Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I will use no more than half of the 60 minutes allotted. I realize that we are in a transition period and moving from a district work period to a capital work period is a bit of a strain, and we want to take it slow. So I will not go on at great length today. But I do think we should note the fact that serious business lies ahead of us. There has been a great deal of talk about a train wreck coming where the mean and extreme balanced budget philosophy of the Republican majority will clash with the more moderate reform approach of the President, and we are going to have some very difficult days. I think it is quite clear that appropriations bills of the kind that we passed before we left here cannot be left standing. We cannot have a $9 billion cut in education, job training and social services. We cannot have tremendous cuts in housing. There are a number of things that just cannot be left standing. We cannot tolerate more than $280 billion in cuts over the next 7 years to Medicare. We cannot tolerate more than $180 billion in cuts for Medicaid. There has to be a train wreck. Unfortunately, in the Congress, in the Senate and the House, the Republican majority has the votes, and they have passed this mean and extreme program. All we have left is a Democratic President who says that he will veto these programs, and then we have a situation where the government may be brought to a halt if the appropriations bills are not signed and the Republican majority of the Congress is not willing to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government going. It is going to be exciting times. But we should all realize that the basic direction for the Naiton is being shaped not only in the next few months but it is already in the process; the direction that this Nation will take is already being shaped faster than we think, and what happens this year we will have to live with, this year and next year, for a long time to come. It is very important that everybody understands that radical changes are under way. They are being proposed, ever more mean and radical changes. But radical changes are under way right now. The great majority of Americans feel that something is very different, that there is something happening. The great majority feels some aspect of this change. But they do not understand it. So the majority of the people are angry, and they do not know why they are angry. I am here to tell you you have good reason to be angry. The problem in America is that we have to learn who to be angry with and how to focus our anger. Where is the problem? I hope that everyone will take time to read an article that appeared in the New York Times on last Sunday, September 3. It is an article that appeared on the op ed page. It was entitled ``Companies Merge, Families Break Up.'' ``Companies Merge, Families Break Up.'' The article is by Lester Thurow. Lester Thurow is an outstanding economist, recognized all over the world. He is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On the Hill here in this capital we have seen and heard Lester Thurow many times over the last two decades. It is our business to rein in the resources of the country, wherever they may appear, and apply them to the problems that we face. To get back to Mr. Thurow: American companies are moving production overseas, using technology to replace workers, engaging in mega mergers, such as this week's Chase-Chemical deal, and otherwise downsizing. Each year more than half a million good jobs are eliminated by the Nation's most prestigious companies. More new jobs are being generated in the service sector, but they come with lower wages and fewer fringe benefits. With the death of communism and later market socialism and economic alternatives, capitalists have been able to employ more ruthless approaches to getting more for less, to getting maximum profits but with less effort. They do not have to worry about political pressure. Survival of the fittest capitalism is on the march. What other kind of capitalism can we have except survival of the fittest capitalism. And that is appropriate for capitalism to be a survival of the fittest operation. It is up to government to deal with what the implications of that is. Falling real wages have put the traditional American family into play. As the one-earner middle class family becomes extinct, with children needing ever more costly educations for ever longer periods of time, the cost of supporting a family is rising sharply just as earnings plunge. Children exist, but no one takes care of them. Parents are spending 40 percent less time with their children than they did 30 years ago. More than 2 million children under the age of 13 have no adult supervision either before or after school. Paying for day care would use up all or most of a mother's wages. The traditional family is being destroyed. This is an economist named Lester Thurow, who has written 10 or 20 books, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is talking about the economy and the impact of the economy on the family. We hear a lot of talk about family but we do not acknowledge the fact that the economy and what happens in the economy, what happens with wages, what happens with jobs has a very serious impact, the most serious impact on families. In fact, Mr. Thurow is about to say that. Returning to the article: The traditional family is being destroyed not by misguided social welfare programs coming from Washington, although there are some government initiatives that have undermined family structure, but by a modern economic system that is not congruent with family values. The traditional family is being destroyed not by misguided social welfare programs coming from Washington, but by a modern economic system that is not congruent with family values. When we look at falling wages as a factor: Beside falling wages, America's other economic problems pale into insignificance. The remedies lie in major public and private investments, in research and development, and in creating skilled workers to ensure that tomorrow's high-wage brainpower industries generate much of their employment in the United States. Yet if one looks at the weak policy proposals of both Democrats and Republicans, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That is in quotes. As we all know, it is from Shakespeare that Mr. Thurow is quoting. It is that the Democratic and Republican policies at this present point, which focus on this problem, that constitute a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We just passed legislation which refused to continue the Office of Technology Assessment. The Office of Technology Assessment is a basic tool very much needed by the Members of Congress, Members of the House and Members of the Senate. We just threw it out. The one thing that was most significant got axed. We will be passing an appropriations bill for defense in the next few days and we are going to have a B-2 bomber vote again. If past history is any guide, we know that the B-2 bomber, which the Pentagon does not want, and the President does not want, and the Air Force does not want, it will probably pass again. The most unneeded piece of technology around will pass with votes from the House. That is the kind of thing we are in. When they say what we do and what we say is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, that is what they mean. The American people should be angry about all this. Revenue policies are needed to deal with the present problem. We need taxing policies to take the resources from where they are, the revenues in Wall Street, the revenues [[Page H 8587]] that are in the high prices of corporations, we need to take some of those revenues and put them into research and development and into training workers. Mr. Speaker, we have a transition period here, a period which will go on for some time still to come where these great downsizings will make more people unemployed. Something needs to be done during this transitional period. Nobody knows where capitalism will go. It is not planned. No one wants to stop progress, but you need to take some steps to deal with it, and one of the steps that should be taken is to balance the tax burden by taking more revenue from corporations. Corporations now pay only 11 percent of the total tax burden. Individuals are paying 44 percent. That is ridiculous. We need to bring down taxes for individuals and raise taxes on corporations to get enough revenue to sustain the programs that need to be sustained for education and for job training. Mr. Speaker, I am rushing, because I do not want to take too much time today. We will expand on this in the future. We need a creative revenue commission, a commission similar to the base closings commission, which will look at the revenue situation, look at the fact that over the years corporations have gone down from paying almost 40 percent of the tax burden to paying now only 11 percent of the tax burden. At one point, under Ronald Reagan, it went down to 8 percent of the total tax burden. The Committee on Ways and Means has swindled the country. The Committee on Ways and Means, part of this body, and other taxing authorities, have allowed a situation to be created where the burden is very lopsided. One of the things that a tax commission could do is find ways to raise the taxes on corporations, pull out more revenue from corporations while you are lowering families and individuals, and use the money that you get to pour it into education, research and development, and job training. I am going to end at this point, Mr. Speaker. There are a lot of proposals on the board: Flat tax proposals, consumption tax proposals, various proposals that are on the drawing board for such a commission to examine. I would want to add to that an anti-monopoly tax, where any industry which gets more than 25 percent of the market would have to pay a surcharge because it has an advantage that does not need as great an expenditure. I would also add that something should be done about the banking and financial industry, to recapture the almost $300 billion that the American taxpayers have put out through the Federal deposit insurance to bail out the savings and loan associations. All of the industries in the banking field and related financial institutions ought to have a surcharge put on them to collect back some of that money. There are a number of creative propositions by which we could get more revenue instead of focusing only on cuts. Yes, we should downsize government; yes, there is waste, but there is a great problem. We need to balance the tax burden at the same time that we are trying to balance the budget. In doing that, we will produce a situation where the workers of America, the children of America, the families of America would have more to look forward to in terms of facing these tremendous radical changes that are presently taking place in our economy and our society.