Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentleman. Mr. Speaker, it is very important that you take note of the fact that I want to talk about appropriations. He is on the Committee on Appropriations. I want to talk about the budget. That is my primary concern. But I want to take note of the fact that one of the problems with the budget/appropriation process here is that it is very complex and there is too little discussion of it. Four hundred thirty-five Members are not engaged in the discussion of the budget and appropriations process, which is the most important thing we do, which has an impact on the lives of all Americans. The Federal budget is more than a trillion dollars. I do not know what the situation is now, but Great Britain, with a far smaller budget, used to dedicate at least 2 or 3 days where nothing was discussed on the British Broadcast Corporation network except the budget for 2 days; 2 or 3 days, nothing but the budget was discussed. We have a very large budget, a very complex budget. It touches the lives of everybody. And that process alone requires that we have Members who have a great deal of experience. And we should reorganize the House so that more of them are participating in these very complex decisions related to the budget and the appropriations process. All of the items that we have discussed up to now during this 104th Congress in various ways relate to the budget and appropriations process. Certainly, some of the ones that have gotten the most attention, the balanced budget amendment was very much related to an attempt to place parameters on the budget process so that there would be a squeezing, a forcing of, a ratcheting down of expenditures for social programs. That was the immediate aim of the Contract With America, to create a condition where they would be able to force more and more reductions in programs that were designed to help the people in greatest need. They certainly did not want to make reductions in the area of defense, where we have obsolete weapons systems that are now being still funded and manufactured and new weapons systems that are being proposed which are not obsolete but unnecessary because there is no enemy that is capable of threatening us and we do not need an F-22 fighter, we do not need another Seawolf submarine. So the balanced budget amendment, the line-item veto, the rescissions that were made already by the Committee on Appropriations, $17 billion cut from this year's programs, of that $17 billion, $7 billion is cut from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, low-income housing programs; almost $2 billion in education programs cut, and most of those cuts are in programs that help the poorest students across the country. It is all related to the budget and appropriations process. Welfare reform is less a reform of welfare and more a search for dollars. Republican-controlled leadership did not address welfare reform in terms of moving people off welfare and into work. They instead were searching mightily for ways to save money. I think they saved, according to the calculations, about $60 billion, among the dollars that they saved was about $2 billion saved on school lunches. This is a conservative estimate that comes from the Congressional Budget Office. You have heard a lot of different figures thrown around, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the school lunch savings in the Republican welfare reform package amounts to about $2 billion. The search for money is so intense that we reach into the mouths of kids and pull out food in order to save a few billion dollars to contribute to the overall process of accumulating enough funds to give a tax cut. The tax cut for some of the wealthiest Americans is really the crown jewel. That is the crown jewel of the Contract With America. Everything else feeds into that. Some drastic things are being done, some extreme things are being done in order to guarantee that the crown jewel, the tax cut, is in place and that they are able to deliver on that. Welfare reform degenerated into an opportunity to realize some savings on the backs of the most needy people in the country, people who are victims. We are very generous with victims, and we should be. We are not very generous, but we recognize victims and the Government comes to the aid of victims. We have appropriated about $8 billion for the California earthquake victims; $6 billion was appropriated for the flood victims in the Midwest; $6 billion was appropriated for the hurricane victims in Florida. These are all victims of natural disasters, and we recognized that and we came to the aid of the victims. We have victims of man-made disasters, a mismanaged economy in our big cities. There was a time when there were jobs in the cities and large numbers of people migrated from other parts of the country to our big cities to get those jobs during World War II. And a period for 20 years after World War II, more or less, there were jobs. And now the economy has been managed in such a way, including the decisions made on the floor of this House and the other body, decisions are made which allow for it to be more profitable to manufacture products outside the country, to chase the cheapest labor markets across the world, although the companies are owned by U.S. citizens and although the products are sold, the market is here, we are the consumers. Nevertheless, our policies encourage the people who are able to finance, manufacture to go to other parts of the world to do that. So we have created a lot of unemployed people. A lot of unemployment destabilizes families. The easiest way to deal with many of our social problems, welfare certainly, which is primarily Aid to Dependent Children. Children who have no other way of surviving, get assistance from the Federal Government. By the way, those checks average about $350 a month; $350 a month we are talking about. The most generous State, which is probably New York, gets up to about $600 a month, and the cost of living, of course, in New York in far greater than in most other places. If the average is $350, you know there are many places where you are talking about less than $200 a month for a family of three, $200 a month. That is cheaper than full employment. We have welfare in America because it is cheaper than full employment. If you have full employment and have to provide jobs for people, you are talking about a minimum-wage job and probably has to have some health care benefits. It will cost you far more than keeping people alive on $350 a month or less. So welfare is cheaper than full employment and that is why it goes on and on in America. It is always going to be here unless we decide we want full employment policies. Unless we decide that in our vision of America of the future, the vision that is being projected now by the persons, the group in control of the Congress is not a vision that talks about creating jobs for all Americans. They want to take away not only the jobs and the opportunities but also the opportunities to get the education, to get the jobs. Their latest budget cut proposal, they are proposing to cut aid to college students, college loans, which are subsidized loans. There are areas in our society where subsidies are very much in order. There are some subsidies that we ought to get rid of as fast as we can. I will talk later on about some of those subsidies, subsidies to rich farmers. Subsidies to rich farmers are one category of subsidy we need to get rid of as fast as possible. But we certainly should subsidize students. There is a proposal now that we save $12 billion, a proposal that $12 billion would be saved over a 5-year period. Again, the process here is to search for money that can be put into the cash box for the tax cut. So we are going to take $12 billion from the students, college students, by ending the subsidy on their loans during the time that they are in school. Presently a college student gets a loan and they pay back the loan after they get out of school. And the interest on that loan starts accruing after they get out of college and begin to pay back the loan. The Government picks up the interest for the time they are in school, our Government. It is a subsidy, and it is a subsidy that is very much in order. It allows a person to get a college education and go into the job market and get a job which will generate income taxes that during the course of their lifetime will pay for that subsidy over and over again. It is a very meager subsidy relative to the return that you receive for that subsidy. So now that is the latest. We have gone for school lunches. We have gone for the poorest people on welfare. We have collected as much money from those programs as we can. Now we are going to go after the college students and take money from them in this budget process that is so important. So the tax cut, as the grand scenario, the climax of it is the tax cut proposals that will be on the floor of the House next week. This evening, I would like to talk in more detail about this budget and appropriations process. I would like to unmask some of the mysteries of the process and talk about some of the details. And in subsequent special orders we would like to go into the budget in even more detail. I am the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget committee. We are considering an alternative budget that we would like to offer on the floor as a substitute to the leadership budget, to the Republican budget. In the Republican budget, they will present their vision of America for the next 5 years. As we go toward the year 2000, the budget will reflect what they think is most important. They have already indicated that there are some people and some groups that are not important, some people who yield and sacrifice in order to take care of others. ``The America of the future has no room for everybody.'' We would like to present a Congressional Black Caucus budget which shows there is room in America for everybody. There are enough resources for everybody. We do not need to take food out of the mouths of hungry children. We do not need to harass college students and lessen the opportunities for college students. We do not need to make heavy drastic reductions in Medicaid. A lot of things that are being proposed and will be carried out certainly in this House are not necessary, and we want to prove that and show you that we can balance the budget, too. If American people think that there is too much waste in Government, I would concur. There is too much waste in Government. The problem is the waste is not in the School Lunch Program. The problem is in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Programs, what you call welfare, where there might be some abuses and some waste, and there is need for reform. We support reform in welfare. Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the Democrats voted for a reform. I think the only time in this Congress and probably the only time in the last few Congresses that all Democrats have voted for anything together on the substitute, which was a drastic reform of the welfare program. It was welfare reform that was real reform. It provided for jobs. It provided for educational opportunities. It also maintained the entitlement that everybody who is a victim and needs assistance will be able still to receive assistance under Federal entitlement. And we stand behind them. We do not propose a block grant, which is a swindle. Any time you hear the word or concept block grant, you know there is a swindle about to take place, that that function, whatever it is, and the recipients and beneficiaries of that function are going to end up with much less in 4 or 5 years than they had when the block grant was initiated. That is the history of block grants. They are not done unless there is an attempt to foist them off on the States and begin to back away from the commitment at the Federal level. So in the School Lunch Program, where they keep insisting that there is more money than there was before, each year there is more money, well, there is not. The Congressional Budget Office has indicated that there is not more money because the money is a relative thing. If there are more children to feed, then the amount of money has to go up. It has to go up in anticipation of the new enrollment, additional children being enrolled, and it has to go up in anticipation of more children becoming eligible because of economic conditions which move some families that were not eligible and not in need before to the category of needy. So, again, the details are important. Where is the waste in Government? As we talk about the programs that the Republican-controlled House wants to cut, it might be good to juxtapose the programs that they want to cut with the programs that they want to keep. They are all in favor of keeping every weapons system that anybody could imagine, including Star Wars, the Brilliant Pebbles in the sky that is supposed to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles that are going to be fired by what country I do not know since the generals from this country have gone to visit the generals in Russia, and they have gone down into the silos, and they have all agreed to point the rockets away from each other. And a number of things are happening which lessen the need for the so-called Star Wars to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles, even if it could be done; and most scientists say it cannot be done. Yet it took a vote on the floor, the one time we have been able to win a victory for reason, rational thinking, scientifically based thinking on the floor of the House was a defeat of the Star Wars vote, but that was being proposed by the leadership. The leadership is still proposing billions of dollars more for defense at the same time as they say there is a need to cut money from School Lunch Programs. They say there is a need to cut money from loans for college students at the same time we are going to go forward with these new weapons systems. Where is the real waste? The waste is primarily in defense. The waste is in agricultural subsidies that go to rich farmers. We are going to talk about that in this great detail in a few minutes. In defense, you still have the F-22 fighter, which was originally projected to be a $72 billion cost, and because of the questions raised they scaled it down. But even a scaled-down version of the F-22 fighter will cost you $12 billion in the next 5 years. Listen to the figures closely. $12 billion will be used to build F-22 fighters that are the most sophisticated fighters ever known. The trouble is, the second most sophisticated fighter planes ever known are already owned by the United States of America so who will fight the F- 22's? Nevertheless, they are being built for $12 billion over the next 5 years. $12 billion is exactly the same figure that is being sought, the same amount being sought from the college students, college student loans. By making the students pay the interest on the loans during the time the students are in college, they will yield about $12 billion. The same $12 billion, if you want to save it, you can save it by jettisoning, discontinuing the manufacture of F-22 fighters. Why can't we discontinue the manufacture of F-22 fighters? One of the reasons may be is that they are manufactured in the Speaker's district in Marietta, GA. One reason may be that in the other body, the very prominent person in the area of making decisions about defense also hails from that State. Why do we have obvious waste continuing in the area of defense? Take a close look, and you might find it. The Seawolf submarine, another one. The argument is given we need another Seawolf submarine because we want to keep the technology alive. Nobody expects it to be able to be used to fight. That is $2.1 billion. Listen closely: $2 billion, slightly more than $2 billion to build a nuclear submarine. Happens to be the same figure that is being saved from the School Lunch Program. $2 billion, a little more than $2 billion is what the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will get from the School Lunch Program. We could get the money instead from a discontinuance, a canceling of the Seawolf submarine. Or if you do not want to cancel the Seawolf submarine, then look at the CIA's budget, which is a secret budget, is estimated to be no less than $28 billion. All intelligence operations, because the CIA is really atop of all intelligence agencies, that whole operation is $28 billion at least. If you save 10 percent, if you cut the CIA 10 percent per year for the next 55 years, you got them down to about half the size of present CIA, you would be saving each year $2.8 billion. $2.8 billion would certainly cover the cost of the School Lunch Program. And you can contribute it toward some of the other programs, the WIC and a couple of other programs that did not get increases. We are not going to serve all of the eligible babies and mothers in the WIC Program. So if you feel like one of my constitutents feels, that somebody has to do something, she said, ``We have to tighten our belts. That means the kids have to eat cheaper lunches, OK? We have to suffer because we do not want to bankrupt the country. Everybody has to contribute a little.'' Well, I am not certain that everybody should be contributing a little. I am not certain that growing children should have to sacrifice any part of lunch in order to contribute to a situation which is not desperate. It is not a desperate situation. We have places where money can be saved. There are places where money can be saved in the corporate welfare structure. We give a lot of money to corporations. In the first place, over the last 20 or 30 years, the amount of the tax burden borne by corporations has dropped drastically. It used to be more than half, around half of the total tax burden. All the taxes collected in the U.S. corporations were contributing almost half by the corporate income tax. Now the corporations are down to about 25 percent. And the amount, proportion, percentage being contributed by individuals, April 15 is not far away. On April 15, individuals pay far more income taxes than corporations. I would like to see us move toward a situation where we eliminate the individual income tax, the personal income tax as we know it. I would like to see us move toward a situation where we increase, get back to corporate, a greater share of the taxes being borne by corporations. I would like to see a situation where we have taxes from other sources and less from personal income tax, certainly people earning $75,000, $50,000 or less maybe should not be paying any personal income taxes at all. We should be looking to other sources. In the Congressional Black Caucus budget proposal we are going to call for the creation of a tax commission. That is not the first time that has been called for, but I think a more creative commission is needed to take a hard look at all the ways in which wealth is generated in our society now. We are generating wealth now in ways that never were imagined even 10 or 15 years ago. The recent sale that was highlighted by President Clinton yesterday, the recent sale of frequencies above us, you know, above our heads there is wealth. Frequencies optioned have brought $7 billion already into the Federal coffers, up to $9 billion. Well, 10 years ago we wouldn't dream of anything up above our heads owned by all the people being worth $9 billion. They are just beginning the process. Well, let us take a hard look at that wealth in the sky or wealth above our heads and how it may be used for the public good. Maybe we shouldn't be selling all of it. Maybe we should be leasing it or maybe there should be some arrangement whereby you do not have to be rich to buy it. Maybe we should have a lottery system so every American would have a chance, rich or poor, anybody with some know-how and might get into the business, could draw lots. And the Federal Government would lease it to him instead of a person having to put up the capital as an alternative. And because that arrangement didn't involve capital the Federal Government would go in as a partnership. Forty percent of profits would go to the people, to the Government and to the people; and the other 60 percent would go to the person who makes it work and earns a profit. There are many arrangements that we do not look at, royalties on products that are created as a result of Government action and Government research, et cetera. We ought to take a harder look at those. I am not going to go into that much more detail now, but that is part of the process. We need, as I said before, people in Congress who understand these things factually. We need some people who have been here long enough to be able to imagine creatively how we may do things better, how we may collect revenue in less painful ways and more effective ways, targeting the revenue collection process to those who are able most to afford it and those who have benefited most from the riches of America in various ways. So let me just mention a few corporate welfare setups that ought to be looked at in more detail in this budgetmaking process. Instead of cutting school lunches, instead of going after students and trying to squeeze $12 billion out of the Student Loan Program, let us limit tax subsidies for exports. Tax subsidies for exports, if they were limited, would yield revenue to the tune of $21 billion. Tax subsidies for exports, what is that? There is a title passage, a thing called the title passage, sourcing rule and reform the title passage sourcing rule and eliminate the foreign sales corporation loophole. That would enable U.S. corporations, I mean, that does now enable U.S. corporations to shelter a portion of their export income from U.S. taxation. We have a loophole to the title passage and the foreign sales corporation that, you know, whoever talks about these things, the Committee on Ways and Means has a monopoly on this language and a monopoly on the process, and even the other, most of the other 435 Members of Congress never even discuss the tax subsidies for exports. The tax subsidies for exports, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Budget Office, as you know, is an objective body, about as objective as you can get. Most of the people who work there are civil servants. The top leadership is appointed by the leadership of the House of Representatives, so you have leadership in the Congressional Budget Office that is appointed by the party now in control of the Congress, the Republicans, but basically, the civil servants who were there before, people who have civil service status, are still there, and their objectivity is about as good as you are going to get. They said export subsidies increase investment and employment in export industries, but they do not increase the overall levels of domestic investment and domestic employment. In the long run, export subsidies only increase imports. You do not get any great benefit from it. So why subsidize corporations for exports? Twenty-one billion dollars would be gained over a 5-year period if you eliminated that. Impose a minimum tax on foreign-owned businesses. That is another corporate welfare scheme we could go after. If we merely established a minimum tax on foreign-owned corporations to discourage the manipulation of transfer prices which shield income from U.S. taxation, we would realize $1.9 billion. The formula approach under the minimum tax provides a simple way to ensure that foreign-owned companies conducting business in the U.S. pay an acceptable amount of U.S. tax. This is a quote from the Congressional Budget Office. Let us go after these corporate welfare items, eliminate the loopholes, and you will realize a lot of the taxes, the revenue that are being sought, savings being sought by going after the school lunch programs and college student loans. There is a dairy and breeding cattle exclusion. If we end the special exclusion for the cost of raising dairy and breeding cattle, you would realize another $700 million. There is a tax deferral on income of controlled foreign corporations; $5.7 billion would be realized over a 5-year period if we end the ability of U.S. firms to delay the tax on income earned by their foreign subsidiaries until the income is transferred to U.S. accounts, $5.7 billion, and on and on and on it goes. I am not going to exhaust the list of corporate welfare items today. But out there, the American people should take note this is not a simple process, not easy to decipher even when you are a Member of Congress. So I do not expect you to comprehend what has really gone on here. The mysteries are here. You hear the drum beating against people on welfare, demonizing of people on welfare, the comparison of people on welfare to alligators, comparison of people on welfare to wolves. Demonize and scapegoat, and all that is supposed to make you forget that corporations are receiving billions of dollars in subsidies from the American taxpayers. One of the groups that likes to pride itself on not receiving Government aid is the farm community. I have often heard and seen people from the Midwest and the Far West and the South who insist that they do not want Government giving them any kind of help; Government ought to get off people's backs; Government should not intrude into people's lives. There is a great deal of hypocrisy here. A large amount of your taxpayers' dollars are going to subsidize rich farmers. Welfare for rich farmers is a major scandal. It is a legalized form of corruption. We are just going to talk a little bit about one aspect of it. It is so corrupt, legal corruption, you cannot arrest anybody. I am not saying that you should go out and try to effect a citizen's arrest, or you can bring a suit. It is all legal, because it is so complex until most of the Members of Congress, certainly those who come from urban areas and are concentrating on other kinds of things, have not really deciphered exactly what is going on with the farm subsidy program and how awful the giveaway is to rich farmers. Let us take a hard look at it, and I invite you to follow me through a quick review of a report called City Slickers. City Slickers is a report produced by the environmental working group. The environmental working group is a nonprofit environmental research organization based in Washington. It is a project of the Tides Foundation and the California Public Benefit Corp., and they have started preparing a series of reports related to agricultural subsidies, welfare for the farmers. This is just the first report. If you want to get a copy of the report, I will tell you at the end where you can order a copy. It is a very well documented report based on an analysis of data that would probably not have been possible 20 years ago, using computers and analyzing the records of the Department of Agriculture. They have been able to come up with this very informative study which should open your eyes. What they are saying is that in the farm subsidy program, the program that has been in existence now for several decades, actually the program that was started in the New Deal by Franklin Roosevelt, that program was to help poor farmers. The Government got involved in paying farmers to do certain things, and it worked. It was very much needed. In fact, the intervention of our Government into the agricultural sphere productive nation on the face of the Earth when it comes to food production. Our farm industry cannot be challenged by any other industrialized nation. What we produce on our farms, the kind of productivity is unparalleled, and part of the reason for that, a large part of the reason for that, is the early intervention of the U.S Government in the process. Government sometimes can intervene and be a player in a very productive way. The land grant colleges that were created, the experimental agricultural experimental stations, the county agents, all of that was federally, you know, generated. People talk about government should stay out of local affairs. Well, the Department of Agriculture program penetrated right down to the county level, and the county agent went out into the fields with the farmers. It was government involvement at its best. I am all in favor of government involvement when it is necessary. We basically have a capitalistic economy. That does not mean there are not a lot of places where there should not be intervention and government assistance. Government assistance to farmers made a lot of sense when it started. Government assistance to poor farmers kept a lot of people from starving. Government assistance to poor farmers enabled poor farmers to build, to gain the know-how and to build a great agricultural industry of America, but it long ago wore out. It long ago became corrupted. We do not have many poor farmers anymore. Less than 2 percent of the American population now lives on the farm. The billions of dollars that are being, of your taxpayers' dollars, that are going to subsidize the farms or the agricultural industry are going to rich people. They are going to corporations, agricultural corporations. Agribusinesses are absorbing your dollars. They are going to individuals, too many of them are rich also. And many of them do not live on the farm, and the last few years they have not set foot on the farm. That is what this report is all about. This report is about city slickers, people who get billions of dollars from your taxpayers' money, your money, meant for farm subsidies to help keep the farm industry alive. There are many good reasons why we started these programs, to guarantee that we would never lose the family farmer, that they would always be there to make farming competitive, to keep the land productive, to conserve the land, et cetera. There are many good reasons, and there are still good reasons. But the process has been corrupted to the point where people who live in the cities have never visited a farm and are drawing now checks for farm subsidies. Let me just read from the report City Slickers; I think it is such a good report, I will read verbatim from several parts of it. What is wrong with the city dweller owning a bit of land in the country? Absolutely nothing, as far as we are concerned. Why, we would not mind owning a little farmland ourselves, nor do we have a problem with urbanites investing time, money, or both in a farm operation even if it is not their main livelihood, and even if the farm is thousands of miles away. But why on Earth should taxpayers be involved in the arrangement for these gentleman farmers? And as this report documents, we are involved big-time by virtue of Federal agricultural subsidy policies that are out of date and out of control. It is time for a change. Sending hundreds of thousands of Federal farm subsidy checks worth hundreds of millions of dollars to a handful of city dwellers each year can hardly be the best, the fairest, or the most efficient way to help farmers stay on the land, give rural communities a chance to survive and prosper or protect water, land, and wildlife that farming so profoundly affects. Left to the farm policy fraternity, the country's depression-era farm programs will continue to misspend taxpayers' dollars. Americans can do better, but only if more people become involved in the debate over the Nation's multibillion-dollar farm programs. After all, you do not have to be a farmer to get farm subsidies. You should not have to be a farmer to have a say in how your money will be spent after the new 1955 farm bill is signed into law. It just so happens that the farm bill is up for reauthorization this year. So aside from the budget process and the appropriations process, there is a new authorization process for these farm programs. I recall the last time we had the agricultural subsidy program on the floor of the House, I joined with a colleague, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Schumer], in offering an amendment which said that any gentleman farmer or gentlewoman farmer, persons who are not living on farms who have other incomes, any one of those who earns more than $100,000 a year should not be eligible for the farm subsidy program, and that is a clear opportunity for the Members of Congress to take some action in a very meaningful way. They would cut off anybody making $100,000 or more who also was not a farmer full-time from the farm subsidy program. We got only 140-some votes out of 435. That is the nature of the deep entrenchment of the vested interests that support welfare for rich farmers. Let me continue to read from the report though. City Slickers, that is the name of this report, the first in a series of Environmental Working Group studies on Federal farm subsidy programs that will be published over the coming months. They are going to publish other reports. It was made possible through the efforts of the environmental working group, analysts and computer programmers. They went to work in the Department of Agriculture files to pull out all of this data, and what I am reading from in the report is based on hard data. They have the charts in here. They have the graphs in here. They have the statistics in here. If you doubt their findings, get a copy of the report and check it out. It is very sound, basic work. I commend the people who put this report together. Let me read further from the findings of City Slickers: American taxpayers are sending hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal farm subsidy checks every year to a handful of absentee owners, corporations, and other farmers who live smack in the middle of the country's biggest cities. Over the past decade, taxpayers wrote 1.6 million agricultural subsidy checks worth more than $1.3 billion to city slickers, city slickers whose permanent mailing address is in the heart of one of 50 of the most populous urban areas in the United States. They did a study and focused on the 50 largest cities, and they traced the checks coming from the Department of Agriculture to addresses in zip codes in the 50 largest cities in the country. The environmental working group analysis of 110 million U.S. Department of Agriculture computer records, computer records of $106 billion worth of farm subsidy payments made since 1985, found over 74,000 recipients whose current mailing addresses for Agriculture Department checks is in downtown New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas or other top U.S. cities. If you are laboring under the assumption that welfare for the farmers, the subsidy program for the farmers, should not be questioned or not challenged because, after all, they are the people who grow our food and we want to keep them out there, we do not want a monopoly to be established by the agribusinesses. I have heard many reasons offered on the floor of this House. A large portion of the people receiving the checks are not farmers, ladies and gentlemen. They are drawing down the checks and receiving the subsidy from you taxpayers, and they are not setting foot on any farm, I assure you. When they analyzed major suburbs and satellite cities surrounding these big cities, they found that the payments increased greatly. A lot of people living in suburbs also around big cities are receiving payments. It went from $1.3 billion to $1.8 billion when you include some of the other people close to the city. From Beverly Hills to Key West, the research shows that it is the rare, well-heeled suburb, urban enclave or resort spot in the United States that does not receive Federal farm subsidy payments. The pattern, the rule, is that they do. It is rare that they do not receive. The richer the community is, the more likely you are to see large numbers of farm subsidy payments flowing into that area. In every major U.S. city farm subsidy checks pour in from farms located in dozens of States. Farms in 42 States pump government subsidies into New York City. Thirty-eight States send Federal farm dollars to Los Angeles, 37 States are sending agricultural assistance to farmers in Houston. In many cities, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Tucson, for example, half or more of the subsidies come from farms located outside of the State. If you want to make the argument of, somebody has already got a rationalization put together, well, sure, people may live in the cities, but New York State has a big farming sector. Agriculture is a big business in New York State. So these people may live in New York City, but outside New York City in certain parts of the State there are farms. But these checks are not coming from farms in New York State. The checks that are going to New York City are coming from 42 different States, 42 different States. You taxpayers are funneling money meant for farmers into city slickers from 42 different States to New York. And in other cities it is much worse. I am going to read from a chart later on of the five highest ranking cities receiving these payments from you. In big cities, as in the countryside, a small number of individuals, partnerships, trusts and corporations collect the lion's share of Federal farm subsidies. These are rich people mostly who are collecting these checks. Just 862 big city subsidy recipients collected $388 million over the period checked, nearly 30 percent of the total payments to the postal areas in the top 50 cities. A general partnership in Dallas, TX, for instance, received 157 checks over six of the last 10 years. And this general partnership's 157 checks, listen to this, totaled $1.8 million. The $1.8 million came from farms in two counties in Mississippi. Mississippi, one of the poorest States in the country. The money is flowing from your taxpayers' pocket, supposedly to help the farmers in Mississippi, but it flows into a firm in Dallas, TX, which one firm alone collected $1.8 million over the last 6 years. The top recipients in Los Angeles is a general partnership in zip code 90024, and they received 22 checks over 7 of the last 10 years, and those 22 checks were worth more than $837,000. The top farmer in Washington, DC, received a total of 271 farm subsidy checks from a North Dakota county in 8 out of the past 10 years. And his checks, the name of that person appeared in a newspaper article, totaled $286,000. San Diego's top producer is a corporation which stockholders have brought in 246 checks worth $968,303 from a farm in Montana, a farm in Montana that has drawn down your taxpayer subsidies every year since 1985. More than 63 percent of the total farm subsidies paid to big-city recipients went to individuals who on average received at least $13,000 a year over the 10-year period. General partnerships brought in $150 million, averaging $72,000. Corporations with stockholders collected 11 percent of total big-city subsidies, which equals about $138 million. Corporations in big cities collected about $138 million over the period, the 10-year period studied. Joint ventures collected $74 million, averaging $200,000 each over a 10-year period. These are your taxpayer dollars flowing to poor farmers according to the original legislation. The idea was to keep the farmers solvent, help the farmers make a good living, but now it is a corrupt racketeering enterprise, a legal racketeering enterprise. You know, there may be a contradiction in that when you say racketeering and legal, but the savings and loan scandal showed us how you can swindle people, how you can have a massive racketeering enterprise which is mostly legal. Continuing to read from the report, and I am reading from a report called City Slickers. City Slickers is prepared by the Environmental Working Group. They are located at 1718 Connecticut Avenue Northwest, Suite 600, in Washington, DC 20009. I have given you this information because if you do not believe my figures, if you do not trust me or if you want to see more documentation and if you want to read the report in more detail, if you want to get to know about this gigantic swindle, you might want to see the whole report. Environmental Working Group, 1718 Connecticut Avenue Northwest, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20009, (202) 667-6982. Fax number (202) 232-2592. Now I understand there has been some controversy about giving out information about books or things for sale. This is for sale for $10 I think. I have no connection whatsoever with this group. I have never been to their office. I am not a member. Nobody on my staff is a member. It is a nonprofit environmental research organization so far as I am concerned. I welcome you to contact them to get the whole report. We need to know. Members of Congress need to know more. Even those who have been here 10, 12 years do not know enough, have not been here long enough to really learn, no matter how studious they may be or how hard they work at it. It is a complicated world, ladies and gentleman, The American Government is the most complicated entity on the face of the Earth. The Members of Congress, 435, plus the Members of the Senate, 100, are 535 vice-presidents of the world's largest and most complex corporation, the world's most powerful corporation. We hear people talk about term limits. They want to make this body weaker. They want to trivialize what we do here. They want to make it weaker for the purpose of continuing these kinds of scams, these kinds of racketeering enterprises. The weaker the Congress is, the more it is ridiculed, the more it is trivialized, the less it is likely to have the people who will be able to take on correcting these massive racketeering enterprises which waste a great deal of taxpayers' money. The weaker the Congress is, the more likely people are to fall for demonizing of welfare mothers, demonizing pregnant teenagers, calling of alligators and wolves and making it appear that they are about to bring the country down. No, the waste that is about to bring the country down is here. This is one example. We are going to be showing you many others in the weeks to come. Continuing to read from the report City Slickers: Massive and widespread cash payments to absentee interests in cities are just one of many indications that America's Federal farm subsidy programs are out of date and badly out of control. This study underscores just one of the fundamental problems with America's depression-era farm programs. They mostly now reward the ownership of land, not the farming of the land but the ownership of the land. They reward most those who own the most, not those most in need. Let me repeat that. From the report City Slickers: This study underscores just one of the fundamental problems with America's depression-era farm programs. They mostly reward the ownership of land, not the farming of it, and reward most those who own the most, not those most in need. Welfare for the farmers is not means tested. People on welfare, aid to dependent children, that is what we call welfare. You have to prove you are poor before you can get a dollar. Farmers do not have to prove they are poor. In fact, it is well known that many of them are rich, big agribusinesses. Everybody knows. The rich know. Nothing hidden there. No secret. They are the ones who are receiving the taxpayers' dollars. Free money to people who do not need it. Continuing to read from the report, I quote: Absentee landowners, distant corporations and far-flung investors are able to draw substantial government agricultural subsidies, though they may reside in a big city hundreds or even thousands of miles from the farm and never set foot on that farm for years on end. As a practical matter, almost anyone, almost anyone can qualify for Federal agriculture subsidies. You do not have to farm the land, you do not have to live anywhere near the land, you do not even have to visit from time to time. You do not have to be related to the farmer or to anyone else who has an interest in the farm. And wealthy, absentee farm owners who are most likely to run afoul of payment limits or other rules have ready access to legal advice that can help them maximize their government payments, advice provided by the government itself. The fact that Federal farm programs transfer massive Government subsidy payments to recipients in big cities, as we document in this report, is just one result in business as usual. I conclude by stating this is a report called City Slickers, and we need to read more of it together. Get a copy yourself. And as we progress on our discussion of the budget and appropriations process here in this Congress, we are going to talk more about where is the real waste, where is that money that is needed to give a tax cut or do anything else? It is not in the school lunch program. It is not in the college loan program. There are billions of dollars that are routinely being wasted, and we should take note of that as taxpayers.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, of all the proposals on the table, only the Mink substitute insures that families are given the tools they need to obtain living-wage jobs and achieve self-sufficiency, independence, and dignity. We have welfare in this country because welfare is so much cheaper than full employment. The average welfare payment per month is about $350, $350 to survive. That is far different than a minimum-wage job. The substitute also contains the most stringent work requirements we will see on the House floor. Every welfare recipient with a self- sufficiency plan must be in a job after the various education and job- training activities are completed. Investing in jobs is the best investment we can make. Even the Congressional Budget Office has acknowledged a 1-percent reduction in the unemployment rate leads to a net gain of $40 to $50 billion to the Treasury. Let us put people to work. Republicans do not support bills that put people to work. In H.R. 1214, Republicans are merely continuing a hostile pattern of neglect that they have always had toward jobs. In order for Republicans to save money, they do not have to take money away from the free lunches. We do not have to tell the children of America there is a fiscal crunch, and this Nation needs their lunch. We do not have to do that. We can save money in many other ways. Sixteen billion dollars is spent on aid to children; $16 billion is spent on aid to rich farmers. Rich farmers receive the welfare without any means-testing. Let us take some of the money away from rich farmers to pay for the training and job experience in this bill. I urge my colleagues to support this bill. It is the only effective proposal for welfare reform. Vote for the Mink substitute. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the Mink substitute for H.R. 1214. Congresswoman Mink's substitute is the most comprehensive welfare reform plan that we are considering this week because it focuses on what welfare recipients need and want most--jobs. American voters have spoken loud and clear about their job fears and anxiety. In the interviews at the exit polls on November 8, working people explained their anger. Wages are too low. Corporate downsizing, streamlining, and the pursuit of slave labor in Mexico and China have intensified the fears of those who are working today about losing their jobs tomorrow. And among the millions who have been unemployed for many months, and some for years, all hope of ever getting a decent job is fading fast. Welfare recipients have the same fears and anxiety. They wonder what will happen to them and their children if their benefits are taken away, but education, job training, child care, and job search assistance are not provided for them. Of all the proposals on the table, only the Mink substitute ensures that families are given the tools they need to obtain living wage jobs and achieve self- sufficiency, independence, and dignity. Instead of eliminating the current Job Opportunities and Basic Skills [JOBS] program, the Mink substitute sensibly enhances it by striking cumbersome mandates and increasing the States' flexibility to determine who is required to participate in JOBS and who is exempt. There is no arbitrary time limit for AFDC benefits, but the substitute allows states to work with families to determine what is necessary to get them off welfare and into jobs. The substitute also contains the most stringent work requirement we will see on the House floor. Every welfare recipient with a self- sufficiency plan must be in a job after the various education and job training activities are completed. If they are unable to find a job on their own, then they still must go to work at a job that either has been created or is subsidized by their State. Investing in jobs is the best investment we can make. A full employment economy is an economy that grows and can afford to do more. People with jobs produce goods and services, generate income, buy goods and services, pay taxes, and consume less government transfer payments such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC] and unemployment insurance. Even the Congressional Budget Office [CBO] has acknowledged that a 1-percent reduction in the unemployment rate leads to a net gain in the U.S. Treasury of $40 to $50 billion. In a report to the Ways and Means Committee last Monday, the CBO concluded that States will not be able to meet the work requirements in H.R. 1214 calling for 50 percent involvement in job training or work programs by 2003, and 90 percent involvement for two-parent families. That conclusion should not be surprising. Welfare-to-work programs have been consistently underfunded. Specifically, the JOBS program has only received about $1 billion a year even though it would need $6 billion a year to operate at full capacity and enable all eligible AFDC recipients to participate. In H.R. 1214, Republicans are merely continuing this pattern of hostile neglect. In contrast to the Mink Substitute, the Republican bill provides no job or job training guarantees, and it is not funded with any additional money to make sure that people work. CBO has estimates that it will cost $11,440 a year to place just one welfare mother in a welfare-to-work program. That includes the costs of child care, paying supervisors, job training, and paying wage subsidies. But my friends on the other side of the aisle are not interested in such details. Their message to the middle- and upper- income earners in this country is as follows: we are going to save money by stripping poor people of the few benefits they have so that we can give you a tax cut. We will talk about how we want poor people to go to work, but we are not going to spend one dime or create a single job to make that happen. That would cost too much money, and our economy depends on the existence of an underclass of serfs anyway. The Republicans have completely skewed the welfare reform debate. We should not be talking about cutting one form of welfare in this country without talking about cutting all forms of welfare. If sacrifices must be made to balance the budget, then everyone must share in the pain. In order for the Republicans to save money, they do not have to single out AFDC. In 1993, the Federal Government spent $16 billion on AFDC, but the Federal Government also spent $16 billion on commodity price and farm income support programs. Despite the fact that the Government has been spending the same amount of money on programs for tobacco and attacked the agriculture expenditures as vigorously. Somehow, it's alright to subsidize agribusiness, but it's not alright to make sure that single mothers and their children continue to have food on the table, roofs over their heads, and shirts on their backs. There is a double standard here that smacks of racism. Therefore, the test of a true and comprehensive welfare reform plan is not merely whether it is vigilant about reforming the AFDC program, but whether it is just as vigilant about reforming our welfare system for agribusiness and all other corporations. For, wealthy corporations in this country are spoon-fed a whole variety of pork, ranging from huge tax breaks for multinational corporations which export American jobs overseas, to hundreds of millions of dollars to agribusiness corporations to market and promote their products abroad. The Mink substitute passes this test. The Mink substitute pays for the cost of welfare reform by attacking the hundreds of billions of dollars in handouts to corporations by increasing the top corporate income tax rate by a modest 1.25 percent. That sends the right message to working-class Americans--that the fat- cat freeloaders can no longer belly-up to the Government trough. Mr. Chairman, the Mink substitute represents real welfare reform because it ensures that everyone who is willing and able to work will obtain a minimum wage job. It therefore addresses the deficit about which Americans are most concerned--the jobs deficit. I enthusiastically endorse this approach and urge all of my colleagues to vote for the Mink substitute.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, this bill and the amendments continue a pattern that the Republicans have played out in many of our committees of contempt for work, the work ethic treated with great contempt, downgraded, degraded. The gentleman before said work is not expensive. No, work is not expensive if you want to take people back to the days of the plantation. On the plantation everybody had a job. Plantations had full employment. But plantations are not where we want to go. We do not want to reduce people to involuntary servitude or slavery. We do not want to cheapen the labor market in such a way that the thousands of people out there who are unemployed and not on welfare also have their jobs threatened. We have a situation here where the State becomes the slave master if you are going to have inexpensive work as was just described before. What is the rate of wages? What hourly rate are you going to pay? If a person is receiving $300 or $400 a month for welfare, do they have to work 120 hours? What is the hourly rate there? That is involuntary servitude, or it moves toward slavery. What are the working conditions? Are you going to have health care provided at the same time? Are they going to have decent conditions to work in, or are we going to have a situation where there is a competing cheap labor pool in every State so that people who are employed in regular jobs are going to find themselves being laid off, being considered undesirable by the government that they work for because there is a cheap pool of labor that can be employed for almost nothing? Let us clarify in this bill what we mean when we say we are going to make people work 30 hours a week, which means 120 hours a month. What does that mean? What kind of wage rate are you using? How are you judging that? For what will they be exchanging their labor? Are we going to go back to the plantation and not have them have decent health care provided, no job training? You said you do not want to provide day care, so that means only people who do not have children can go to work. Everything about work is hanging loose in this bill. It is not about moving from welfare to work.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, today we have completed the first segment of the debate on the welfare reform legislation. This legislation is a key part of the Contract With America, or the Contract Against America. But I would like to place it in the context of the evolving budget development process. More important than the Contract With America or the Contract Against America, whatever you want to call it, is the budget process that is now under way which really establishes the priorities for both parties. It really indicates the vision of America and where America should be going for both parties and for others within the parties. I would like to speak this evening as the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget task force. We are preparing an alternative budget to show a vision of America which will encompass all Americans, a vision of America which will speak for the caring majority in America, not just the people in need, but the people who have the good sense to understand that they have to respond to the need of the most unfortunate among us. The caring majority budget sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus would be an alternative to the budget that will be produced by the majority of the House of Representatives. That majority of the House of Representatives really represents the ideas and the interests of an elite minority. The elite oppressive minority has determined they want to prepare a revolutionary budget, a budget with far-reaching consequences, and they have begun that process already. Stage 1 in that process occurred last week when we passed the rescissions for 1995. It is an ugly word, rescission. Rescission means that for a year that is already in progress, a year that has begun already, a budget that has already begun, a budget that is a result of long deliberations, a budget that is the result of bills and laws passed in the authorizing committees, a budget that is a result of the actions of the last year's Appropriation Committee, Appropriation Committee of the 103d Congress, we went through a long process and a lot of man-hours went into the hearings and the preparation. Finally we voted on the floor the appropriations which went into the budget that began October 1, 1994. That budget was the product of long deliberations in the House and then, of course, the Senate had an equally deliberative process. Then we had to come together, the Senate and the House, long negotiations, a lot of man-hours of very talented people that went into the preparation of that budget. But now the new Committee on Appropriations recklessly come along and they reach into that budget that is in process now and they pull out more than $17 billion in rescissions. The pattern of the rescissions shows clearly where the budget process will be going when it begins for the next year's budget. The rescissions affect the budget that is in effect right now, the 1995 budget that started October 1 of 1994 and continues until September 30 of 1995. The new budget that will take effect October 1, 1995, this year, that budget process has just begun. The way in which the rescissions budget was handled gives a key to what will happen in the budget development that will take place over the next 2 months for this budget year. The snapshot of where the current majority in this House of Representatives wants to go, the preview of coming attractions that is indicated by the controlling party, the Republicans who now control the House, the people who represent the interests of the elite oppressive minority, their preview is not just startling, it is a devastating statement about where they intend to go. It is a dangerous course that they have laid out. One cannot say that the oppressive elite minority that is in control, the people who are moving forward in the interest of a very small group of Americans, one cannot say that they are guilty of some kind of secret conspiracy. The conspiracy is not secret at all. It is right there in the open. You can see clearly where they are going. If you can see clearly, then the reaction for those of us who would be the victims has to be a more profound and a more energetic reaction in my opinion. I don't think we should sit still and throw figures and numbers around in a theoretical way. What the rescissions budget did that was passed last week with the Republican votes--they have the majority and they voted the rescissions budget that they had the numbers to put in place. What that statement that it made with $7 billion in cuts in HUD, housing programs, most of it aimed at low-income housing, most of it aimed clearly at low-income housing, $7 billion, the largest hunk that came out of the existing budget was housing, housing for poor people. That is a clear message that was sent. Did we have to, even if you wanted to reach a goal of $17 billion, you wanted to cut the budget by $17 billion, did you have to in such an overwhelming way take so much from one particular department or one particular function like housing? Did they have to do that? And then there are cuts in education which amount to almost $2 billion, almost $2 billion from education, and most of the education programs that are cut are directed at the inner city poor, programs to help poor children. Then you have cuts like the zeroing out, complete wiping out of the summer youth employment program. Zero. An indication that not only are we going to take the money out of this year's budget, but zero for next year. Clearly the shotgun is aimed at the places where poor people live. Clearly people to begin with. Then there is a more specific targeting of poor people who live in urban areas, people in the big cities who are the basic beneficiaries of public housing. People in the big cities are the basic beneficiaries of title I, which was cut. They are the basic beneficiaries of some of the other education programs like the drug- free schools program that was cut. It is aimed at the inner city poor. The more specifically large numbers of the people who are the beneficiaries are minorities. Large numbers more specific than that are people of African decent, black people. It is no conspiracy that is in secret. It is clear for any student who knows basic arithmetic, it is clear who the target is, it is clear who the victims are already and who the victims will be in the bigger budget. It is quite clear. One is reminded of what Shakespeare put in the mouth of King Lear at a time when King Lear's two daughters, two of his three daughters had betrayed him, and King Lear states, ``Fool me not to bare it tamely. Touch me with noble anger.'' That is Shakespeare's complicated way of saying, ``It's time to get mad.'' Anger is very much appropriate at this time. Anger is the order of the day. If you are a leader of people of African descent, if you are a leader of poor people, if you are a leader of people who live in the big cities, it is time to get angry, it is time to react, because what is happening is revolutionary. These are very large cuts. Public housing evolved over many years but in a few years it will be wiped out if we allow a $7 billion cut to take place in the rescission process. Then there is talk of wiping the whole department out, and also at the same time, probably actions generated by some of the targeting of the elite oppressive minority has influenced the White House. The Secretary of HUD, Housing and Urban Development, made a statement yesterday in connection with his reorganization of HUD. They are getting on the bandwagon in too many ways. They are proposing to phase out public housing as we know it, not change it, not reform it, but phase it out. Eventually you will have a system at the end of their process where there will only be vouchers. People will be given vouchers to go out and look for your own housing. The problem with the vouchers is every year you will probably have a cut in the amount of the vouchers. The problem with most of the programs being offered by the Republicans who are in control of the budget-making process is that everything they set forth and offer as a set amount of money available for a particular function is subject to being cut in the future by the same reckless Appropriations Committee. The same appropriations process will whittle down the vouchers just as it will whittle down the School Lunch Programs and all the other block grant programs. So my point is, however, it is clear who is the target. It is clear that the 60 years of social programs that have benefited many different types of people but the programs that now benefit a great proportion of people of African-American decent, those programs are the ones they are targeting, starting with the welfare reform. The welfare reform, of course, I agree with you. You must have welfare reform. We must make adjustments and try to make the welfare program work for the people who are poor, the people who are the intended beneficiaries of the program, try to make it work and try to make it work with the least possible cost. I agree with the process of reform. Let us go forward with reform. There is not a single function of government or a single department of government or process of government that can't stand some reform. That is our business. We are here to provide oversight for all of the activities of the government. We are here to deal with reform. So welfare reform is very much an appropriate activity. The problem is that welfare has been under scrutiny for a long time. Welfare, as we call it, when we say welfare it is short for welfare for mothers and children, what in technical terms is called Aid to Families with Dependent Children. People refer to that as welfare, but it is really Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a part of the whole Social Security Act, a part of what started with Franklin Roosevelt. Aid to Families with Dependent Children is just that. It is money directed to children who have needs. And the mothers of those children are just the overseers of their welfare, and they are the recipients technically. So mothers and children are the recipients of what we call welfare. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should reform welfare, try to make it better, just as it is fitting and proper that we reform any other aspect of government, any other function of government, any other welfare that the government provides. The government also provides other forms of welfare. Nobody ever calls it welfare, but when it is money being given to either victims, poor people who are victims of the economy and can't find jobs or victims of family breakdowns, many times as a result of the facts that the male can't find jobs, the family does break down. Poor people are victims. Victims of hurricanes are recipients, also victims of floods, victims of earthquakes. They are all recipients of government help because they are victims. Then there are other people who are recipients of government help who are not victims. They are recipients of government help because a system has been developed which has made them dependent. You know, welfare for the farmers, for example. Farm welfare, welfare for rich farmers, is an atrocious mutilation of a program that started with the New Deal to help poor farmers. Poor farmers were helped by the government in many ways. Agriculture is one of our most successful industries as a result of the government helping, but the whole thing has gotten out of hand, and for years now we have had welfare for the farmers which is as great as the legitimate welfare that goes to mothers and children. I think the illegitimate swindle of welfare that goes to the farmers is what we should be also taking a close look at what we should be scrutinizing very carefully. But that has never happened. Welfare for the farmers is an untouchable in the budget. You may be interested in knowing that welfare for the farmers in the form of the price supports, just that one form of subsidy is about the same amount of money that is spent for welfare for mothers and children, $16 billion--$16 billion goes to farmers not to grow grain. It goes to farmers, and many of those farmers are very well off. A large proportion of them are not farmers at all in the sense of individuals who are farming. They are people who are on corporate boards of corporations that are agribusinesses. Most of our farming is done these days by agribusiness. In case you didn't know it, only 2 percent, 2 percent of the population now is involved with farming, only 2 percent. So the $16 billion that goes to the agribusinesses in the name of helping farmers is not going to help large numbers of individuals out there. It is going to help corporations. It is a check that they got. It is a socialist intervention into the farming industry. They are smothered with socialism. The agricultural industry is probably the most successful industry in the history of America. As a result of government intervention years and years ago, it is successful. If it is so successful, why do we have to continue to provide a government welfare check to farmers or to agribusinesses? That $16 billion there in the budget could go for something else. But they have not targeted, my point is they have not targeted agriculture subsidies. In the $17 billion rescission budget you won't see any large cuts of agricultural programs. They are not taking a heavy hit like housing or education for the poor or job programs for the poor, summer youth programs. You won't find anything zeroed out for agriculture in the rescission budget. This is very important to take note of this. Why is it that an activity which involves only 2 percent of the population is an untouchable activity? How is it that the farm welfare system go on and on? Nobody is talking about ending farm welfare as we know it? How is it that this happens? the power of the farm lobbyists. We talked a lot about lobbying. We talked about special interests. You should take a close look at how it is done, how 2 percent of the population can go on and on, as long as they want to go, control a whole system of subsidies. And I have only mentioned $16 billion worth. The Washington Post told us last year that another aspect of the welfare program for farmers, called the Farmers Home Loan Mortgages, $11.8 billion, billion, in loans to farmers was forgiven over a 5-year period. We are not discussing reform in that area. That appeared on the front page of the Washington Post. There was some scurrying around for a while. There was talk of a committee dealing with that. It didn't happen in any significant way. Then we know, of course, we failed to reform the savings and loans system. Instead of reforming the savings and loan system, we deregulated it. So the savings and loans program, which said that the government stood behind all of the people who have deposited their money in the savings and loans banks up to $100,000, that collapsed completely, not completely, it collapsed overwhelmingly. And it is costing the American taxpayers as much as $200 billion. But we are not laboring to reform a program that has cost you $200 billion. You can't even get a good report as to where it is right now. It is still going forward. They are still trying to salvage the money that was lost via the savings and loan swindle. And there are still people running around who pocketed millions of dollars who have not been even called and interrogated, many others who have been interrogated who have never been prosecuted, and many others who have been prosecuted and they never paid a dime, many others who have spent some time, a few weeks in prison, but never paid a dime also. They come out and were millionaires still. So if you want to reform a significant portion of the government, we should be looking at reform for the savings and loans program. We should be looking at reform for the agriculture welfare system. That kind of reform is not on anybody's mind. They would prefer instead to target the programs that are serving the poorest people. And programs that are serving the poorest people, unfortunately, disproportionately large numbers of African-Americans are in those programs. Now, if there is a 10th grader, a sophomore out there listening, the obvious question is why are so many African-Americans in these programs? Why are so many African-Americans poor? Why haven't African- Americans made it? Why are they vulnerable so that we can be targeted by people who are powerful and that we can become victims again? African-Americans enjoyed prosperity for a very short period of time during the era of World War II and the 10 years following World War II, 20 years following World War II. There were jobs. Jobs were available in the big cities. That is why you have so many African-Americans in the big cities. They weren't concentrated there before World War II. African- Americans were spread out all over the country, and most of them were in the South, not all of them, but most of them were in the South. Why were they in the South? Because the South had the largest slave population. Why did they have the largest slave population? Because the South's primary commodity, its primary income crop, was cotton and a few other items that required a large amount of labor, cheap labor, and you had large concentrations of slaves in the South. They left the South during World War II, and they came north. They found jobs. And if you look at history, examine the period when they had jobs, African-Americans in the big cities had jobs. You will find that there was a relatively small amount of family disintegration, of family destabilization. There were few families with only one parent. There was work available, and when work was available it was possible to maintain stabilized, good families, stable families, and go forward. But that was only a brief period. The jobs that existed in Washington, DC, in New York, in Chicago, in all the big cities where African-Americans have accumulated, those jobs began to disappear as the economy was mismanaged more and more. And the people who were in charge of our economy gave away our economic base for manufacturing. They gave it away to Japan and to Germany and to Taiwan. And you know the jobs that would be there for people normally, even without a war and without defense production, were all gone because the entrepreneurs and the investors and the people who own the plants found that they do make greater profits by using cheap labor somewhere else in the world. And that is a pattern that started then. It started 20 years after World War II. And it escalated, and now it is in full boom. It is the way to go if you are going to produce a product. You don't invest in America and manufacture in America. You find the cheapest source of labor somewhere in the world, and you bring the product back to America. So for that reason the jobs are not there. You have large numbers of African-Americans along with other poor people in the big cities where they came because there were jobs, and they are trapped there. And we have had an anticity policy. Part of the reason that the policy has been anticity is because there are large concentrations of African-Americans and Latinos, minorities who didn't have any political power, large numbers who could not fight for themselves because they didn't have political action committees. They didn't have big contributors. For many reasons, the kind of power you need in America is not present in the inner city communities of our big cities. So, steadily, from the time of Ronald Reagan's first year to the present, steadily there has been an assault on the big cities. Steadily, the Federal Government has taken away programs that benefited the cities. The savings and loan money that built the shopping malls and the condominiums and all of the failed projects in the Midwest and the West, most of that money came out of our big cities, by the way, because even in the big cities, with millions of depositors, they accumulated large amounts of money in our banks. The poorest banks are rich in our big cities because the numbers of people who are depositing are so great. Their deposits were taken out and invested across the country in failed projects, and the savings and loan drain that benefited Texas and California, a large part of the dollars came from the big cities. You had war being made on our big cities, and that war has wrecked the black families, has wrecked teenagers' lives, lives of teenagers, and that war continues. Instead of the present oppressive elite minority trying to rebuild our cities, as they do across the world, most countries are proud of their cities, and they want to rebuild them, a decision has been made by the oppressive elite minority that they want to destroy our cities, that they are going to build an America where big cities do not count; the populations of big cities can be thrown overboard. There is a triage process that we will follow. After all, so many of them are black, so many are African-American. And in case we do not complete the process with the budget, they have introduced affirmative action, an attack on that, assault on affirmative action to send the message even more clearly that we are targeting African Americans. The big cities have large accumulations of African Americans, and I would like to get back to the point I was making. Why are they there? I just told you. They went there seeking jobs. The jobs were there. The jobs have been taken away now. So they are there. They are vulnerable. They are poor. Why do they have to go to the big cities? Because the economy of the South where they were was even poorer. The wretchedness of black families was greater in the rural South before World War II than it is in any big city now. Starvation and hunger, exploitation, a state which was not too far removed from slavery existed for hundreds of thousands of African Americans, because slavery, getting back to heritage. Why are so many African-Americans poor? Because they are victims of a process that never had any mercy in it. They are victims of a process that never offered any real aid until the Great Society programs, the New Deal and the Great Society programs came along. There was no aid of any kind. You had millions of African-Americans who were set free by the 13th amendment to the Constitution. And the Emancipation Proclamation set some free before, and upon achieving that freedom, they were empty-handed. They had nothing. If there are any sophomores still listening, remember that slavery existed for 200 years in America. Slavery existed for 400 years in this hemisphere. Slavery in South America and the Caribbean area started long before it started here. But slavery existed in American for 200 years, and some people who says slavery was an institution, slavery was an industry. Slavery was an industry, a vile industry, but an industry. Slaves were recruited. Slaves were imported to make money. Slaves were brought and sold like property. They were bought and sold like machines for 200 years. For 200 years slaves were handled in a way which reminded them at every point that they were property. In order to accomplish this, slaves had to be treated in ways which obliterated their humanity. I used the word ``obliterated''; an attempt was made. I take it back. They did not succeed fortunately. But an attempt was made to obliterate any sense of humanness in the slave in order to make him a more productive machine, a more productive beast of burden. Their sense of humanity had to be wiped out. So slaves were bought and sold and deliberately families were not allowed to exist. You know, there might have been 1 or 2 percent of the slave owners who were kind enough to let families stay together or to respect the family unit, but basically, in the salve industry, it was counterproductive to have family attachments. So the slaves were for 200 years in a situation which discouraged any family. Any families which we have, any sense of family which we have, which is very strong in the black community, very strong in the African-Americans community, any sense of family is there despite all of the hardships. That sense of family is there because we the people of the African-Americans communities, the victims of slavery, held on to it, made it happen, and kept it happening. But for 200 years there was an attempt made to make us forget all about family ties, forget all about our humanity in every respect, religion, family, art, culture, everything. If the sophomores are still listening, just try to imagine what it is like for a Mexican person who is very poor, owns very little, who comes across the border from Mexico to California as an immigrant; imagine an immigrant in a whole new world, does not speak the language, is poor, and was poor back home, and try to imagine what I am saying when I say that that immigrant, that poor immigrant coming across the border from Mexico to California, is a millionaire compared to a slave being dumped on a wharf somewhere in America and taken to the auction block. Because that poor Mexican has a village, a family, a culture, associates, people to go back to or to remember, reminisce about, to communicate with even after he arrives here. That poor Mexican probably has some friends or some associates or a community of people who might not know him individually but will receive him in California if he comes across the border. They are rich compared to what the slave had. The slaves were deliberately cut off from their culture, from their sense of family, from their societies that had been built up over hundreds of years. They were deliberately cut off, and right away they were put on board ships, and they were arranged in ways to separate slaves who came from the same places, even the same tribe or the same languages, and not allow them to be together, because there was fear of mutiny. They did not want them to have any sense of commonality. So the obliteration process for slaves started on the ship. It continued at the wharf when they were unloaded and sold. They were sold regardless, irregardless of any attachments that they might have had. If a sister or brother happened to come together, then nobody would recognize that certainly on the wharf, and then it went on and on for 200 years. The largest number of slaves that existed at any time in the history of slavery in this country, however, were not people who were brought across the sea. You know, millions were brought across the sea. But the largest number were born in this country. They were bred in this country. Slave-breeding was a basic part of the slave industry. Why am I mentioning the ugly subject of slave-breeding? Why am I bothering to mention that? Because the history of the black family and the disintegration of the black family, the problems of the black family, are rooted in slavery. An attempt was made to obliterate any sense of family, and when freedom came, no attempt was made to help in any way, economically, socially, culturally, no attempt was made. So when a sophomore asked the question, why so many black people are poor, why are they so vulnerable, why are they all gathered in the big cities? The answer is they are in the big cities because they came looking for jobs, and they found jobs, and they thrived for three or four decades. But before that they were in the rural South where they were very poor and never had a chance, because nobody ever gave any help to the slaves after they were set free, and before that, of course, they were slaves, and instead of them being helped by anyone, an effort was made to obliterate, block out their humanity, destroy any sense of family, any sense of culture, any sense of religion. You cannot suddenly, as a nation or a group of civilized people, say that 200 years does not matter. You cannot obliterate and say it did not exist. That is what the Communists used to try to do in Russia, just wipe out segments of history. It did exist. After we were set free, the 13th amendment and the 14th amendment, 15th amendment, there was another hundred years of oppression, lynchings, denial of all rights. So we are talking about 300 years before we had a situation where people could get up and leave the South, come to the big cities. There was nothing to fall back on. Nobody has a parent who gave them anything. They did not inherent any land. They did not inherit any bank accounts. You know, why are they so poor? Why are African-Americans in such large proportions in the big cities poor? Because their ancestors were slaves, their ancestors were victimized. There was nothing to fall back on to build any economic base. The miracle is that so many, that there are so many middle-class black families, there are so many people who have overcome all of this. There are so many who prosper no matter what. The cruelest activity that you could perpetuate would be to target this vulnerable bunch, this vulnerable group of people who are the descendants of slaves. We are the victims. We are the descendants of victims, and now we have been targeted again. Probably many of the people who are targeting the victims are the descendants of the oppressors, the slave-owners and the slave industry, people who participated in the slave industry in many different ways. It is time to get angry when you see the policies of the Government of the United States being shaped by people who would cut the budget in ways which seek to wipe out the victims of the descendants of slaves. In this budget process that we are about to embark upon, we are told that there is a desire to save $722 billion over a 7-year period. The call is for a balanced budget by the year 2002. They said the budget must be balanced, and that is a criteria that is set. The Congressional Black Caucus budget would not be allowed on the floor. It will not have a chance of getting past the Committee on Rules unless we can show we can balance the budget by the year 2002. All other budgets, they say, must do the same thing. At least, you must show over a 5-year period that the budget that you are 5 years; $722 billion in savings must be realized over 7 years; $59 billion must be the deficit, no higher than $59 billion in 5 years, and in order to get there, the kinds of cuts that were made last week, $17 billion in the rescission process, will have to be magnified many times over. They will have to make even more cuts in housing programs for poor people. They will make even more cuts in programs like the school lunch program, in programs like the summer youth employment program, in training programs for welfare mothers. The cuts will be humongous, monstrous, unless we turn aside from the revolution that is being promoted by the oppressive elite minority now in control of this Congress. It is a very serious situation. Added to the cuts, as I said before, is the attack, the assault on affirmative action, which doubles the victimization. We see a pattern in the welfare reform bill that will be repeated over and over in the welfare reform process. In the bill that is being offered, the element of reform I support, as I said before. We all want to reform any Government program and make it work. The human animal is not an administering animal. We do not naturally know how to administer anything. So any big activity, any complex activity needs to be reformed from time to time, needs to be revised, adjusted, and welfare is no exception. But we should also revise any other aspect of the Government in the same manner. We have no problem with the reform element. Welfare is also, unfortunately, a vehicle for the demonization of African-Americans. Welfare is a vehicle for the demonization, first, of poor people. It is a vehicle for the demonization of pregnant teenagers, teenage mothers, and it is a vehicle for the demonization of African-Americans. How does this happen? Because it has become a code word. When people think of welfare, the media, the political leadership, have handled the problem and issue in ways which have led to an association of welfare with African-Americans, with black people. So it becomes a demonization. If we want to really reform it, let us take out the demonization. Let us stop talking about welfare in terms that demonize people. Let us look at the problem. They are a set of victims like other victims the government helps, and let us go forward with reforming welfare in that spirit. Let us talk about jobs and the need for jobs and job training without calling people lazy. ``Lazy'' is a ridiculous term to use with the victims of the descendants of slaves. In slavery everybody had a job, and they had to do it. In slavery they worked people from dawn to dusk. In slavery they worked them every day, except a few kind slave owners who gave Sundays off. But if there is anybody who knows what work is all about, it is the people who are the descendants of the victims of slavery. So let us stop the demonization. People are not on welfare who are able-bodied because they are lazy. In my district certainly, if you have the jobs, for every job you produce there will be 10 or 20 people in line to get the job. There are no jobs, and we have been looking for jobs for decades now. We have to produce jobs in the Congressional Black Caucus budget, in our vision of what America should be like. We are going to have a job creation program, as we always have had in previous budgets. We are going to have job training. We are going to have job educational programs. You know, if you give a bright welfare mother a 2-year college education, she can become a part of the middle class, or a degree in nursing, or x-ray technician, or blood work technicians, a number of different jobs that are available for people who have training. But you have to have the money and the budget to provide for that 2 years of training in order to allow this person to bridge the gap and get into the middle class. When you are demonizing people that are making the assumption that they are lazy, making the charge, then you do not put money in the budget for training and for job creation. There is no money in the welfare program that has been offered by the Republican majority in the House. There is no money, there is no program, for job training. There is no program for job creation. We started out talking about get off welfare and go to work, and the Democratic alternatives to the welfare program of the Republicans, you are going to find an effort to provide job training. There is money in there for--in the Deal substitute and certainly the Patsy Mink substitute. There is money to provide for training to allow people to get off of welfare, but it is too good a demonization technique and a demonization weapon for the Republicans to seriously deal with jobs and job training and seriously try to reform welfare. You can have a good election issue if you continue to demonize the people who are on welfare because they are black, because they are teenagers, because they are pregnant. All of a sudden teenage girls become a threat to the moral fiber of the country. As I said before, they are not a threat to the moral fiber of the country. I would like to have fewer teenagers pregnant. I would like to see fewer unwed mothers. The number who are increasing, who are not African American, is great, which means that there is a situation of helplessness and hopelessness that is driving this situation, and we need to correct it before this disease spreads beyond the vulnerable poor populations of our cities and engulfs other groups. We should reasonably examine it and determine that we are going to provide hope for teenagers regardless of their race or color. We are going to provide hope, and one area you provide hope is through education, providing the best possible education. Next to the cuts in housing that were in the rescission budget last week, Mr. Speaker, the $7 billion in cuts in housing programs for low income people, the cuts in education were the second most vicious groups of cuts because they are targeted to eliminate hope for large numbers of young people. The specific cut of the summer youth employment program and the specific cut of the drug-free schools program, those specific cuts are aimed at programs for young people, and they become, as my colleagues know, the most vicious, among the most vicious of all. If we are going to continue and repeat those kinds of cuts, then we are going to wipe out hope for more and more young people and end up with more and more being caught up in the web of teenage pregnancies and other social ills. Teenage pregnancies are a problem we are going to resolve. Let us reasonably try to get that kind of hope restored to teenagers so that they will not drift into that kind of situation which hurts both the mother and the child. Babies should not be raising babies. Teenagers should not be raising babies. We do not want it, and we should rationally do everything possible to end it. But do not demonize pregnant teenagers. Do not demonize them and use the code that there is something wrong with black pregnant teenagers, there is something wrong with black families, there is something wrong with the black community. Do not demonize and gain some kind of political advantage by appealing to the gut racism in certain people. Do not let the welfare reform process drift into that. Teenagers are not a threat to the moral fiber of America. Teenage pregnancies--there was a time when teenage pregnancy was a threat to the moral fiber of America, and I said it before on this floor, and I repeat it to remind my colleagues that teenage pregnancy was a threat to the moral fiber of America, black teenage pregnancy--during the days of slavery, 200 years of slavery when teenage pregnancy was promoted and teenage pregnancy was a profit-making enterprise. Breeding slaves produced more slaves in America than importing slaves from Africa-- breeding. Every teenage slave girl was expected to get pregnant as soon as she was old enough to get pregnant, forced to get pregnant. Terrible things could happen to her if she did not get pregnant, and she did not choose the man who made her pregnant. Part of the breeding process was to select the men who did the impregnation. So, that was a threat, that kind of activity which went on for 200 years industry, that was a threat to the moral fiber of America. