Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. With inflation as a factor, there are no cuts?

Mr. OWENS. Could the gentleman tell us what percentage the food stamp program has been cut?

Mr. OWENS. Would you estimate September 1996 instead of 1995? Can you make an estimate of how long it is going to take? It has been 25 years.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman tell me what date will be an acceptable date for the final privatization? We are past the deadline.

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is a continuation of the effort to get truth in budget balancing and to have it be made clear to the American people, have it on the record, that we are continuing to rob the cities and the people of the cities in order to take care of the programs and the institutions that support rural America. I have nothing against giving all the possible support to farmers and institutions that serve farmers and rural America, but why are we robbing the cities? Why are we taking away a program for summer employment for youth? 600 young people will not be employed because the Committee on Appropriations is going to strike that program, cut it to zero. We are cutting away job training programs for youth, job training programs for adults. We are drastically cutting title I programs, almost $1 billion for poor youth. When it comes to this bill, we continue old institutions that have been draining the taxpayers for some time, even though they promised they would have a limited life and go out of existence. Here is an example of one of those situations. Suddenly silence has descended on the House in terms of challenging some of these programs, but I think it is very important to get on the record exactly what is going on with respect to the robbing of the cities in order to take care of defunct and obsolete rural institutions. This amendment would strike legislative language in H.R. 1976 which blocks the pending privatization of the Rural Telephone Bank and would delete the more than $3.5 million in appropriations provided for the operation of the bank. The Rural Telephone Bank was created in 1971 to provide an additional source of credit for rural telephone companies which did not qualify for subsidized direct loans and loan guarantees available from the Department of Agriculture. At the time, taxpayers were promised that the RTB would be a time limited venture, comparable to the Federal land banks. We were assured that the initial Federal capital outlay would be repaid by eventual privatization of the bank. Privatization. The other side is fond of privatization when it comes to programs that are serving people in the cities. Why don't we have privatization here for this program? The bank's enabling legislation directed that this privatization would begin on September 30, 1995, this year. The Clinton administration has been preparing to carry out the bank's privatization and has not requested any additional funding to support the bank, but H.R. 1976 derails those plans. It blocks privatization and it provides a new infusion of tax dollars to keep it running as a Federal entity. We are going to continue a government program which is slated to be a private program. Yes, I want to remind my colleagues that this is in addition to the loan subsidies that were provided already by the USDA's rural utility service. In doing this, the Committee on Appropriations insists it supports privatization. It just wants more time to study the issue. Frankly, Mr. Chairman, I think 25 years is long enough to study the issue. This privatization of the Rural Telephone Bank is not coming out of the blue. It was mandated 25 years ago. This was a promise that Congress made to the taxpayers in 1971. If we tell people on welfare two years is enough, you have to get off, five years is enough, you have to get off, tell people in public housing, two years is enough, you have to get out, why don't we set some limits on the other subsidized programs across the country? We have farm subsidy programs not being discussed here, $20,000, $30,000 going to a family. It has been happening for the last 30 years, but nobody is talking about ending it. This amendment will strike the legislative language and move on to have the privatization take place. I think it is very important that we support this amendment, which is consistent with all we have been preaching. It would assure this promise is kept and the privatization proceeds on course. It should also be noted that this is one of those rare issues on which President Reagan and President Clinton agree. President Reagan tried to privatize the Rural Bank in 1981 and was rebuffed. He was told it was too soon and we should wait until 1995 to privatize. 1995 is now here, and President Clinton wants to follow the lead of President Reagan. No more studying, stalling, no more excuses. Let us keep the promise and scrape this barnacle off the hull of the Federal Government. We do not want the taxpayers to be burdened with this any longer than they have to. Let us privatize the Rural Telephone Bank. I urge a yes vote on this amendment.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. OWENS. The gentleman objects to what; the amendment being offered en bloc?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I offer two amendments which were printed in the Record as amendment No. 22, and I ask unanimous consent that these amendments be considered en bloc.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I appeal----

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I appeal the ruling of the Chair.

Mr. OWENS. Yes, Mr. Chairman. The point of order which has been raised against this amendment represents gross hypocrisy. While my amendment does include authorizing language, that is, by proper observance of the rules, not permitted in an appropriations bill, by now it is crystal clear to all of us that this appropriation bill is riddled with scores of authorization provisions, and there are many more appropriations bills on their way through the subcommittee and the committee process which have even more examples of authorization provisions. This point of order represents an unbridled hypocrisy because both Democratic and Republican Members on the floor here are prevented from proposing the same types of substantive changes to bills that the authors of the appropriations bills clearly are being allowed to propose in subcommittee and in committee. I will just give you one example in this particular bill, page 478, line 14. [[Page H 7107]] There is a $50 million earmark to remain available indefinitely for construction of forest roads by timber purchasers, $50 million. That is legislating. It is legislating in favor of corporate welfare, pure and simple, corporate welfare, but in the bill. Specifically, in this case, by possibly blocking a vote on my amendment, this point of order would rob the American people of the opportunity to reduce the deficit by almost $2 billion over 7 years, and we all want to reduce the deficit. Here is a creative way to reduce the deficit. Here is a creative way to get new revenue without taxes. We are all looking for new ways to get revenue without taxes, I am sure. It is a golden opportunity to also exhibit truth in budget balancing. If you really want to balance the budget, let us deal with some of the giveaways that we are always protecting. With all of the talk I hear about deficit reduction from the other side of the aisle, I am shocked some of my Republican colleagues prefer to continue to allow rich mining companies to continue to pocket the money of hard-working American taxpayers. This amendment would provide that the royalties would be charged, 8 percent royalty would be charged on the value of minerals produced from hardrock mining by private companies on Federal lands. Currently, the Federal Government does not collect a single dollar in royalties from these companies. This is precisely the type of taxpayer swindle that the Republicans are not willing to talk about. It is a kind of corporate welfare that exists in the budget and in the appropriations process.

Mr. OWENS. The point of order relates to the fact that there is in this appropriation bill, and all the others, legislation of this kind. I just gave my colleagues one example, and this is proposing one that will be very beneficial for the American people in that it will reclaim a giveaway of gold----

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. OWENS. Well, I would like to know from the gentleman what is the difference between my amendment at page 47, line 14, of this particular bill which has a $50 million earmark to remain available indefinitely for the construction of forest roads----

Mr. OWENS. I am responding to the point of order in that there are under way numerous provisions of the same kind that I have here in appropriation bills. There are examples in this bill. I want to know what is the difference between the kind of amendment that I am proposing and the kind of provisions that are routinely based in the appropriations bills now. Mine would be of great benefit to the American people because it would stop allowing mining companies to rake in $1.2 million a year for mining hard-rock minerals on public lands that belong to----

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, last week the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education reported its appropriations bill for next year. The bill will be considered by the full committee on Thursday and by the full House next week. On previous occasions, Mr. Speaker, I made it clear that nothing is more important in this House, nothing that we contemplate and nothing that we legislate on is more important than jobs and education. And in our complex society jobs and education are inextricably interwoven. We cannot really hope to have a decent job in this complex society unless you do have an education. When I came to Congress 13 years ago, I volunteered, and I wanted very much, to serve on the Education and Labor Committee. I thought that there would be a lot of competition for service on the committee which deals with education and jobs because in my district of course the most important thing that was clearly communicated to me by my constituents was a need for more jobs. We had one of the highest unemployment levels in the country concentrated in my district. People wanted jobs, they needed jobs, and of course, in order to qualify for some of the better jobs, they needed an education. I saw that right away. I wanted to serve on the Education and Labor Committee, and that was the name of the committee at that time, because of the fact that was the way I felt I could give the greatest amount of service to my constituents. To my great surprise I found there was no great amount of competition for service on the Education and Labor Committee. The smarter members of the freshman class when I came in all told me that the Education and Labor Committee is a graveyard. You cannot get any contributions for our campaigns by serving on the Education and Labor Committee, and, true to form, I found that it was easy for me to get a place on that committee, and I, of course, still wanted a place, but there were many vacancies on Education and Labor, and year after year there were vacancies, and people came on that committee only after they could not find any other place. But I think it was a great mistake on the part of those who chose that course. Nothing is more important than jobs and education. Nothing that we do is more important than what we do in order to encourage an economy which produces jobs and an economy which makes it possible for people to work and earn decent wages under conditions that are not life-threatening, under conditions that do not destroy the health of workers, and of course closely added to that is the need for education systems that allow people to qualify for these jobs, allow people to be able to operate and earn their own way in our complex society, and allow people also to meet other requirements in our very complex society. So jobs and education are very important. They are very important, and in the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget the only area that we propose great increases in the budget, [[Page H 7169]] although we were under the mandate to show a balanced budget over a 7- year period, and we met the mandate, and we balanced the budget over a 7-year period, we were not able to give increases elsewhere, but we did increase the education budget by 25 percent. We recognized that function 500, which is education and job training, was the area that had to be given priority. It was quite pleasant to note that the President, President Clinton, when he decided to announce his own 10-year budget, chose to emphasize and to clearly make education and job training as a priority. The President proposes to increase over a 10-year period by more than $40 billion the education and job training budget. So we clearly have set that priority. We are quite distressed by the fact that the overall Republican budget cuts in domestic spending call for a 4-percent cut over the 4- year period. Most programs will be cut only 4 percent if you average it all out. However the Republican appropriations bill shows that education has the lowest possible priorities because education is cut by 16 percent, not 4 percent, but by 16 percent, or $3.9 billion is cut out of funding for training and education and an additional 24 percent is cut out of other programs in function 500, labor programs, an additional $2.7 billion. Now what does this mean in terms of the contract for America, the contract on America, some of us say the contract against America? What is the vision of the people who are in charge? The Republican majority want to do what in the future? They want to do what in the present? They want to do what in the future which leads them to believe that education and job training should be assigned the lowest possible priorities? The Republicans have clearly said that they want to remake America. We are going to remake America. They are going to remake America this year largely through the appropriations process. They are not able to muster the kind of votes in the Senate that are going to allow them to remake America through an authorization process where committee by committee and bill by bill they would be able to pass a bill which--bills which pass the House, so they are going to do it through the appropriations and budget process. What do they do with jobs and education? Immediately they communicate to us that in the action taken by the Appropriations Committee the jobs and education are assigned a very low priority. The future of America, as envisioned by the Republicans in control of the House, is a future that does not need to have programs which provide the best possible education for the most people in America. The Nation does not need the best possible education system. Yes, it is true that the Federal Government does not run the education system in America. Everybody knows that we all agree that only about 7 percent of the total education budget is money that comes from the Federal Government. The Federal Government plays a minor role in education. But it is a very pivotal role, and it is a role that needs to be expanded, and not cut off, and not diminished. We have always prided ourselves on leaving education to the States and to the local school districts. Perhaps we have gone overboard. I think we have gone overboard and allowed too much to be left to the States and the local school boards over the years. We are not like France, or Great Britain, or Japan, or Germany. We do not have a highly centralized Department of Education running education for the whole country. We have never had that; there is no danger of us ever falling into that anytime soon in the next 100 years, I assure you, but we go to the other extreme. Instead of not only not having the highly centralized, centralized, overbearing direction of education from a central point, we are out of the picture too much, and the Federal Government has played too small a role, and for