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we have just concluded the debate and the vote on the appropriations bill for the Education, Labor, and Human Services portion of the budget. We have almost concluded the entire appropriations process. The big one left, of course, is the Department of Defense. This process moves us a little further along the road toward the remaking of America. Speaker Gingrich and the Republican majority have said they intend to remake America. Speaker Gingrich also says that politics is war without blood. So we have concluded the first phase of the war. The Contract With America with just a warm-up. The budget and appropriations process really opened the blitzkrieg. The first phase of the blitzkrieg is about to come to an end. I think it is important to take this time to note that it has been devastating indeed. The people of America, the caring majority, the majority of the people in America, have been the victims of the beginning of this scorched Earth policy. Tremendous cuts have been made already, and this is just the first year in the effort to balance the budget in a 7-year period. This is the easiest one. These cuts will escalate greatly over the next few years. So whatever has begun today, as horrible as it may be, is only the beginning. It is very important that the American people understand that this is only the beginning, and $9 billion was cut from the Health and Human Services and Education and Labor budget, $9 billion for the budget year that begins October 1 1995 and goes to September 30, 1996. If $9 billion was cut in this first round, you can imagine how much more will have to be cut and will be cut in the second round, the next budget year, because the budget for this year still leaves the Republicans, who are controlling the process now, with a deficit of $170 billion, the House-Senate budget that concluded, under which we are laboring with respect to the appropriations now. That budget still left us with a deficit in 1996 of $170 billion. Over the next 7 years, that deficit will go down from $170 billion to a surplus of $.614 billion in the year 2002. In order to get that deficit down and end up with a surplus in the year 2002, drastic additional cuts have to be made. So it is important to understand where we are in the process of the remaking of America, in the process of this war without blood. Speaker Gingrich says that politics is war without blood, but he did not say it was without pain and he did not say it was without suffering. And there is a lot of blood, too. I think it is very important to note that in the process of making budget cuts in the appropriations process, the Committee on Appropriations went far beyond its jurisdiction, and they did a lot of legislating, against the rules; they violated the rules. This majority violates the rules whenever they see fit, and they have the same kind of contempt for rules that dictators and tyrants have. Rules are just to be played with the bourgeoisie and the folks who believe in little words on pieces of paper. They violate them when they get ready. So a massive violation of the rules occurred in this appropriations process with respect to the Labor, Education, and Human Services appropriation. They had a large number of legislative matters introduced into the process. One of those matters related to the enforcement of health and safety standards on jobs by OSHA, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. One of those legislated items cut the effectiveness of OSHA by one- third. By cutting the budget by one-third and specifically saying that the cuts have to apply to the enforcement process, OSHA's enforcement administration, enforcement process, the people in charge of enforcing the rules and regulations on health and safety, they could not spend but two-thirds of their last year's budget. They are cut by one-third. That is going to cause not just pain and suffering, but there will be some bleeding and dying, because last year [[Page H 8520]] in America 10,000 workers bled and died on the job. Another 46,000 died as a result of diseases contracted or as a result of health conditions contracted on the job. They died elsewhere, but right on the job 10,000 died. So in this process of making budget cuts, they have also legislated a less safe environment for all the workers in America. They have declared war on workers, and that war has casualties. That war has a body count. The body count and the casualties will go on. There were many other areas within this appropriations process where the Committee on Appropriations usurped the powers of the authorizing committees and legislated. They changed the National Labor Relations Board's ability to operate by cutting them by 30 percent. They are going after the workers. A major target in this war are working people. They say unions. They have a vendetta against the unions. They want to get revenge on the unions. But working people out there, most of them in America do not even belong to unions. In the process of getting revenge on he unions, they are destroying conditions for working people in general. The NLRB affects other people other than unions. OSHA affects other people. It is the workers of America, and everybody out there, who is not a big wage earner, not an executive or on a big salary. Sooner or later they fall into a category where they need to have some bargaining power or leverage. Most of us are workers. In the final analysis we are workers, and our working conditions are being steadily made more dangerous as a result of activities undertaken in an appropriations bill. The Committee on Appropriations exceeded its authority. It is just the beginning of a process which probably will go on for a long time to come. They have always exceeded their authority. I have always taken the position we do not need a Committee on Appropriations. The Committee on Appropriations makes the Congress sort of an inept dinosaur. We have a huge Committee on Appropriations with a huge budget, a huge staff, and they make the most important decisions about where money is going to be spent. But in the final analysis, the Committee on Appropriations has the least amount of information, because there are authorizing committees that spend all of their time on different segments of the governmental functions, of the policies that govern our country. The authorizing committees have the knowledge. The authorizing committees conduct the hearings. The authorizing committees accumulate the experience over time. But the power lies with the Committee on Appropriations. The appropriation committees, of course, were created as old- fashioned, primitive methods of centralizing power. You centralize the real power in a body that is supposed to be a democratic, deliberative body, so it is easier to control by the Speaker and the leadership. That is why appropriation committees exist. But they used to pretend that they had limitations, and it was only going to deal with the actual appropriation of the funds. They are not pretending anymore. The appropriations committees have taken over and they have proceeded to legislate whenever they feel like it, which means that if we were to be honest with the American people we would close down part of the Congress. We could send all the Members home who do not serve on the Committee on Appropriations or the Committee on Rules or the Committee on Ways and Means. That is about one-third of the Members of Congress on those three committees. The rest of us really should not be drawing salaries, because we are not allowed to make decisions. We are not allowed to make important decisions. We play around at the edges. We have hearings, we pretend we have legislation. But in the final analysis, the clout lies with the Committee on Appropriations that is going to appropriate the money, and the Committee on Ways and Means is going to develop the revenue. Whenever the Committee on Ways and Means brings a bill to the floor, it does not even pretend to have a democratic process. In the 13 years I have been here, I have never seen a Committee on Ways and Means bill come to the floor which was an open rule, where the Members of Congress who do not serve on the Committee on Ways and Means had a possibility of having some kind of input, making some kind of decision. So the Committee on Ways and Means is totally in control of the revenue producing activities within this country. The rest of us either say yes or no or vote present, but we do not have any input. We have a very inept dinosaur, a very inefficient dinosaur and you have, after all, in the House of Representatives, 435 Members who are among the brightest and most energetic people in the country, who understand government, who understand human nature. They would not be here if they were not tremendously capable individuals. But they come here and they are immediately made irrelevant. They become obsolete if they do not get a place on the Committee on Appropriations or the Committee on Rules or the Committee on Ways and Means. And the Committee on Appropriations used to pretend that they had some use for the rest of us but in this last operation, certainly the Health and Human Services and Labor and Education budget, they made no pretense. Open legislation takes place throughout the bill and every effort to vote down that legislation, authorizing legislation, within the appropriations process, the majority beat it down with their numbers. They have the numbers and they can, of course, violate the rules and render us all ineffective. Nevertheless, we have to make do for the time being. Hopefully in the next Congress we can do something about the dinosaur and get rid of the overwhelming power of the Committee on Appropriations. Democrats were never that interested in doing that before, but maybe they can understand the evils now. What I wanted to do today is to let everybody understand that this process has just begun. First of all, the implications of the process over a 7-year period are devastating. I want you to understand that if the cuts are great this year, they have to be greater next year and greater the year after that, until we get down to the point where we have no more deficit. So that is one thing that has to be understood. The other thing to understand is that, and it is hard to understand. Until I became a legislator, although I thought I was pretty intelligent and pretty well educated, I could not understand all the machinations that take place here in Washington. We have passed it on the