to strike women, pledge not to dishonor women. Mr. Speaker, I think those were agendas for returning that are important. The most important agendas, however, have still to be supplied. Elected officials, whether Congressmen or city councilmen, assembly persons, State Senators must supply that agenda. We must enter the battle for the minds of our young males. They are engaged, we must guarantee that they remain engaged in a constructive way. We must guarantee they understand that a state of emergency exists. It is a political problem, and they must step forward to deal with that problem. The full text of the statement is as follows: Statement of Congressman Major R. Owens on the October 16 Million Man March Sponsored by the Nation of Islam In my activist bones there is something that makes me always yearn to support a demonstration or a march. Certainly, given the vicious unrelenting attack on public policies which benefit the majority of Blacks, there is an urge to applaud any non-violent action that makes the Gingrich hi-tech barbarians a target. As a manifestation of massive people empowerment a march on Washington by the Caring Majority could be very much in order and long overdue. But the October 16th march is not a Caring Majority march. Is Minister Louis Farrakhan's march focused on the current outrages of the Washington Republican majority? Is the anger of this march targeted at the pending legislation which will eradicate the entitlement of all poor children, including Black children, to receive Aid For Families with Dependent Children? Are the voices of the organizers denouncing the proposals to eradicate the entitlement for Medicaid? Are the idealistic youth headed for Washington being told that they should vent their rage on those who have cut billions of dollars from low-income housing, job training, education and other vital programs? Unfortunately in most march organizing circles the answer to these questions is ``NO''. Despite my activist instincts I refuse to participate in the October 16th Million Man March because the agenda of the March is purposefully shrouded in contradictions and conflicting messages. As a leader and elected member of Congress I can not endorse and engage in an activity which has leaders who loudly call for ecumenical and united action, but who thrive on autocratic planning and decision-making. I can not agree to blind and unconditional unity with those whose slogans and platforms have consistently been reckless and divisive. I cannot support a major statement by a group whose continuing isolationist posture and separatist strategy pose a long-term threat to the survival of the African American community. Those who want to participate should not be denounced or even discouraged. I have talked to several dozen young men who are planning to join the March. One quarter of them clearly see the March as a religious affirmation experience. Approximately one half see it as an opportunity to ``bond'' with males and be a part of a massive generation of ``positive energy''. One fourth state that they are going in order to personally protest the ``political situation''. Given this obvious intense desire to participate, my advice to these young men has been: If you go carry your own banner and give out your own leaflets to state the reason you are there. This March is a golden opportunity to send a powerful message to America. But this March is Minister Louis Farrakhan's March. His picture has been on every recruitment poster. Farrakhan will determine who speaks and for how long on the program in Washington. This assemblage in Washington could have been Farrakhan's golden opportunity. Minister Farrakhan could have used this platform to truly unify Black America by endorsing the ideals and principles which place the African American community on the very highest moral ground. Farrakhan could have wiped out the past and taken a great leap forward by following the example of Nelson Mandela and denouncing all racism, sexism, anti- semitism and other religious bigotry, homophobia, prejudice, immigrant bashing and oppression of the poor. A pledge to cleanse anti-semitism from the Nation of Islam's literature, videos, radio and television scripts would have constituted [[Page H 10141]] a dramatic first step toward the rising of a new sun of unity in the firmament of the Black community. The doors would have been opened wide for the full embracing of our allies among all ethnic, religious, national and economic groups. The Nation of Islam, in unison with the African American Community, would have been able to assume its rightful place as a critical part of the greater Caring Majority. This March offered a golden opportunity for Minister Farrakhan. But the speeches within the last forty eight hours have indicated that he has chosen to trample on this option for conciliation. Basic steps to establish an environment which rejects bigotry and anti-semitism have been rejected. Farrakhan's speeches trumpeting the charge of ``bloodsuckers'' has grown more shrill. At the same time that Black college professors are working to prepare a more detailed political manifesto, Minister Khalid Muhammad, one of the nation's crudest and most notorious anti-semites, has been given the pivotal role of instructing the young Marchers. As the march progressed, Khalid Muhammed continued to view this March as primarily a religious one with the date chosen to be as near the birthdate of the Honorable Elijah Muhammed as possible. For him the March is still primarily ``a day of atonement for the sins of Black men against Black women and their families''. Leadership by an unrepentant Khalid Muhammed emphasizing the presence of Black men in Washington for the purpose of ``atoning'' for their sins is the one way to guarantee a dangerous and harmful message from this massive March. Speaker Gingrich and his hi-tech barbarians will welcome such a ``confession'' by Black men. This ``atoning'' validates the repeated Republican attacks on the Black community. If the sins of Black men are the problem, then 232 years of slavery and a hundred years of brutal oppression after slavery are not part of the problem. If the collective sins of Black men are the major problem, then government policies which have denied economic development in the great cities and generated long-term unemployment for Blacks are not a significant part of the problem. If the collective sins of Black men are the primary problem, then there is no need to fight the eradication of the entitlement to public assistance for poor children. There is no need to fight the proposals to end the entitlement to health care through medicaid. If sin is the primary problem then government policies and actions have almost no role to play in the struggle to rebuild African American Communities. Sin is the province and responsibility of religions, ministers, churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and other similar groupings. Government only causes confusion and division when it mixes with religion. Not sin, but public policies, government laws, rules, regulations and actions must be the primary concerns of elected officials and other secular leaders. No one should ever underestimate the role of personal morality in human affairs. We know that individuals are ultimately the masters of their own fates. But it is the duty of government to facilitate human and family positive development. Government and public policies must always strive to remove as many obstacles to ``life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'' as possible. The Nation of Islam should not oversimplify the problems of our complex society and allow those in power to wash their hands and forget the problems they have created. Instead of the Congressional Black Caucus endorsing a primarily religious march which had a planning process and an agenda which the Caucus could not influence, I urged the members of the CBC to issue its own agenda for action and invite all interested groups to march and fight for this Caring Majority Agenda. (See Attached) For the sake of our families and our communities we must never engage in actions that are wasteful and counterproductive. But all Americans must understand that these are desperate times. The oppressive forces in control of the Congress have created a political state of emergency. In support of a Caring Majority Agenda all concerned groups must lobby, write letters, petition, demonstrate, and march! In the final analysis time, intellect and energy spent denouncing the actions of others represent resources not being most effectively used. Let us leave the Nation of Islam to crusade with its religious focus on sin. It is for us, the Caring Majority, to define ourselves not merely with words but with mass actions. From coast to coast, throughout this nation, Manifestations of Empowerment must be organized by the Caring Majority with high visibility, and a powerful focus. With representatives from both sexes, all races and ethnic groups, all religions and creeds; in unison with all who care about the expansion of freedom, jobs, justice, and health care, the Caring Majority must move beyond October 16th and seize the initiative. And, as a climactic statement to those in Washington who want to ``remake America'' for the convenience of an oppressive elite minority, the Caring Majority, in the Spring of 1996, must convene its own ``Tianamen Square'' assembly of one million persons on the mall in Washington. We shall overcome! Attachment Congressman Major R. Owens' Statement on the Million Man March fight for the cbc and caring majority agenda In support of the Congressional Black Caucus and Caring Majority Agenda we strongly urge all concerned groups to lobby, demonstrate, petition, write letters and march in these critical days ahead when the President will be negotiating with the Republican controlled Congress to save the nation from devastating budget cuts. Fight Aggressive Racist Attacks in All Forms: the attacks on affirmative action, school desegregation, set asides and the voting rights act. Fight government and unofficial acts which encourage sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, immigrant persecution or denial of basic rights to any group. Fight for Education as a national priority. The CBC Alternative Budget demands a 25 per cent increase in funding for education. President Clinton is also proposing a large increase for education. The Summer Youth Employment Program must also be funded. The Republicans have voted zero for next years Summer Youth Employment Programs. Fight to stop all cuts in Medicaid as well as Medicare. This nation still needs a National Health Insurance Program with universal coverage. Fight to end the monstrous cuts in HUD programs for low income housing. More than seven billion dollars have already been cut. That is already too much taken from the poorest families in the nation and the homeless. Fight to support the retention of adequate wages and pensions for the military, federal workers and other public service workers. Fight to increase the minimum wage, to guarantee the right to organize unions, to end striker replacement and to maintain safe and healthy conditions in the workplace. Fight to balance the nation's tax burden lowering taxes on families and individuals while forcing corporations to pay their fair share. At present corporations cover only 11 per cent of the tax burden while individuals and families shoulder 44 per cent of the tax load. Fight for cuts in defense which downsize the CIA, the overseas bases and wasteful weapons. Fight for an increase in foreign aid to Africa, the Caribbean, Haiti and other third world nations to assist with vital health and education needs. Fight for increase in funding for youth crime prevention programs and for a decrease in the billions being voted to build prisons. Fight and unite with the Caring Majority for the retention of Social Security as it is now. Stop moving the age requirement back and stop tampering with the COLAS. Fight for ourselves--fight for America Mr. Speaker, I want to close with a quote from the New York Times again. Columnist Russell Baker, a white man, felt very strongly about what happened yesterday. Columnist Russell Baker spoke his mind and I want to quote. I am going to enter the entire article in the Record, but I want to quote columnist Russell Baker from the New York Times' October 17 issue in the Record. So it was left to Louis Farrakhan to act. It is hard to say why without speaking realistically of the state of American politics, which has less and less to do with anything of consequence. Surely somebody of stature, Democrat or Republican, ought to have felt obliged to act long ago. It is hardly a secret that one of the country's most dangerous problems is the increasingly desperate situation of its young black male citizens. The portrait of a nation in trouble is etched in the statistics on black unemployment rates, black school dropouts, rising imprisonment of young blacks and killings of black youngsters by black youngsters. When a large portion of a nation's youth is being thrown away, or hustled into prisons, or lowered into graves, it takes a remarkable capacity for indifference to say that, well, it's a pity, but it's not our problem, it's a problem for the black community, black churches, black neighborhood leaders. It is hard to see how a multiracial nation can avoid damage if its leaders refuse to deal with its gravest problems on ground that they are distinctively problems of race. I am quoting from Russell Baker's article in the New York Times today. Everybody now knows about the problem of the young black male, and nobody with power has done anything about it. To be sure, President Clinton has gone into the occasional black church and made the correct sounds, but where is the highpowered, bipartisan, interracial Presidential commission empowered to recommend executive and legislative action? Have the leaders of the black community put pressure on White House and Congress to wake up? If so, the pressure has been as that of a feather pillow on the pyramid of Cheops. Who are the leaders of this black community, anyhow? Are there any, or are they just fictional creations of the media? Maybe the ``black community'' is fictional, too. Why shouldn't it be? After all, there is no such thing as a ``white community,'' no group who can sensibly be called ``white leaders.'' Maybe it is tired old racist thinking to keep talking about a ``black community'' complete with ``black leaders.'' Maybe it makes more sense nowadays to drop all that [[Page H 10142]] separatist language and say, ``There's nobody here but us Americans.'' The Clinton administration was not the first to do nothing about the desperate situation of the young black American. Doing nothing about it has been the unswerving policy of Presidents back as far as Richard Nixon. Not incidentally, it was Mr. Nixon's so-called southern strategy that rebuilt the Republican party on white hostility to the Democratic record on civil rights. Nor are the dynamic Newt Gingrich conservatives engaged with the problem. The Contract With America may ask us to assume this its blessings will lead one of these days to more secure childhoods, better schooling, better jobs, and a full dinner pail for young black men. But in the meantime, the Contract With America is explicit about the need to cut welfare. If a single Republican presidential candidate has spoken on the matter that produced the Million Man March, it has been a pianissimo performance. Let's not forget, either, that some kind of action is overdue. Some kind of action was overdue. There was a vacuum to be filled. Politics has declined into a game for overgrown boys and their high-tech toys. You win by finessing reality. So, finally it was left for Louis Farrakhan to act. It made a lot of people so mad they could spit. That often happens when good people have done nothing. End of quote by columnist Russell Baker, a white man commenting on the Million Man March. The full text of the article is as follows: [The New York Times, Oct. 17, 1995] He Filled a Vacuum (By Russell Baker) So it was left to Louis Farrakhan to act. It is hard to say why without speaking realistically of the state of American politics, which has less and less to do with anything of consequence. Surely somebody of stature, Democrat or Republican, ought to have felt obliged to act long ago. It is hardly a secret that one of the country's most dangerous problems is the increasingly desperate situation of its young black male citizens. The portrait of a nation in trouble is etched in the statistics on black unemployment rates, black school dropouts, rising imprisonment of young blacks and killings of black youngsters by black youngsters. When a large portion of a nation's youth is being thrown away, or hustled into prisons, or lowered into graves, it takes a remarkable capacity for indifference to say that, well, it's a pity, but it's not our problem, it's a problem for the black community, black churches, black neighborhood leaders. It is hard to see how a multiracial nation can avoid damage if its leaders refuse to deal with its gravest problems on ground that they are distinctively problems of race. This mistake was made by President Eisenhower 40 years ago and swiftly regretted, for Eisenhower was a serious man, serious about government's duties. He tried to avoid the multiracial reality of America in the Arkansas school desegregation crisis by arguing that race passions resided in the human heart, which could not be changed by government action. When Arkansas's white Governor Faubus proposed to let the white human heart express itself by defying a court desegregation order, however, Eisenhower used the Army to preserve government by law. Everybody now knows about the problem of the young black male, and nobody with power has done anything about it. To be sure, President Clinton has gone into the occasional black church and made the correct sounds, but where is the high- powered, bipartisan, interracial Presidential commission empowered to recommend executive and legislative action? Have the leaders of the black community put pressure on White House and Congress to wake up? If so, the pressure has been as that of a feather pillow on the pyramid of Cheops. Who are the leaders of this black community, anyhow? Are there any, or are they just fictional creations of the media? Maybe the ``black community'' is fictional, too. Why shouldn't it be? After all, there is no such thing as a ``white community,'' no group who can sensibly be called ``white leaders.'' Maybe it is tired old racist thinking to keep talking about a ``black community'' complete with ``black leaders.'' Maybe it makes more sense nowadays to drop all that separatist language and say, ``There's nobody here but us Americans.'' The Clinton Administration is not the first to do nothing about the desperate situation of the young black American. Doing nothing about it has been the unswerving policy of Presidents back as far as Richard Nixon. Not incidentally, it was Mr. Nixon's so-called ``Southern strategy'' that rebuilt the Republican Party on white hostility to the Democratic record on civil rights. Nor are the dynamic new Gingrich conservatives engaged with the problem. The Contract With America may ask us to assume that its blessings will lead, one of these days, to more secure childhoods, better schooling, better jobs and a full dinner pail for young black men, but in the meantime it is explicit about the need to cut welfare. If a single Republican Presidential candidate has spoken of the matter that produced the Million Man March, it has been a pianissimo performance. Let's not forget, either, the fierce and forbidding tetchiness of many black people, which discourages whites from discussing the problem. It is understandable that a politician might ignore the subject entirely when he fears that getting involved may earn him the epithet of``racist.'' Some kind of action was overdue. There was a vacuum to be filled. Politics has declined into a game for overgrown boys and their high-tech toys. You win by finessing reality. So finally it was left for Louis Farrakhan to act. It made a lot of people so mad they could spit. That often happens when good people have done nothing.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, further reserving my right to object, I rise in support of the unanimous-consent report. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I would ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling] to explain his request.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, movement toward universal health care coverage was the centerpiece of the Clinton health plan during the 103d session of Congress. Concern with the achievement of that ideal generated great complexity in the proposal prepared by the administration. It was a noble plan in pursuit of a most compassionate purpose. Among the industrialized nations our Government stands almost alone in its refusal to sponsor universal health care coverage. In this 104th Congress the majority has chosen to catapult our American civilization further backward and away from the health care coverage of the poor provided by the Medicaid entitlement. To end the provision of health care for the poorest Americans would be a barbaric act. Nevertheless the plan for this heartless public deed is going forward. If the Republican health care bill is passed thousands of Americans who now have health care coverage will lose it. The Republicans are giving notice to the uncovered that when the Declaration of Independence declared that all men have a right to ``life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'' it did not mean them. This mean and extreme position cannot be accepted. The tree of life must be allowed to bloom for every human soul. Attached is a summary of the notice that the Republicans are sending to the uncovered. Republican Notice to the Uncovered Health and happiness The majority can pursue But the tree of life We won't let bloom for you The medicine Modern miracles make Not available for your sake A dose of penicillin Cost less than a penny With no HMO You don't get any Why should the government Pay everybody's doctor bills Only the evil poor Contract expensive ills Drugs cost dollars The uncovered can't pay On this beautiful earth Not everybody Is scheduled to stay Health and happiness The majority can pursue But the tree of life We won't let bloom for you Your days of strife Our policies renew O say can you see Your liberty to die free From heavenly hospitals Mothers hustle your Discharged babies home quick Abuse will be charged If you let them get sick For the elderly It is wise to stay well Unregulated nursing homes Will be harder than hell Health and happiness The majority can pursue But the tree of life We won't bloom for you.