that reason our Nation has fallen behind in terms of the competence and productivity of its workers in terms of the reproduction of a labor force that is going to be able to meet the complexities of the future. We are in deep trouble because we have not played enough role. If the Federal Government were merely to get involved a little more, it would not hurt. In fact, we could easily go to the point where the Federal Government is supplying instead of the present 7 percent of the total education funding, it can supply 25 percent. In fact, we should move toward that goal where at least 25 percent of the total education funding in America is supplied by the Federal Government, and then we would have 25 percent of the decisionmaking power. Even if we had 25 percent of the decisionmaking power, 75 percent of the decisionmaking power would still be left to the States and to the local governments. So there would be no domination of the Federal Government of education. We do not need to lessen and diminish our role in education. We need to increase our role in education. It is quite dangerous, any vision of America which says that education is not important. Well, that is the vision that is being offered by the present Republican majority. Perhaps it is because they are people whose mind-set is shaped by their philosophy that only an elite group can run America and only an elite group needs to get an education. I call them the elite minority that chooses to oppress the majority. Now that is a very difficult phenomenon in a democracy, and the great question is, Will the elite minority that controls the House now and controls the Senate, will an elite minority be able to stampede the great majority of Americans out there into accepting this oppression, accepting this denial of opportunity through education programs, accepting this large cut in job-training programs? Will the elite minority be able to stampede America, and divert their attention and get them interested in so many other things like abortion, and affirmative action, and voting rights, and various other immigrant-bashing, various other diversionary tactics, allow them to downgrade education, abandon job training, at the same time win votes? That is a great question; we do not know what the answer is going to be. I assume that the majority of Americans will clearly recognize the threat, the danger, to their own well-being of that kind of philosophy and an elitist group which wants to govern only for that small group. It is a danger to the majority. The majority certainly will have at their disposal the instruments for dealing with that kind of philosophy now that it is clearly revealed. It was not part of the Contract With America. Whether you like the Contract With America or not, in the Republican Contract With America they never stated we are going to downgrade the Federal involvement in education. They never stated we are going to give less money to job training, and less money to schools, and less money for drug-free schools and safe-schools programs. They never stated that. They never said we are going to cut school lunch programs. They never stated that. They never stated we are going to have fewer job training programs. In fact the impression was given that one of the things they definitely wanted to do was have everybody assume personal responsibility for themselves. The great emphasis was on reforming welfare, taking up the call of the President to change welfare as we know it. They certainly in the Contract With America said they would do something about welfare in terms of making people move from welfare to jobs, and yet the very area which allows people to move from welfare to jobs is the area of education and job training, and that is the area which the Republicans have chosen to cut the most, the most. Sixteen percent they are cutting in education, 24 percent in other labor and job-training programs, 16 percent, 24 percent, in areas where people need the greatest amount of help in order to become self-sufficient in order to be able to get off welfare, in order to, those not on welfare, to be able to go on and get the kind of training they need for the kind of highly specialized and complex jobs that are opening all the time. We cannot have an America that is moving forward if we do not have every possible opportunity to upgrade the work force, every possible opportunity for people to help themselves. Are Americans better off now than they were before the Contract With America started? Now that the Contract With America has been completed, are you better off now than you were before, or is the Republican concept of a Contract With America now [[Page H 7170]] out of control? Have they gone into areas where the contract never intended to go because certain people want to get revenge on labor? Certain people want to experiment with their own ideas about education? Certain people see the Federal Government in a way of local experimentation that might be more advantageous for people who want to privatize the schools or who want to pursue certain elitist agendas that cannot be pursued if you have a Federal Government which is trying to set some standards. Goals 2000 is zeroed out. They do not want anything to do with Goals 2000. Goals 2000 is now zeroed out by the Republican majority, but Goals 2000 was conceived of by a Republican President following the lead of another Republican President. The whole movement toward reform of the public school education began under Ronald Reagan with the report of ``A Nation at Risk.'' It was continued under George Bush when he set forth America 2000 and held a conference where he set forth six goals for American education. President Clinton was at that Governors' Conference which set those six goals. President Clinton has followed through from America 2000 to Goals 2000. If you like Goals 2000 and America 2000 side by side, you are going to find they have more in common, they have more similarities, than they have differences. One of the big differences of course in America 2000 President Bush was proposing vouchers and greater privatization of schools, and President Clinton removed that completely from Goals 2000, but in spirit the whole idea of establishing standards where every school system could use those standards as a model, not--there is nothing mandated about it, there is nothing--the Federal Government does to force anybody to do anything, but the Republicans want to move away from the establishment of those standards. There was great bipartisan agreement on the establishment of the standards. Goals 2000 went forward. It was passed, authorized, and funded with bipartisan support. Suddenly this new majority. The people who want to give us a contract have set off on a different course. They want to revolutionize in the wrong direction. Revolution is always a dangerous course. You know revolution is sometimes a necessary evil. You cannot change things any other way except by having a revolution. But even the best revolutions go wrong. Revolutions are inherently destructive. They move too fast so rapidly, they try to do so much, that inevitably they will do a lot that is wrong. Why? Why have a revolution in an area where we do not need a revolution, where we have an evolution, a steady progress. Slow but steady movement in the right direction is evolution. We have a pretty rapid evolution in education, an improvement of education. So why throw in a revolution which cuts off the Federal involvement by cutting off all the funds for Goals 2000 and by also rolling back other programs like chapter 1. Been funded for more than 25 years. Started under Lyndon Johnson to help poor school districts. Chapter 1, title I is now being cut drastically by the Republicans, an almost $1 billion cut. Head Start for the first time. No Republican President or Democratic President has ever cut Head Start, but Head Start is now being cut by $200 million by the majority, by the Republican majority in the latest proposals to come out of the subcommittee on the Labor, HHS, and Education appropriations. That is what we are up against. This Contract With America is out of control. The vision that the Republican majority has has to be examined and reexamined, because it is dangerous if it is a vision which sees education as being a low priority. The assault on education and labor certainly was not openly contemplated or stated as part of the Contract on America, Contract With America. The contract said nothing about moving not only to downgrade education and to cut off job training programs but also to attack the workplace. There is an assault on the protection of workers in the workplace. There is an assault on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and all of the laws that they have promulgated to help protect the safety of workers. Much of this does not cost any money. Small amounts of money are involved, but the appropriations and budget process is being used in order to cut and destroy the effectiveness of these safety and health programs. They cannot pass bills and get them through the legislative process and get them signed by the executive branch. So in the absence of being able to pass authorizing legislation and get it signed into law, they are using the back-door approach of the budget and appropriations process. They have cut off large amounts of funding for OSHA, the Occupational Health and Safety organization. They have cut off money for the Mine Safety Health Administration. They have cut off money for the National Labor Relations Board. The largest cut of organizations and entities designed to help workers has been NLRB. Thirty percent has been cut. These big numbers might be hard to follow, but just consider your budget for your House for a week, and if it took a 30 percent cut, you know what 30 percent means, if you take your salary for 1 month and you take a 30 percent cut, I have some idea what 30 percent means. These are relatively small agencies of the Federal Government, the OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Mine Safety Administration, the research arm of OSHA called NIOSH, all very small pieces. Even the National Labor Relations Board, as comprehensive as it is and as important as it is to labor relations, it is still a small part of the overall executive budget. So when they make these cuts they do great damage. They make it almost impossible for the agencies to function, and they know that. They are legislating through the appropriations process, crippling the agencies. It is an assault on workers. And you might say, well, who cares about workers? Well, when we say workers, we do not mean people who are out there digging ditches necessarily, people who haul garbage. Workers are wage earners. Anybody who earns a wage is clearly a worker in the category of what we are talking about, and the vast majority of Americans are people who earn hourly wages or they earn salaries on the basis of hourly wages. They have salaries, but they pretty much work on the same basis as hourly workers. If they work over 40 hours, they want overtime, et cetera. So you have a vast number of people employed by other people who are wage earners or workers. If you want to call them, working class, middle class, or you can even reach out, include some small entrepreneurs. There are a lot of people with small businesses. They earn less than the average hourly wage earner, but they like the independence. In fact, one of the things that came out when we were doing the studies on health care last year in preparing health care legislation was that a large percentage of the small business owners of America have no health insurance. A large percentage of those people are independent, and they have their own business, and they deprive pleasure from that, and they contribute greatly to our economy, and we need more of them. They cannot afford to even pay for their own health insurance. So if you are talking about people working every day and they cannot afford to be without a week's worth of earnings, then you could include large numbers of small businesspeople in the same category. When you get through adding the hourly workers and the salary people who are really working on an hourly basis and you add to them the entrepreneurs and the small business owners, you are talking about two- thirds of America. You are talking about working conditions and earnings for two-thirds of America. So it is two-thirds out there, at least, that we are talking about when we say that the Contract With America has chosen to assault working people, assault the working class. The middle class is a working class, anybody who is in those categories I mentioned before. [[Page H 7171]] This assault is about more than money. Yes, the balancing of the budget has been touted as one of the major goals of the Republican majority, and it has been conceded by the White House and a lot of other people that maybe we should be unlike all of the other industrialized nations. Maybe this Nation should work toward a balanced budget. A balanced budget might be a good idea. It may not be absolutely necessary because there are a lot of other industrialized nations like Germany, France, Britain, Holland, that do not have balanced budgets, and they have larger national debts than we do, and they function pretty well, but let us break ground and lead the other industrialized nations into a situation where we have national balanced budgets. It might be good idea to save money on interest which is mounting all the time. All of it is worth experimenting with. We will accept the need for a balanced budget. The President makes much more sense than the Republican majority and the Congress. He says let us do it over a 10-year period. Let us not glorify suffering and pain. Let us try to minimize the suffering and pain. Let us not sit comfortably from our vantage point in the elite upper group expecting a tax cut while we let people suffer in the other two-thirds of the economy. Let us try to balance the budget in a way which is fair and spreads the burden to all of us. Maybe we should even balance the budget slowly and look for new sources of revenue. In the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget, we proposed that we move toward an increase in the burden, the proportion of the burden of revenue of taxation that is borne by corporations. You know, we have in this country a strange phenomenon where since 1943 the amount of money--the percentage or the proportion of the overall tax burden borne by families and individuals has gone from 27 percent to 44 percent. Individuals and families now bear 44 percent of the total tax burden. Corporations went in the other direction. They bore almost 40 percent of the total tax burden in 1943. They went from almost 40 percent of the total tax burden down to 11 percent. At one point it got as low as 8 percent of the total tax burden. Stop and think about that. Every American who is angry out there ought to think about what he is angry at. You have got good reason to be angry. You have been swindled. Over the years, the Committee on Ways and Means has been owned by corporations. Over the years, the Committee on Ways and Means has allowed itself and the Congress, yours truly included, have sat paralyzed when Ways and Means bills are brought to the floor. You cannot amend them. You cannot do anything about them. And we have not fought vigorously enough and exposed what is going on to a great enough degree to make the American people understand. We have been swindled. At this point, after adjustments made by the Clinton administration, corporations are carrying about 11 percent of the total tax burden, while individuals and families are paying 44 percent of the total tax burden. And again, under Ronald Reagan it went as low as 8 percent. Corporations were paying as low as 8 percent. So there is good reason to be angry. But let me come back to my major point here. In the attack on workers, the budget is not of great concern. The numbers and the money is not of great concern. The attack on workers is an attempt to destroy a certain segment of our society, a certain segment of the political