House of Representatives. We passed the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education budget. And we passed most of the other appropriations bills. They still have to go to a conference with the Senate and the Senate has not passed most of their appropriations bills. The Senate can move very fast when it wants to. So the likelihood is that in the month of September all of this is going to be completed by the Senate and the House, and the Senate operate from the same set of overall budget figures that the House operates from. There is an agreement between Senate and House, and we are proceeding on the basis of one set of budget cuts. So the Senate budget will cut Education, Health and Human Services as much as the House budget will cut it, as much as House appropriations cut it. The difference is where they will cut. The Senate may choose to not assassinate OSHA, not to try to destroy the health and safety standards of the workers of America. They may choose to instead take more money out of the Pell grants. They may choose instead to impose more of a burden on student loans. But overall, it is going to be just as bad because they have to stay within those budget figures. That is the other trick that we have to deal with. We have to understand that the Committee on the Budget has already set certain levels, and the Committee on the Budget has determined that you cannot cross lines. One of the charades that took place with respect to the Health and Human Services and Education budget was that if you wanted to restore the cut for Head Start--and these high technology barbarians have done something nobody else has done in the course of history of the Congress. President Bush did not [[Page H 8521]] cut Head Start. President Reagan increased Head Start. Head Start has never been cut by any President. But they cut Head Start. If you wanted to restore Head Start cuts, you had to take it from somewhere else, but there is a bigger cut in title I. So if you wanted to restore Head Start, you could cut title I some more. If you want to restore title I, a billion dollars is a large amount of money because title I is the largest program of assistance to elementary and secondary education that takes place through the channels of the Federal Government. Everybody likes to think it is Federal money. The Federal Government gives back a portion of the budget, a portion of the people's money, because all taxes are local. All revenue derives from individuals and families and it is sent to Washington so it is getting our money back. We get back a very tiny amount of our money for education. The Federal Government only is involved in about 7 percent of the total expenditure for education, but its involvement comes through the title I program for elementary and secondary education. They are cutting that by more than a billion dollars. We could not restore any of that without cutting some other part of this same function 500. Yes, we could cut the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, and give a few million maybe back to Head Start, or we could cut OSHA or we could cut MSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration. You could have cannibalism, cannibalism among worthwhile programs. That choice you have. Let the programs eat each other. Because the trick is, you cannot go outside of the function of Health, Human Services and Education to get any money from the places where the real waste occurs. We cannot go back, we cannot go and take it from defense. You cannot, everybody knows where the waste is, but you cannot even propose it on the floor at the time of the deliberations on the Health and Human Services and Education bill. We know there is waste in the defense weapons systems. We know the B- 2 bomber is the most wasteful weapons system that we ever confronted. We know that because there is agreement at the Pentagon. They say it is wasteful. They do not need it. The Secretary of Defense says he does not need the B-2 bomber. The President says he does not need it. Everybody agrees except the Members of Congress, the Members of the House, that we do not need a B-2 bomber. So we put back $500 million in the annual budget and over the life of the B-2 bomber program, we are talking about $30-some billion. So if we wanted to take care of Head Start and wanted to take care of title I, Pell grants, OSHA, MHSA, all the worthwhile human services programs, you can easily do it if you are allowed to reach into the defense budget and get the waste out of there to take care of it. Because the defense numbers are tremendous numbers. Just take the B-2 bomber. You have a great solution to the problem over the last 7 years. By cutting out the B-2 bomber, we could refund these programs at the level that they existed before and even give them increases. So where are we in the process? I want to get back to that so that every American citizen listening will know that this complicated process is not so complicated after all. The appropriations process is about to come to an end in the House. The House Committee on Appropriations will consult with the Senate. They will come out with a joint conference report of what they both agree on. It will go to the President for the President's signature. Each one of these appropriations bills goes to the President separately. So the President will probably sign the defense appropriations. Unfortunately, there is not very much disagreement between the White House and the Congress on defense. When they should have been cutting this, they were not cutting either. So I suspect that the defense appropriations bill will probably be signed. It is the last one we do, but it may be the first one signed by the President. I suspect that the last thing the President will sign, if he ever signs it, would be the Education, Health and Human Services budget. In fact the President has already said he is likely to veto the appropriations bill if it comes to him in the form that passed the House of Representatives yesterday. If it comes that way, we know it will be vetoed. What happens when the President vetoes? Each one of the appropriations bills, the President has the option of signing it, it becomes law, and that will guide our expenditures for the next year. Or he can veto it and it comes back to the House of Representatives. If it comes back to the House, we can override it, if we have two- thirds of the Members of the House vote to override. In the health and human services bill, there is no chance that there will be a two-thirds vote to override. In the housing, VA, veterans and housing bill, I do not think there is any chance that they will get an override. In a number of the key appropriations bills, there will not be a congressional vote great enough in the House of Representatives to override the veto. You should follow this. Every citizen should follow this, because what it means is that as we approach the deadline date of September 30, which is the end of the Federal fiscal year, these programs that do not have an appropriations bill, which is now law, the appropriations bill has not been turned into law, they have no way to continue operating. They run out of money. They have run out of money and a crisis is created. A crisis is created. The probability is that, given the games that the Republican majority is playing and given the extreme and mean positions that they have taken here on these vital programs, they will not agree to the continuing resolution. The way you continue programs when the money runs out is you have to vote for a continuing resolution, which covers all programs for which there has been no appropriations bill signed. The likelihood is that the same people who refused to vote decent amounts of funding for these programs to begin with are not going to accept a continuing resolution which continues them at the same level as last year. In fact, some of these same programs have already been cut this year in a rescission bill, which was promulgated by the Republican majority. And that rescission bill cut $16 billion out of this year's budget to make it impossible for some of these programs to continue because they have already been cut, regardless of what a continuing resolution says, they would have to receive a cut this year and then pick up on the continuing resolution, and it cannot be accomplished. So we are headed for a crisis, and every American should understand the nature of the crisis. In my district last week, in discussing the problem with some constituents, there was one elderly lady who said to me: Well, if the Government is out of money and we just do not have no more money, then I will make my sacrifice. I do not mind sacrificing just like everybody else. I do not mind the Medicare cuts. I do not mind making my share of the effort. I do not mind suffering if our Government is in trouble and they just do not have any more money. Well, that is a noble sentiment. I suspect that the majority of Americans feel the same way. When the suffering is necessary, they are willing to do it. In World War II, massive amounts of people were willing to suffer and endure. So it is nothing new. Americans are willing to suffer. But it is important that you understand that the suffering and the pain that is being inflicted is unnecessary. It is unnecessary for elderly people to worry about their Medicare payments. It is unnecessary to worry about whether you are going to be able to get into a nursing home or not. When your money runs out and you cannot afford Medicare anymore, you cannot afford to pay for your own health care, as thousands of elderly people spend down, they get very sick, the medical costs, despite the fact that they have Medicare, there is a portion they have to pay. They run out of money and they become poor as a result of bad health, as a result of operations, as a result of time in the hospital. And they can only be put in a nursing home if they are convalescing after an operation if they declare themselves poor and go onto Medicaid, the other part of the health care program that was created by Democrats. Remember, we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of Medicare. Medicare [[Page H 8522]] was created by Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat. Medicaid was created by Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, just as Social Security was created by Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat. We are celebrating Medicare's 30th anniversary, and it is important to understand that there is no need for this in the richest country in the history of the world. The United States of America is the richest country that ever existed in the history of the world. They said, well, you might say there are some Arab countries that