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin where the last speaker left off. I think that it is important to note that America is not a spectator democracy. Americans should participate. Americans should be engaged in the process of deciding our own faith. We have a Constitution which allows us to do that. We are not helpless victims. We should not sit by. We should participate. We need more demonstrations. We need more writing of letters to Congressmen. We need more petitions. We need more marches. Whatever is possible to participate in, we should do that. Action is needed now. I think it is important also to note that the first participation of Americans should be in terms of the dialog. Let us engage in the dialog. Let us listen to what we hear. Let us analyze it. One of the great things about seniors, and I like to be around seniors because senior citizens have lived for some time and experienced a great deal. I am not too far away from that myself now. When I was very young, I always liked to be around senior citizens. They know so much more than the rest of us. They are always so much more interesting to talk to and listen to. You cannot put much over on senior citizens. I do not think the salesmen we have heard this morning will be able to put much over on senior citizens. I do not think the sales package of the Republican majority will put that much over on senior citizens. Senior citizens will listen and ask themselves the question, how is it that the Republican majority in their plan makes such a great deal about eliminating fraud, when at the same time, they have recently made a deal with the doctors and the medical establishment, the perpetrators of the fraud, to endorse their plan? Why are the doctors so happy? What is contained in the deal that was made between the AMA and the medical establishment and the Republican majority which makes them so happy? Surely they are not agreeing to a program which is going to make them more accountable. Who is responsible for the excessive costs? The medical establishment. Who is responsible for the fraud and the waste? The medical establishment. How can you say that to a senior citizen who has seen a number of things happen in their lives? They have seen the hustlers and seen the swindlers come and go. No senior citizen would go out to buy a used car without thoroughly checking it out and having somebody with them who knows a lot about cars. No senior citizen would buy a new car without checking it out. There are a number of things you do, because you are old enough to know better. So check out the proposition that fraud and waste will be eliminated in the Republican majority plan, and the Republican majority made a deal with the doctors. How can those two things be the same? The doctors, the medical establishment, are the people responsible for the fraud and the waste, certainly the fraud. Last year when the Clinton administration's plan was on the table, I proposed a number of times that we have a one-tenth of 1 percent set aside of all the money appropriated to establish consumer advisory committees, patient advisory committees. The people who are in the plan should at least have one-tenth of 1 percent of the total amount of money so they can maintain an organized advisory committee made up of the people receiving the service. Nobody would support that plan. Nobody would support that plan. If you do not have that kind of organized plan built in to defend yourself against fraud, I do not suggest to any senior citizen, and I do not think any senior citizen would be foolish enough to turn their doctor in. I heard the proposition that you get a reward, you get a bonus for turning your doctor in for fraud. If you turn your doctor in, be sure you get another doctor. I think I can tell senior citizens, if you turn your doctor in, do not go back to him. If you turn two or three doctors in in the same city, they are going to blacklist you. I do not advise you to follow that route, period. And I do not think most seniors would be dumb enough to get involved in a situation where the people responsible for their lives, they are reporting fraud on. That is not enough. If you want to deal with fraud in health care, you need a better apparatus to do it. Do not tell senior citizens to buy that. Do not make comparisons with the Clinton plan. Let us engage. Let us remember, what did the Clinton plan try to do last year? What was the administration's primary aim? The primary aim was to get universal health care coverage, not just to deal with Medicare. Medicare, Medicaid, it was understood that the programs had to be refined, that there was some waste, that it is possible to make it more efficient and more effective. And in order to get the money needed to extend the coverage and to have more people covered, we would do that. The noble purpose of the Clinton administration plan is not one of the purposes and goals of this Republican health care plan. They are dumping the coverage. Less people will be covered because they are saying that Medicaid should no longer be an entitlement. They did not talk about that. There is a health care plan which includes more than Medicare; it includes Medicaid also. Medicaid will no longer be an entitlement. You will not be able to get Medicaid, which means seniors are in great jeopardy. Those who spend all their resources as a result of a very serious long-term illness will not be able to fall back on Medicaid and go into a nursing home and deal with a long-term convalescence because it will not be there without the Medicaid entitlement. They are going to take away the responsibility of the Federal Government to provide for the poorest people, the health care. That is a great step backward from the Clinton plan that was on the table last year. It was called too complicated, too complex. It was more complicated because of the fact it tried to do more. It tried to address the problem of our civilization that we must be ashamed of. American civilization is the only industrialized nation in the world which does not have universal health care coverage. By universal, I mean it is moving toward the coverage as many people as possible. Some have 96 percent. Canada may have 98 percent. But the idea of universal coverage is there in most of the industrialized nations of the world. Only South Africa is an industrialized nation that has no universal health care coverage. So we are trying to move in that direction. This plan abandons it completely. In the Republican health care plan, there is no attempt to move toward universal coverage. In fact, there is a headlong gallop backward toward less coverage by denying the Medicaid entitlement. So we are in serious trouble. I also hope that everybody who heard the previous discussion will use their faculties and engage and go back and look at a little recent history and know that the biggest felony in America was already committed. In the future you might say to saddle our children, our grandchildren, with bills that are difficult to pay in the future. You may call that a felony, but I think that is quite farfetched. That is going way out. We have had the worse felony in the history of America take place right before our eyes. It is called the savings and loan swindle. Some of the gentlemen who are talking, certainly the one in the well, knows the history of the savings and loan debacle very well. Never before in the history of civilization has there been a swindle of the magnitude of the S&L swindle, where the taxpayers in America were made to pick up a bill of $250 billion, by the most conservative estimates. It is conservative, and it is not settled yet, because it is still going on. It might be $300 to $400 billion that the taxpayers [[Page H 10061]] have to put out to clean up the savings and loan swindle. Never before in the history of civilization have so many stolen so much from so many and gotten away with it with so few prison terms, never before. So the savings and loan association swindle is the biggest swindle in the history of mankind. Newspapers like the Washington Post and some others never seem to quite get the time or the space to deal with the magnitude of that swindle. The party that now proposes to cut Medicare by $270 billion over a 7- year period has not dealt with the fact that we still have a $250 to $300 billion bill that we maybe ought to try to collect. The taxpayers of America maybe ought to say to the savings and loan associations that do exist now, to the accountants that were part of the conspiracy, to the lawyers for the banks that were part of the conspiracy, that they all pay a surcharge until that $250 to $300 billion is paid back. The great swindle has taken place already. The greatest felony in the history of civilization, has taken place right before our very eyes, and very little is being done about it. Finally, I want to address myself to the fact that everybody who hears should engage and listen and question and ask the question, is the Medicare system about to go bankrupt? You have heard them quote the trustees, and they have given you the names of the trustees, Shalala, people within the Clinton administration. Why do you not go and ask Donna Shalala, Mr. Rubin, why do you not go and ask them, is the system in danger of bankruptcy within 7 years? Since they are being quoted, listen to their answer. they said so already. You have a problem of about $90 billion, $89 to $90 billion over the 7-year period. It was assumed that, if you make the system more efficient, if you weed out the waste and the fraud, you could achieve the savings of that $90 billion over a 7-year period without draconian cuts in the benefits, without tremendous increases in the premiums. So listen to their dialogue and take it a little further. Go ask the trustees. Go ask them, do you have to make this $270 billion cut? And also the $270 billion, how does it relate to the tax cut that the Republicans are proposing, which is $240 billion? Let us listen. Americans, we are not spectators, we do not have to be witnesses. We can do things. We need action. That is what I want to talk about today. We need people to understand that, if you sit still and watch this as a spectator, the President as a Democrat against the Republican controlled Congress, and we wait for the great train wreck situation to evolve to its climax, you will be derelict in your duty as Americans. You owe it to all of us, we elected officials have to do our job and we have not done it well and should find new ways to do it better. Even Democrats in the majority are going to have to find a way to deal with the fact that a Republican controlled Committee on Ways and Means will be on the floor with a bill which will have a closed rule. As Members of Congress, we have to vote it up or down, but we cannot have an opportunity to let our constituents know where we stand and offer some alternatives and go on record for the alternatives. That will not be the case. We have to find a way to deal with that, but that is another discussion for another time. We need action now. Every American should ask themselves the question, what am I closest to, what can I do? My vote is not enough. I have an opportunity to vote every 2 years for Congress. I have an opportunity to vote every 4 years for the President. That is not enough. I also have in the Constitution the first amendment, a number of other things standing behind me which allow me to do things beyond my vote. Action is needed. On the issue like education right now, let me make an appeal that you get involved in the fact that the education budget was cut by $4 billion, the Federal aid to education. You say that is a tiny amount. The Federal Government only puts in about 7 percent of the total amount for education anyhow. So why are you worried about that? Well, the cuts in the Federal dollars are followed by cuts in many States where the States are cutting the money available for education and the localities are cutting money. So we have an education crisis in most of the country. Certainly in the big cities we have a serious crisis. I am calling for some action now. I think that we should call upon all of the children in the schools, we should call upon all the parents. And beyond the parents and the children, we should call upon the church leaders, the business people. Everybody should let it be known that we think education is very important. The polls consistently show that education ranks in the top five concerns of Americans over and over again. No matter how other things fluctuate, crime may go to the top sometimes, health care may go to the top, education always comes out of the top five. There is a basic understanding, the folk wisdom of Americans is that education does come first. It is like the early slaves coming out of slavery. They wanted first of all to learn to read. Education had the primary value for the early free families. Education in the black community has always been a highly charged value. Confusion about how to get that education and obstacles being placed in the way of preventing the obtainment of the education has been a problem. But the value is there. It is certainly a value in the African-American community. It is an American value. Action is needed now, because the signal has been sent from Washington. The Republic controlled Congress has cut education by $4 billion. Head Start has been cut. The one program that sends the greatest amount of money out to elementary and secondary schools, the aid to the disadvantaged, called the title I program, the title I program has been cut by $1.1 billion. the summer youth employment program has been cut out completely, zero. We have an emergency. We ought to do something. So we are asking that everybody--this is an appeal that I made to the National Commission for African-American Education. It is an appeal I made to an assemblage of the Congressional Black Caucus education brain trust. It was adopted and made a resolution that November 15, which is right in the middle of open school week, open school week is a national phenomena all across the country. So on Wednesday, November 15, we are asking that everybody who cares about education will do something. Do not be a spectator. Bear witness. Go out to your local school. Everybody has a school near them. It is the nature of education in America that there is some school near everybody. Go to the nearest school and do something to let it be known that all citizens care about education. In the leaflet we have put out calling for overwhelming support for education on November 15, the national education funding support day, we have stated that you can participate in the following activities: Show up at your nearest school. Just show up and let your presense be a testimony of your support. This is the first and most important step. During the morning gathering at the school, spend 1, 2, 3 hours at the school. Do some upbeat things. Take some upbeat and positive action to demonstrate your love for children. Bring some pencils and papers and crayons if you are in a poor neighborhood to hand out to the children. Or bring chalk and erasers and supplies for the teachers inside the classrooms. If you are in New York City, they need chalk, pencils, erasers. We have a crisis in supplies in the great city of New York where we spend $8 billion on education. There is a crisis in terms of supplies and chalk. There is a crisis also in terms of they do not have places to seat children. At the beginning of the school year in New York, there were 8,000 high school pupils who did not have a place to sit. They have not fully solved that problem. So show up and do something useful. If the area around the school needs the rubbish and dirt removed, then bring some plastic bags and shovels and clean it up. Do something useful to help the program inside the school. Talk to the school administration, the principals. if it is not disruptive, ask what you can do to help inside the school. [[Page H 10062]] At the same time as you pass out information about PTA meetings, school board meetings, legislative budget hearings, citizen rallies, you should sign up volunteers to help with school trips. Distribute a list of names and addresses and phone numbers of all elected officials, especially those elected officials who are directly responsible for education. You should engage all participants who come by to register new voters and to make sure they are registered themselves. If you re in an area like the area I live in, where there are 150,000 people who are not citizens, you should certainly encourage immigrants to seek citizenship. These are legal immigrants. They can seek citizenship. Show them ways to do that. Certainly the parents of children in the schools who are immigrants, you should encourage them to seek citizenship. There are a number of ways on November 15, Wednesday, everybody can take action. You do not have to be a spectator. You can take action for education. You can deal with the fact that the President is going to be in negotiations with the Republican controlled Congress on the appropriations bill for education. There are a lot of items in there. We want him not to lose his focus, to understand that the American people care about education. Education is one of the top priorities. It is not enough just to believe that; you have to manifest it and let it be known. We have to engage in what is called a manifestation to your empowerment, a manifestation of your concerns. You are not only concerned but you want to let it be known, you are a voter, you are out there, and you want to do something about the problem of funding for education. I have just used education as an example. But there are many other ways in which we need to show that we are involved in this process. You have to believe that this is a turning point in the history of America. It is a turning point. You have to believe Speaker Gingrich when he says we are going to remake America; take him seriously. Whatever you may think of the Speaker, he is competent, he is a great organizer. He is probably the greatest politician that has come along in the last 20 years. When he says he is going to do something, take him seriously. The Speaker says we are going to remake America. He has a lot of bright people with him who believe that they can do that and are trying to do that. I think they are very bright, but they have no compassion. I have called them high-technology barbarians because of the lack of compassion. I will repeat it again. They are the smartest people you can engage anywhere, but they have no compassion; and therefore I think they deserve the label of high-tech. Barbarians. But they have to be taken seriously. The Speaker has said we are engaged in war without blood. Politics is war without blood. Politics is war without blood. If you are engaged in war without blood, then do not sit there and assume that you are on the sidelines, that civilians are not going to be involved. There are no civilians in the political war. Everybody is in danger. Everybody must understand that you must engage in the war. He has said it. This is war. Therefore, you must make plans to participate in the war. The allied forces must plan a defense against those who have mounted the attack. The Speaker has made it clear, he is going to remake America. We are mounting the attack. They hit the Nation on November 9, 1994, with a blitzkrieg. That blitzkrieg was very successful. They have taken control. They will march on. Allied forces must be united. Allied forces must understand they are in a war, and you must plan for the defense. Do not sit there and think that you are a civilian and you are going to escape. None of us are going to escape. We are all part of this war. They are going to remake America, and I do not think we need to remake America. I have said that over and over again. America needs to be improved. There are all kinds of ways in which we should strive to improve America. We do not need to remake it. We need a steady process of escalating improvement, but they are going to remake it. And they are not going to remake it in the interests of the majority. America is going to be remade, and they have made that clear in all of their actions since January 1995. Since January 1995 of this year, it has been quite clear that, no matter what the Contract With America says, the overwhelming aim of the Contract With America is to make America a place where the elite can survive conveniently without any problem in terms of taking care of the majority. A small elite minority will be survivors, and they will enjoy the fruits and benefits of a great American economy, and the rest of the people will be thrown overboard. That is clearly how America will be remade if we sit by and let it happen. We should not be spectators. There is a train wreck in process already. People have said, well, the great train wreck metaphor did not quite materialize on October 1. We passed a continuing resolution which will take us until the middle of November. The drama of a train wreck has been avoided. Well, the train wreck process has started. It is pretty clear that the Republican majority is not going to yield. They are moving headlong forward with Medicare, the rape of Medicare, as one of the things they are proposing to do, into the entitlement for Medicaid. All kinds of things are happening which make the train wreck inevitable. But recently it was announced that the Speaker and the majority in the House are contemplating sabotaging the train process, put a brick on the track and run away, not to engage. The train wreck metaphor always assumed you would have a situation where the President would veto the bills, the Republican majority in both Houses cannot override the veto, and therefore there would be negotiations at the White House. That happened once with George Bush. The negotiations at the White House would be between a Democratic President and a Republican controlled Congress. What the Speaker has recently indicated is that in his war without blood, guerrilla tactics are going to be introduced. They are going to put a brick on the track and run away. Congress is going to pass the bills, send them to the White House, and adjourn. I can think of nothing more irresponsible than that. But that is the kind of guerrilla action we have to look forward to. Why not? Because in the process of avoiding the dramatic train wreck, what