infrastructure, a certain segment that does not cater to the philosophy of the elite minority that is in charge now. That is what we are up against. This assault is designed to destroy the voices and the ability to participate in the political process of two-thirds of the Nation's people. It is assigned to wipe out any influence and any effectiveness that organized labor has. Because organized labor is a very small percentage of the total voting population out there, 16 million and going down, but they have a consolidated solidarity that allows them to have much more influence than the numbers would indicate, and they are one of the few organized forces that is not already controlled by the elite minority that is seeking to change, remake the government of America. They are not under the control of the people who are perpetrating the Contract With America. So they must be destroyed, and that is what this is all about. The assault on organized labor does not necessarily save money. But it accomplishes another purpose of wiping out the opposition. Couple the two, the assault on education with--an assault on education and job training with an assault on the instrument, the voice, the mechanism by which people can fight for more jobs and better jobs and fight for better education, and you have an indication of what the grand design of the elite minority is. They have a vision of the future. Their vision of the future and their vision of what America should be is an America that has no room for two-thirds of the people. We are not going to share the great wealth of America with two-thirds of the people. We are going to govern, according to the vision of the elite minority, govern in order to enhance the advantages and refurbish the luxuries of a small elite group, and that is what this grand design was all about. Turning to education for a minute, let us take a look at some of the cuts that were taken in the education area. Education for disadvantaged students, and Title I program, which supports tutoring and remedial education services for low income children and others who are falling behind in school, the House bill cuts the program by $1.1 billion. That is 17 percent. This is in one year. We are talking about the cuts in that 1-year period, not over the 7-year period; 1.1 million educationally disadvantaged students will be out of the program, 1.1 million students around the country. The House appropriations bill destroys the drug free schools--the drug free and safe schools program. It cuts it 60 percent, eliminating services to 23 million school children. Adult education programs support literacy training and basic education for adults. The House bill gouges $25 million out of the program, denying services in this small program to 125,000 adults. It goes after Head Start, as I stated before. Head Start will have 50,000 fewer children than before. We were proposing that Head Start be increased. George Bush increased Head Start programs. Ronald Reagan increased Head Start programs. For the first time, we have a cut in Head Start programs, after both parties have continually agreed that this was a program that works. It is a program where the funding--and youth employment and training programs, the House bill cuts total training for disadvantaged youth by 54 percent. To the youth of America, here is the message: Youth of America who are not in school, the programs are cut more than half. If you are in school, we are only cutting 16 percent. If you are in school, we are only cutting 16 percent, but we care not about the future of the youth of America. We care about putting them in prison, we care about more money for prisons and more money to make certain that law enforcement operations round them up, but we are not interested in educating the youth of America. To the youth of America we are saying that the summer jobs program, which is already inadequate and funds too few youngsters, will be totally eliminated. It funds about 600,000 youngsters throughout America during the summer months. They get a job if they are low-income youth and they qualify. That is going to be eliminated totally, completely, zero funding is there. For year-round training programs for low-income youth, the cut will be 80 percent. That almost wipes it out. That leaves only 20 percent. Just stop and think, your monthly paycheck or your weekly paycheck, if you cut 80 percent out of it, if you take $8 out of every $10, what do you have left? You can understand how this is a destruction of a program. It does not exist anymore if you make that big a cut in the program. Training for dislocated workers, people who lose their jobs by having large defense plants close. We said they would be a priority. We promised them, we had a contract with them that as we [[Page H 7172]] cut back on the expenditures for defense, workers in those plants would have an opportunity to be relocated, to be retrained, and we had special programs to do that. Now we are suddenly going to cut those programs 34 percent, $446 million. This will mean that 140,000 worker who are in the program already will be dropped out and no new workers of any substantial amount can come in. Training for low-income adults, those people on welfare that we yell we wanted to get off welfare and get a job, that will be cut by $225 million, denying assistance to 74,000 that we now give assistance to to get off welfare, we are going to have that many fewer who will have the opportunity to get jobs and to get off welfare. This is what we mean when we say we are going to reform welfare, change it as we know it. It is really not necessary to decimate education and training in order to balance the budget. The issue is how we go about reaching the balanced budget and what programs should be given priority as I said before. The Republicans have clearly decided that education is not a priority. Their budget would cut education spending by $36 billion over the next 7 years. The Congressional Black Caucus, as I mentioned before, has put forward a detailed budget which would, like the Republican plan, eliminate the deficit over 7 years. We have told them how to do it. But our budget doubles the spending for education and training and other human investments. We make education our first priority. We make education our first priority, and President Clinton has also proposed in his 10-year balanced budget plan to make education the first priority. His budget calls for a $140 million over a 10-year period. It is important that the American people understand that this attack on education and training by the present Republican majority is unprecedented. Every single Federal education training and education program on the books, all that exist now, were enacted with bipartisan support. We had both Republicans and Democrats agreeing. Former Vice President Dan Quayle, not a liberal Republican, not a moderate Republican but proudly a very conservative Republican, he wrote the Job Training Partnership Act, which is the principal job training program in existence now. When he was a Senator, Dan Quayle wrote the Job Training Partnership Act. Now the Republicans are trying to rewrite history and they attack the same Job Training Partnership Act as a failed Democratic program and they want to destroy it. We have always proceeded on a bipartisan basis with every education and training program since I have been in this Congress. We have taken exhaustive painstaking steps and we have made every effort, even when it was quite annoying, to achieve consensus on every bill that we brought forward to the floor. Neither Republicans nor Democrats were happy with every provision of each bill that we passed over the last 13 years, but in their entirety each bill commanded overwhelming bipartisan support. At the start of this Congress, many believed that this bipartisan approach would continue under the Republican majority. At least in the area of education and job training, we thought we could continue the bipartisan support. After all, education and job training had not been mentioned in the so-called Contract With America. That turned out to be purely wishful thinking. There has been no moderation and no bipartisanship. Our Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities has turned into an unrelenting attack dog for the radical right, intent on dismantling and disemboweling each and every education and training program which serves the American people. They even took the first step immediately to change the name of the committee. It has always been called the Committee on Education and Labor. But instead of Committee on Education and Labor, they chose to rename it Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, leaving out Labor. The word labor is not contained in the name of the full committee, and the word labor is not contained in the name of any of the subcommittees. The attack on labor, the ideological obsession with destroying labor began with the renaming of this committee. Since January, the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities has taken some of the following actions. We have gutted the school lunch program, as everybody knows. We have told the children of America, the Nation needs your lunch. It is not enough to feed all the hungry. If the money runs out before the end of the year in the case of block grants to the States, children will have to just go hungry. We have to, after all, maintain the money in the budget in order to give a tax cut of more than $200 billion over a 7-year period to the richest Americans. We must save money. The Nation needs the lunch of school children in order to transfer those much-needed funds to the wealthiest Americans who need a tax cut. That is the plan of the controlling Republican majority. They have repealed Federal child abuse prevention programs, also. Most of our State laws and programs designed to prevent and prosecute child abuse originated with a series of Federal laws enacted during the 1970's. These set out model laws, guidelines and programs and provided States with funds to implement them. By all accounts, it has been an extremely successful Federal-State partnership, improving the detection, the prosecution and the prevention of child abuse. Inexplicably and without a single hearing, the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities has gutted all of these laws and taken away the assistance that is provided to States and community-based and parent organizations. Before we adjourn in August for recess, there are indications that this committee will add substantially to this already impressive catalog of carnage. One of the bills that the committee proposes to act on is the elimination of the Department of Education. In 1995 in America at the end of the 20th century as we go toward the 21st century, they insist on pursuing this agenda of eliminating the Department of Education. As I said before, our Nation does not have a strong and over centralized Department of Education to begin with. We have too little direction from the Federal level in education. Now the Republicans are proposing to eliminate that. They will try to do it through the budget process, since they are not able to get agreement with the other body that they can eliminate it right away through an authorization process. They want to eliminate all small programs. The committee also plans to repeal nearly every remaining elementary and secondary education program on the books. They want to replace them with a lump sum, unrestricted block grant. The Republicans argue that many of these programs are too small to do any good and should be tossed out. The logic is bizarre. If a program is small and does not require much funding, if it is not hurting the balanced budget process, it is still tossed out. It is still destroyed because it is too small. You are either too large or too small. B-2 bomber programs, programs to fund the B-2 bomber, on the other hand, are gigantic programs. I guess it is their size, the size of the B-2 bomber program, is what makes it attractive. We can see nothing else attractive about the B-2 bomber program; the B-2 bomber program, which will absorb about $30 billion over the life of the program to build a bomber that nobody needs, that the President says he does not want, that the Secretary of Defense says he does not need, that the Air Force says they do not want. Nobody wants the B-2 bomber, but the House of Representatives insists on including it in the budget, maybe because it is such a large program that the size of it, the gigantic nature of it, is attractive by itself. Small programs are considered evil, useless, they must be eliminated. But a gigantic program that nobody wants, that will cost $30 billion or more, that at all costs we seek to retain. This is a kind of individual action that results from a vision of America which is distorted to begin with, a vision of America which is front-loaded to deal with the one-third elite population. If you are going to be concerned with the elitists, then you insist that there be a tax cut of more than $200 billion. If you going to be concerned with the elitists, you insist on the funding of a B-2 bomber. Who makes the profits on a B-2 bomber? The company that manufactures it, the district that is lucky [[Page H 7173]] enough to get it as a plant where the planes or parts of it are going to be manufactured. You are playing to a very small group. If you took the same $30 billion and were to spend it in the civilian sector, you could create twice as many jobs. There are many studies that have been conducted and they all agree: Every dollar spent for military hardware would yield twice as many jobs if you spent them in the civilian sector. We could spend the B-2 bomber money any other way in the civilian sector and create jobs for twice as many people as are created by funding the B-2 bomber. The assault on education is an assault which is partly driven by a concern for money, the desire to save money by cutting back on the Title I program, the Head Start program, the school lunch program. All the money you save by cutting these programs can be used to fund the more than $200 billion tax cut for the rich, so we understand that that assault is driven by the need to get money to pay for the tax cut for the rich. The assault on labor is not saving tremendous amounts of money. That is an ideologically driven assault, an assault which shows that the Contract With America is out of control. There are certain people who want to get revenge on labor. There are certain people who think that you can silence a large segment of America if you destroy organized labor which is at the core of the opposition. So they have mounted this assault on labor unrelentingly starting with the Striker Replacement Act under the Democratic-controlled Congress. We twice passed a striker replacement act, which I call a right to strike act, because the provision in American labor law which allows employers to permanently replace workers, which is unlike any other industrialized nation except South Africa, that is a provision which takes away the right to strike. If you can be permanently replaced, then you really don't have the right to strike. We passed a bill twice in the House of Representatives under Democratic control. We did have a President who signed it. Now we have a President who has taken the initiative. The President has ordered that in the area of government contracting, they will not contract with any employer who practices the permanent replacement of strikers. Any company that engages in the permanent replacement of strikers cannot do business with the Federal Government under the Executive order issued by the President of the United States. That Executive order now has been challenged. Our committee, as part of its attack on labor, has proposed a bill to nullify the executive order on striker replacement. It was reported to the House by the full committee as H.R. 1176 on June 14, 1995. Those of us who are on the committee, of course, we fought the passage of it. But the Republican majority has the numbers. So the President's order, his Executive order which says that no contractor