people per capita are richer than we are. There may be four or five countries in the world where per capita at a given moment they have higher incomes. But if you look at the assets and resources of these nations, you will find that it is all very much illusionary. Overnight something can happen to the oil prices in the world, and in Saudi Arabia the standard of living goes down drastically. In Kuwait, the standard of living is going down because they are not getting as much for their oil products as before. Nigeria, which has some of the finest-grade oil in the world, faces a crisis because there is a glut on the market, and oil prices still go down. So we are not in America dependent on any one set of natural resources. We are not dependent on any one set of minerals or any one set of climatic conditions. There are well-established institutions. Our country, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, has produced an abundant supply of rich, natural resources and rich farm lands and growing seasons that allow us to maximize the amount of foodstuffs grown here. We could feed the whole world if we wanted to. All of that together adds up to riches that no other nation has. And you put it all together, there are riches that no other nation can begin to dream of. Add to that the law and order, the well-established legal system, an institutional government which stabilizes things so that you are not, even in the worst of times, and we may be going through some of those worst of times in terms of the democratic process, but even in the worst of times there are not cataclysmic shifts that overnight render our resources less potent and our economy cannot be brought down by any one turn of events. We are the richest Nation that ever existed in the history of the world. We should not be contemplating forcing suffering and pain upon the elderly. We should not be contemplating forcing children to go without decent lunches. They cannot get a decent meal anywhere else, even the school; with the help of the Federal Government, they should be able to get a decent lunch, because those same children will become the soldiers of tomorrow. They will become the workers of tomorrow. They will become the Congressmen and the leaders of tomorrow. Those same children. We are rich enough. We have the resources. The problem is that every American must understand, the problem is the attitude and the vision of the people who have the power now. When you have this train wreck, when there is a crisis created between the President and the Congress, the President vetoes the bills, they go back to the Congress, they cannot override. The Congress refuses to pass spending, a continuing resolution. When that happens, we should all be ready to join fully into the debate and understand what is happening. The new America is being shaped. If the people, if the great majority of Americans stand up and say: No, we will not accept anybody or any argument which tells us we are too poor to be able to take care of all the sick; we are too poor to be able to take care of the elderly; we are too poor to provide school lunches; we are too poor to provide a decent education for the generation of Americans who will have to work to keep the Social Security system going, to keep the Medicare system going. There are some people worried about Medicare becoming bankrupt, and it certainly will be bankrupt if our workers are not working and adding to the fund. Social Security will be bankrupt if our workers are not working and adding to the fund. If all of the jobs are shipped overseas or to Mexico and the workers are not contributing to the Social Security fund, the rich may still get rich by using the labor of people overseas, but the workers overseas do not pay into the Social Security fund. The workers overseas are not contributing to the future of America. You can get cheaper labor and use high-tech instruments and you can bring in from India some very well-educated computer programmers. But those Indian computer programmers are not paying into the Social Security. They have no stake in our society. We have to understand what all this means when they are trying to remake America by wiping out the working conditions for the workers of America; by lowering the wages of the workers of America; by creating conditions which make it very difficult to educate the vast population of America. We have to understand what is happening. The remaking of America may mean the destruction of America. We have to get involved. Nobody should accept the argument that we are too poor as a country, and I want to make my sacrifice. Do not rush to make a sacrifice for this particular agenda. Everybody should be in favor of cutting waste in government, and we certainly are. We do not want to spend a single dime that we do not have to spend. But do not rush into believing that the problem we face is because all of our education programs are wasteful or all of our health care programs are wasteful. That is not the problem. The problem is that there was a tremendous waste in government and the people in power do not want to confront that waste. The waste is in the B-2 bombers. The waste is in the Seawolf submarines. The waste is in the agricultural subsidies. We had an amendment on the floor which said, look, we do not want to cut subsidies for people who need subsidies, but for all of these people who are gentleman farmers and they only farm part time, if they have an income outside of their farming activities of $100,000 or more, then they should not be receiving subsidies. That is all we said; a simple, commonsense proposal was on the floor. Let us not give taxpayers' money to people who are farmers who have other incomes of $100,000 or more. That was voted down. That was massive waste confronted. The opportunity was there to curb that waste, but it was voted down. There were other examples, also. An amendment said, let us not subsidize tobacco. There is a great debate about tobacco and whether it is healthy to us and whether it is contributing to the destruction of the health care budget, because it creates a lot of very complicated illnesses which are very costly; whether it is destroying the morality of our youth. I am not going to get into that, but the question was, Should we subsidize it, should taxpayers continue to pay subsidies for promotion of tobacco products? That was voted down. So, before you accept the argument that massive cuts have to be made, and great amount of suffering has to take place in the Health and Human Services and Education budget, look carefully at the rest of the budget of the Federal Government. We have a whole series of things that we need to deal with in terms of cutting waste before we get there. We are talking about people who have a vision of America which includes B-2 bombers over school lunches. Seawolf submarines over nursing home care, home care for the elderly. That is their vision of America. What we have to understand is that in 1995, we have to deal with the long-range vision of America. The vision thing that President Bush had trouble dealing with; the Speaker of the House has no trouble dealing with that. There is a clear agenda and there is a clear sense of direction that has been set forth, whether you agree with it or not. At least you should applaud that there is a clear agenda. The agenda says that America should be only for the over-class. Only an elite group. We are going to have public policies, government policies, which take care of and even pamper the over-class. Pamper the people who have computers. Everybody who owns a computer is in the over-class automatically. You have to have a certain level of salary, send your kids to school and pay for it, if necessary, because the [[Page H 8523]] agenda is to let the public school system collapse. They do not care whether public schools exist or not. They know that States are cutting back on education budgets. They know that cities are hard pressed and they are cutting education budgets. They know that the Federal Government gets all of its tax moneys from cities and towns and villages. We cannot say that Federal money is Federal money; therefore, it should never be used for education. People have a right to ask for some of the money back for education. Education is as legitimate an activity and function as any other if it is needed. So the vision of the elite, the majority Republicans here, have an elite vision, a vision to take care of the elite. The over-class will be taken care of. The over-class will be pampered and enhanced. The over-class will be enriched. The over-class will receive a tax cut. We will give them money while we are cutting programs, vitally needed programs from everybody else. That is their vision of America. Take care of the elite. Take care of the small group that went out to vote in 1994, November 1994. They came out and they voted and they always come out to vote. There is correlation between wealth and voting. The richest vote 100 percent of the time and the middle-class vote 75 percent of the time. It is at the bottom, the people who are the poorest and need the help from the Government the most, the social contract benefits the most, who do not understand the relationship between their vote and public policies. The present majority has an agenda which says we will take care of those that we know vote. Their votes are guaranteed. If we take care of them in abundant ways and guarantee that all of the nuisances of a few extra taxes here and tax regulations there, if everything that in any way is a cobweb in their lives is removed, then we shall prevail. They will support us and we shall prevail because, after all, they are the big contributors. It is assumed that this process can go forward and they can continue to make these gigantic budget cuts, like the one that has just been made in the Health and Human Services and Education and Labor budget, and that no one will intervene; that all of us citizens can only sit back and watch, because if they have the majority, they can pass the bills. We can only wait to 1996, and they are hoping that we believe that is all we can do and, therefore, we will wait until 1996. The great majority of Americans who are affected by these cuts will be demoralized and think that there is no hope or they will believe, like the lady who says, ``I am ready to make my sacrifice, the Government is out of money and, therefore, I will suffer gladly for my country.'' They believe they can prevail by sowing these kinds of lines of confusion out there, but they are not correct in assuming. Americans, the caring majority out there, the great majority who will be impacted by these cuts, my appeal is that you get up and start acting right now. My appeal is that