has happened already? What happened with the continuing resolution? The continuing resolution that has been passed already reduces spending and moves toward the level of spending that the Republican-controlled Congress wants. Already we have downloaded, we are spending less, moving in that area. Why do they not try to negotiate another continuing resolution and also further download the situation and decrease the budgets of all the programs? That is what you call slow poisoning, a slow poisoning through the continuing resolution. Instead of attacking the victim with a knife and slashing him to death, you poison them quietly. The continuing resolution can poison all the programs that the Republicans do not want. The pain will be less visible. Most of this pain will not be felt until next October 17 anyhow. Some of it will be introduced, however, right away, through this poisoning process, the greatest most dramatic things in Medicare and Medicaid, the big programs. What we do now will take effect in the next fiscal year. So you have to keep in mind that the process is important right now because of the pain it is going to produce later on. Some of the pain will not come until after the November 1996 elections. That is not by accident. Certain cuts are programmed and scheduled so that the impact will be felt after the November 1996 election. Keep your eyes on the process now. Do not be a spectator now. Get up and act now. Write your letters now. March and demonstrate now. The train wreck calendar is in process. It is no less a problem than it was 2 months ago. Taxes, revenue, money, budgets, appropriations, that is the heart of the process of what is going on here. We do a lot of important things in the U.S. Congress. We should not minimize any of the things we do. What the Congress of the United States does affects the [[Page H 10063]] life, health, and welfare of people all over the world. It should not be minimized ever. But of all the things we do, at the heart of it are the processes which relate to taxes, revenue, money, budgets, and appropriations. That is at the heart of the process. My colleagues may wonder why I always come back to this discussion of the tax burden and the way the tax burden has been shifted over the last 50 years. I do not have my chart here today, but I had one last time which showed in graphic terms one of the great problems with America, one of the reasons why people who want to remake America are telling us that the good things will go bankrupt, they want to reduce school lunches because they are too costly, they want to reduce Medicare drastically, Medicaid, they want to end the eligibility. They have already ended the eligibility for Aid to Families With Dependent Children. Everything is going to go bankrupt, they say, because we have a deficit and it is possibly going to get greater and there are no more sources of revenue, no sources of taxes. They have labeled certain people as big spenders. As I said last Tuesday, one of the right wing groups has labeled me as one of the five biggest spenders in the Congress. I proudly accept that honor of being labeled a big spender by their standards, although their standards are quite flawed. I am the sponsor of a $60 billion bill. They have gone around and checked to see what the dollar figure is on the bills that Members have proposed. I am the sponsor of a bill which proposes to spend $60 billion for job training, for jobs for the stimulation of the economy, and $60 billion may sound like a lot of money. How dare anybody propose over a 5-year period to spend, over a period of time to spend $60 billion a year to revitalize the economy. That is a stimulus to deal with what I consider to be a transition periods that we are now in. We are in a transition period where the new technology is throwing people out of work, downsizing and streamlining and pushing people out of jobs and we need a stimulus. We may thing $60 billion is a great amount. The little nation of Japan, with 75 slightly more than 75 million people, has a package now going forward that is $90 billion a year. A stimulus package that is $90 billion. So a $60 billion proposal, I do not have the power to get it passed, but if we want to judge me on what I see as a vision, the vision of America I have, what I see as the remedies, then I accept that judgment. On the other hand, the flaw in this rating of big spenders does not take into consideration what a Member is against, the spending they are against. As I said before, Rush Limbaugh, who chose to highlight this on this show, needs some people who know how to subtract. Take all the programs and all the times I have spoken on this floor and all the amendments I have introduced to subtract from the Federal budget. Programs that I am against mount up into the billions of dollars. The F-22 that will be manufactured in Newt Gingrich's district of Georgia. Will cost us $12 billion over the next 7 years. I am for taking that one out. The B-2 bomber, over the life of its history, will cost us $33 billion. I am for taking the B-2 out. The Seawolf submarine, more aircraft carriers, star wars, the CIA. I had a very specific amendment on the budget to reduce the CIA budget by 10 percent a year over a 5-year period. If we assume the New York Times figure of $28 billion for the CIA and the intelligence operation is correct, then, over a 5-year period that $2.8 billion would amount to quite a bit of money that we could use to replace the $4 billion they took out of education, the $7 billion they are taking out of low-income housing. We could do things with that $2.8 billion per year over a 5-year period or, let us extend it to a 7-year period. The CIA has proven over and over again that not only is it of dubious worth, but it is also dangerous. The CIA recently revealed that they had a petty cash fund of $1.5 billion that nobody knew about in high places. The Director of the CIA did not know about the $1.5 billion. The President did not know about it. Nobody knew about it in high places. How much more do they have? How is the CIA able to have a $1.5 billion slush fund? That is what they admit to. I am sure it is higher. A $1.5 billion slush fund and nobody knew about it. I think one of our famous predecessors said when we have a million here and a million there, we get into the billions and it all starts adding up. A billion is a lot of money, ladies and gentlemen; $1.1 billion is the amount of the cut on the title I program. If they would just please give us, CIA, your petty cash fund, your unauthorized petty cash fund, give us your unauthorized petty cash fund to make up the $1.1 billion, we will let them keep the rest. I know what the deal is. I heard the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence say now that we know about that money, we have taken it back. How is it the Office of Management and Budget did not know about it? Office of Management and Budget specializes in cutting small programs. They cut out like library programs that acquire foreign language books in universities; they cut out little programs that train teachers; they are specialists in going through and cutting out little programs. To be small is to be dangerous in the Office of Management and Budget. How, Office of Management and Budget, did you ever let the CIA acquire a $1.1 billion slush fund? So the message is, if we look at the record of Major Owens in terms of spending, and we subtract all the things I have said we should stop spending for, including the farm cash subsidies that flow to places like Kansas to farmers who are making $400,000 and $500,000 a year, let us stop giving money to farmers that make more than $100,000 a year. That is a good cut-off point. They will not give me that kind of cutoff for the welfare recipients in New York, but for the welfare farmers we propose let them keep getting cash subsidies if they make $100,000 or less. No, no, we put that on the floor and it was voted down. Where was the Rush Limbaugh statisticians to figure that one out when that amendment, cosponsored by myself, was voted down? We could save a lot of money if the farm subsidy program were just limited to people making $100,000 or less. But this Congress would not tolerate that. It only got 47 the last time we put that on, 47 votes out of 435. Americans had better engage in a dialog. There is a lot of waste in government, and the places where they will not touch it are the places we should all be looking. Take a look at a recent report that was put out by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said congressional Republicans, I am quoting from the National Journal's Congress Daily, October 11, 1995, ``if the Rush Limbaugh researchers want to track this,'' October 11, 1995, the National Journal's Congress Daily. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said, ``Congressional Republicans in their budget cutting fervor are giving corporate subsidies a free ride.'' The study was based on the Congressional Budget Office report defining which Government programs or tax breaks constitute business subsidies and focus on tax appropriations and reconciliation proposals passed so far in the House. It found that for every dollar that this majority, Republican majority House, has reduced corporate subsidies provided by Government program, for every dollar they have reduced the House has increased corporate tax subsidiaries some other way by nearly the same amount, $1. So addition and subtraction. Do not let the Republicans play games with us. They have reduced some of the corporate tax subsidies, but for every one that they have reduced in dollar value, they have given the same amount in some other way. Therefore, a statement accompanying the study contended, ``Congress is achieving an overall reduction of only $6 billion, or less than 1 percent, in the $724 billion in corporate subsidies the Federal Government is slated to provide over the next 7 years.'' Let me read that again and put that down in this dialog that we have to participate in. Remember this figure that this Republican majority that is so intent on cutting Medicare by $270 billion, this Republican majority is [[Page H 10064]] only willing to cut the corporate welfare by $6 billion, which is less than 1 percent if we look at the total amount of $724 billion that the Government is slated to provide to corporations over the next 7 years. Herein is the problem. Not only must we cut defense programs, not only must we cut wasteful farm subsidies, weapon systems, and a CIA that is spending our money in a very excessive way; we must cut the subsidies that we are providing for corporations. ``This lack of progress,'' I am reading again from the report: This lack of progress in reducing the overall level of corporate subsidies stands in sharp contrast to the deep cuts that Congress is making elsewhere in the budget. If overall corporate subsidies were to be cut to the same degree that the Congressional budget resolution targets programs other than defense and Social Security, they would be reducing $122 billion over the next seven years out of the corporate subsidy budget. Let me repeat the figures. These are figures we should put in our private database and remember as we go through the dialog about where America is going and what money and funding will be available for programs that are worthwhile for all the people. Understand that the corporations are refusing, the Congress is refusing to reduce the subsidy for corporations, which now would be $724 billion over a 7-year period. They are refusing to reduce that in the same manner that they are reducing other nondefense programs. If they did that, we could save $122 billion over the next 7 years. Remember, as we listen to this dialog of the swindlers who want to take $270 billion from Medicare and they want to end the entitlement for Medicaid totally, the heart of this whole process is remaking America, is the question of who will get the money. Will the American majority, those in need, or the educational establishment in order to guarantee we have productive taxpayers in the future, will the places that will do the most for America be the recipients of the funds or will they give it to the Americans having the most, corporations making profits at a great booming rate? They are the ones who should be paying more; they are only paying 11 percent of the total tax burden, while families and individuals are paying 44 percent of the tax burden. Here is the time to correct it. If the Republican majority were sincere, if the salesmen who tried to sell us the $270 billion cut in Medicare as an effort to save Medicare, if they were to got to work on cutting the corporate subsidies, we would be able to lower the deficit at the same time, not make draconian cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and education, and still go forward with a fair tax system. Raise the tax burden, eliminate the subsidies, have the corporations carry more of the burden. That is the answer. Now, what will happen? They are going to make these draconian cuts and try to sell them to us by coming with a set of diversions. How will the Republicans try to get away with all this? How will they face senior citizens next fall at election time? How will they face the parents of children who have been deprived of lunches? How will they face the people who are sons or daughters of immigrants or people who are the fathers and mothers of immigrants, or people who are certainly immigrants themselves who have become American citizens? How will they get away with all this? The great massacre will be covered by diversions. They will have arguments on gun control to divert the attention of people who care about guns away from the fact that they are being robbed of an opportunity to get an education or to have a job retraining program when they are laid off. Large numbers of people in the working class care a lot about guns. I am sorry they do. The great majority of American people, 80 percent, want some form of gun control, and they can certainly care about guns and agree to the sensibility of gun control, but, no, they will divert us. They will be talking about guns and the needs to save America by having more freedom to use guns and less gun control. They will be talking about the Voting Rights Act being a threat to Americans, that if we draw districts in a certain way, that is un- American. Odd shaped districts have been drawn since the history of the country by both parties, and America has never suffered. They will be after the immigrants, yelling and screaming about the immigrants are causing the downfall of America. Well, immigrants have traditionally been a vital part of the American scene, and America is doing very well compared to most of the other industrial nations of the world. They will talk about affirmative action, affirmative action and a color-blind society. Again, I have talked about that in the past. Affirmative action is necessary, to correct past wrongs. We had 232 years of slavery, the greatest crime in the history of humanity, 232 years of slavery in America, 100 years of brutal oppression following that 232 years of slavery. We cannot expect the African-American population as a group to make up for all that lost time. There was a recent book on wealth, black and white in America, and one of the important conclusions of that book was that in terms of wealth versus wages African-Americans are coming closer and closer. Certainly middle class African-Americans who have an education are closer and closer to the wages of middle class whites, not the same but getting closer all the time. The gap has been closed over the past 10 years. Great advances have been made in terms of wages. But when we look at wealth, and wealth means more than wages, it means ownership of assets, when we have a home, we have a car, we have stocks and bonds, when we look at wealth, the gap is wider than ever before between middle class African-Americans and middle class whites. Why? The biggest factor in wealth is inheritance. What is passed down from one generation to another is the biggest factor. The biggest factor of home ownership in America is the fact that the mothers and fathers are able to give a young couple the downpayment on a house. And the biggest body of wealth held by average Americans is in their homes. So it is just common sense. If we had 232 years where your slave ancestors were passing nothing down, there was nothing they could pass down because they had nothing for 232 years, they are behind, and then 100 years of oppression after that where they had very little to pass down. Then they are not ever going to catch up, and nobody says they must catch up. But understand, the great disparity that has been inflicted on African-Americans is because of slavery, because of slavery, the greatest crime in the history of humanity, the obliteration I call it. The obliteration. It was an attempt to obliterate the humanity, the soul, of a set of people so that those people would be a more efficient beast of burden. They would be more efficient in industry, mostly the agricultural industry, but efficient machines, efficient beasts of burden. It was an attempt to obliterate them and take away their humanity. Do not let them have families, do not treat them like human beings. Sell them as if they were commodities. That great crime of slavery cannot be just ignored. It is a vital 232 years of American history, 232 years. I have talked about slavery before and people have gotten upset. I have talked about the great Atlantic crossing, the number of people lost, and the figures I used aroused Rush Limbaugh researchers, and I conceded the point that I had made a mistake, quoted in the New York Times, which itself was quoting a sort of folk history that is prevalent in the black history about the numbers. It is like Paul Bunyan exaggerating the numbers. The fact is that millions were lost crossing the Atlantic in the slave trade. Millions were lost crossing the Atlantic, and millions were lost in the brutality of the slave industry in America. If we want to quibble like some of the Nazis still want to quibble about the holocaust, it was not 6 million, they want to talk about 5\1/ 2\ million, or 4 million. If we want to quibble, go ahead, but I say to those who are interested in the conversation and the dialog, just mourn for the first million. Mourn for the first million. Everybody will concede there were at least a million lost crossing the Atlantic. Everybody will concede there were at least a million lost through the brutality of the slave trade in America. In North America, the slave trade was kind compared to the slave trade [[Page H 10065]] in the Caribbean Islands and the slaves trade in Brazil and South America. The practice in Brazil and South America was to work the slaves until they worked them to death. They did not have breeding farms. They did not attempt to keep the slaves alive and get offspring from them like they did with their livestock. They just worked them to death and brought in more, so the numbers will never be known. So anybody who thinks they can count the numbers of slaves that came into the New World by looking at British ships and British accounts and assuming this whole thing was organized and regulated is not naive; they are dishonest. We cannot regulate savings and loans and banks in America to keep them from swindling taxpayers. How do we think in those days there was any kind of real regulation of a slave trade that was pumping money into the coffers of some of the most respected people in the European nations? So let us not quibble about the numbers, Rush Limbaugh and your researchers. Let us not quibble about the numbers. If we care about the subject, than just mourn for the first million. Mourn for the first million slaves who were treated like animals and died like animals. Mourn for all of those who were thrown into the breeding pens and forced to breed like animals. Mourn for all of those who died horrible deaths as a result of being under masters that wanted to work them to death. They wanted as much as they could get out of them until they dropped dead. So there is plenty to mourn for. Do not make a joke out of slavery. When we make a joke out of slavery, we are endangering ourselves. I think of your posterity, your children and your grandchildren, may not appreciate it. Do not make a joke of the greatest crime ever in the history of humanity, the attempt to obliterate the souls of millions of human beings. We are not spectators, as I said before. We do not have to stand by and watch this diversion. This diversion is going to take place. Gun control, affirmative action, voting rights, immigrants, that diversion is going to take place. We know it will take place, so let us prepare ourselves. Let us get our allied forces together. The constitution provides us with the weapon. We can demonstrate, we can petition, we can march. Do not sit and mourn about somebody else's march. Let us make our own march. The caring majority ought to be marching, the caring majority should get ready at every level. What I call manifestations of empowerment should be taking place at every level all across America. What is a manifestation of empowerment? It is an action like the one I just proposed for Wednesday, November 15. Come out, wherever you are, and go to a public school. Let it be known we care about education. That is a manifestation of empowerment. In every way the health care problem is not just a national problem. They are threatening to sell the hospitals in New York City. Some of the best hospitals in the world that have great reputations, that have served people for several generations are now to be sold and made into private hospitals. So we are saying in New York come out on a given Sunday, let us have hospital appreciation Sunday. Let all the churches bring their congregations from church to the hospitals and let us surround them and let it be known that people care about their hospitals, people care about health care in various ways in cities, in towns. Get people to moving and do things. We cannot wait until November 1996 and think we can deal with the problem then. Get people moving now. Mr. Speaker, this is nothing new. I have an action paper, which I call ``The Third Force.'' It is a draft paper, and I may change the name and call it ``The Caring Majority Agenda,'' but I put it out in June and I have circulated it to colleagues of mine in the Congress and in the Congressional Black Caucus, and to members of the Progressive Caucus, I have circulated it to labor leaders and other elected firms and I have said we have to get moving. We cannot wait until November 1996, let us move now. I will quote from my action paper. Republican arrogance and impatience have clearly framed the parameters of the battleground. The issues and causes around which we must mobilize are clearer now than ever before. The questions are: Is the United States of America a nation of the rich and powerful only? Shall the great majority of the population remain immobile while it is reduced to a status of urban servants or suburban peasants? Shall the resources of the richest Nation that has ever existed in the history of the world be used primarily to benefit an oppressive elite minority? Or shall public policies be shaped to share our real wealth and spread the benefits of our collective labor, our hard won peace, and the exploding advances of our technologies? Shall we share it for everybody? The oppressive elite majority presently in charge of the Congress has thrown down the gauntlet. An assumption has been made that the majority vote in the Congress and the financial contributors to these Members of Congress are the only ones who have the real power to decide the basic questions facing our Nation. A mistaken assumption has been made that until 1996, only the votes on the floor of Congress shall decide the fate of America as it moves towards the year 2000. It is a sacred duty of the caring majority to demonstrate that Americans do not have to sit idly by as spectators while their elected officials wreck their democracy. The ballot box on election day is a primary instrument, however, it is not the only means toward the end of freedom and justice for all. The people have a right to intervene. To save our Nation we must interpose or creative political energies and our individual bodies to halt the onslaught by a merciless set of hightech barbarians who have misinterpreted their election by an oppressive elite minority as a mandate to tyrannize the caring majority. The caring majority must rise to defend itself. To lead the crusade to save America, we need a caring majority agenda. From coast to coast, in every one of the 435 Congressional districts, we need citizen activists to insist that they are ready to fight intensely to save their Nation from catastrophe. This caring majority force needs ordinary people willing to participate in a national master plan for justice. We need legions recruited from among those who suffer as a result of the current oppression, which is imposed by the oppressive elite minority, and we need legions from among those who are not suffering but who understand the inevitable destructive path of the present blitzkrieg to remake the American government in the wrong direction. The primary weapons to be employed for all strategies and tactics of the caring majority should be nonviolent weapons. A lapse into violence against the entrenched establishment automatically guarantees defeat. Nonviolent direct action employed in conjunction with clear sets of demands shall be the operating rule of the caring majority. Massive nonviolent direct actions and coordinated simultaneous other actions are what are necessary to carry the caring majority forward. Now, Mr. Speaker, I am just reading portions of an action paper that I put out in June. I am still waiting for comments from key people. I also have a timetable here. I have an agenda, a partial agenda, that was proposed to the Congressional Black Caucus. About 3 weeks ago, I said the Congressional Black Caucus should endorse groups that support its agenda. The Congressional Black Caucus should put out an agenda and have groups march to support that agenda, and that agenda should be the caring majority agenda, an agenda for everybody to strongly urge all concerned groups to lobby, demonstrate, petition, write letters, and march in these critical days ahead when the President will be negotiating with the Republican-controlled Congress to save the Nation from devastating budget cuts. First on the agenda is to fight aggressive racist attacks in all forms. Fight the attacks on affirmative action. Fight the attacks on school desegregation, on set-asides, and the Voting Rights Act. Fight government and unofficial acts which encourage sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, immigrant persecution or denial of basic rights to any groups. No. 1 on the agenda must be a fight against any racism, any divisiveness. We need to build allies. We need to come all together and understand that America should be America for everybody and we cannot have separations in the process of the fighting. Otherwise, we play into the hands of those who are in the elite minority profiting from those divisions. Fight for education as a national opportunity. Fight for education as a national priority. The opportunity for an education must remain a national priority. Fight to stop all cuts in Medicaid as well as Medicare. This Nation still needs a national health insurance program with universal coverage. Fight to stop those cuts. Fight to stop [[Page H 10066]] the taking away of the Medicaid entitlement. Fight to end the monstrous cuts in the HUD programs for low income housing. Fight to support the retention of adequate wages and pensions for the military, Federal workers and other public service workers. Fight to increase the minimum wage. The Republican majority said they will not entertain any dialog on increasing the minimum wage. One hundred American economists have said we need an increase in the minimum wage. The only way you can have workers keep pace with what has happened is to increase the minimum wage. All we are proposing in the Gephardt bill, which I am a cosponsor of, is a measly 45-cent increase in two steps, a 90-cent increase in the minimum wage. The Republican majority says they will not entertain any discussions of any increase in the minimum wage. So we need to fight to increase the minimum wage. We need to fight to guarantee the right to organize unions in the worker replacement provisions. To end striker replacement, we have to first support President Clinton's Executive order. We need to fight to maintain health and safety conditions in the workplace. There has been a fight on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration [OSHA]. We need to fight that. We need to fight for cuts in the defense budget, those cuts that will downsize the budget and generate the money to fund the programs needed. We need to fight for an increase in foreign aid to Africa, Caribbean, Haiti. Haiti was one of our proudest moments in our foreign policy. The anniversary of the liberation of Haiti will take place shortly. We should take note of the fact it was a shining hour, a great moment, for American foreign policy. We need to fight for an increase in the funds for youth crime prevention program. The majority has eliminated this program. We need to fight for an increase in those programs and a decrease in the prison funds to build prisons. We need to fight and unite with the caring majority for the retention of Social Security as it is now. They are chipping away at Social Security. Do not believe what you hear. Stop moving the age requirement back. Stop tampering with the COLA's. This is an agenda for the caring majority. You need to move on an agenda that is focused. I have a timetable. You need to have actions in your localities, in your States. You need to do things. Americans are not spectators. We are not put in that spectator role. Actions at the local level, make allies, all races, all sexes, all religions. And finally we need an action in Washington. The whole culmination of this activity should take place in Washington. Washington is the place, Washington is the key. What happens here sends out signals. It determines the way things are going to go in the States and in the cities. Washington does not provide all the money for our cities and local government, but they set the tone. So, therefore, at some time on this agenda, the climax has to be the caring majority with its agenda has to come to Washington in millions. The caring majority has to come. I propose next spring, the anniversary of Tiananmen Square in China, why don't we come together and work toward it between now and next June? Tiananmen Square in China took place in the first week of June. Tiananmen Square I offer because it is so important to note the fact that a totalitarian government of China could not resist, could not stop the flow of information out from Tiananmen Square to the rest of the world. When you get that many people together with determination, they built statutes of liberty, the media was there. The media tends to try to ignore the caring majority agenda. You cannot get the same exposure for the caring majority agenda that you get for the Republican health care plan. So a Tiananmen Square type operation, have a million people come together on the mall. You have an agenda. There is no question why you are there. Come together to confront the Congress, confront the White House. What we need most of all is direction for our Government. Let us plan to do it. You are not spectators in America. You have the right to get up and move. Let us use our right and let us make certain that the remaking of America does not take place while we are sitting on the sidelines. Troops, get ready. The march you make will be to save your own soul and your own nation.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentleman for reemphasizing the fact that education has been recognized by the best minds in America as being a No. 1 priority. We understand we are in a technological and scientific revolution. We understand that you need the best minds possible in order to compete in this global economy. Yet we have not acted accordingly. The dialog has not placed that emphasis where it belongs. I submit, again, the article by Lester Thurow which appeared on September 3, 1995, this year. Thurow, who is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has testified on the Hill before many committees. He is recognized as an authority. I think his warning ought to be heeded. He has written many books. He is not a Democrat or a Republican. I think it is an objective voice. And when he starts this article with the following paragraph, we ought to all take heed. It ought to be a part of the ongoing dialogue. The newspapers ought to pick it up, the talk radio hosts. I recommend to Rush Limbaugh, that you read the article. You do not read anything, but you have your staff read the article thoroughly and comment on it to your audience even, who needs to understand what the best minds in America are saying about the phenomena we face. I will only read the first paragraph, because previously I have introduced the entire article into the Record: No country without a revolution or a military defeat and subsequent occupation has ever experienced such a sharp shift in the distribution of earnings as America has in the last generation. At no other time have median wages of American men fallen for more than two decades. Never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the per capita domestic product was advancing. Here is a situation we are in, and, in order to deal with it, we ought to raise the level of the dialog by analyzing and listening to the voice of people like Mr. Lester Thurow. We ought to take a close look at the big-spender lists that are compiled by certain groups, and I understand I was singled out on Rush Limbaugh's show as 1 of the 10 big spenders in the Congress. Well, let us have some honesty in that dialog. It is also a distorted dialog because Rush has people who know how to add, but he does not have people who know how to subtract. You know, as the minority whip has just said a few minutes ago, we are spending money on programs that will, weapons systems that are, no good, and I am on record as being against the spending of $33 billion for the F-22 that happens to be manufactured in Marietta, GA, which is the district of the Speaker of the House; $33 billion ought to be subtracted from my big-spender total, Rush. Tell your staff to get a specialist who knows how to subtract. The only people you have know how to add. Subtract the money from the Seawolf submarine, which I oppose. We do not need to spend $2.1 billion to build another Seawolf submarine. Subtract the money which I propose we cut from the CIA budget. We proposed a modest cut of 10 percent over a 5-year period, and the CIA accepts the basic figure that they are spending, about $28 billion per year, the CIA and other intelligence operations related to the CIA. If you cut that $28 billion by 10 percent a year, you would have $2.8 billion. You could restore the cuts in the title I program for education for the disadvantaged. You could restore the cut in Head Start. The $2.8 billion a year out of the CIA would be quite an important amount of money when you consider the small, but very effective, programs that have been cut which spend far less. Take that off my total, Mr. Limbaugh. I oppose star wars, the wasting of money for a program that most scientists said never made much sense anyhow and would not be effective. There is no power in the world capable of really firing that kind of, offering the kind of, threat, that they insist is there. I oppose that. Subtract that from the total. Let us have some honesty in the dialog. You know, Mr. Limbaugh has targeted me. I would like to say, you know, I am honored to have such enemies. You know the full-disclosure laws that affect the Congress I would like to see applied to some of our talk show hosts so that in the dialog you know who you are listening to. You will be listening to a multimillionaire when you listen to Rush Limbaugh, and you ought to know that. You can check my disclosure record and see exactly what I am worth and where it comes from. It is quite a paltry sum, I assure you. Senator Byrd in the Senate recently proposed that we have talk show hosts fill out disclosure forms in the same way that Members of Congress and the Senate are required to fill out disclosure forms. I think that makes a lot of sense because regular talk show hosts are privileged people. The American people are making available, especially those who are using broadcast television, they are making available a limited asset, a limited communications medium. We do not have an unlimited number of opportunities for people to broadcast. It is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission because it is limited, and people who are using radio and using broadcast television are people in a special category who ought to be considered in the same manner as public officials. At least let us know where your income comes from and let the people who are listening be able to determine what your point of view is, how it is influenced, and have as much information on your financial status as we have on public officials because really the talk show hosts, especially the more arrogant ones, have taken a role which is similar to public officials. They should not do that, but the kind of world we are living in, the entertainment, and the sports, and the religion, and politics are all merging together. We cannot separate it. We would like to see it remain separated, but it is all merging together, and people are often listening to entertainers who have opinions that they are pumping out over the airways, and they are caught off guard, and they absorb a lot of that. So the reality is that is what we are faced with, so let us take a look at the people that are privileged to use broadcast television, broadcast waves of radio, like Mr. Limbaugh. You know, he is really not a public official. He is like very close to, I understand, the Speaker of the House. He could be called the jester of the Speaker, you know, the joker. In Shakespeare's plays, Mr. Speaker, they always have comic relief, a jester, a joker, and not always was it comic relief. They did have some insights sometime. I think in King Lear they do not call him a jester. He is called a fool. King Lear refers to his jester as [[Page H 9780]] his fool, but the fool is not stupid. I remember that play very well. I had to do quite a bit of work on it, and I know that the fool made some of the most insightful comments, so the fool is not stupid, Mr. Limbaugh is not stupid, but he still is not a major player, he is a fool. You know, the fool in King Lear disappeared, and there is a great deal of discussion in literature about whatever happened to the fool. As we know, King Lear went down the hill. He had two daughters he gave his fortune to, and they were not very grateful, and they took all that he had, and he went mad in the end. The fool disappeared because the fool was no fool. The fool was a mercenary. He just walked out of the situation. You know, King Lear later died as a result of being in prison and tortured, and his daughter, the good daughter, was hanged, and the question is what happened to the fool. Was a fool being a mercenary, not a central player, moved off of the scene? I am sure when you have multimillion-dollar jesters on television they should not labor under the illusion that they are major players, but they are significant. You know, they do make a contribution, and we welcome the contribution of the jesters and the fools, but we do not take it too seriously. Let me just talk about one more thing in terms of the distorted and dishonest dialog. Unfortunately my colleague from Texas previously made a comment about New York versus Texas with respect to Medicaid and how Texas only gets 50 percent of what New York gets. He did not bother to round the dialog out by saying New York at the local level and the State level puts in far more than Texas and, as a result of what the State and the local governments put into Medicare and Medicaid, they get more from the Federal Government. That would have rounded off the dialog. You hear a lot of discussions about New York. The Speaker has always, you know, for the whole time that I have been here, he has always used New York as a favorite whipping boy, and now that he is Speaker he has not stopped at all. So he recently called New York a great wasteland. Let us round out the dialog and take a look at New York versus the Nation. New York right now is the State which supplies the greatest amount of money to the Federal Treasury in ratio to what they get back. We pay into the Federal coffers as of last year, the last year that the figures are available, for 1994, the fiscal year 1994, we paid in $18 billion more into the Federal Treasury than we got back from New York. If New York were able to take that $18 billion, we could solve all our fiscal problems, I assure you, but $18 billion more went out of New York to the Federal Treasury than came back in terms of Federal outlays, and you are going to have to take my word for it. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the previous dialog is very much in concert with what I would like to talk about. I have been talking about the budget and appropriations process as being one of the most important things that has happened in this Congress in the last 20 years. It is always important every session of Congress what we do with the budget and appropriations process. Nothing is more important than the budget and appropriations process. But in particular in a year when the Contract With America insists that we must balance the budget, and balancing the budget means making horrendous cuts of programs that have existed for the last 50 years, it is very important that we follow carefully this budget and appropriations process. We are now in a period where a great deal of stagnation has occurred. The first appropriations bills have gone to the White House, the appropriation for the actual budget of the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the President has vetoed it because he wants to have that bill as a part of the bigger discussion. The other major appropriations bills are moving quite slowly and we have passed a continuing resolution. I have previously talked about a continuing resolution. We have passed a continuing resolution to allow the Congress 6 more weeks to reach a point where it can meet the requirements of having all the appropriations bills passed for this fiscal year which began October 1. I want to talk about the need for, in this process, a more honest dialog. I think that is what the previous two speakers were talking about, the need for honest dialog as we move into this very important discussion and very important negotiations that will take place between a Republican-controlled House and Senate and a Democratic President in the White House. The scenario is going to be pretty much as I predicted some time ago. The major appropriations bills will be vetoed by the President. He has already pledged that he will veto the Education, Human Services, Labor appropriations bills, and he said he is going to veto any bill which has the Medicare cuts that are being proposed. So we know that the major bills will be vetoed. We know that there are not enough votes. The Republican majority does not have enough votes to override these vetoes. We know that the discussions are going to take place. Negotiations are at a very intense level at the White House with the President. These are going to be mega negotiations, and those negotiations are going to determine the direction of America for the next 10 or 20 years. What comes out of those negotiations will give us some breathing room to take these massive changes at a slower pace. What comes out of the negotiations could be an agreement that will move America in the wrong direction. We do not want that to happen. We would like to have those negotiations take place, and I think that the American public needs to understand that they have a major role to play in the coming negotiations between the Republican-controlled Congress and the Democratic President. Public opinion is always important. Both the President and the Republican leadership will be watching public opinion as we move into those negotiations. The public has to be involved. They have to understand what is going on. In order to do that, of course, we need an honest discourse. We need some admissions, like the one that the two previous speakers were trying to get from the Republicans, the admission that they never supported Medicare. Ninety percent of Republicans have always been against Medicare. So if they never supported Medicare, it should be known, it should be on the table. Their argument that they are moving to try to prevent a bankruptcy of Medicare, you can have reasonable doubts raised if you know that they never supported Medicare when it was first proposed by Lyndon