with the Federal Government would be allowed to practice the permanent replacement of strikers, that order is now under attack, and the committee has reported to the full House now a bill which will strike down and nullify the executive order of the President. That is an unprecedented step, by the way. Congress very seldom takes steps to nullify an Executive order of a President. Another bill that they have passed out of the full Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, which used to be called the Education and Labor Committee, as part of the attack on labor, we passed what we call the Team Act. The full committee ordered H.R. 743, the Team Act, favorably reported on Thursday, June 22. The Team Act can be called more accurately the Company Union Act. The Team Act sets up a situation where companies can establish their own union. Nothing is more dangerous for unions than to have the employers, the management, be able to pick the people they want to bargain with and who they want to work with. The Team Act could be called the Company Union Act, and that is passed as part of the assault on labor. It has come out of the committee and has been reported to the floor. The OSHA reform, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as I said before, is under attack. The OSHA reforms that have been proposed by the chairman of the subcommittee, Mr. Ballenger, he has introduced a bill, which is H.R. 1834, entitled, ``A Comprehensive Reform of OSHA,'' which could be better described as a death and injury act. It really guts the enforcement of OSHA and makes OSHA into an agency which has no viability. They cannot enforce any of their rules or their standards if they follow the procedures that are established in this act by Mr. Ballenger and the subcommittee. That has been introduced and is still in the process of holding hearings. The Fair Labor Standards Act reform is also under the Workforce Protection Subcommittee chaired by Mr. Ballenger, and they are proposing, first of all, to gut the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Child labor sections of the act will be dealt with later. They are starting by gutting the most important provisions related to workers, and that is the provision for overtime. That is part of the assault on labor that has gone forward. Minimum wage. They refuse to deal with minimum wage at all. It is a negative assault on labor. By refusing to consider minimum wage or allowing any legislation to be considered which increases the minimum wage, they are assaulting two-thirds of the population out there suffering from increases in cost of living, living under an obsolete minimum wage standard. The President and the Democratic leadership of the Congress are sponsoring an increase in the minimum wage of 90 percent over a 2-year period. That is our answer to the assault on the wages of workers. The Davis-Bacon Act and the Service Contract Act, Davis-Bacon Service Contract Act protect workers when they are on government contracts. They must be paid the prevailing wages of a given area while they are working on a government contract program. This was a program that was developed by Republicans. Mr. Davis was a Republican; Mr. Bacon was a Republican. It has been legislation always supported by Republicans previously. But now this revolutionary Republican majority wants to wipe out totally, repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. Fortunately, they have not been able to do this through authorization, so one of the appropriations bills, the Transportation Subcommittee, has placed in the appropriations bill a provision cutting off all funds for the enforcement of Davis-Bacon on projects related to transportation. That is part of the assault on labor. On and on it goes. The assault on labor, the assault on education, the two primary programs necessary for two-thirds of Americans to survive those are unrelenting, and it must be stopped. It is quite tragic that the vision, the vision that is driving the Republican majority is a vision which is a danger for two-thirds of the population. Any vision for the future that caters to only a small percentage and refuses to endorse the principle of sharing the riches of our Nation, any such elite, selfish vision is a danger to the America of the future. Oh, beautiful and spacious skies and acres and miles of rich, productive farmland, this is America which God has been quite good to. God is good to America, and America should be good to its people by sharing the great wealth. Hills and mountains full of gold, silver, copper, and uranium for energy; nature yields so much to America. This is a land where democracy flourishes, a land with a written Constitution that establishes the framework for law and order, and the peace that comes as a result of that law and order makes rapid, unbroken progress possible. With all of the flaws and faults of our American system, we still have the best government that man has ever conceived. America with political freedom and a free marketplace, a land where science and technology expand with infinite possibilities. This great America, preserved and protected by thousands of nameless soldiers who fought the tyranny of Tojo in Asia and the tyranny of Hitler in Europe; this America made available to all of us by God, nature and the accidents of history; this America protected and perfected by so many from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and millions of unpaid [[Page H 7174]] slaves who helped to build it. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and all of the soldiers known and unknown, who fought to hold on to our freedoms and our opportunities. This America belongs to all of us. This is the America which we have to envisage; this is the America which you have to fight to keep; this is the America that the elite minority wants to destroy: The workers, the wage-earners, the salary workers, the small business people, the executives, the owners. This America does not belong to any one group, this belongs to all of the Americans. The elite oppressive minority shall not prevail. This America belongs to all of us, and we will fight to keep it. We must fight the assault on education; we must fight the assault on labor. We must fight to preserve the America for all Americans.

Mr. OWENS. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Returning to quote Justice Ginsburg: Finally State legislatures may recognize communities that have a particular racial or ethnic makeup, even in the absence of any compulsion do so, in order to account for interests common to or shared by persons grouped together. When members of a racial group live together in one community, a reapportionment plan that concentrates members of the group in one district and excludes them from others may reflect wholly legitimate purposes. Therefore, the fact that the Georgia General Assembly took account of race in drawing district lines--a fact not in dispute--does not render the State's plan invalid. To offend the Equal Protection Clause, all agree the legislature had to do more than consider race. How much more, is the issue that divides the Court today. Continuing to quote Justice Ginsburg, her dissent: We say once again what has been said on many occasions: Reapportionment is primarily the duty and responsibility of the State through its legislature or other body, rather than of a Federal court. Districting inevitably has sharp political impact, and political decisions must be made by those charged with the task. District lines are drawn to accommodate a myriad of factors, geographic economic, historical and political, and State legislatures, as arenas of compromise, electoral accountability, are best positioned to mediate competing claims; courts, with a mandate merely to adjudicate, are ill- equipped for this task. Federal courts have ventured now into the political thicket of reapportionment when necessary to secure to members of racial minorities equal voting rights, rights denied in many States, including Georgia, until not long ago. The 15th amendment, which was ratified in 1870, declared that the right to vote shall not be denied by any State on account of race. That declaration, for many generations, was often honored in the breach; it was greeted by a near century of unremitting and ingenious defiance in several States, including Georgia. I am quoting from the dissenting opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and I want to repeat this sentence. The 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, declared that the right to vote shall not be denied by any State on account of race. That declaration, for many generations, was often honored in the breach; it was greeted by a near century of unremitting and ingenious defiance by several States, including Georgia. After a brief interlude of black suffrage enforced by Federal troops but accompanied by rampant victims against blacks, Georgia held a constitutional convention in 1877. Its purpose, according to the convention's leader, was, to fix it so that the people shall rule and the Negro shall never be heard from. In pursuit of this objective, Georgia enacted a cumulative poll tax, requiring voters to show they had paid past as well as current poll taxes; one historian described this tax as the most effective bar to Negro suffrage ever devised. In 1890, the Georgia General Assembly authorized white primaries; keeping blacks out of the Democratic primary effectively excluded them from Georgia's political life, for victory in the Democratic primary in those days was tantamount to election. Early in this century Georgia Governor Hoke Smith persuaded the legislature to pass the Disenfranchisement Act of 1908. True to its title, this measure added various property, good character, and literacy requirements that, as administrated, served to keep blacks from voting. The result, as one commentator observed 25 years later, was an almost absolute exclusion of the Negro voice in State and Federal elections. Disenfranchised blacks had no electoral influence, hence no muscle to lobby the legislature for change, and that is when the Court intervened. It invalidated white primaries and other burdens on minority voting. It was against this backdrop that the Court, construing the Equal Protection Clause, undertook to ensure that apportionment plans do not dilute minority voting strength. By enacting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress heightened Federal judicial involvement in apportionment, and also fashioned a role for the Attorney General. Section 2 creates a Federal right of action to challenge vote dilution. Section 5 requires States with a history of discrimination to preclear any changes in voting practices with either a Federal court or the Attorney General. And on and on it goes to show that the Voting Rights Act was in response to a definite, long-range oppression of the rights of African- Americans at the ballot box. Justice Ginsburg makes it quite clear that the Equal Protection Clause does not rule out extraordinary measures being taken by the Federal Government to deal with past wrongs and to compensate for what happened in 232 years of slavery and the period of disenfranchisement that followed. She argues with the basic principle that is established by Justice O'Connor in Shaw versus Reno. She does not accept that premise. But then Justice Ginsburg moves on to another area. She says that even if you accept the reasoning of Shaw versus Reno, even if you accept Justice O'Connor's contention that race cannot be the predominant consideration in drawing districts, political districts, even if you accept that and apply it, the 11th District in Georgia meets the standards. The 11th District in Georgia is no more a district drawn with predominant race considerations than any other district in Georgia. It considers other factors also. It does not cross but a few county lines, and some districts cross a number of county lines. The 11th District of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of Georgia is more regular than 28 districts in the country that are cited as being the 28 most oddly-drawn districts in the country. So Justice Ginsburg applied the standard of Shaw versus Reno and still concludes that even if you applied that standard, the 11th Congressional District should not have been invalidated. I urge all Americans who really want to take a close look at what the Supreme Court did to not just read the majority opinion; read the dissenting opinion. It was a 5-to-4 decision and that 5-to-4 decision means that some day the reasoning of Justice Ginsburg may be the basis for overturning that decision. I also said before this was a serious matter. I want to address myself particularly to the African-American community. This is a serious matter. We have a situation where on that same Court, rendering several of the decisions that have affected school integration, affirmative action and now voting rights, is a justice who happens to be African-American. Justice Clarence Thomas is on that Supreme Court. Justice Clarence Thomas is an African-American, and there are some who believe that the Court is emboldened even more in its pursuit of the dismantling of voting rights and affirmative action, and set-asides as a result of Justice Thomas being there as an African-American. There are some who say that Justice Clarence Thomas is the most powerful African-American in the country, and there are some who say, being the most powerful African-American in the country, he is the most dangerous African-American in the country. There are some who say that his presence and his continued support for the opinions which are destroying affirmative action, set-asides, and voting rights constitute a special kind of problem. There are some who say that at least Justice Thomas is honest and he is clearly on the side of the conservatives, and, therefore, we have to respect his opinions. The greater danger they say may not be Clarence Thomas, but those who do not openly say they are conservative, who are masquerading as leaders in the African-American community, and they share the same opinions as Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Clarence Thomas's case was well-known to most of us. The vote on Justice Thomas in the Senate got a great deal of publicity, and there were a number of us in Congress, including all of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who opposed the appointment of Justice Clarence Thomas at the very beginning, long before there was any discussions of his private life, which we think was wholly out of order. Long before that had happened, a position had been taken by the members of the Congressional Black Caucus against the appointment of Justice Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. As a member of the Education and Labor Committee, Justice Thomas in his previous employment as the head of EEOC had been before our committee numerous times, and Justice Thomas had clearly sabotaged the law he was hired to implement. Justice Thomas defied the intent of Congress. He ignored the intent of Congress. He ignored the directions of the committee. So we had a clear position, and I adamantly opposed the appointment of Justice Clarence Thomas long before any question was raised about his personal life. I make that distinction because so much confusion resulted from the fact that an unprecedented situation developed where the personal life of an official seeking public office was aired in public. I totally agreed with Justice Thomas on one point. It was a high- technology lynching. It should never have been considered in public. It should have been an inquiry held behind closed doors. It should have proceeded as all personnel matters proceed. It was a circus which was most unfortunate. Of course, there were many people who opposed him because of his record, opposed him because of his ideology, who were swayed by the problem that he faced, and later changed their opinion. But steadfastly we insisted that a record like the record of Justice Thomas in Government made it clear that he would be an enemy of the forces of civil rights, the forces of