you start understanding what is at stake right now. Public opinion is a very real force in our deliberations here. Every Member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, is watching public opinion. Every Member of Congress who wants to come back here cannot afford to ignore public opinion, and it is not generated out of thin air. People act. You have to tell your neighbors to wake up. There is a vision of America that is a dangerous one for us, and there is a vision of America which will destroy America for the majority of Americans. There is a vision of America which is really un-American, because it is geared toward an elite group, and over-class, an oligarchy. It is totally contradictory in respect to what this country is about. There is a vision of America that says we do not need public school education because we can educate our children or we can have privatization of education and accomplish more that way. Those of us that have some money and can afford to pay some portion of the cost can participate in the privatization process. We will educate our children. That vision of America is totally wrong because they are assuming that this country can exist with just an educated elite, with just a portion of the population educated. They have missed the point of America. They have missed the point that we are different from Europe and this country was built into a powerful Nation over a relatively short period of time because it reached out and provided opportunities for everybody. It reached out and made an attempt to provide education for everybody. In a modern society, a very complex modern society, the geniuses or the technicians and the scientists cannot be effective unless the people under them, the mechanics, the literacy level, the scientific literacy, the computer literacy of the total population contributes to what the elite over-class is able to accomplish. They will not prevail and they will not succeed, but they do not know this. They are going to try to take a shortcut and pamper, humor, take care of just the over-class and assume that they can build a nation on that. It is a vision that is a flawed vision. It is a vision that is the wrong vision and we need to offer another vision. That is why we did the Congressional Black Caucus budget, which had no chance of passing. We went through the motions and put it on the floor because we wanted to offer a different vision of America. We wanted to offer a vision of America which ran counter to the elitist vision. We wanted to show that you can have a great American Nation that is not elite. You can even balance the budget. You can balance the budget by eliminating the real waste. The real waste in defense, so the Congressional Black Caucus cut it by $350 billion over a 7-year period, a $350 billion cut. You can balance the budget if you do one other thing, which has to be part of the discussion. The old lady who believes that America is bankrupt and broke should know that over the last few decades the amount of money being contributed to help balance the budget by corporations, the revenue stream, revenue from corporations, has gone down since 1943 from a high point of 40 percent. The tax burden was borne by corporations by about 40 percent in 1943. Forty percent of our overall tax burden was borne by corporations, 27 percent was borne by individuals and families. Over the last few decades, it has dropped from 40 percent to as low as 8 percent in 1980. The corporate burden, the corporate share of revenue, dropped as low as 8 percent in 1980 and it is now at 11 percent. So of the money we raise from taxes, through taxes, taxation, revenue that is needed to run the Government, only 11 percent of that is contributed from corporate income. At the same time, individual taxes rose from 27 percent of the overall tax burden to 44 percent. We are paying 44 percent of the tax burden in 1995. In 1943, we were paying about 27 percent. So if people are angry about the fact that they as an individual and their family, they are paying too many taxes, their tax bill is too high, I agree with them. They are right. In order to relieve the tax burden, what we need to do is to return to some kind of fairness with respect to the corporate portion of the tax burden. In our Congressional Black Caucus budget, the major way we balanced the budget was to raise the corporate tax burden up to the level of 15 percent. From 11 to 15 percent is not a great jump, but as you move it up, you create the possibility of balancing the budget without having to make cuts in Medicare, cuts in Medicaid. We even increased the budget for education by 25 percent. Education and job training budget was increased by 25 percent. So in this rich Nation of ours, we do not need to sacrifice the elderly. We do not need to sacrifice the health care of the elderly. We do not need to sacrifice school lunches. What we do need to do is have our own vision of America projected. The vision should include fairness in the tax burden. The bearing of the tax burden should be fair. When people fill out their income tax in April, the corporations should lessen their burden by shouldering more of the burden themselves. I am in favor of a tax cut. The majority of Republicans are not alone in the [[Page H 8524]] proposal for a tax cut. We are in favor of a tax cut. In our Congressional Black Caucus budget, we propose a tax cut for the poorest Americans and we were able to give the tax cut at the same time we kept Medicare at the same level. We kept Medicaid at the same level. We were still able to give a tax cut to the people who need it most. I am in favor of more tax cuts for individuals and families, but that can be done only if we raise the tax burden for the corporations who have gotten away with buying out the Committee on Ways and Means over the last few decades. That Committee on Ways and Means that I said was so powerful before, their collusion with the corporations of America took the tax burden for corporations down from 40 to 8 percent in 1980, and now it is just 11 percent. Those are the people who want to bring us a new approach to taxes. They are talking about a flat tax. There are proposals for new taxes. In our discussion of what the vision of America should look like, we should not forget the revenue side. Liberals, progressives, Democrats, do not talk much about taxes in terms of revenue that has to be produced to keep our Nation going at the quality level that we think is necessary. We do not deal much with tax proposals. Only in reaction to Republicans do you define progressives, Democrats, and liberals. These are terrible names out of the mouths of some, but these are the people who have made America great. Franklin Roosevelt was a liberal. Lyndon Johnson was a liberal. Harry Truman was a liberal. The people who have made America great have not talked enough about taxes, and the organizations now which focus on the budget and appropriations process do not talk enough about the need to deal with creative taxation, creative revenue enhancement. How do we get more revenue with less pain? How do we relieve the American families and individuals of the burden of more taxes while we get the taxes that are necessary to run the Government? That is a question that is not discussed enough. It has to be discussed at every level. State governments are crying they have no more revenue sources. They want to give tax cuts to individuals and businesses in many cases, and everybody sits around mentioning the fact that we have to make these draconian cuts because there is just no more money. There are plenty of resources in the richest country that ever existed in the face of the history of the Earth. There were resources that were given by God still out there in our minerals. In the Midwest we give away gold mines, we give away uranium mines. We let people take these Government lands and mine minerals and we do not ask for a royalty. We ask for a minimum payment for land that belongs to the citizens. We can get more money into our revenue stream if we were to take a different approach and not give away our resources, our land resources out there in the West, Midwest and Far West. There is a great controversy about grazing land. Public grazing land is used by private ranchers. They pay one-tenth of the cost of the grazing land that they would pay if it was private land, one-tenth of the cost, and then they complain about that. They are complaining about Government intruding. They want to take it all. They do not want to pay anything. They do not want Government officials around watching them as they take advantage of the resources that belong to all Americans and then they complain about Government being on their back. In the plan that was proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus, and I served as the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Alternative Budget Task Force. A plan was proposed by both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus in the revenue area to give tax relief to working Americans. We wanted to reduce the taxes of working Americans by $112 billion over this 7-year period. We proposed to enact a tax credit equal to 20 percent of an individual's FICA contribution, up to $200 per person annually. That means that everybody would get--take advantage of that, but we would go no higher than the $200 per person annually. It would be a small tax cut, but it would be symbolic, and it would be just a beginning. We would be proposing additional tax cuts for individuals and families because there is an imbalance. Individuals and families are paying too much of the tax burden. Corporations are paying too little. A vision of America and the future, a vision of America which is able to provide education for all who need education, a vision of America that can provide nursing home care for the elderly, Medicare, Medicaid, a vision of America that can provide decent housing for all Americans, that vision must include a revenue stream that will pay for all of that and we should not leave it to the Republicans to determine what that revenue stream is going to be. We have to work it out also. In our proposal, the body of our budget proposal, we propose that there should be established a commission on creative revenues. Just as we have a base closing commission after decades of trying to do it through the political channels and running into partisan politics, the only way we have made headway in closing bases, military bases, is by appointing a commission to make the recommendations. Congress has the final vote. Congress has the final vote. But the commission deliberates and looks at things in a rational way and proposes which bases should be closed. We need a commission to look at revenue