Johnson. Ninety percent of the Republicans voted against it. They have consistently been against Medicare. So why should you believe that, if 90 percent of them were against it in the first place, they are honestly seeking to save it from bankruptcy? Why not believe instead the Democratic argument? A bill has been introduced to follow through on that argument that if you really are worried about bankruptcy, the commission recommended that you had a problem of about $90 billion and that over this 7-year period a $90 billion problem exists and a cut of $90 billion is necessary? That can be achieved by cutting real waste. But if you try to cut $270 billion, then you are getting into the heart of the program, the benefits. You are going to be forced to raise premiums. The honesty would help a great deal to let the American people know from the outset that we are talking about a $90 billion problem and not a $270 billion problem. The $270 billion is needed because the greater portion of that money will go toward the provision of a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans. We need some honesty. I was fortunate last night to be a part of a very honest dialog in Durham, NC. I was invited by a workers' committee for occupational safety and health. They had a hearing, which is a people's hearing to bring some honesty into the discussion of the OSHA problem. That kind of thing should be taking place all over America. People are going to have to come out, have your own hearings, have your own forums, have your own discussion, and take a close look at what is going on. Last week, 100 economists declared, and many of these economists are Nobel Prize winners, they declared there is a great need in America for an increase in the minimum wage. What is on the table is the Gephardt bill, which I am a cosponsor of, which calls for an increase of about 90 cents in the minimum wage over two steps, not very much, but at least that is needed. We need an honest discussion. And if you have 100 economists who say that this increase is necessary and who show that inflation has eroded the wages of American workers to the point where they are making far less than they were making 20 or 30 years ago, then we can go forward accepting the fact that these are economists trained to do this. We accept their wisdom on so many other issues. Why not accept it on the minimum wage and go forward? So the honesty in the dialog is very important. You know, the Roman Empire had some of the best systems in the world in terms of their system for justice and government, et cetera. You know, part of the reason the Roman Empire declined is because, despite the fact they had the systems, the people who were running the systems began to take them as a joke. They began to violate those systems and refused to deal with those systems in an honest way, and the rot that went into those systems led to the destruction of the Roman Empire. This Nation is in a position where, unless we bring some honesty in our dialog and discourse, we certainly are going to not be able to get through this critical period on negotiation with an outcome, a final product that is going to carry America forward. On the subject of honesty in Medicare and Medicaid, nothing is more important, because that is the biggest program that is on the chopping block, biggest in terms of its impact on American people, not just the dollar figure but the impact on the American people. Both Medicare and Medicaid will impact on the lives of most Americans. We would not want a situation where we have less health care and we have [[Page H 9777]] fewer people covered than we had last year when we were proposing a movement toward universal coverage. I am going to yield to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Bonior], our whip, to help us to bring some kind of reasonableness back into this dialog on Medicare and Medicaid.

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentleman, and I want to reinforce and reemphasize what he said. We are not going to get an honest dialog if we depend on the talk show hosts only, the editorial boards of the newspapers. We are not going to get an honest dialog which puts forth the most important facts and the most important aspects of the situation. It is going to be necessary for people to demand, to ask the right questions, and begin to ask more questions and demand some solid, solid answers. It is not going to happen unless we have quite an outpouring of activity on the part of the general public. This is true of the Medicare-Medicaid situation; it is true across-the-board. On this whole matter of trying to balance the budget within 7 years, it may be desirable to balance the Federal budget, but why do we have to do it in 7 years? We could move at a slower pace and accomplish the same thing without having all the tremendous, draconian cuts and dislocations that are taking place. In this matter of balancing the budget, I have repeatedly said, and I will say it again, and I have a chart which reemphasizes what I said before, part of the answer, part of the solution to the problem of balancing the budget, is to take a look at what has happened to taxes in America since 1943. Part of the answer of balancing the budget is what we did with the Congressional Black Caucus budget. We looked at the situation in terms of the tremendous low [[Page H 9778]] percentage of the tax burden borne by corporate America, how since 1943, when the corporations were responsible for 39.8 percent of the tax burden, and I have the fractions here, I usually say 40 percent, but 39.8 percent if you want to follow the chart in a detailed way, 39.8 percent of the tax burden was borne by corporations in 1943 and individuals and families were responsible for only 27.1 percent of the tax burdens. By 1983, we had a cataclysmic shift. Instead of individuals being responsible for 27.1 percent, they found themselves responsible for 48.1 percent of the total tax burden, and the percentage of the responsibility of the corporations in America dropped as low as 6.2 percent in 1983. That is a low point. But it is not too different in terms of ratio right now in 1995. Individuals and families are bearing 43.7 percent of the overall tax burden, while corporations are bearing only 11.2 percent of the overall tax burden. Other taxes, excise taxes and duties and other things make up the rest of the revenue collected. But if you look at this, you can see how the American people have been swindled. Unfortunately, I cannot blame all of this on the Republicans, because Democrats were running the Committee on Ways and Means for a large percentage of the time here. There were Republican Presidents who had trickle-down theories and pushed it down, under Ronald Reagan down to 6.2 percent with his trickle-down theories. Here is the great swindle that the American people ought to be angry about, but in the discourse, the dialog about the balanced budget, we cannot get this argument to surface. The editorial pages have not dealt with it at all. No columnists seem to be able to see the obvious. Nobody wants to take a look at the need to balance things off. You can balance the budget if you raise from that 11.2 percent, raise the corporate percentage of the tax burden up to 16 percent. We would balance the budget in the alternative budget presented by the Congressional Black Caucus. We balance the budget without cutting Medicare or Medicare 1 cent. We even increased education by 25 percent. The key to it, in addition to cutting defense and cutting corporate welfare, is to raise the tax burden on corporations up to 16 percent. You can have a tax cut in our alternative budget. We had a tax cut for individuals who deserved a tax cut in the middle- and working-class families. You can lower the tax burden for individuals and families while you raise the tax burden on corporations, and you still will wipe out the deficit and not have to make the draconian cuts.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. I would like to point out I have been talking about this for 3 months now, and I have yet to see any major columnist discuss it, I have yet to see any editorial board discuss it. Rush Limbaugh, who follows me very closely and often targets me for his ridicule and comments, does not talk about this. I would like to send a message to Rush and his staff to, at least, put this on your agenda and comment on it. Let us introduce it into the dialog and explain to us why in this period where corporations are making very high profits, Wall Street is booming, why in this period of transition, where strange things are taking place in our economy, while Wall Street is booming, corporations are making high profits, there is a great deal of downsizing and streamlining which leads to high unemployment, and, worse than high unemployment, underemployment. People are getting new jobs, but they are making far less than they made before. This has been a transition period, and the way to get through the transition period and finance the kinds of programs that are needed for job retraining, for education, which the President has emphasized that education is vital in this particular situation that we face, we need a way to finance it. Instead of cutting the education budget by $4 billion and cutting the job training budget by another $5 billion, we should be financing with an increase in the taxes on those who can pay them, the corporations, the necessary ingredients of a transition program. And we know that education and job training are vital to that transition situation. Otherwise we are in a situation where the standard of living of Americans is going to be falling rapidly. The 5 percent will continue to get far richer than before, while the people who make up the other 95 percent, especially those in the very middle, continue to get poorer.

Mr. OWENS. There is a sucking sound out of New York, there is a sucking sound out of Michigan, out of all the Great Lakes States, the northeast States. There is a sucking sound moving the money mostly into the South and the Midwest, and those are the people who yell the loudest about getting Government off our backs and not wanting Government to be a part of solving their problems. Let us really take a close look and have an honest dialog about this whole matter about which States' populations are paying more into the Federal coffers, who is paying for the Medicare and Medicaid, who is paying for the defense budget. Let us take a close look at it and have an honest dialog about it. I thank the gentleman for his comments, and I am quoting, you know, for the benefit of Rush Limbaugh and all the others, I am quoting from a document called the Federal Budget and the States, Fiscal Year 1994 and an introduction by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and it is published by the offices of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. So, I urge you, Mr. Limbaugh, to have your folks get a copy, and you can check and see that everything that I am saying today is well analyzed, and well documented, and acceptable, and you ought to offer it to your audience as a dialog, as part of a dialog of honesty, about what is happening in the finances for the United States of America. Some of the people who are pushing so hard for States to have control of programs worry me a great deal because we may be in for a Balkanization of the United States. What if we had 50 States which became 50 countries? What if we followed the pattern of the Soviet Union and we broke up? New York would be able to make it, ladies and gentlemen. New York would not have a problem. They have problems economically, they come and they go. Somehow we continue to pour more into the Federal coffers than we get back. Mississippi would have a major problem. Georgia would have a problem. The losers and the gainers are clearly stated here. You ought to take a hard look at it. The biggest gainers, of course, are the South Atlantic States, they all gain, and the east South Central States, they all gain. It is quite an eye opener. I urge you to get a copy of the Federal Budget and the States, published by the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. I urge Mr. Limbaugh to make sure that his extensive staff gets a copy and discusses that with the people. The dialog ought to be more honest. Stop slurring New York. The generosity of the people of New York should be [[Page H 9781]] appreciated, because over many decades, New York has done this. They have paid more into the Federal coffers than they ever gotten back. I think Franklin Roosevelt, who was a genius, clearly understood with the New Deal policies that you were going to be moving vast dollar amounts of wealth from the Northeast, including New York State, into the rest of the country, from the west coast into the rest of the country. This generosity was not by naive people. Lyndon Johnson often boasted of the fact that every time he conceived of the new program, the Southern States would gain. He often sold his programs openly to the southerners in decisionmaking power in the Senate and in the House by saying, ``Look, if you take Medicare, Medicare, if you go with me on Medicare, if you go with me on Medicaid, it is not going to be your problem. You are not going to have to cough up the money. The money is going to come out of the Northeastern States. The money is going to come out of the Great Lakes States, the industrial States. The money is going to flow to Alabama, to Georgia, to Mississippi.'' It is still flowing that way. Let us be honest about the dailog. Do not slur New York. Appreciate New York. Appreciate Michigan. We have this distorted dialog in many ways, and I am going to do something I have not done so far this year. That is, I want to comment on the O.J. Simpson case. I have not been following it very closely. The average sophomore in high school knows more about it than I do. I am doing to limit my comments. First of all, I accept the President's statement that the jury has made a decision. As Americans we should also respect the decision of the jury. But I have been a little upset and even became quite angry about the fact that the inner-city ladies on the jury, that is what they have been referred to as, inner-city ladies, have been unreasonably vilified. They have been criticized, they have been treated with great contempt. I must come to their defense and say that that is a great example, a great manifestation of the kind of dishonest and distorted dialogs that Americans have become comfortable with. The fact that this is a race situation, everybody has become very comfortable accepting that this is a conflict between American blacks and the rest of the population, it is a black-white situation. Ted Koppel goes on and on with special 1\1/2\ hour shows, and they play out these distorted arguments that do not address some very obvious situations and very obvious facts. No. 1, the system says that if you have reasonable doubt, reasonable doubt, you should find a defendant not guilty. Whose reasonable doubt? The reasonable doubt of the people on the jury. Was there reason for them to have reasonable doubt? Oh, yes, there was. Why was there reason for the people on the jury to have reasonable doubt? Because they had a set of architects and engineers to manufacture that reasonable doubt probably unparalleled in murder trial history. You have Mr. Dershowitz, you had Mr. Bailey, you had Mr. Shecht, you had Mr. Cochran. A lot has been made of the fact that Johnny Cochran was on stage in front of the cameras, so it is Johnny Cochran versus the prosecution team, but most of the defense team was white. It was interracial. I think Mr. Shapiro was the original lead attorney, and maybe in charge of the whole thing. I do not know. It is said Johnny Cochran's final speech was not necessarily written by Johnny Cochran. The team put it together. You have architects and engineers of reasonable doubt, the best in America, the best that America has. Automatically, a person on the jury must have been influenced by the quality of the lawyers, the reputation of the lawyers. If I was sitting on the jury, I am quite an admirer of Alan Dershowitz, and if he was a lawyer for the defendant, I would be influenced. My doubt would be pricked. Mr. F. Lee Bailey, who has written books and was famous, it would be pricked also. When you have that kind of team of attorneys, automatically their presence creates some doubt, but the way they handle a case, so skillfully, given the fact that they have great skills and unlimited funds, so they could have an investigation and find out things about Mark Furman that nobody else would admit, all of that would create reasonable doubt, an interracial team of the top lawyers in America. Bigger than the racial factor or the racial card was the dollar card. Why is it that nobody was honest enough to discuss the dollar card, the money involved in this case? Why is not Ted Koppel on ``Nightline'' discussing that? Why are not the editorial boards that insist on commenting on this case, even though they said it is over, on and on they go with the comments, why are they displaying great contempt for the inner city women, and implying that they were ignorant, and therefore they had reasonable doubt because they were ignorant? No, they had reasonable doubt because the architects of reasonable doubt put those doubts there on the one hand, the best paid lawyers in America. And probably that trial, more was spent on it than has been spent on any murder trial in America. That interracial team raised those doubts. I understand Mr. Shecht was welcomed by his law class back to school. I picked up this article in the New York Times which says that ``Barry Shecht, a Member of the O.J. Simpson defense team, returned to school this week. He received a tumultuous welcome from his students.'' Most of the students disagreed with the verdict, but they applauded the player, they applauded the architect of reasonable doubt. To quote Mr. Shecht, ``I am sure we will engage in extended discussions about this case,'' he told 300 students and faculty members who crowed around him at a welcome home party on Thursday. ``The case taught us a lot about race. It taught us a lot about the police. It taught us a lot about science and its limitations, and maybe it taught us a lot about each other.'' What Mr. Shecht does not say is it taught us a lot about money, about the power of the dollar in the courtroom, about your ability to get the very best. I quote from the article: ``Whatever the public opinion of the not guilty verdicts, Mr. Shecht said he had been received graciously everywhere. `It is interesting, because the students here have had a very positive reaction to my involvement in the case, which is pleasing, because I know that a lot of them don't agree with the verdict.' '' If you do not agree with the verdict, Harvard students, are you going to applaud Mr. Dershowtiz returning? If you do not agree with the verdict, are we going to celebrate Mr. Shapiro? What I am saying is they are the architects of reasonable doubt, and they placed the doubt there, on the one hand. On the other side, you had gross incompetence, gross incompetence manifested by the public representatives, the police department; of course, not just incompetent, but evil, racist, to the point where great amounts of doubt were instilled in reasonable people after hearing the voice, the report on Mark Fuhrman, which the rich, well-funded legal team could get because it was able to hire some very good investigators. That is reasonable doubt created out of a public servant and a public institution. The police department and their sloppiness in the case, documented again and again, you know, certainly was an instrument in the generation of reasonable doubt. Again, the defense team, the prosecution team, why did they not insist on a greater representation of the peers of the defendant? Our system says you should be tried by a jury of your peers. Why are we persecuting and vilifying inner city ladies when they were really not the peers of Mr. Simpson? There were no football players on the jury. There were no millionaires on the jury. People like Rush Limbaugh, he did not live in California, but people like that, celebrities, celebrities were not on the jury. This was not a jury of Mr. Simpson's peers. It seems to me the prosecution should have tried harder to get a jury of the peers. Why does not somebody talk about that portion of the system? Why does not somebody talk about the fact that in America we still have a ceremonial speech by the judge which says, ``If you have a reasonable doubt, don't come back with a verdict of guilty''? That is part of the system. There was a lot of talk about the power of television, and we ought to remove television from the situation because it made people behave differently. The power of television we [[Page H 9782]] ought to escalate. I think every felony trial in America should be videotaped, at least, because the people who do not have the money cannot employ the best legal advice. They are getting shafted day in and day out in the courts. There ought to be a video record of every case, of every felony, so judges know, everybody in that court knows, that ``There is a record here, transcripts,'' which are written and very expensive to get, and they never tell the full story because they are, after all, the written word. The videos would produce a greater degree of justice. If the judges know the video camera is watching, ``History will record what I am doing here in this courtroom,'' let us have more television, not less, the power of television could bring far more justice than we have. The distorted reasoning, the mutilated logic and the dialog that is one-sided is becoming, you know, a major habit of the American scene. If we cannot talk honestly about situations, then how can we ever solve them? The dishonesty and the mutilated logic of the discussion by people who are well educated of this O.J. Simpson case is very disturbing. Tell me about the dollar card, talk about the dollar card. Stop insisting that it is a race card. There were interracial teams on both sides. The predominance of whites--the district attorney of Los Angeles was white, and most of the team was white, except Mr. Darden and maybe one other guy who got in there later, I understand. The predominance of whites on the defense team says that it was not a race card. The doubt was sowed by architects who know how to sow it. The doubt was sowed by engineers who know how to do it, because they were very well paid. Let us talk about all of that in order to have a reasonable dialog. Let us talk about the competence of public officials in these trials, of the competence factor. Let us maybe have a situation where we can make appeals to the best attorneys in the country to somehow do prosecution, sometimes. There are a lot of things to talk about, except the ignorance, quote, of the inner city women who made the decision. I think reasonable doubt was certainly there for numerous reasons. The salvation of the greatest democracy that ever existed is what we are talking about. If we cannot have an honest dialog, we cannot solve problems, we cannot solve budget problems here, we cannot solve appropriations problems. I would like to quote the Pope, applaud the Pope's statement that this Nation was founded by men who understood God very well, and I think God spoke through the pen of Thomas Jefferson when he said, ``All men are created equal, all have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'' I think in our dialog about the budget and our dialog about balancing the budget, we ought to take a hard look at what those Founders said, not get away from it. We are a Nation founded under the premise that all men are created equal. They all deserve health care, they all deserve a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If you do not have the benefit of modern technology, you are not being treated equal. You are not being treated as if you were created equal. The Preamble to the Constitution talks about promoting the general welfare. That means health care, Medicaid, for everybody. We need to deal with the imbalance in the tax revenues. I have recommended creation of a revenues commission. A revenues commission would play a major role in balancing the budget and providing for the general welfare, and guaranteeing the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of all Americans.

Mr. OWENS. The gentleman is correct. The gentleman is from Michigan. Michigan is a loser State. Michigan paid $10 billion more into the Federal coffers than it got back from the Federal Government, $10 billion. Now people talk about the Rust Belt and the Northeast as had it economically. They are not growing, but for some reason all of the Great Lakes States were losers. The Great Lakes States lost more than anybody else collectively. Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin; they lost $42 billion in this balance-of-payment game. They paid $42 billion more into the Federal Government than they got back. New York was the State with the highest. You know we do not have the highest population. California. Something has happened in California. They are very smart. California did pay in more than they got out, but only 3 billion; 3.7 billion was paid into the coffers more than they got back. California has learned how to get their money back. Something is happening. It is the largest State, but New York is still the biggest loser, 18 billion, 18.8 billion, by the way almost 19 billion versus California's 3.7 billion. So, when they slur New York and talk about New York being a wasteland and a drain on the Federal Government, let us take a close look at the implications. Let us take a close look at the implications of all this talk about States rights economically and pushing down programs, you know in these various grants that go to the States, and flat grants, and you are going to let the State run the situation. New York may work out very well if you keep going in that direction and you let New York stand alone in its own financing and not have to pay into the Federal coffer because the gainer States are the ones with the loudest voice around here about States' rights and wanting to change the system. The biggest gainers are in the South. The biggest gainers are Alabama, and Georgia, and Kentucky. Mississippi is one of the biggest gainers. The absolutely biggest gainer is next door to us in Virginia. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, 2 weeks ago, I attended the 13th International Conference on Asian Affairs at St. John's University in New York City. At that conference, I listened to a scholarly discussion on the Republic of China's recent economic and political achievements and Taiwan's need and desire to return to the United Nations and other international organizations. As I stated during the conference, Taiwan truly deserves a much larger international voice. On the question of Taiwan and China, we should all remain mindful of the fact that the Soviet Union allowed two national entities under Soviet rule, Ukraine and Byelorussia, to sit in the United Nations as independent voting members. A clear precedent already has been set. At the conference, I further expressed my admiration for Taiwan's willingness to help underdeveloped and needy countries become self- sufficient. I firmly believe that countries such as Haiti can benefit from assistance received from other countries, including the Republic of China on Taiwan. On October 10, 1995, the Republic of China on Taiwan will celebrate its National Day. I wish it much success in its continuing bid to return to the United Nations and in its efforts to help developing countries such as Haiti. Mr. Speaker, for valid, well-documented political, economic and social reasons, it is evident that Taiwan is deserving of our support.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to associate myself with the remarks of some colleagues of mine who were here earlier speaking about the Medicare cuts and the Medicaid cuts. Nothing is more important now on the legislative agenda than the rape of Medicare and Medicaid. Many people have focused on Medicare and do not even know that Medicaid is being cut even more drastically than Medicare. Medicaid is being cut by $180 billion over a 7-year period. But it is a smaller program and the percentage of the cut is much greater. Of even greater significance than that is the fact that there are proposals on the table to eliminate the entitlement for Medicaid. Medicaid at present offers a means-tested entitlement. That is, if you can prove that you are poor and needy, then you qualify for Medicaid if you are in the category which on the basis of this means-testing process makes you eligible. This means-tested entitlement, as we call it, is now on the chopping block. It is being proposed that it be eliminated. We have a precedent that has been set in the last few days. We have witnessed the Senate follow the pattern of the House and eliminate the entitlement for AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. That is welfare mothers in popular terms. Welfare mothers, welfare families, welfare children, under the law that has existed since the Social Security laws were enacted, under the New Deal, under Franklin Roosevelt, have had an entitlement. That is, if you can prove that you are really in need and you are poor and you qualify under the means-testing, then you are eligible for the benefits of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children. That is gone now. It is only a matter of the President signing it into law. The Senate has passed a bill which removes the entitlement. The House had already removed it before. It is a barbaric act. I have used the word ``barbaric'' before. I have defined barbarians as those who have no compassion. Many barbarians have a great deal of education but they have no compassion. When I use the word ``barbarian,'' I do not refer to religion. I do not care which religion or which denomination they belong to. If they have no compassion for anyone except their own kind and kin, then they are barbarians. They are incapable of having compassion. Barbarians are a threat to society, especially when barbarians have power. When barbarians are able to make decisions and they do not have any compassion, they are a threat to any society. They are a threat to America, because they are making these horrendous cuts and taking away entitlements like the entitlement of a needy child to help from their Government. They are threatening to take away the entitlement from Medicaid, the entitlement of a person who is sick or families who are in need of medical attention and are unable to pay for that medical attention themselves. They are going to take it away. They are going to leave the elderly out on the hillside to die, in symbolic terms, because when you cut Medicaid and you take away the Medicaid entitlement, what you are doing is cutting nursing home care, because two-thirds of Medicaid goes to nursing home care and care for people with disabilities. Two-thirds. One-third is for families who are poor, but two-thirds goes for nursing home care for the elderly and for people with disabilities. So you are going to take away the nursing home care from the elderly people when you remove that entitlement. The Federal Government is going to get out of the responsibility of promoting the general welfare in that respect and leave it all up to the States who would not do it before. Before we had Medicaid, they would not do it. Before we had Medicare, the States would not do it. So there is no reason to believe the States are going to take up that burden once the Federal Government gives them that responsibility and slowly the amount of money made available by the Federal Government is decreased. I want to loan any support and certainly associate myself with the remarks of my colleagues who spoke earlier about this problem of Medicare and Medicaid being number one on our agenda. Everybody has to be concerned about it. It is a snapshot of our civilization. Where are we in America right now? If the American people sit still and allow this to happen, where are we? If we allow coverage for health care to instead of going forward to become universal coverage as we were discussing just a year ago, just a year ago we had plans on the table to move forward universal health care coverage, where eventually 95 percent, at least, of all the people in America would be covered with some kind of health care plan. Now instead of moving forward, we are going to take away the coverage which is already guaranteed to people who are eligible for Medicaid and move backwards. There will be many fewer Americans who are covered with any kind of health care plan after this Medicaid entitlement is removed. That is a great step backwards, and the American people must focus in and take a close look at who are we, what are we, where are we? Are we so desperate that we have to act as barbarians? Are we so desperate that we have to sit by as the voters and the citizens and approve of such barbaric acts? Are we going to swallow the arguments that we are on the verge of bankruptcy and there is no other way to get out of this threat of bankruptcy except to do mean and extreme things to each other, to the least among us, those who are unable to help themselves? Please try to stay with it, because the pace of change over the next 3 or 4 weeks will be quite rapid. Next week we will have a week off, but the pace goes forward even though the Congress will not be in session, because the negotiations now on the appropriations bills, the negotiations and the details of the health care plans and Medicaid, the welfare reform, a number of things are happening, and they will go forward even while Congress is not in session next week. But once we return, then all other things will have to be wrapped up in a matter of a few weeks and the pace will be mind-boggling. There will be radical legislation changes. We are not just finishing up the first half of the 104th Congress. The agenda for the 104th Congress requires, because of the way the leaders have structured it, that we pass radical legislative changes before this half of the session ends. That means that in the next 3 or 4 weeks, you are going to have to follow very closely while some very mean and extreme changes are made rapidly. Under the cover of the rapidity, the swiftness with which things are done, much will be lost unless we follow very closely. We did pass a continuing resolution today. A continuing resolution, I have explained before, is a resolution necessary to keep the Government going when the appropriations bills have not been passed to cover programs and activities of the Government. Most of the appropriations bills have not been passed by both the House and the Senate. I would like to applaud our leaders in the House, our leaders in the Senate and our leaders at the White House for not indulging in melodrama. We did not have any melodramatic showdown [[Page H 9661]] at this point. Because to have any attempt to stop the Government or even pretend to stop the Government at this point would be ridiculous. There is so much to be done, there are so many appropriations bills that have not been passed by the Senate. There is so much, it would be ridiculous to pretend that we could stay here over the weekend or work out some kind of solution in such a short period of time. There will be still a problem later on. We have expanded it until November 13, I think, and the continuing resolution ends on November 13. The train wreck that has been talked about, the train wreck that is coming will definitely occur at that time, I assure you. There will be a clash between the President and the Republican-controlled Congress, because the President says he will not accept certain bills. He has made it quite clear. On some he says he may not accept them, but on one or two he has said he will not accept certain appropriations bills. One of them is the human services, education and job training appropriation bill. If it comes out of the Senate and comes out of the conference process and looks the way the bill looks in the House, with $4 billion in education cuts and $5 billion in job training and human services cuts, then the President has made it quite clear he will not sign the bill, he will veto it. Probably he will veto a Medicare bill which is as outrageous as those that are being proposed. I hope the President will shortly, in the next few days, make a clear statement that he will veto any bill which ends the entitlement for Medicaid. We have lost the entitlement for Aid to Families with Dependent Children. We have lost the entitlement for people who are poor and are in need of assistance. It is lost. Overwhelmingly the Democrats joined the Republicans to vote for it in the Senate. They can never override in Presidential veto. The power of the actions of the Senate has come back to influence the people in the House. It is a lost cause. The House stood up firmly, Democrats in the House stood firmly on the principle of entitlement. I congratulate my Democratic colleagues, the conservatives, the liberals. Everybody got together on the bill that we offered as a substitute. We offered a substitute bill which would have provided job training, would have provided a longer time for people to be educated and get job training. It would have provided some kind of program to help create jobs. In addition to that, most important, the bill that was offered by the Democrats on the floor of the House at the time of the welfare reform bill consideration kept the Federal entitlement. The Federal Government stands behind individuals who are in need. The Federal Government stands behind individuals who are in need when a hurricane happens. We take it for granted. It is not written in the legislation that automatically you will get Federal aid; it is going to be there no matter how rich you are. If your house is blown down by the winds, no matter how many times you build your house in a place where the winds are likely to blow it down, when they come again, you will get Federal help. When floods occur, no matter how close you build your home to the river, no matter how many times you keep building your home close to the river, no matter how well-off you are, when floods occur, you are going to continue to get help from the Federal Government. Earthquakes, $7 billion, $8 billion for the California earthquake. You can expect, regardless of the state of a person's income, everybody who is affected by the earthquake will get some help from the Government. That is a civilized government. That is a government designed to promote the general welfare. That is the way it should be. But it should also be that way for people who have economic difficulties and need help. Oh, yes, there are abuses in the welfare program. There are abuses in the earthquake relief program. Have you heard? There are abuses in the flood relief program. There are abuses in programs that relieve hurricanes and tornados. Wherever human beings exist, they promulgate abuses of programs. Some people take advantage of the situation. There are going to be abuses. I am going to talk in a few minutes about two sets of abuses, abuses that are in the welfare reform program that enrage so many citizens and abuses that took place in the savings-and-loans program, which seem to be forgotten already although they cost more than $250 billion. That is a most conservative estimate. I will make a comparison in a few minutes. Before I do that, I just want to end my alert on Medicare and Medicaid. American people, please, keep your eyes on Medicaid and the Medicaid entitlement. Do not let the Medicaid entitlement be wiped away. We can only mourn now for the entitlement for poor people, public assistance, and only mourn now for the entitlement for children, dependent children. We can only mourn because it is almost all over. The agreement has been reached. There is very little we can do politically to roll back the clock and to gather the forces necessary to maintain an entitlement that was instituted by the Social Security Act under Franklin Roosevelt. We cannot bring it back. But we can stop the escalation of the barbarity. We can stop the barbarians from taking away the Medicaid entitlement. We can act. Let your Congressman know. Let your Senators know. Let everybody know you do not want to move further away from universal health care. The thing that brings us closest to health care for poor people is the Medicaid Program. You do not want to take health care away from seniors who, after they exhaust their income, they exhaust whatever assets they have, go from Medicare to Medicaid. You do not want to do that. Too many of our senior citizens would be left on the hillside to die, in symbolic terms. Let us move for a minute to take a look at the fact that Americans are outraged by abuses in welfare and the welfare reform has certainly been in response to some ridiculous kinds of things that have occurred. I would criticize the social work profession. I would criticize the public policy planners for allowing a lot of little things that could have been corrected to mushroom. But I assure you that welfare, as a system, is far more honest, the system for providing public subsidy to children who are dependent is far better run and far more honest than most Federal programs that exist today. Let me repeat that: There are abuses in any program that has ever been conceived by the Federal Government, State government, or local Government, and any government, any programs that have been conceived of by any government anywhere in the world. The human mind is such that there are people who can move in and begin to find places to take advantage of the system. The abuses are inevitable because of the fact that human beings are so intelligent and some of them who are very intelligent are not at all honest. There is always the guy who is looking, the hustler who is looking for a way to take advantage of the system. So welfare has had its abuses. The abuses, again, are minuscule compared to the abuses that we have seen in some other programs. Let me just stop for a moment and read a couple of clippings to you. Let me just stop for a moment and take advantage of some recent developments which you might have missed. You might have missed the fact that in the New York Times, on September 25, and many other papers in the last few days, there has been a big discussion of the fact that the CIA had more than $1.5 billion. I know these numbers lose you. You know, you think in millions, and hundreds of millions, but when you get to billions, people just cannot understand a billion dollars and what you can do with that. You know, a billion dollars, I assure you, would pay for a lot of nursing home time for hundreds of thousands of people. A billion dollars would cover a lot of food for a lot of school lunch programs. A billion dollars is a lot of money. The school program, lunch program, was cut by about $2 billion over a period of 7 years. We could give back that $2 billion and say: School lunch program, you don't have to worry about searching out the immigrant children. You don't have to worry about driving out the immigrants, legal immigrant children, by the way. You do not have to worry about looking for the illegal ones. You do now have to deal with these draconian cuts that are going to be squeezed as you move the program down to the State level [[Page H 9662]] and cut back on the amount of funds, because you have a $1.5 billion windfall here in the CIA. The CIA has secreted. They have so much money and there are so many abuses, and the administration is so loose and so lax until $1.5 billion was secreted away in a slush fund without the Members of Congress being informed. The heads of the agency, the agency heads, the people in charge said that they did not know about it. The President, the White House, they did not know about it; $1.5 billion. Put that down. You know, that is an estimate of the New York Times. It is secret, of course. It probably was more, but it is a secret figure. The conservative estimate is $1.5 billion. Mr. Speaker, what I am trying to do is demonstrate that there are widespread and very costly abuses throughout the Government. There are many at the city level and State level which never get the visibility that Federal programs get. But occasionally there are some secret programs in the Federal Government, like the CIA slush fund that I am talking about. They discovered $1.5 billion in a slush fund that nobody knew about except, I guess, the people who keep the money. I mean, how can they not know? How did it not show up on the books? What welfare recipient could ever get away with a few hundred dollars not showing up in the system? Here we have $1.5 billion. What is going to be done as a result of finding that there were people who were keeping $1.5 billion or more out of the reach of their supervisors and out of the reach of Congress and the President? What is being done? Excuses are being made. All kinds of excuses are being made. Now, this is in an agency which has been guilty before, ladies and gentlemen. This is the spy satellite agency. You know, in popular terms, this is the Nation's spy satellite agency. It is the National Reconnaissance Office. The National Reconnaissance Office was cited, you know, not too many months ago for having a building under construction which cost $317 million, more than $3 million. This was a building under construction for more than, and I have it here, $347 million last year. Last year, Senators said they were surprised to find the agency had built a new headquarters in northern Virginia near Dulles International Airport. The Senators of the United States were surprised that a whole building had been built, a new headquarters in northern Virginia near Dulles International Airport. You cannot hide a building, and you certainly cannot hide a building next to the airport, I guess, unless you are the CIA. But the Senators were surprised to find that $347 million had been used to build a building. But $347 million had been concealed in accounts that did not appear to be for construction. The agency said it has been negligent. ``Oh, we are sorry, Mr. Senator, we are sorry, Mr. Representative, but we have been a little negligent. We had this $347 million, and we built a building, and you did not see it.'' Now the same agency is discovered to have an additional hidden amount of $1.5 billion or more, and they are saying the same thing. ``We are sorry, you, we are a little loose.'' Excuses are being made because these are white middle-class males. Excuses are being made. They can be sloppy. They can waste your money. They are not welfare children. They are not welfare mothers, who most people think are black or Latino, although the statistics will show that there are more whites on welfare. The racism that creeps into the outrage about welfare will not here, because, after all, these are educated people, very well educated. If you can hide the building of a building next to an airport, you are a genius. It takes a whole set of geniuses to build a building next to an airport and, you know, Dulles is here in the Capital. It is in the Washington area, and the Senators not see it, not know about it, the Representatives not know about it, the White House not know about it. These are geniuses who have misspent $1.5 billion or more. They are geniuses, but barbarians in the sense that they have no qualms, no conscience, to say, ``Look, we did not use this money, you can have it back, and you can use it to cover some Medicaid costs in the nursing homes or you can use it to cover some food stamp costs, you can use it to cover some earthquake victims' costs, some flood victim costs.'' No. They have kept the money and, fortunately, something happened that it was discovered. This is the same agency that so mismanaged and blundered so much that they had a man named Aldrich Ames in there for years in charge of the spy operation in Eastern Europe and Russia, and he was a spy for Russia, for the Soviet Union. Aldrich Ames is his name. Aldrich Ames grew up in the CIA culture. His father was in the CIA before him. Aldrich Ames was an alcoholic. Aldrich Ames was a guy who took his girlfriend to the safe houses of the CIA against regulations. Regulations, you know, we have got family values in the regulations, but he violated that. He violated all of the operating principles of the agency, and yet he was promoted again and again, and he caused the death of at least 10 people working for the CIA, according to official count, caused their deaths. My point is, I do not want to dwell too much on this, my point is here is a blundering, deadly agency of the Federal Government, and all they get are raps on the knuckles. This a very poisonous agency that causes life and death in large numbers. This is the agency which labeled Jean-Bertrand Aristide as a psychopath. This is the agency which gave money to the group in Haiti that was fighting against the United States Government's effort to reach a peaceful solution in Haiti. This is the CIA. The CIA budget, we do not even know what it is, but we can go on the floor and propose to cut it, whatever it is, We wanted to cut it by 10 percent. The estimates by the New York Times and those media groups that are able to get good information, the estimate was that it was a $28 billion operation, and we looked forward to a 10-percent cut, which would have produced $2.8 billion that could have been put into education, college Pell grants. You know, we are cutting all over the place. You know we are cutting all over the place. You have heard my colleagues before on the other side of the aisle talk about Government waste must go. Well, let us not continue to cover up where the real waste is. Let us not join the barbarians. Let us cut, I say cut. Ten percent of the CIA would have produced at least $2.8 billion per year. We want to cut it 10 percent for 5 years so that you would cut the agency down to about half the size, and this made sense. But on the floor of the House we have produced this bill three times, and each time we get fewer votes from the Members of the House of Representatives. Do they want to streamline Government? Do they want to cut waste? Do we want to balance the budget by the year 2002? No. We want to terrorize the poor. We want to go after the blacks. We want to go after the Latinos. We want to demonstrate that this Government does not exist for certain people. We want to throw certain groups overboard and produce a situation where only the elite can survive. Otherwise why do we not go after an obviously blundering dangerous agency and do to it what we have done to the welfare program? Radical reform; they need radical reform. The radical and extreme reform that took place with respect to welfare was not necessary. Reform was necessary. In fact, Government should be in the business of reform. We should always be reforming. That is what Government should do, trying to streamline itself, trying to make better use of the taxpayers' money, trying to get greater value. That is what we should be all about. But we are blind when it comes to certain favored groups, certain favored operations. You think that is an extreme situation? Let us take a look at the article that appeared in the New York Times on September 7 of this year, not too long ago. It is about the old mining law where the Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Babbitt, is complaining about the fact that he is powerless to stop some other white males who are educated and rich from taking advantage of the system. Mr. Babbitt is upset. He says his hands are tied by a century-old law which forced him to approve reluctantly the sale of 110 acres of Federal [[Page H 9663]] land in Idaho for $275. I did not make a mistake, my colleagues, $275 for 110 acres of land. Now I would say that $275 for 110 acres of land is a bargain almost anywhere, you know, even in a swamp. Well, you might hope that 1 day you are going to find something in the swamp that is going to be useful. You got nothing to lose if it only cost you $275. But this land is estimated to contain a billion, a billion dollars worth, of minerals. Let me repeat, $275 for 110 acres of Federal land in Idaho. The land may contain a billion dollars worth of minerals. I am quoting from the New York Times, September 7, 1995. You can go check it out with Mr. Babbitt, the Department of the Interior. The next paragraph goes on to explain the land was conveyed to Faxcult, a Danish company, under an 1872 law that requires the Government to sell Federal mining rights for as little as $2.50 an acre. It is an 1872 law that requires the Government to sell Federal mining rights for as little as $2.50 an acre. Do you hear? It was sold to a Danish company, a foreign company. Mr. Speaker, they are on the floor bashing immigrants and talking about how terrible it is that immigrants come in and they take jobs and do horrible things. Here we have given away to a foreign country 110 acres of land for $275, and the estimated mineral yield of that land is a billion dollars. Now you might say, ``Well, it's very generous of us. There's nothing barbaric about that.'' You know, it is Americans who are compassionate enough to give to foreigners a great gift. Foreigners are not their kind and kin, so, if they are going to give to foreigners, the Danish owners, this kind of bargain, this kind of gift, then that shows that they are not barbaric. These are very generous people. They may be naive, but they are very generous, because, after all, they are giving it away, and they will not gain anything. Well, life is a bit more complicated than that. Economics is a bit more complicated than that. Business is more complicated than that. Probably no American company thought they could stand up and take the heat from the American people of having gotten away with that kind of deal. So they have gotten a foreign company, but I assure you the people that owned this company are not all Danish. I assure you that the conditions which led to keeping this law would not be there just to benefit a foreign company. Congress has sought for years to change the law according to the New York Times again. Congress has sought for years to change the law, but under the strong pressure from the mining industry western lawmakers have repeatedly blocked the legislation. Supporters of the law maintain that it helps to promote mining in the United States and preserve jobs. To promote mining in the United States and preserve jobs you have to give away 110 acres at $2.75 an acre. Congress has sought for years to change the law under strong pressure, but under strong pressure from the mining industry. Who is the mining industry? You know, I assure you it is not just this little Danish company, not foreigners. The mining industry has stockholders. The mining industry has very powerful people in very powerful places. Western lawmakers have repeatedly blocked the legislation. Western lawmakers? Who are the western lawmakers? They are not foreigners. We do not elect foreigners to office, so western lawmakers, whoever they may be, have blocked legislation which is sought to correct this 1872 law. Probably made sense in 1872 that everybody--you would have to be a fool to believe it made any sense now. Any child can tell you this does not make any sense except if you want to rip off the American people. Land is owned by the American people until it is conveyed to the mining company, and they say it helps the United States to promote mining in the United States and preserve jobs. If you charged more, you charged a thousand dollars an acre, you cannot promote mining and preserve mining jobs? You know, if it is a billion dollars that is expected, a billion dollars worth of minerals, you certainly could get a higher price. We are back to that old issue of taxation and revenue. I proposed before that we have a revenue commission, you might recall, a revenue commission to look at ways to get revenue more creatively instead of continuing to tax families and individuals so heavily. You know families and individuals are heavily taxed; 44 percent of our tax burden is borne by families and individuals, and only 11 percent is borne by corporations. Now these are not the only sources of revenue. There are other kinds of revenue that help make up the total package. When you take a look at some of those other kinds of revenue, we can get revenue from mining lands that are sold, as the President proposes, but here we are up against lawmakers, western lawmakers, who are not insistent, enraged by the fact that somebody is ripping off the Government. No, those are not poor welfare people, one out of every hundred who might be a hustler, who might be taking advantage of the Government programs. These are not people using food stamps who might buy cigarettes for food stamps instead of buying food. These are not those kind of people. These are people who are taking millions of dollars away from the American people that could go into our revenue coffers. Let me just read on a minute because it is a bit sickening, the whole story, and you can get the flavor of how sick it is by just reading. The wimpish way we react, the wimpish way our policymakers deal with these outrageous abuses, is enough to give you a heart attack. It is outrageous. Quote from the New York Times article: But Mr. Babbitt, in conveying the Federal tract in Idaho, said he found making such deals, quote, ``increasingly distasteful'', increasingly distasteful, and he called the law, the law that does this, whose intent originally was to promote development of the West, outdated and exploitative, exploitative, exploitative of taxpayers. Mr. Babbitt found it increasingly distasteful, and he found the law outdated and exploitative of taxpayers. Now I am not criticizing Mr. Babbitt except I think his language is much too wimpish. You know, I am reminded of the quote from King Lear. King Lear, after his daughters have betrayed him, said, ``Fool me not to bear it tamely. Touch me with noble anger.'' Somebody ought to have some noble anger when the CIA secretly has $1.5 billion stashed away and nobody knows about it. Somebody ought to have noble anger when the CIA can build a building near the airport and the Senators and the Members of Congress do not know about it, and the building costs $347 million. Somebody ought to be outraged. They tremble and they shake when they talk about welfare people. You heard them before saying they stand in line, and they get with their food stamps better food than the guy behind them who is working all day. That is outrageous, and they tremble and they shake when they say that, but they can let the white males, educated in many cases, rich, promulgate a system. Any lawmaker who is part of promulgating this system is not dumb. Somewhere there are benefits that his constituents are getting in larger amounts if you want to keep selling the land of the people of the United States for $2.50 an acre, and you know billions of dollars are going to be made. The 110 acres in Clark County, ID, are believed to contained an estimated 14 million tons of high-quality travertine, a mineral used to whiten paper. I am quoting from the New York Times article again. Last year, quote, ``when American Barrick Resources, a Canadian mining company, used the law to buy a mine with $10 billion in gold deposits for about $10,000, Mr. Babbitt called it the biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy.'' Let me read that again. Last year, when American Barrick Resources, a Canadian mining company, used the same law to buy a mine with $10 billion in gold deposits for about $10,000, Mr. Babbitt called it the biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy. Mr. Babbitt, I am glad you have such strong language for it, you know. If you get $10 billion from the people of the United States for $10,000, you think somebody would be on television screaming about it. They could do nothing else except tell the American people about it. [[Page H 9664]] The President and his campaign said we want to end welfare as we know it. Why does somebody not say we want to end the giveaway of billions of dollars mostly to foreign companies, but they have American backers? We want to stop American lawmakers from perpetuating this thievery. Why does somebody not have the guts to stand up and be outraged about stealing money which could provide coverage for thousands of people on Medicaid? For hundreds of nursing home people? I continue to quote from Babbitt. I find this process where my hands are tied by a law signed by Ulysses S. Grant increasingly distasteful. Mr. Babbitt likes the word ``distasteful.'' Again I am not criticizing Mr. Babbitt. At least he is talking about it. Where have the other Secretaries of Interior been? Where have the lawmakers in this House been? Why does not anybody talk about this? Why does anybody not expose it? Why is it the American people do not know that they are walking away with billions of dollars in minerals that belong to you? He said that, ``While Congress is cutting programs across his department,'' Mr. Babbitt is upset about his department being cut, as he should be, the Interior Department, he said, ``While Congress is cutting programs across my department, the government is losing $100 million a year from royalties from hardrock mining.'' One hundred million a year in royalties for hardrock mining. How many school lunches could you buy with $100 million a year? How many prescriptions for Medicaid recipients can you fill for $100 million a year? I quote again from the article: ``The bill to overhaul mining laws would require a 2 percent royalty on net profits on minerals taken under the 1872 law. Other proposals before the Congress would require companies to pay fair market value for the surface land, but nothing for the minerals.'' In other words, as we sit here today, as we talk today, there are Members of Congress in the Senate and in the House of Representatives who are protecting the thievery that is going on right before our very eyes. This is a Federal program that should have radical reform, radical change, but nobody is moving because white, rich, well-educated males benefit from it. They protect themselves. I talked before about the end of entitlement for Medicaid. I said, ``The end of entitlement for Medicaid is on the table.'' It is not here yet. Medicaid is a patient in the emergency room, on the operating table. Medicaid is about to be butchered. Aid to Families With Dependent Children is on its way to the morgue. They have cut the entitlements already. What would Franklin Roosevelt say? I am sure that the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt is quite angry and quite agitated tonight. Over the last few months, I am sure that spirit has been quite angry and agitated at the wholesale destruction of the programs which he began to put in place. Franklin Roosevelt was the architect of the Social Security Act, which created Social Security, and later Lyndon Johnson used Social Security to go on to create Medicare and Medicaid. They are all related. I am sure Franklin Roosevelt, having created entitlements for the poor, he also created farm subsidies for poor farmers. Farm subsidies for poor farmers now have become farm subsidies for rich farming businesses, agricultural businesses, so I am sure the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt is a little upset about that. As he looks at the end of entitlements for people who are poor and need public assistance, for children, mostly, Aid to Families With Dependent Children is just that. If you do not have poor children, you do not qualify. We are ending Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the entitlement. On the other hand, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, the Congresses that surrounded him, were also the architects of the savings and loans program. They were the architects of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for banks and for savings and loan agencies. I wonder what the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt is doing as it beholds the kind of abuse that took place in the savings and loan program, the kinds of abuses that have taken place in big banks of the program that he started; because when Franklin Roosevelt stabilized the economy and the banking industry by creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, he brought into the equation every American taxpayer. The taxpayers stand behind the banks. Every American can put their money in the bank, knowing that up to a certain amount of money, it is insured, backed up by our great Federal Government. Franklin Roosevelt started out with I think it was $10,000, which was a lot of money at that time, and he probably never dreamed that the abuse, both official abuse and unofficial abuse, would lead to a situation where we would raise the amount from $10,000 per person per bank to $100,000 per person per bank. So you can abuse it by going to a lot of different banks and getting insurance. It was not ordinary Americans who abused it. People who put their deposits into savings and loan associations did not abuse the loan. People who put their deposits in the banks which later on failed, they failed and we covered up the failure. Several big banks have failed in this country and we have covered it up and bailed them out with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation funds. The savings and loan debacle, which is the greatest swindle in the history of mankind, there are no other swindles as great as the savings and loan swindle, that could not be covered up. It was a federally assisted program. Did we get rid of savings and loan associations? Have we put them out of business? Have we been as radical in dealing with the savings and loan situation as we were with the reform of welfare? No, we have not. How many people were put in jail for their abuse, often outright stealing of large sums of money that then had to be replaced by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation? How many people have been put in jail? Relatively few, because most of them are white, middle-class, well-educated, and sometimes very wealthy males. they are not treated the same way as poor people, many of whom are Latinos and blacks, and most of all, poor. They are not treated the same way. If they were, then the savings and loans, the whole program would have had radical changes. Large numbers of people would have been put in jail. Large numbers of people would have been taken out of the banking industry. There was collusion all over the place among well-educated, wealthy people in high places, in many cases: accounting firms who turned their heads away while all kinds of tricks were played with the books; lawyers who found a way to make everything that was done, no matter how terrible it was, legal. In the State of Texas they had a situation where it was not the Federal Government regulating the savings and loan association, but the State of Texas. The State of Texas has the power to regulate the savings and loan associations in Texas, but the Federal Government, all of the taxpayers of America, stood behind their savings and loan associations, just as they stood behind those in New York or any other part of the country. Why do I say that? Because in Texas you had the largest number of savings and loan associations failing, the largest amount of money was lost in Texas, where the State had the power to oversee the banks. But the Federal Government, the taxpayers, stood behind the banks with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation dollars, so they made a killing in Texas. Not only did they oversee the situation and let it get out of hand any way they wanted to, they made millionaires, they made billionaires, most of whom have never gone to jail. Then when it all collapsed, we set up the Resolution Trust Corporation. That was the device we set up. We did not take away the entitlement, we did not wipe out the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. We did not do anything as radical as what we are doing to poor people on welfare. No, we set up a Resolution Trust Corporation, a very complicated animal, and most of the offices of the Resolution Trust Corporation, the greatest percentage of the offices of the Resolution Trust Corporation, had to be based in Texas. That is where the greatest problem was. California was next, and they spread it around. Denver had its Silverado Bank, the famous bank. The son of the President of the United States sat on [[Page H 9665]] the board of the Denver Silverado Bank. It was spread around, but Texas had the greatest concentration. After they had regulated their own banks to make rich those they wanted to make rich, they they got the benefit of having a large Government agency locate there and spend money there and hire people there. Many people who were hired in the Resolution Trust Corporation had formerly worked in some of the banks that had gone, that failed, some of the savings and loan associations that had failed, so they got a jobs program as a result of swindling the American people out of a large part of that $250 billion to $300 billion. This is happening in America. This happened recently in America, the largest swindle probably in the history of mankind, right before our eyes, and we reacted by coddling and taking care of those who were guilty. Let me be more specific about guilt. You be the judge. The Silverado Bank in Colorado, in Denver, CO, the Silverado Bank made a deal with a person who came for a loan. One of the people who came for a loan wanted to buy a building. The building was assessed to be worth $13 million, $13 million. The bank said, ``Look, we will accept an assessment of twice that much for the building, $26 million, if you will deposit in our bank the extra $13 million, so we will give you a loan of $26 million for a building worth $13 million on the condition you will deposit that $13 million back in the bank, because we know the auditors are coming and we have problems.'' If that is not a criminal action, I do not know what is a criminal action, but that was done by the Silverado Bank. That is just one of the things they did. They lost almost $2 billion. They are not the largest offender. We all know Mr. Keating in California was the largest offender, but Silverado lost more than $1 billion, and on the board of Silverado was the son of George Bush, Neal Bush. This kind of transaction took place, and later on as they sorted it out a recommendation was made that Neal Bush should be barred from sitting on any boards of any other banks. He protested vehemently. Later on, I think secretly, out of the eye of the cameras, he even was made to pay some kind of fine, along with the other board members who had been a part of that situation. But nobody has said he should be put in jail or any other board members of Silverado should be put in jail. Two hundred fifty billion dollars, at least, and there are some estimates that it is twice that amount. You cannot get decent figures because the white males, the educated white males, the wealthy, educated white males who run the banking system and the accounting system and the lawyer system related to it, they make it so complicated you cannot get clear figures as of right now as to what the savings and loan swindle has cost the American people. This is a Government program: wasteful, blundering, billions of dollars down the drain. Nobody has ever said, ``Let us get rid of all savings and loans, let us get rid of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.'' No, we have found a way to take care of the needs of the white middle-class wealthy who are involved in the abuse that have wrecked the savings and loan associations. This is strong language, I know, but the barbarians do not hesitate to drive their spears through the bellies of babies. The barbarians have no shame. The barbarians come to the floor of the House and they talk about the need to streamline Government and the need to have a balanced budget by the year 2002. But the barbarians come to the floor of the House and they will not cut the B-2 bomber, which might cost us $33 billion over the lifetime of the program. The barbarians with a straight face said, ``We must continue the B-2 bomber.'' They fight hard on the floor and they win the votes to keep the B-2 bombers. The barbarians want to increase the funding for star wars, a system that has always been questioned by scientists. The barbarians come to us and say that they want to give a tax cut, and I am all in favor of a tax cut, but if the tax cut is close to the same amount as the Medicare cut, the tax cut is, I think, $240 billion over a 7-year period, and the Medicare cut is $270 billion over a 7- year period; $240 billion for the tax cut, $270 billion for the Medicare cut. The barbarians look at us with straight faces and say, ``We must have a tax cut. If that means that the elderly cannot have nursing homes, then so be it. If that means that prescriptions are going to be limited because people cannot afford to pay for their prescriptions, and of course when they cannot get their medication many will die, so be it.'' The barbarians are not afraid to make their case forcefully. The barbarians want to end Davis-Bacon, which was created to stop bringing in slave labor. It was created by two Republicans to stop people from bringing in slave labor and undercutting the wages of working people. We are going to have to have some other kind of Davis-Bacon to stop the nations like India from bringing in computer programmers who work for one-twelfth the amount of money computer programmers who are Americans work for. We are going to have to have some kind of Davis-Bacon to stop the Russian physicians and technicians who are working here for the minimum wage. They can come here and undercut American physicists. We are in a situation where the civilization, the society, must take some steps to do what is rational to make for an orderly transition, where people are able to earn a living and not disrupt things by allowing hustlers to take advantage of the situation by bringing in outsiders who can undercut the labor market. The labor market that we may be protecting tomorrow may be our physicists and our chemists and our college professors. We had better take a look at the logic of Davis-Bacon, the invention of two Republican Members of Congress. The barbarians refuse to look at this chart, which I will have in the future when I speak, I will have a larger version of it. This is the chart I have been talking about on several occasions. This shows corporate versus family and individual share of Federal revenues. The share of the revenue burden that is born by corporations went down from 39.8 percent in 1943 to 11.2 percent today, while the share of the individual and family tax burden went up from 27.1 percent to 48.1 percent, and now it is at 42.7 percent. This chart is one I bring to every session to let my colleagues see the remedy. If my colleagues want to balance the budget, here is the remedy. Balance the tax burden, raise the tax burden, the percentage of the tax burden borne by corporations. We can lower the percentage of the tax burden borne by individuals at the same time. We can do justice to the American people and American families who have paid enough high taxes. At the same time, we can balance the budget by having the corporations, which are making profits now at a higher level than ever before, having them pay a greater share of the burden. It is a simple solution. We do not have to cut Medicare, we do not have to cut Medicaid, we do not have to act barbaric, in a barbaric way toward children and the elderly. We should on a rational basis sit down and take a look at the next 7 years, or as the President has projected, the next 10 years; whatever my colleagues want to do to balance the budget, it is possible to do it in a rational way. On the one hand we have to save money by dealing with all of these abuses that we allow to go on if white, rich, educated males are involved, get rid of those abuses and at the same time look at the revenue question, the revenue side and produce the revenue in a rational way and a less painful way. This is income taxes. We can take a look at the mining, how much more we may realize by taking a hard look at the mining situation or other resources that are presently owned by the American people that are being squandered. I have talked about the frequencies, the fact that we have auctioned off certain frequencies and earned $9 billion already. We can take a hard look at that. There may be more. There are solutions that are not barbaric solutions, and I ask the American people to keep their eyes on activities in the Congress for the next few weeks. It is your money, it is your civilization. We do not want to be accomplices to barbaric acts. We want to promote [[Page H 9666]] the general welfare. We want to take America forward, out of the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt and the spirit of Lyndon Johnson. We want to continue to have a great society. We want to take care of the majority of the people that need to be taken care of. We are Americans, we are not barbarians.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, last weekend, from September 20 to 23, the Congressional Black Caucus held its annual legislative weekend conference. More than 20,000 people participated in the various activities of the Congressional Black Caucus' annual legislative conference. It was our 25th anniversary. I think it was a clear indication to all who are concerned that the Congressional Black Caucus is still very much alive and a very potent force in the politics of this Nation. Some 20,000 people came to various activities, including workshops on major issues like education, transportation, health, et cetera. We reaffirmed a clear Congressional Black Caucus agenda. We call it the Congressional Black Caucus and the Caring Majority Agenda, because it includes so many more people than people who are black. The overwhelming majority of Americans agree with the agenda that we set forth. We started this agenda when we offered the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget on the floor of the House, and we continue the fight. Today and tomorrow we particularly want to emphasize the fact that we are very upset about the death of the welfare entitlement, the death of the entitlement for poor people in need of assistance. The entitlement is on its last breath, its last gasp, almost. The Senate has agreed to end the entitlement, and the House has previously agreed to end the entitlement. We are afraid the President will not veto this end of entitlements that have existed since Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security. We are going to particularly focus on that. In fact, we are going to wear black arm bands tomorrow to mourn the death of entitlements, the entitlements related to assistance to the poor. That is just the beginning. We understand that on the table now, everybody should know that on the table now is a proposal to kill the entitlement for Medicaid. We have almost killed the entitlement for assistance to poor people. We have set a precedent, so now we are going to go on to kill the entitlement for Medicaid, which means that many fewer people will be eligible for assistance with health care than were eligible last year, when we were talking about moving toward universal health care. We have an agenda. We want to fight this. We want to fight the death of entitlements. We want to fight aggressive racist attacks in all forms. The Congressional Black Caucus has pledged to continue the fight against the attacks on affirmative action, we are pledged to continue the fight against school desegregation, set-asides, and the Voting Rights Act. We want to fight for education as a national priority. The CBC alternative budget demanded a 25-percent increase in funding for education. President Clinton has also proposed a large increase for education. We want to fight for this increase. We do not want the President to lose sight of this priority. We want to fight to stop all of the cuts in Medicaid as well as Medicare. This Nation needs a national health insurance program with universal coverage. We should not take a step backward and end the entitlement for Medicaid. We want to fight to increase the minimum wage, to guarantee the right to organize unions, to end the striker replacement activities, and to maintain safe and healthy conditions in the workplace. We want to fight to balance the Nation's tax burden by lowering taxes on [[Page H 9569]] families and individuals, while forcing corporations to pay their fair share of the taxes. At present, corporations cover only 11 percent of the tax burden, while individuals and families shoulder 44 percent of the tax load. We want to fight this injustice and balance the tax burden. Mr. Speaker, if we want to balance the budget, first balance the tax burden and relieve individuals from high taxes while we raise the burden on corporations up to a more reasonable level. Mr. Speaker, we want to fight for an increase in foreign aid to Africa, the Caribbean, Haiti, and other third world countries to assist with vital health and education needs. During this weekend we passed a specific resolution related to education. Mr. Speaker, I am the chairman of the Education Brain Trust of the Congressional Black Caucus and the National Commission for African- American Education, along with the Congressional Black Caucus Brain Trust Assembly, and those organizations declared their full support for the organization of a National Education Funding Support day on Wednesday, November 15, 1995, during open school week. Just about 6 weeks from now, during open school week on November 15, 1995, we would like for people to come out in large numbers. We want all of the community groups, senior citizens, businesses, all kinds of people, churches, unions, to mobilize and bring people out on the morning of November 15, to the nearest public school. Everybody come out to the nearest public school to show that in America, there is overwhelming support for education, that there is overwhelming support from all walks of life, and we want to reaffirm this on November 15, during open school week. So please come out and participate. This is a particular and specific outcome of the Congressional Black Caucus weekend and we would like the support of every individual across the Nation.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this is not an exercise in conflict resolution for a Sunday school, this is the opening shot in a blitzkrieg against organized labor in America. The gentleman from Georgia, Speaker Gingrich, has said that politics is a war without blood, and the war is on against labor. The campaign against labor begins here in the context of the move to destroy the National Labor Relations Board, the curtailment of the functions of OSHA and MSHA, the reduction in overtime, and the National Labor Relations Act. There is a whole battle plan where the panzers and the dive bombers and all of that will be released against organized labor. Organized labor must be wiped out because in this politics war that the Speaker talks about, labor is a strong resisting force. There are not many forces out there that can resist the remaking of America the way Speaker Gingrich and the Republican majority wants to remake it against organized labor. The goal is Chinese capitalism. Chinese capitalism means that we have public policies, government policies which control the labor market. They control the workers so that the workers are manipulated for the benefit of the entrepreneurs and the management in order to produce a return suitable to the government and the entrepreneurs and the corporation. That is what we are talking about, a war against labor that begins today. Mr. Chairman, we have had the guerilla warfare, we have had the sabotage, the black bag stuff in the appropriations bills and the budget bills, now it is open war. This legislation will undermine employee protections in two major ways: One, by allowing nonunion employees to establish sham unions; and, two, by allowing other employees to establish company-dominated alternative organizations while employees are in the process of democratically deciding whether to be represented by a labor organization. Neither of these possibilities are permitted under current law. You get rid of current law, and the way is open. The points I have raised against the bill I assure you do not overstate the truth. Edward Miller, a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, said in testimony before the Dunlop Commission ``If 8(a)(2) were to be repealed, I have no doubt that in too not many years sham company unions would again recur.'' We cannot forget that the collective bargaining brought about by the National Labor Relations Act has helped bring prosperity to the Nation by increasing the wages of workers. Without equality of bargaining position, recurrent business recessions would be aggravated by the depression of wage rates and worker purchasing power. Mr. Speaker, we cannot allow sham unions to carry the day once more and strip workers of the independence they earned through blood, sweat, and tears. I urge my colleagues to vote against this bill, which gives management an overwhelming advantage over American workers. We do not need Chinese capitalism in America.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to salute Medgar Evers College as a beachhead of enlightenment in urban America which offers an institutional point-of-light as a model for all who care about education. Medgar Evers College is a liberal arts college, a community educational resource, and a pivotal cultural center for Central Brooklyn in New York. Twenty-five years ago, the college, named for the martyred civil rights leader, was established with a clear mandate--to provide access to higher education for the residents of Central Brooklyn. On September 28, the college will mark its 25th anniversary with a Founder's Day celebration that will include a commemorative ceremony in honor of the founders and a benefit dinner that will raise funds for student scholarships. In offering outstanding academic programs and a wide range of services designed to meet the needs of the community, Medgar Evers College, a unit of the City University of New York [CUNY], has amply demonstrated that it is fulfilling its noble mission. The college should be commended for the caliber of its innovative, career-oriented programs and the foresight it has demonstrated in providing needed services to area residents. Typical is the Small Business Development Center, which was created to deliver management assistance to small and minority-owned businesses in Central Brooklyn through courses, counseling, conferences, and seminars. With great personal pride, I have watched the birth, growth, and mature refinement of Medgar Evers College. As a commissioner of the Community Development Agency under Mayor John Lindsay, I assisted in the selection of the first Community Advisory Committee for the college. Several years later, as a member of the Higher Education Committee of the New York State Senate, I led the fight to retain the status of the youthful Medger Evers College as a senior college. This fight was successful; however, in later negotiations with the chancellor of CUNY, a compromise reduced the institution to a community college with a few senior college programs. Medgar Evers College must be congratulated for waging a long struggle which culminated in its 1994 redesignation by the New York State Legislature as once more a full-fledged senior college. Special tribute must be paid to the leadership of this fine institution--its distinguished president, Dr. Edison O. Jackson; its capable and concerned administrative staff; and an experienced and dedicated faculty. At the benefit dinner, the college will present its first Uhuru Awards to Mrs. Myrlie Evers-Williams, chairperson of the board of the NAACP; Mrs. Coretta Scott King, chairperson of the board of the Center for Non-Violence in Atlanta; Dr. Betty Shabazz, the college's director of public affairs and cultural attache; Dr. Ramona Hoage Edelin, founder and CEO of the National Urban Coalition; and former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. Dr. Jackson assumed the presidency of the college in 1989. These have been exciting years, as evidenced by the fact that during this time, enrollment nearly has tripled; bachelor's degree programs in environmental and computer science have been introduced, as well as an associate degree program in nursing; and a core curriculum has been created to strengthen liberal arts education. Just as significant is the ongoing effort by the college to internationalize its curriculum and thereby better prepare students to be a part of the global marketplace. In a recent report in which he articulated his vision for the future, President Jackson spoke of the need to chart the proper course, ``to ensure that Medgar Evers College achieves the greatness to which it is destined.'' He said further: [O]ur quest is to become one of the premiere institutions in this city, state and nation . . . our intent is to create an institution that will provide high quality academic programs and student support services in response to the many educational, social and economic contemporary challenges facing the community they serve. This unique role which Medgar Evers College is carving out for itself is adding to the richness and diversity of the City University of New York. Mr. Speaker, its achievements in its relatively brief but eventful history bodes well for a bright future for Medgar Evers College, and as it prepares for the 25th anniversary celebration, the college merits our congratulations and sincerest good wishes for continued success. This relatively new but vibrant institution is truly a Point-of-Light for urban communities throughout the Nation.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will continue to yield, I do not agree with the liability being a problem where total control has to be regained. I think it is a far simpler procedure than that. But if the gentleman agrees to try to work it out, I certainly would agree to an effort to work this out.