civil liberties, and of the African- American people. I mention this because in these critical days when there is an attempt to dismantle all of the gains that have been made by the African-Americans over the last 50 years; in these critical days when the second reconstruction is being trampled, the one reconstruction was trampled, and all of the Members of Congress who were black were removed from Congress, we are not facing a situation quite that bad, but in many ways the economic impact of the decisions that are being made will be even harsher on the African-American population in general. So here we are in a critical situation. There is a state of emergency. Our leadership and people we select as leaders is critical, and what I am moving on to and what I am leading up to is the fact that there were many in the leadership who knew very clearly what the positions of Justice Thomas were, yet they supported him because he was an African-American. The danger in the African-American community now, the danger with respect to the leadership at this critical time is that we are going to again be taken in by the fact that the old standard of the black bourgeoise is allowed to predominate. Anybody who is educated, any, African American who achieves becomes a person we look up to, becomes a person we will not criticize. The standards within the African-American community for leadership, the standards get diluted. You do not have to clearly stand for policies, public policies, which are in the interests of the masses of African-American people. People who back away from those standards can still serve as leaders. They can enjoy the status of leaders. They can pronounce themselves as leaders and get away with it. It is important that at this critical moment we understand that many people who made the error of supporting Justice Thomas because he was an African American are the kind of people we must avoid in the future, the kind of people who have to come to grips with what are the basic policy provisions that should be set forth in the African-American community at a critical time like now. Can we have people voting for B-2 bombers which may cost $31 billion over a 7-year period and at the same time they are cutting Medicaid, at the same time they are cutting school lunches and at the same time draconian measures in the area of housing? The rescissions bill that was passed today cuts low-income housing by $7 billion. Can we have leaders who fail to understand that those are the public policies that impact on the greatest number of African-American people? And they have a duty to fight to see to it that those policies which are detrimental to our people do not go forward. Can we understand that there must be an evaluation of leadership so that we do not have an elected bourgeoisie carrying out their own private personal agenda while they ignore the public agenda of the African-American community? This decision by the Supreme Court and all the other things that have happened in the last few months are a warning. If we do not understand that there is a state of emergency now, we will never understand that. The Clarence Thomases have clearly proclaimed where they stand. There are some Members of the Congress, some black Members, who clearly proclaim they do not want to be part of the Black Caucus. They do not want to represent black interests. I admire people who clearly say where they stand. On the other hand, the Benedict Arnolds we must worry about. I want to close with a statement that I sent out to all of the African-American leadership. It is kind of a convoluted, indirect statement because during the time when Justice Clarence Thomas was under consideration for the appointment, even after the congressional Black Caucus was taking a position opposed to his appointment even after the NAACP had taken a position, even after the leading civil rights organizations had taken a position, there were leaders who came forward and said because he is black, we should not oppose him. One of those leaders wrote an article in the New York Times, and it particularly struck me at that time as being devastating to our position One of those leaders in the cultural field wrote a very piercing op-ed piece for the New York Times where she said, ``I know that he is guilty of not running the EEOC in accordance with the law. I know he has trampled on our interests on many occasions. I know this, I know that. All of this is true, but, still, he should be given a chance.'' And I have that ringing in my ears every time a Supreme Court decision comes down, ``Still, he should be given a chance. He will change.'' That was Maya Angelous, a poet I respect a great deal, a poet that has become more famous since her famous poem was recited at the presidential inauguration. I think Maya Angelous and the other leaders who supported Clarence Thomas now need to go talk to Clarence Thomas. They need to also let the rest of the African-American community understand the implications of what is happening. So I have written a little statement here, Maya Angelous, I am addressing it to: Go Talk to Clarence Thomas Maya talk to Clarence please He's knocking us down to our knees Clarence is talking real loud Running with the wrong crowd Dangerous opinions he always writes Hurling our people toward long poison nights Maya talk to Clarence please In the name of Black ancestors who drowned in the seas Talk to Clarence End his heathen roam Haul him to his heritage home Maya you recognized his record of public sin You promised that Clarence would be born again The miracle of Hugo Black and Earl Warren would be repeated Maya you promised ideological addiction would be defeated Maya time to make your move a sacred point you still have to prove Maya talk to Clarence please! I would say that to all the other leaders who supported Justice Clarence Thomas. I would say that to all the other leaders who support compromise and are ready to forget about the interests of the thousands of African Americans out there who are suffering because public policies are being perpetuated, public policies are being perpetuated which will hurt them directly. The rescission bill, with all of its cuts of low-income housing, would hurt African Americans directly. The B-2 bomber, being taken as a priority over Medicaid, over free lunches, will hurt African-Americans directly. It is time we all understood that there is a state of emergency in the African-American community. The African-American leaders will have to rise to the occasion and lead in the interests of all African- Americans.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, yesterday the Supreme Court began the process of dismantling the Voting Rights Act. I think it is very important to note, however, that in that process it was a 5-to-4 decision. All hope is not lost. Since it was a 5-to-4 decision, I urge all Americans to take a close look at the issue from the point of view of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who offered a brilliant dissent from the majority opinion. It is very important that we understand what Ginsburg is saying. The hope for the future lies in the following of the line of reasoning laid down by Justice Ginsburg. This decision will not stand like many other misguided Supreme Court decisions. One day we expect it to be overturned. But it is here now. It is most unfortunate. It is a very serious matter at this point. Even with the decision of yesterday still alone, it would be a serious matter because, after all, it goes to the heart of the civil rights progress over the last 20 years. It deals with voting. It deals with representation. The Voting Rights Act has been a huge success. The Voting Rights Act by any measure has been a huge success all over the Nation at every level, whether you are talking about municipal offices or State offices, school boards, certainly at the level of Congress, representation under the Voting Rights Act has greatly increased for people of African descent, for people of Latino descent and for some other minorities also. It has been a great success in the Congress. We now have 40 persons of African descent. If we had a numerical formula of the 435 people in Congress, if you had a numerical formula that every group should be represented in proportion to its size in the population, and we do not have such a formula, I am not asking for such a formula, but if you had such a formula, the African American population is approximately 13 percent of the 260 million Americans; 33 million people. So the 13 percent would not be, if you had 13 percent, you would have a little more than 40. Ten percent would give you 43, of course; maybe 44, but 40 is pretty close. The act has accomplished its purpose. It goes a long way in the direction of accomplishing its purpose toward giving representation which reflects the population. So it is a serious matter to begin to roll this act backwards. Yesterday, of course, it should be remembered, the Supreme Court did not throw out the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act is not nullified. The Voting Rights Act has not been declared unconstitutional. The Voting Rights Act has been merely handicapped, strangled a little bit; the process of strangling has begun. But it is not dead. It is not destroyed. I will talk more about that in a few minutes. If the decision with respect to the Voting Rights Act had come along, it would be serious enough, but the Supreme Court also moved on matters related to race and civil rights in this particular session to strike down the setaside contracts that the Federal Government has sponsored in the Adarand decision. The Supreme Court also backed away from school integration in a case that was also passed on. The direction is to declare that the 14th amendment, the 14th amendment is for the purpose of establishing a color blind society. The 14th amendment may have that as one of its purposes, but the 14th amendment first of all, most important of all, is an amendment which was designed to bring the newly freed slaves into the mainstream of American society legally. The 14th amendment was developed at the end of the Civil War, after the Emancipation Proclamation. There is no question, it is very crystal clear what the first intent of the 14th amendment was. The first and the most important intent of the 14th amendment was to deal with the fact that legal status as citizens must be assigned and given to the newly freed slaves. That was the one clear intent from the very beginning. If we expand that to cover other minorities, if we expand that to cover other groups that are discriminated against, there is nothing wrong with that, of course. Interpretation can be so much broader. However, the first and most important purpose of the 14th amendment was to make it clear once and for all, in the Constitution of America, that all of the ex-slaves were to be considered as full citizens of the United States of America. What was the history of the Constitution before the 14th amendment? Before the 14th amendment, the Constitution was not silent on slavery. The Constitution was not silent on slavery. Unfortunately, the Constitution stated earlier that in counting for representation in the House of Representatives, slaves in the States would be considered three-fifths of a man, male slaves, of course, would be considered three-fifths of a man. After all, women did not have the right to vote, whether they were free or slave. Each male slave would be considered three-fifths of a man. That is in the Constitution. The Constitution spoke again in the 14th amendment and made it clear that nobody should be considered anything other than a full-fledged citizen. It was done by the same people who had fought slavery. The spirit of the abolitionist was on the floor of the House of Representatives, so it is crystal clear what the first and most important intent of the 14th amendment was. The misinterpretation of the 14th amendment is at the heart of what went wrong with the Supreme Court. Justice Ginsberg clearly understands that. The other Justices choose not to understand it. Mr. Speaker, I have been on the floor before and I have talked about the need for a truth commission. The whole dark period of slavery in the history of America has been pretty much ignored. In the textbooks, nobody wants to talk about such unpleasant things. However, slavery existed in the United States of America for 232 years. People chose to call slavery the peculiar institution. It was not an institution. Slavery was a criminal industry. Slavery was a criminal industry. Slavery was designed to exact as much labor from human beings as possible. Some people have compared 232 years of slavery with the holocaust perpetrated by Hitler. I do not think that is an appropriate comparison. We do not need to borrow words like that. We are to give a clear designation to what happened in slavery. Slavery was an attempt to obliterate, obliterate the soul and the humanity of the African- Americans who were transported here against their will. They wanted to obliterate their souls, they wanted to obliterate their humanity, in order to make them more efficient beasts of burden, in order to make them work better, harder, and derive more profits from their work. That is what slavery was all about. I think we need a truth commission to make the story of slavery known to all Americans. We have glossed over it. We cannot have a Nation exist in a healthy state that chooses to ignore a segment of its history that went on for 232 years. Unless we come to grips with recognizing what slavery was all about, we are always going to be making the kinds of mistakes that the Supreme Court makes in its interpretation of the 14th amendment. We need a truth commission. South Africa has a truth commission that is set up. In Haiti they are talking about setting up a truth commission. Horrible things happened in South Africa. South Africa was a situation where the minority population, minority white population, almost enslaved but later on forced into second class citizenship the majority black population, so South Africa, in order to move ahead, in order to progress, refused to try to punish the people who were responsible for the crimes during the era of apartheid. Instead of trying to punish them, they are trying to seek reconciliation. The process of reconciliation is being driven by a truth commission. They said, ``We cannot punish everybody. If we tried to punish everybody, we would probably end up devoting resources that would be badly needed to build the country.'' If we tried to punish everybody, we would probably inflame situations among groups and individuals which would only lead to more violence. It would only make it more difficult for the country to come together, so we do not want to try to punish. We do not want justice. We cannot afford justice. What the South Africans have said is that reconciliation is more important than justice. They have gone forward. However, they said we do want the truth known. We are not going to go forward as a nation unless we have a commission that goes back and examines the crimes that were committed, and tells the story. They will name names, but nobody named, nobody found in the telling of the story to be guilty of a crime, will be punished, no matter how heinous the crime is. If it took place during the period before the new constitution came into effect, they will not punish anybody. They have decided that vengeance belongs to God. Probably only God is powerful enough to really take vengeance. It would destroy their nation if they sought justice. Reconciliation becomes more important than justice in South Africa. The same pattern has been reproduced in Haiti. The Haitians have decided they do not have enough jails, they do not have enough courts. They cannot pursue the people responsible for 5,000 murders over the last 3 years. They cannot pursue, except to a limited extent, the people who perpetrated the crimes that were so heinous during the period of time that Jean-Bertrand Aristide was kicked out of Haiti and had to remain in exile here in the United States. They do not want to destroy their nation by using their resources to seek justice. They do not have the capacity to seek justice. They chose reconciliation, instead, because it is the only positive way to go. However, they wanted a truth commission. They want the story told. They want it known who did these terrible deeds, who was responsible for those awful murders and mutilations. They want this truth to be known. They will not punish anybody, but they want the truth to be known. The United States of America needs a truth commission about slavery, about slavery and the implications of slavery for the African-American population of this Nation. The truth should be told; a full commission to look at the whole 232 years, and also to examine the 100 years after the 232 years, where slavery was followed by an oppressive effort to keep the descendants of the slaves from enjoying full citizenship; the lynchings, the murders, the systematic denial of due process. There were laws on the books which denied the right to vote. There were laws on the books which made it clear that they did not want African-Americans to have the right to have a trade, to be able to earn a living as a carpenter, as a contractor, as a person who had a trade that they could use. They could not get licenses. They had to work for somebody else. On and on it goes. It all needs to be examined. When we are talking about affirmative action and voting rights and the necessity for special situations, we need to know the background. We need a truth commission that establishes that. The consequences of the Supreme Court's misguided decision are great, as I said before. The Supreme Court, on the surface it sounds like common sense, of course, would dictate that, of course, America is a color blind society, and the 14th amendment for equal protection would tell you that nobody, nobody should be given any special consideration. Common sense dictated the Dred Scott decision, the Dred Scott decision. Common sense dictated the Plessy versus Ferguson decision, which said separate but equal schools is all you need to guarantee that there is equal protection. The Plessy versus Ferguson decision endured for many years before common sense was subordinated to an interpretation of the law which clearly established the fact that you cannot have separate but equal. The very fact that they are separate means one of the two parties will not be equal. Therefore, the common sense that appears to be so obvious to certain commentators on the radio, on television, it is obvious that they could reach no other conclusion. Common sense. Read Justice Ginsburg's decision and learn about common sense as interpreted by another scholar, by another person who is on the Supreme Court. You will find common sense is not so obvious. There are consequences that are immediate for the African-American community. The consequences are great, indeed. The consequences of this decision by the Supreme Court mean there will be litigation. Already a district has been challenged in New York State, in New York City. The gentlewoman from New York City, New York, Nydia Velazquez, her district is being challenged, and of course there will be litigation connected with that. If any district in any part of the country is ordered to redraw its lines, of course it affects all the other districts that are nearby, so in Georgia, you will have all the districts in Georgia affected by the decision yesterday with respect to the 11th Congressional District in Georgia. In New York, if any one of the districts in downstate New York are affected, all of the districts will be impacted. They have to be redrawn. The consequences will be great. The consequences will be great in terms of political terms, partisan political terms, because it allows a situation for a great deal of mischief. The Supreme Court has said that politics is war without blood. If politics is war without blood, then no general will pass up an opportunity to take advantage of whatever situation opens up, so the generals in the Republican Party will take advantage. All kinds of things are about to happen in the African-American community. We have always enjoyed certain kinds of privileges in terms of certain groups have never been very popular. The public has never supported certain parties. Therefore, you can expect that people who think one way will not declare themselves to belong to a certain party, or they will not declare themselves to be conservative or to be in favor of certain kinds of policies which are detrimental to the masses of people that they represent in a given congressional district. We can expect more subterfuge. We can expect Edridge Ames types in the political arena, pretending that they are in favor of certain kinds of policies, but using the unsettled situation to take advantage of it, and running candidates in the primary as well as in the general election; all kinds of scenarios will be unleashed as a result of this tampering with the Voting Rights Act. There is a great challenge to the black leadership that is being set forth here. The Voting Rights Act brings it home, makes it crystal clear, that there is a state of emergency in the black community. In the African-American community there is a state of emergency. I have said this several times before on the floor of this House. The state of emergency now should be clear to everybody everywhere in the African- American community. The state of emergency relates to the attack on affirmative action, the attack on the Voting Rights Act, the attack on school integration. Those are minor compared to the attack on the poor population of the African-American communities. African-Americans still are predominantly poor. Sixty percent of African-Americans in the United States of America could be classified as poor. There is another marginal group that if they miss one paycheck at their job, they will fall into the poverty category, also, so poverty and the consequences of poverty are experienced regularly by an African-American community that came out of slavery after 232 years of slavery, and found no help, no Marshall Plan. The Freedmen's Bureau that was set up was a tiny little operation for a few years, but no effort was made to help millions of people in a transition from slavery to full citizenship, so the consequences of that have come down from one generation to another. It is not surprising that they are poor. The economic consequences have generated other problems. When people have decent incomes, they can take care of most of their own problems. When people have decent incomes they do not need welfare, public housing. When people have decent incomes, they can take care of their family problems to a greater degree. Every family has problems: middle class, the rich, working class, poor. Everybody has problems. However, what gives the middle class and the rich great advantages is they have money that can help to deal with their problems, and they do not have to have their problems become public, a public consideration. The black community does not have that. Large amounts, the great, predominant percentage of the African-American community are poor. There is a book that was written in the 1930's called Black Bourgeoisie, by E. Franklin Frazer. For many years this was a textbook for black college students and black leaders. Everybody had to read it, the Black Bourgeoisie. It was a scathing criticism of the mores and values of the emerging black middle class. It talked about how they were preoccupied totally with themselves, preoccupied totally with their own concerns, and they engaged in activities which were unproductive. They spent large amounts of money on consumer products in an attempt to demonstrate that they were affluent. A number of criticisms were made, and sometimes, perhaps, maybe they were too harsh. The black bourgeoisie emerging out of the 1930's needs to be congratulated. Things were so difficult, there were so many obstacles and so many rules. You could not become, as I said before, an electrician, a plasterer. You could not be a contractor. Those people who were able to make some headway against all the oppression and all the roadblocks, they deserve credit for being able to economically improve themselves, no matter what problems they had. If they were not generous and they were not magnanimous in reaching out to their communities and providing leadership, then they can be forgiven to some degree. There was a new effort that started with Martin Luther King, however. In the 1960's, the middle class provided the leadership which reached out to the masses of African-Americans and said, ``We are all in this boat together, we all have these problems, and we are going to join to wage an assault to obtain our civil rights.'' The spirit of the 1960's and the spirit of Martin Luther King that went forward was a spirit that was cradled, nurtured by the black middle class, the African-American middle class, the so-called black bourgeoisie, you might say, if you want to stay with the terminology of E. Franklin Frazier. That black bourgeoisie provided magnanimous, generous, courageous leadership in the fight to get the Voting Rights Act, to get the school integration, to end employment discrimination, to get affirmative action. They are to be applauded. They came in large numbers to the Congress. It was clear that the congresspeople who came here and were parts of the Black Caucus were graduates from a movement that cared about the majority of African-Americans. The danger with this present situation, one of the dangers that we will have to deal with is the fact that there will be Benedict Armolds in great numbers. There will be large numbers of people who will masquerade as being concerned about the masses, but they will take advantage of the situation. We may have an elected black bourgeoisie that cares only about itself, only about the deals that they can make, only about their own status, and deceives the great masses. We have a possibility of large numbers of Judas men and Judas women, betraying, deceiving. That is one of the consequences of the process that has been set in motion, the domino, rolling, in respect to the Voting Rights Act, an unsettling number of situations, making it possible for opportunists to come in. Let me go back to the very beginning, the Supreme Court decision that set in motion all of this. I said the Supreme Court decision began the process of dismantling the Voting Rights Act. It was a continuum of an assault on civil rights legislation, civil rights laws. By itself it is dangerous enough, but in that context it is even more dangerous. We should think very seriously about what is taking place. I think God must spend many days weeping when He observes the United States of America. God must spend many days weeping when He observes that He has given so much to this land of plenty, beautiful and spacious skies, law and order for long periods of time, no great war to devastate our cities and destroy our countryside, prosperty. We are the richest Nation that ever existed on the face of the Earth, and the riches have not ceased. Profits are being made on Wall Street, profits are being made by corporations at a greater rate than ever before. People with jobs and wage earners are not benefiting from that. There is no correlation anymore, no association between the profits made by corporations and the welfare benefits received by the working people of America. They are downsizing and taking away jobs at the same time they are making big profits. Automation, computerization, a number of things allow them to make big profits, increase their investments, increase their activities, produce more products, while at the same time they reduce the number of jobs. There is a problem there, but in general this is still the richest Nation in the history of the world. The Fortune 500 corporations, most of them have budgets greater than most of the nations of the world. Unparalleled wealth. Never before did such wealth exist. God must spend a lot of time weeping when He looks at all of this that He has bestowed on the United States Of America and then look at the pettiness that is driving many of our political activities, the pettiness which makes affirmative action a critical problem. Affirmative action is not a critical problem. Affirmative actions has not resulted in any great movement of African-Americans anywhere. They are not in large numbers in the boardrooms of corporations. They are not in large numbers, I assure you, in the top executive suites. They are not in large numbers, or any credible number, in the management structures after all these years of affirmative action, less than 30 years of affirmative action. When you look at the statistics, it is appalling how little has been accomplished for the people who were supposed to be the first beneficiaries. Going back again to the first intent of the 14th amendment, the first affirmative action programs were designed and fashioned to deal with the descendants of slaves, to deal with the situation of righting past wrongs. But what has been accomplished? There has been no great move forward. Consider the shoeshine boys when you go through the airports and places where people are prosperous and they pay a lot for a shoeshine. There was a time when a shoeshine boy was a stereotype and people though most of the shoeshine boys in the country were black, black men, black boys. The shoeshine boy was a subject of humor or subject of ridicule. But when you travel from now on, look at the shoeshine attendants in the airports. When you go to a fancy club where they are paying $3 for a regular shine and $5 for an executive shine, which means if you can do 4 shines per hour, for $3 a shine, you can make $12 an hour; for $5 a shine, you can make $20 an hour. That is not a bad pay. When it was 35 cents per shine and 5 cents per shine and even $1 a shine, most of the shine boys and the shine men were African-American, people of African descent. But if you look now, do your own survey and you will see that not only have we not made it to the boardrooms of corporations, not only have African- Americans not made it to the executive suites, not only have African- Americans not made it to middle management, but they are declining even in the area of the shoeshine industry, because as the benefits of the industry go up, the wages go up, other people have displaced the African-Americans. Take a look for yourself and you will see a most interesting phenomenon. If you look at waiters in hotels, it used to be predominantly expected, especially in the South, the waiters were predominantly African-American waiters, but as the standard of living has risen and the wages of the waiters have risen, you find fewer and fewer African-American waiters in the hotels. Not only are we not in the boardrooms and the executive suites, we have not held on to the waiting jobs, waiting tables in hotels and restaurants. Take a look for yourself. Do your own survey. Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, even in the professions where the black middle class has striven so consciously to try to move, there was a time when 5 percent of the teachers in America were black, were African-Americans. The percentage of teachers who are African-American has gone down. The percentage of law enforcement personnel, policemen, who are African-American has gone down. The percentage of doctors who are African-American has gone down in the last 20 years. Not only is affirmative action not succeeding in the industrial sector, in the corporate sector, in the areas that were targeted, overall black employment, blacks climbing up the ladder in terms of wealth, in terms of responsibility in industry or in academia, it has decreased and declined. God must be very upset and spend a lot of days weeping when He looks at so little having been done for those who need help most, and sees the outrage, and the amount of energy and effort being poured into criticism of affirmative action and criticism of those tiny, very tiny gains that have been made. As I said before, many of the gains have turned into losses. God must spend a lot of days weeping when He sees that so much has been given to the United States of America and they behave in such petty ways. We have a history of being a country that I am sure God must appreciate a great deal and the world must appreciate a great deal. We have been celebrating 50 years after World War II. As I watch the documentaries and get educated in greater detail than ever before about what went on in World War II, I am sure the whole world applauds the courage and the generosity, the lack of selfishness of Americans the men who died in Normandy on D-Day or the men who stormed Iwo Jima; Okinawa. All of that kind of courage and that kind of going forward to save the world from totalitarianism and Naziism and tyranny, I am sure God must applaud a great deal. But here we are at a point where peace reigns basically, and instead of moving on to build a new society, a society where the wealth of this great Nation can be shared, where the wealth can be used to take care of the needs of everybody, instead of moving in that direction, we have chosen to move in the opposite direction and to hunker down and begin to hoard the benefits and hoard the wealth, and begin to throw overboard a certain segment of society and say, ``We don't care what happens to them. We don't really care.'' As I said before, God must spend a lot of days looking at all this and be very upset that we are so petty and moving in such a negative direction so rapidly. But all hope is not lost, because there are great things happening all over the world. The accumulation of all these great things may begin to have an impact on what is happening here in this country. Even in this country, the Southern Baptist Church last week apologized for their position on slavery, the Southern Baptist Church, which was created as a result of a schism at the time of the Civil War. The big issue in the Southern Baptist Church was that they wanted to label African-Americans, Negroes, as being less than human and not worthy of God's blessings, that they were not to be considered in the Christian church as equals. They apologized. The Southern Baptists apologized. They voted, large number of delegates, to apologize and to take note of the fact that the evils that were generated by slavery still exist and they must work to eradicate them. The Southern Baptists did that. Some people say, well, their membership is declining. There is some ulterior motive. I do not care. They did it. For one glorious moment, they rose to the occasion and they admitted that they wanted to tell the truth, they wanted to be a part of the truth, they wanted to get away from the doctrine of obliteration. The doctrine of obliteration said that the African-American, the African transported here, was not a human being, and therefore they could be made beasts of burden, more efficient beasts of burden, by treating them like beasts. The Southern Baptists represent just one of those many areas where there is hope. There is hope in the Supreme Court, too, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg writes the decision of the kind that she wrote. Justice Ginsburg took just the opposite approach of Justice Kennedy, who wrote the decision for the majority. Justice Kennedy based his ruling on the Shaw versus Reno case. I think the majority opinion for that was written by Justice O'Connor, with Justice Clarence Thomas, of course, supporting it in great measure. Justice Ginsburg says that it is not common sense. It is not obvious to her, as the law is made and the intent of the constitutional amendment is examined, it is not at all clear to her that the 14th amendment is primarily concerned with being colorblind and not concerned with remedying past wrongs, which the full legal integration of the African-Americans, the former salves and their descendants into American life. Let me must read a few excerpts from Justice Ginsburg's dissenting opinion. As you know, it was a 5-4 decision, and Justice Ginsburg was joined in her dissent by Justices Stevens, Bryant and Souter. Legislative districting is highly political business. This Court has generally respected the competence of state legislatures to attend to the task. When race is the issue, however, we have recognized the need for judicial intervention to prevent dilution of minority voting strength. Generations of white discrimination against African- Americans as citizens and voters account for that surveillance. In other words, what she is saying is that we have generally kept our hands off, the judiciary has kept its hands off the reapportionment process. There was a series of cases that established clearly that it was better to leave it to the State legislature and the only regular, systematic intervention of the courts came with the Voting Rights Act for the purpose of dealing with the problem of giving African-Americans their full voting rights and avoiding the dilution of the voting strength of minorities. I go back to Justice Ginsburg's dissent, and I quote: Two years ago in Shaw versus Reno this Court took up a claim analytically distinct from a vote-dilution claim. Shaw authorized judicial intervention in extremely irregular apportionments. In other words she is saying that we started something 2 years ago when we considered the North Carolina case, Shaw versus Reno. For the first time we moved away from the voter-dilution concern of the Court and we moved into a new era. We moved into an area where extremely irregular apportionments, the way the district looked, or the circumstances under which the district was created, became a concern of the Court. And she does not agree, of course, that that movement was justified. To continue quoting Justice Ginsburg: Today the Court expands the judicial role announcing that Federal courts are to undertake searching review of any district with contours predominantly motivated by race. Strict scrutiny will be triggered not only when traditional districting practices are abandoned, but also when those practices are subordinated to, given less weight, than race. Applying this new ``race-as-predominant-factor'' standard, the Court invalidates Georgia's districting plan, even though Georgia's Eleventh District, the focus of today's dispute, bears the imprint of familiar districting practices. Because I do not endorse the Court's new standard and would not upset Georgia's plan, I dissent. Continuing to quote Justice Ginsburg: At the outset it may be useful to note points on which the court does not divide. First, we agree that federalism and the slim judicial competence to draw district lines weigh heavily against judicial intervention in apportionment decisions; as a rule, the task should remain within the domain of state legislatures. Second, for most of our Nation's history, the franchise has not been enjoyed equally by black citizens and white voters. I want to just repeat; I am quoting from Justice Ginsburg and I want to read that again: For most of our Nation's history the franchise has not been enjoyed equally by black citizens and white voters. To redress past wrongs and to avert any recurrence of exclusion of blacks from political processes, Federal courts now respond to Equal Protection Clause and Voting Rights Act complaints of state action that dilutes minority voting strength. Third, to meet statutory requirements, state legislatures must sometimes consider race as a factor highly relevant to the drawing of district lines.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the Republican budget calls for $100 billion in cuts in low-income assistance programs including aid to families with dependent children, food stamps, supplemental security income, child welfare programs, and the earned income tax credit. These programs are left unscathed by the alternative budget which the CBC prepared earlier. Republicans have continually assaulted these welfare programs, as they call them, since the beginning of the Congress but have neglected to seriously attack other forms of welfare. For example, the abuses in farm subsidy programs are widespread and well-known and they have not been attacked. Republicans also have not attacked corporate welfare. The problem of corporate welfare was at least recognized in the House-passed budget. The House did include at least $25 billion in corporate welfare cuts when the bill left here and the Senate also enacted their version, it had $9.4 billion in corporate welfare cuts. But somehow in the conference all of this was dropped and there are zero cuts in corporate welfare at this point. To add insult to injury, after we vote on this budget agreement we will also have a rescissions package brought back. I urge a ``no'' vote on this conference report. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to House Concurrent Resolution 67, the conference agreement on the fiscal year budget resolution. This budget decimates virtually every major social program on which working families rely. The budget inflicts immense pain on those least able to withstand it while perpetuating corporate welfare, increasing defense spending, and cutting taxes for the wealthiest individuals. First and foremost, the conference agreement calls for cuts for $10 billion in outlays for student aid and a 33-percent cut in discretionary spending for education and training programs over the next 7 years. Due to [[Page H 6583]] spending caps, we would lose $4 to $5 billion in education funding in fiscal year 1996 alone. In stark contrast to the Republican scheme, the President, the Congressional Black Caucus [CBC], and the Progressive Caucus have made the education and job training portion of the budget their top priority--a view which is in line with the majority of the American people. Both the President's proposed budget plan and the CBC/ Progressive Caucus alternative budget include tens of billions of dollars in spending increases for education and job training, while the Republican plan proposes to cut spending on these programs by similar amounts. Second, the Republican budget slashes Medicare by $270 billion and Medicaid by $182 billion. The Medicare cuts translate into $150 month out of the pocket of the average senior citizen, and the Medicaid cuts mean that 800,000 to 1 million seniors and individuals with disabilities will lose health care coverage completely. The CBC/ Progressive Caucus alternative budget, on the other hand, leaves these vital programs intact with no decreases in funding. Third, the Republican budget calls for $100 billion in cuts in low- income assistance programs, including aid to families with dependent children [AFDC], food stamps, supplemental security income [SSI], child welfare programs, and the earned income tax credit [EITC]. Again, these programs are left unscathed by the CBC/Progressive Caucus alternative budget. Republicans have continually assaulted these welfare programs since the beginning of the Congress but have neglected to seriously attack other forms of welfare. For example, the abuses in farm subsidy programs are widespread and well-known. Today, the environmental working group once again is releasing a report which details such abuses. In this report, the ``Fox in the Henhouse,'' it is revealed that local, federally paid, Department of Agriculture employees who run farm subsidy programs routinely practice fraud, extortion, and embezzlement. In just one incident in California, four employees fraudulently issued 17 Federal farm subsidy checks worth more than $270,000, using the cash to buy illegal drugs. Republicans also should be ashamed to bring a budget plan to the floor which drastically reduces funding for every program for the working poor and does not strip a single cent from corporate welfare. That is right--not a single cent. The House-passed budget resolution included $25 billion in corporate welfare cuts, and the Senate-passed version included $9.4 billion, but somehow all of that was dropped in conference. America's working families know that we can do better than that. The dirty little secret of corporate welfare is out of the bag. The CBC/ Progressive Caucus alternative budget includes $500 billion in corporate welfare cuts, so the people know that it can be done. And it is not just Democrats who are pushing for an end to corporate welfare. Even the very conservative Heritage Foundation is on board with the idea. To add insult to injury, after we vote on this budget agreement, we will vote on the new Republican version of the rescissions package that President Clinton vetoed earlier this month. Unfortunately, the new bill is only slightly better. It is like telling the American people that we are going to give them one cyanide pill instead of two. The rescissions bill remains completely unacceptable. I urge my colleagues to reject the budget conference agreement and the rescissions package, both of which deliver a sharp blow to the stomachs of the most vulnerable Americans without equitably distributing the pain necessary to move toward a balanced budget.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Meek amendment. I think the amendment that Meek seeks to amend, Mr. Goss, places the process of Haitian democratization under a vague and mischievous standard. The question is how do we define a democratically constituted government, how do we define a democratic election process? The Meek amendment makes it pretty clear that the responsibility would be fixed upon the President. It must be made known to the President. Otherwise the President will certify whether the democratic process took place and whether the regime in power is a result of a democratic process. Yes, I agree with the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Goss]. We should say no. We should not support any regime that is in power as a result of a process that is not democratic. But what is the definition of the process, what is the definition of staying on track? As the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Goss] said, they must stay on track. I agree they must stay on track toward democracy and maintain the democracy. Let the President determine what staying on track means. The President, the executive branch, is in charge of foreign policy. Let us make it clear the Meek amendment makes it clear that they will determine that. Instead we have in the Goss amendment a rather vague situation where it is not clear who will determine whether or not they are on course. We should bear in mind that the liberation of Haiti marks a high point in United States foreign policy. The liberation of Haiti sends a message to all of the nations in the Caribbean area and this hemisphere, all throughout the world, that we stand well on the side of democracy, and when it is clear that a democratic government has been deposed, we will have the strength and the resources of the American Government on the side of the democratic government. We have, step by step, supported a process which the Haitian people themselves began in 1987. Let us understand the context in which the presidential election has just taken place. First of all, the election was an election which involved 11,000 candidates running for everything from village council up to the national legislature. That is very difficult for anybody to run. They have no machines, no election machines. They do not have boards of elections that have existed for decades. Their constitution only came into existence less than 10 years ago. So they are carrying out a process under the worst of circumstances in an economy that does not even have the infrastructure to support electricity on a 24-hour basis. All of this is taking place within less than 10 years in the Haitian society. They said they can never write a constitution, but they wrote a constitution. They went out and voted for that constitution. They said they can never have free elections, and it looked for a while as if they can never have free elections because people were gunned down at the polls in the first two elections. Finally, Mr. Chairman, they had an election where they elected Jean- Bertrand Aristide as President. After the election was certified as being a fair and free election, he was deposed by the army, and that situation lasted for over 3 years. Now some of the people who supported the criminals who deposed the democratically-elected President are trying to set a very high standard that they were never concerned about while Haiti was under the domination of criminal dictators. We have broken through; we have liberated Haiti. The process is moving in a very swift way. Mr. Chairman, they have had an election less than a year after the president was returned. The president who is there now has agreed to step down. He has made no claim to the fact that he was out of office for 3 years and, therefore, he ought to be continued. Some other people are making that claim, but Jean-Bertrand Aristide will step down. Jean- Bertrand Aristide will play the role of George Washington and see to it that there is an orderly, peaceful transition of government. All of these things are moving on track, and they are moving in ways that most cynics said they can never move. Why do we want to introduce a vague standard here? Why do we want to place Haiti under scrutiny, which will not help the situation at all? Why not let the process go forward and let the State Department and the President, the executive branch of government, determine whether or not they are meeting the requirements of a movement toward democratization that is acceptable for the United States to continue to support? I hope that the gentleman will accept the amendment to his amendment because the difference is not so great. We only clarify and pinpoint the responsibility for defining what democratization is in Haiti. I urge that we support, all people to support, the Meek amendment.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman and congratulate him on this special order. I would also like to thank the leadership for taking this opportunity to highlight a very important piece of legislation. I serve as the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. Mr. Speaker, I have in front of me a package of printouts listing a portion of the 10,000 Americans who died in the workplace last year. About 56,000 die of accidents that take place in the workplace and of diseases contracted in the workplace. But 10,000 die in the workplace, at the workplace. I think that it is important that we note that there are names and addresses of human beings here. They are very real. The notion that government agencies like OSHA exist only to make work for bureaucrats or to make life unpleasant for businesses is untrue in most cases, but certainly in the case of an agency like OSHA, we can clearly prove it to be untrue. One of the great things about the Vietnam War Memorial is the fact that it does give individual names. No more Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. You know exactly who it was who died and what day they died, and I think that to humanize what happens in this great so-called bureaucracy of the Federal Government, it is important of us to take a look at the actual list of names and addresses of the human beings who have died in the workplace. Over the years, OSHA has decreased the number who die in the workplace, or who die as a result of diseases contracted in the workplace, but OSHA has not done the job 100 percent. OSHA must continue to exist. 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 propelled the Republicans into a search and destroy mission against OSHA. This relentless attack places all American workers in harms 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 suffered at their places of work. 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 proposed ``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 horrible accidents. It is not exaggerating at all to say that the proposed Republican OSHA reforms, H.R. 1834, could be accurately described as the Death and Injury Act of 1995. Provisions designed to protect the health and safety of workers are being eradicated. The requirements of serious compliance by employers is being demolished. Reasonable protections are being blown away leaving workers dangerously exposed and defenseless. As a result of this Republican invasion of every worthwhile Government program there will be a criminal escalation of the body count. Before the Republican aggression against programs they target as enemies, there is always a barrage of propaganda attempting to pulverize the facts and the truth. Always there are bombardments of disinformation about Government bureaucracies. Like most Government agencies initiated by Democrat Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Democrat Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, OSHA is not the blundering irrelevant entity described by the Republican propaganda machine. OSHA is very much in accordance with the mission of the U.S. Constitution ``to promote the general welfare.'' Promoting the general welfare of workers involves providing basic protections of their health and safety. The workplace should not be a place which diminishes the opportunity and damages the capacity of any American to engage fully in their right to the ``pursuit of happiness.'' Although organized labor led the fight to create OSHA and unions play a major role in enforcing the regulations, OSHA is not a gift of the Democratic Party to union members. OSHA represents a logical fulfillment of the promise of our Constitution. OSHA is for all Americans. The Republican juggernaut has launched a counterattack against the basic mission of our Constitution. The following examination of the Republican proposals will expose the destructive nature of their ``Death and Injury Act'': summary of the republican death and injury act After the September 3, 1991, fire at the Imperial Food's Hamlet Plant--where 25 workers were killed and 56 injured--Mr. Cass Ballenger, now chairman of the Subcommittee on Workplace Protections, told the Charlotte Observer, ``it's embarrassing that it takes a fire like this * * * before the news media makes a big enough deal that people will say `OK, we'll pay more tax money' (for worker safety). It's the squeaking wheel that needs the grease and this wheel apparently hasn't been squeaking loud enough. * * * I think everybody agrees that it's underfunded and bogged down with bureaucracy.'' Given this insight, can you imagine how utterly incomprehensible it is that the Death and Injury Act is being proposed by Congressman Ballenger. Let's closely examine the Republican Death and Injury Act. The Ballenger bill viciously targets all working Americans--without prejudice or discrimination. However, the suffering it will inflict on workers and their families is not equally distributed--only the workers lose. the bill This legislation is an assault on worker safety and health protections. The Ballenger bill undermines the safety net for workers by: virtually eliminating the general duty of employers to maintain a safe and healthy workplace; making it almost impossible for OSHA to inspect workplaces and issue citations; taking away the right of workers to raise safety and health concerns without fear of employer reprisals; making it harder, if not impossible for OSHA to set standards; and eliminating important job safety agencies. enforcement Ballenger guts the enforcement provisions by shifting 50 percent of the resources for this activity to consultation. To focus this agency's energies on nonenforcement compliance activities further erodes OSHA's ability to prevent hazards likely to cause death and serious physical injuries. OSHA's enforcement program is woefully inadequate. At current levels of inspections, Federal OSHA can inspect workplaces only once every 87 years. Under Ballenger there will be no inspections--no enforcement. Ballenger permits the employer to self-evaluate by conducting its own ``safety audits''. Workers will not have access to these audits. If this isn't the fox guarding the chicken coop, I don't know what is. Fifty-six thousand American workers die each year from accidents on the job or disease and injuries suffered at their places of work. [[Page H 6383]] Ballenger guarantees an escalation in work-related deaths. Ballenger prohibits OSHA from issuing citations to first time violators. Although, under current law, a citation is issued within 6 months of the inspection, and employers can request an informal conference to resolve the citation (even before a hearing takes place); it is not enough for Ballenger. This bill sends employers the message that they will not be punished until they are caught, not once but twice, by OSHA. Therefore, many employers will not comply. Ballenger slashes fines and employers who violate laws for which there is no specific standard, such as ergonomics or indoor air quality, will never be fined. The General Accounting Office [GAO] has observed that civil penalties accessed under the OSHA Act are inadequate to deter violations of the act. In 1993, the average penalty collected for a serious OSHA Act violation was $550. As a matter of fact, a report in the Daytona Daily News highlighted a Georgia company that paid a $2 fine for an OSHA Act violation which resulted in the deaths of two employees. Ballenger insures violators will not have to pay. protection of employees from discrimination Ballenger requires workers to inform employers of complaints before contacting OSHA. The right to confidentiality is eliminated and as a result, retaliation against workers who file complaints will escalate. Employees will not report safety and health hazards, or illness and injuries, fearing that they will lose their jobs. Ballenger compromises the protection of workers from discrimination: Ensuring the victimization of the American worker into the 21st century. Ballenger gives employers the right to blame workers for not following safety rules in order to overturn citations and fines. Ballenger generously provides employers with opportunities to avoid sanctions for hazardous work-place violations. Ballenger makes it easier for employers to randomly drug test workers. Ballenger makes a mockery of a persons right to privacy. occupational health and safety standards Ballenger prevents OSHA from setting standards unless they can prove that the costs will not exceed the benefits. Ballenger effectively restricts the cost for worker health and safety to zero. Ballenger lets companies overturn safety and health standards in court and tie up the standard process in redtape. Ballenger forestalls the development of standards for ergonomics, indoor air quality and other emerging hazards, indefinitely. mine safety and health agency [msha] and national institute for occupational safety and health [niosh] Ballenger collapses MSHA into OSHA, effectively eliminating the agency which has been very successful in reducing fatalities and injuries in the mine industry. Ballenger places the lives of workers in 14,500 mines in this Nation at risk. Ballenger eliminates NIOSH--the only agency in this country that conducts research on worker safety and health. Ballenger eradicates any possible major research effort in health and safety; placing all American workers at risk. The disruption caused by the Death and Injury Act by needlessly combining MSHA and OSHA and eliminating NIOSH, will cost the Federal Government time, money, and experienced staff. Most importantly, however, it will cost thousands of innocent lives--the lives of men, women and young people who go to work to help support their families, pay for their education or simply to earn a living. This Death and Injury Act is a menace to all Americans. A fully functioning OSHA offers an umbrella to all Americans. The children, families, and relatives of workers benefit when workers are protected. Against the Republican attack on OSHA the majority of Americans must mobilize to defend themselves. Speaker Gingrich has stated that his brand of politics is war without blood. It must be remembered that even before the Republican declaration of war against OSHA there were 56,000 casualties each year. There is already too much blood. A war against OSHA will be costly. A war against OSHA is madness that must be halted immediately. The 56,000 casualties represent real people with names and faces. These are real people who left loved ones behind. These are real Americans who were lost despite the reasonable efforts of their Government to protect them in the work place. We cannot consciously accept policy changes which will guarantee that more Americans will die. Our society places a high value on statistics. Each year for each holiday we broadcast the holiday highway death count. We deplore the statistics which tell us that homicides by gunshot are out of control. Last year there were 16,000 gunshot homicide victims. And, or course the periodic Vietnam War body count led thousands of Americans to protest in the streets. It should be noted that of the Vietnam War Memorial there are 57,000 names of those who died during the entire war. In contrast, there are 56,000 American work-place casualties each year. We Americans place a high value on human life. Large numbers even insist on protecting unborn life in the wombs of mothers. To defeat the Republican Death and Injury Act we must raise the level of our voices and in every way possible inform the voters. This is not abstract politics. These are living, breathing, working citizens who are being protected. Perhaps the Republican warmongers will get the message if we follow the example of the Vietnam War Memorial. This great monument ends the practice of celebrating unknown soldiers. Carved on that great wall are the names of all the individuals who died. Mr. Speaker, each day I propose to enter into the Congressional Record a portion of the 56,000 names of the casualties of last year's work place hazards. We propose to begin with North Carolina where, a few years ago, 25 workers in a chicken parts packaging plant perished. During a hearing before the Subcommittee on Workplace Protections there was also a mother from North Carolina who pleaded with the committee not to destroy OSHA. She had already lost one son and a second son was gravely ill as a result of accidents at the plant where they worked. Speaker Gingrich defines politics as war without blood; however, the kind of politics being pushed by the Republican Death and Injury Act is very much a life and death matter. Children will lose fathers and mothers; 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. Chairman, I rise in support of the Orton amendment. Mr. Chairman, we cannot promote the general welfare unless the citizens are informed. Our people cannot fruitfully engage in the pursuit of happiness in this complicated information age unless they are informed. For the past 100 years Congress has paid for Government publications to be sent to depository libraries located in each of our districts across the country. The depository library program ensures that ordinary citizens can have access to Government information, but H.R. 1854 reverses 100 years of precedent by having executive branch agencies reimburse the Government Printing Office for their publications. I assure the Members, no executive branch agency will have it as a priority. They will not do it. H.R. 1854 also mandates a massive shift from print to electronic dissemination of information. However, in promoting a ``cyber government'', the bill ignores the fact that we cannot electronically reach most of our constituents through these libraries. They are not wired. They do not have the ability to receive electronic information. Mr. Chairman, information must be produced not only in electronic formats, but also in traditional print formats, in order to accommodate the wide range of the majority of our people's needs and abilities. Many citizens are not yet ready to use Government information in an electronic format. Most libraries do not have the capacity to receive it that way. Mr. Chairman, H.R. 1854 also eliminates the availability of free copies of the Congressional Record that we send to our public schools, hospitals, and nonprofit libraries, not to mention free copies of bills, reports, and other documents that we supply. These proposed changes do not take us anywhere. I urge a ``yes'' vote on the amendment. [[Page H 6220]]