possibilities, look at tax laws and the possible revisions of tax laws. Give that commission time to operate, time to deliberate. Give them whatever they need. Let them bring back recommendations to the Congress instead of it coming out of the Committee on Ways and Means, which is corrupted. The Committee on Ways and Means is a major part of the problem, never a part of the solution because they have allowed corporations to take over the committee. How else would you explain a drop in the share of the revenue burden by the corporations? The corporations were paying only 8 percent of the tax burden in 1980 and 11 percent in 1995, whereas they were paying 40 percent in 1943. They control the Committee on Ways and Means. They got the laws enacted which allowed them to pay less and less taxes all the time. Do not go to the Committee on Ways and Means if you want justice in taxation. If you want justice in terms of the tax burden or the way it is borne in this country, leave out the Committee on Ways and Means. Have a tax commission, a specially appointed commission bring to the total Congress recommendations about where America should go in the next 7 to 10 years. The majority of the House and Senate have proposed a 7-year balancing the budget. The President has proposed a budget balancing process that will go over 10 years. I agree with the President. Why have the extra pain and suffering that is caused by trying to do it in a 7-year period? There is no great pressing emergency. We are not at war. There are no reasons why we cannot, if we want to balance the budget, do it over a 10-year period, rather than 7-year period. Either way you do it, we should look more at the revenue problem. It is not just a matter of expenditure. As I said before, in our revenue section of the Congressional Black Caucus budget, the carrying majority budget for the Congressional Caucus was well as the Congressional Black Caucus, we proposed tax relief for working Americans over the 7-year period which would be a $112 billion tax cut. It is not as much as the 320-some-billion-dollar cut that is being proposed by the Republicans. The Republican majority is proposing a 320-plus-billion-dollar tax cut over a 7-year period for the richest Americans, for the richest people in the country. They would benefit the most. That kind of tax cut will not help the situation. It will only make it more difficult. We also supported tax provisions in President Clinton's budget. We supported an effort to enhance tax compliance. We supported eliminating loopholes for multinational corporations. One of the ways that corporations get away with paying so little a portion of the revenue burden is that they have these loopholes like the following: If you change the foreign tax credit that [[Page H 8525]] is given to multinational corporations, if you change the tax credit to a tax deduction, just that change would increase the amount of revenue gained over a 7-year period to $71 billion. We would get an additional $71 billion. Reform taxation of the income of multinational corporations, get another $86 billion. Capital gains reform would produce $67 billion. Corporate income tax reform, by eliminating the accelerated depreciation tricks, we could eliminate $162 billion over a 7-year period and on and on it goes. If you look at the revenue side and you look at how corporations continue to evade their fair share of burden, you would find that there are great things that could be done. There are also other creative processes that could be undertaken to generate revenue. We have just passed a telecommunications bill on the floor of the House. Telecommunications is an industry which 50 years ago was a very tiny industry compared to steel, compared to transportation, but telecommunications is the industry of the future. Telecommunications makes something almost out of nothing. They do not have the burden of having to have a source of natural resources, iron, ore or coal, good weather. It is all a matter of imagination and the way you manipulate the resources. You have to use technology to provide entertainment, to provide information. Technology has made the communications industry the technology industry, the telecommunications industry the industry of today and the industry of the future. Millions, billions of dollars are being made by people who are merely creative, clever, smart. Now, I have no problem with that. Making money is part of what the capitalist system is all about, but the capitalism of today and the capitalism of tomorrow should understand that taxation is the duty, the proper tax policies, tax policies which are fair and tax policies which go after those who are making the resources, making the money. They have the resources; they should be taxed. Telecommunications depends on the airwaves. The airwaves belong to all Americans. Broadcasting is regulated by the FCC because we do not have enough for everybody to have one as they see fit. It has to be regulated. It is a scarce resource. Because it is a scarce resource, it belongs to the American people. The American people have a right to demand that they get more revenue from those resources. We also now are selling off spectrums up there above us, spectrums for a different kind of communication, not just broadband broadcasting. We have gotten commitments of $9 billion already. That should have a special taxation. We are selling it and the Government will reap a one time benefit of $9 billion for the contracts that are already under way. Why not have it permanently taxed so that future generations, as long as the Nation exists and the airwaves are above our heads, can benefit from that because it belongs to everybody. There was a motion on the floor, an amendment to require any drug companies that benefit from Federal research to pay a portion of that back in terms of lower drug prices. I say we should go further. Any company, whether it is a drug company or a telecommunications company, any company that benefits from Federal research have the Government as a permanent partner. There should be royalties on the products forever. We have numerous products that would not exist had it not been for military research--radar, computerization, all kinds of components of this big telecommunications revolution, and the great technological revolution, all of those components were developed through military research paid for by the American people. Why not have a royalty so that the American people every time a product is sold will benefit from the research that they paid for? On and on it goes. I want to close out by just saying that what I am trying to talk about is the fact that we have reached a landmark, a milestone, a major milestone in the process of remaking America. I take Speaker Gingrich and the majority Republicans very seriously when they say they are going to remake America, I believe that they are really going to try to do that, and they are smart enough to do what they say they are going to do if we do not stop them. I am all for remaking America, thinking as we go into the 21st century a vision of a new America is a proper vision. But what shall that vision be? I see a vision of an America that is the richest Nation on the face of the earth, the richest Nation that ever existed, and its resources are used in a way which benefits every American, resources are used in ways that benefit all Americans for education, for health care. The question is, Is the United States of America a Nation for the rich and powerful only? Shall the great majority of the population remain immobile while it is reduced to a status of urban serfs or suburban peasants? Shall the resources of the richest Nation that has ever existed in the history of the world be used primarily for the benefit of an oppressive elite minority or shall it be used for the benefit of all the people and shall a caring majority rise up and let it be known that they are going to determine what America looks like in the 21st century and it is going to be an America for everybody, an America that is fair, an America that is living up to the hope of the Constitution. Our job is to promote the general welfare, that is the welfare for everybody, not to cut school lunches, not to cut medicare, not to make life painful for the elderly and the weak. Our job is an America which has compassion. My Advice To The Privileged Orders

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, in connection with the remarks I made on August 2, 1995, I wish to submit the following additional remarks and extraneous materials which include the following items: A. The letter of dying coal miner Jacob L. Vowell killed with 183 others in a coal mining accident. B. The text of articles on OSHA which appeared in the Washington Post on July 23 and July 24. C. A summary of the quotes which were contained in the Washington Post articles. Letter of Dying Coal Miner Jacob L. Vowell Killed With 183 Others Ellen, Darling, goodbye for us both. Elbert said the Lord has saved him. We are all praying for air to support us, but it is getting so bad without any air. Ellen I want you to live right and come to heaven. Raise the children the best you can. Oh how I wish to be with you, goodbye. Bury me and Elbert in the same grave by little Eddy. Goodbye Ellen. Goodbye Lily. Goodbye Jemmie. Goodbye Horace. Is 25 minutes after 2. There is a few of us alive yet. Jake and Elbert. Oh God for one more breath. Ellen remember me as long as you live. Goodbye Darling. Letter written by Jacob L. Vowell while he and 26 others barricaded inside a Tennessee mine after a May 19, 1902, explosion. Although the makeshift barricade held out the bad air for over 7 hours, the trapped mines were eventually overcome by suffocating gases. The disaster claimed 184 lives. [From the Washington Post, July 23, 1995] The Hill May Be A Health Hazard for Safety Agency--Shift in Political Forces Brings GOP Push to Weaken OSHA (By Michael Weisskopf and David Maraniss) Thomas Cass Ballenger, in his rolls as small-town industrialist, civic benefactor and veteran congressman from the western hills of North Carolina, always displayed a talent for fund-raising. But the money never came easier than during the congressional elections last fall, when he traveled around his state soliciting contributions for candidates who would serve as ground troops for the Republican revolution. Whenever Ballenger spoke, checkbooks opened at the mention of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), a regulatory agency that had emerged as a symbol of everything the business world disliked about the federal government. His vision of a House of Representatives controlled by Republicans, as Ballenger later described it, went like this: ``I'd say, `Guess who might be chairman of the committee who'd be in charge of OSHA?'' ``And they'd say, `Who?' ``And I'd say, `Me!' ``And I'd say, `I need some money.' And--whoosh!--I got it. This was my sales pitch: `Businessmen, wouldn't you like to have a friend overseeing

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, all taxes are local. The Federal money came from the local level. We pay our income taxes and send them to Washington. We need our money back for education. The States and the cities are not going to be able to take care of the education problems. Let me just tell you about two schools in my district. Public school 208 in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, is one of them. Nearly 70 percent of all the children are from low-income families. Most of them are working poor. The school is overcrowded, filled to 120 percent capacity, with an average class size of 30. About one-third of the students test below what the State considers minimum competency in math and reading. If this bill passes next year, the title I tutoring of 270 of these children will no longer be there. Prospect High School is another school in my district. It is 68 percent of students from low-income families. The building is almost 70 years old, in shocking disrepair. Many of the classrooms do not even have blackboards. There are not even enough chairs in the cafeteria to seat all the students, so some of them must stand up and eat or they eat propped up against the wall. Extracurricular activities are nonexistent. If this bill passes next year, these students will not have title I programs they need, 1,000 students will miss out on title I programs.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I think it is important to note that there has been a misstatement about adding $5 million. This is squeezing of $5 million out of other programs that are already in OERI. OERI's budget was increased by 17 percent, but at the same time, they were forced to assume responsibility for a number of other programs that were defunded. Mr. Chairman, if we add up the money taken away from those other programs, like the desegregation centers, the technical assistance centers, we will find what is taken away from them is far greater than the increase that OERI received. Assuming that this colloquy had some meaning, the colloquy protects the labs, the centers, and one other item that was mentioned there as being protected. Only those 3 items are protected. All of the other entities that are included in OERI will have to suffer as a result. Mr. Chairman, this is a squeezing, because of the fact that we start out with the wrong amount for OERI to begin with, because we have the wrong amount for the Department of Education totally. The problem is, back to the B-2 bombers, back to the F-22s, back to all the wastes that exist in other parts of the budget. We are forcing the other education programs to eat each other, and that is not proper. We should not be laboring under the illusion, thinking that $5 million is being added here and that is going to take care of the literacy program and none of the other programs in OERI will be hurt. Many vital programs in OERI have already been eliminated and they must make up for that and assume those responsibilities with the existing money that they have. Mr. Chairman, this amendment does not allow them to do that. It only places a greater burden on what is left in OERI, including the funding of five institutes that have to be started up and they are part of the existing OERI structure that has been approved. All of that is being put under the hammer in terms of $5 million being taken away.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, 10(j) injunction processes allow the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, to do the job they set up to do. They operated for the last 60 years, done a great job for labor relations in America, but in their zeal to destroy organized labor and their zeal to destroy the workers of this Nation, the Republicans, the majority, has moved in this appropriations bill in a way which is abusive, abuses their power and makes a mockery of the democratic process. It trivializes the institutions that we have built for the last 60 years. The 10(j) process, when it was not in existence, caused the National Labor Relations Board to be impotent in cases which were life-and-death matters. I am going to give my colleagues one extreme example. In August 1989 the company fired employee Jerry Whitaker for having previously filed an unfair labor practice charge with the Board. The Board ordered the company to reinstate Whitaker, and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals enforced the Board's order in 1992. The company ignored both the Board and the court. This is Gary Enterprises ignored the court and the Board, and the Board was forced to bring a contempt case and forced the company to comply. After being discharged, Mr. Whitaker, while he is waiting for this process to take place, had to find work. He could not find work. He finally found work hauling logs. He had to sleep in his car. He had a heart condition, and one morning while a contempt case was still pending before the court, Mr. Whitaker was found dead in his truck from a heart attack at age 55. The Board is still trying to collect the back pay owed to Mr. Whitaker's estate by the company. This is the kind of case that today would be considered for a 10(j) injunction. It could not happen today. The use of the 10(j) injunction today successfully could have put Mr. Whitaker back to work promptly, reduced the back pay owed by the company, and possibly saved and prolonged Jerry Whitaker's life. This is a life-or-death matter, and we are using a shortcut process in the appropriations process to deal with it.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this bill is not merely about saving money. Very little money is saved in the reductions, the cuts on OSHA. This is about micromanaging the Department to achieve certain targeted objectives. There is a conspiracy to wipe out OSHA. There is a conspiracy to destroy the effectiveness of OSHA. Thirty-three percent of the enforcement budget is cut, 33 percent is cut from an already small work force. With the number of inspectors that OSHA has presently, it would take them 86 years to inspect every business establishment in America one time, 86 years already. Now they are going to cut that by one- third. There is a conspiracy. Mr. Chairman, that conspiracy is documented in a Washington Post article, two articles, which appeared July 23 and 24, and I intend to submit them in the Committee of the Whole for the Record, the entire two articles from the Washington Post. These articles expose the fact that there is a covert war to obliterate OSHA and MSHA. This conspiring has been underway since the beginning of the 1994 election campaign. The Post article indicated that the down payment for the contract to assassinate OSHA was $65,000 in North Carolina. I am certain that similar war bonds for the destruction of OSHA and MSHA were being purchased in other States, also. They are specifically going after certain aspects of OSHA to please the business community. The world already knows how the Republican Party has turned over the Waco investigation to the NRA. That is well documented. Thanks to this article in the Post, we now know that certain parts of what I call the Death and Injury Act in the authorizing committee was turned over to similar outside vested interests, and certain aspects of this appropriations bill have been turned over, to be written by outside interests. Mr. Chairman, we are talking about life and death. We are talking about a bill which will go after the standards which protect the health and safety of American workers. Fifty-six thousand workers die per year. Ten thousand died last year directly on the job. The rest of them died as a result of complications suffered by conditions on the job or diseases contracted on the job, but 10,000 died directly. In North Carolina, we know about the 25 people who were killed in one fire in a North Carolina plant that had not been inspected by OSHA. In Georgia, on March 17, 1994, Mr. Sangster, an employee of the Industrial Boiler Co., was killed while attempting to test fire a boiler. The boiler exploded and the left front door struck Mr. Sangster, killing him. There were quite a number of such deaths in the State of Georgia. I mention that because there are prominent Members of the State of Georgia delegation on the committee seeking to assassinate and destroy OSHA. Also in Georgia, on April 18, 1994, a Mr. Powel, an employee of Harbert-Yeargin Co., was killed while in the process of erecting scaffolding. He bent over to pick up his hammer and his safety lantern got caught in an ungraded drive shaft. Mr. Powel was dragged into the shaft and killed. In Pennsylvania, where the head of our authorizing committee that is out to assassinate and destroy OSHA resides, on December 13, 1993, a Mr. Rever, an employee of Hartlaub's Used Cars and Parts, was crushed to death. No safety chain assembly was being used, nor was the vehicle jacked and blocked as it is supposed to be to prevent the falling. As a result, when Mr. Rever used an impact wrench to remove parts, the van fell on him, crushing his head and chest. Mr. Chairman, this is a life and death matter for American workers. Not only the members of labor unions but all American workers are affected. Since OSHA has existed, the number of deaths and injuries have gone down. We must save OSHA from this micromanaging, and the authorizing language in this bill, which is part of the appropriations for appropriation, is part of the conspiracy to destroy it.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, further reserving the right to object, I rise in support of the unanimous consent request. As the gentleman stated, H.R. 1225 concerns the compensation for overtime for State and local court reporters. Although a blanket exemption from the Fair Labor Standards Act overtime requirements would be inappropriate, where court reporters are otherwise receiving compensation for a transcript on a per-page basis and are preparing the transcript on their own time, that time should not be required to count for purposes of computing the reporters' overtime. I support this legislation because it achieves that end, and I commend my colleagues, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling], the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Fawell], the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Ballenger], for working to resolve this issue in a bipartisan manner. Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, I will ask the gentleman to explain his unanimous-consent request.

Mr. OWENS. Further reserving the right to object, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the war on workers and families in America will be escalated this week when the Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill reaches the floor of the House. For all matters concerned with workplace protections, this Republican appropriations bill is not focused on appropriations. This is, instead, a stampede into radical authorizing legislation. The authorizing Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities is rendered obsolete by what the Committee on Appropriations is doing. The antiworker, antiunion Republican overlords have chosen to bypass the authorizing process and implement their war against the workers by cutting the funds for OSHA, MSHA, and NIOSH. We have also provisions which require that OSHA cannot use but two- thirds of its funds, present funds, for enforcement activities, cuts the enforcement budget by 33 percent. It also cuts out economically targeted investments. It bans the use of such funds from the pension funds for economically targeted investments. It allows 14 year olds to load bailers and compactors, although as recently as 1994 a man was killed in a compactor. It moves into such minute detail as removing the requirement that miners are not allowed to drive as part of their work. It micromanages with dollars. By micromanaging with the dollars, the Appropriations Committee will streamline and accelerate the dirty work which was begun already by the authorizing committee. The goal of the oppressive elite overclass is to take control of the situation through the appropriations process. What they want to do is create a level playing field for the worst company bosses in America. The goal is to reduce American workers to the level of the desperate, nearly enslaved workers of Bangladesh or the Chinese prison laborers. Spend no significant money on the health and safety of workers. That is the goal. Turn all American workers into urban serfs or suburban peasants. This is the final solution. This is the ultimate goal. Total control is the Republican goal. OSHA enforcement, as I said before, has been cut by 33 percent. That is one-third for enforcement. Already, we only have enough inspectors to inspect American businesses once every 86 years. With the kind of work force they have, they can only inspect every business establishment once every 86 years. They wanted to cut that by one- third. MSHA, cut by 7 percent. NIOSH, which does research on new and dangerous chemicals, is cut by 25 percent. The National Labor Relations Board is cut by 30 percent, all of this in the appropriations bill to carry out the will of the Republican overlords in their war against labor. Congress must be concerned about the health and safety of all American workers. The blind and furious ideological war being waged by the Republican party against the Nation's labor unions has impelled the Republicans into a search and destroy mission against OSHA. This attack places all American workers in harm's way. There will be a large number of casualties. Already more than 56,000 American workers die each year as a result of accidents on the job or from disease and injuries they suffer in the workplace. Passage of legislation designed to disable OSHA will greatly escalate this unfortunate body count. Speaker Gingrich has recently proclaimed that politics is war without blood. The reality is that the Republican war on OSHA will provide pain and suffering, and in many instances their scorched earth assault on OSHA will also produce blood. Among the 56,000 casualties last year, there were 10,000 who bled and died at the work site as a result of a horrible accident. There is a contract on the life of OSHA. Reform is no longer the objective of the Republicans. Vengeance is a goal, but vengeance only belongs to God. Members of Congress who want to dedicate their efforts to the task of making Government work must labor to promote the general welfare and do everything possible to make it easier for Americans to engage in the pursuit of happiness. Congressmen and Congresswomen should not plot to murder OSHA and MSHA. Speaker Gingrich defines politics as war without blood. However, the kind of politics being pushed by the Republican death and injury appropriations act is very much a life-and-death matter. Children will lose fathers. Wives will lose husbands. Parents will lose sons and daughters. Americans will die as a result of these reckless changes being proposed to dismantle OSHA. This brand of politics is too extreme. This kind of political war is too deadly.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we are privileged to salute Ivy Catherwood as a Point-of-Light for America. For 34 years of her 80 years, Ms. Catherwood served on the staff of the New York City Police Department. Her story is a story of self-help, sterling citizenship, and great generosity to her community. Ivy Catherwood was born in the Roxbury section of Boston, MA, on July 29, 1915. Her parents, Louise and Claude, both of West Indian descent, moved shortly after her birth back to Jamaica in the West Indies. She attended elementary and high school in the West Indies. She returned to the United States and worked for several years in Boston as a saleslady. In the mid 1950's, she came to New York City and attended Hunter College for 2 years studying liberal arts at night. She also held several jobs--one as a clerk at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan. She was hired by the New York City Police Department in November, 1960, and worked for 34 years until April, 1995. She has two brothers, one deceased. She also has 1 nephew, 1 grand nephew, and 1 grand niece. Her extended family consists of the many organizations of which she is a member: NYPD Guardians Association--was the secretary for 6 years and civilian trustee for approximately 10 years, Vanguard Independent Democratic Association, 100 Women for Major Owens, the Federation of African-American Civil Servants--served as a delegate from the Guardians Association, the Federation of Black Trade Unionists, DC-37, Local 1549--served as a delegate from the NYPD, CBTU, and CLU. Ivy is an outstanding example of loyalty and dependability. She can be counted on to make the phone calls for the union or political candidates and assist with voter registration or other assigned tasks. Ivy has been an outstanding financial supporter of elected officials and community-based organizations. She fully understands the concept of political and economic empowerment. Her activism is witnessed by her colleagues and many friends because she teaches by example. We pause to salute Ivy Catherwood on the occasion of her birthday and retirement after 34 years of service with the New York City Police Department. Ivy Catherwood's great Point-of-Light shines behind the achievement of many Brooklyn and New York City leaders. Through several decades, Ivy has been there for the causes that mattered most. As a model for her generation and for our youth, we proudly salute Ivy Catherwood as a great Point-of-Light.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, this week we celebrate the 30th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid. I emphasize Medicaid because in the ongoing debate about the cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, Medicaid gets left out. Medicaid is very important. I want to remind everybody that 30 years ago, Democrats created Medicare and Medicaid. Lyndon Johnson, as part of the Great Society program, created Medicare and Medicaid. Democrats created Medicare and Medicaid, just as Democrats earlier created Social Security. Franklin Roosevelt was a Democrat. Democrats created Social Security. Today we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid. These two forms of health insurance are the ones which serve those people most likely to need medical care. Yet they are the primary targets of the Republican scorched-earth Grim Reaper budget cutting. While many of my Republican colleagues will rush to the floor next week to defend the continued funding of the B-2 Stealth bomber, they meanwhile are launching a stealth attack against Medicare and Medicaid. Republicans propose to limit the growth of these programs at a rate which is actually one-half of the rate of growth for the private insurance industry. Because two-thirds of the money in Medicaid goes to the services for the elderly and individuals with disabilities, the Medicaid cuts will drastically reduce access to long-term care for those who need it most but are least able to afford it. If you do not believe it, look at my home of New York City, where the nightmare has already begun. A Coney Island woman has had her 12 hours of daily attendant home care, which is much cheaper than nursing home care. Her 12 hours have been cut back to 4 hours. To make up for the 8-hour difference, they gave her an expensive beeper. She is so sick she cannot even open her mail, let alone use a beeper. The cuts in Medicare are equally astounding. They will result in low income seniors paying more than double their current monthly premiums by the year 2000. Let us retain the programs created by Democrats. Let us fight to retain Medicaid and Medicare.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment. During the last few days, we have heard clearly what the plot to balance the budget is all about. The plot to balance the budget is merely to squeeze out money from Medicare and Medicaid and money for the cities. The plot to balance the budget is not sincere at all, because we are refusing to take away taxpayer subsidies for tobacco. We will not take away taxpayer subsidies for alcohol. We will not take away taxpayers subsidies for mink coats. How are we going to balance the budget? It would be only fair if you were to offer export promotion funds for everybody. I have a used clothing processing plant in Brooklyn, the largest in the world, and they export used clothing to all parts of the world. The underdeveloped world buys a lot of used clothes. They should have the export advertising subsidy also. They should get in on it also. All products, such as automobiles, have a hard time in Japan. They should have the export promotion program also. We should be fair and have socialized marketing across the board; never balance the budget, cut Medicare and Medicaid.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. You are saying it has not been cut at all?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman's pledge. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, can I interpret that the gentleman will be willing to set a date for privatization?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, would the gentleman repeat that? Do I have the chairman's word?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman be offering the same agreement next year? The logic will still be there. You are saying we should never privatize again?

Mr. OWENS. Is the gentleman saying he is opposed to privatization of the Telephone Bank? He never wants to privatize it? He wants it to remain as it is forever, so the Federal Government will subsidize it for anything?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OWENS. If the gentleman will yield further, I am happy to hear that the Committee on Appropriations is committed to the privatization of the program with all deliberate speed. I hope that speed is not too deliberate.

Mr. OWENS. The food stamp program is now an entitlement. It will no longer be an entitlement once it is block granted, and there are proposals to block grant it, so areas like mine will have to take a huge cut if they depend on the States to continue after it reaches the levels it is funded at the Federal level.

Mr. OWENS. The proposal to block-grant the food stamp program has been dropped?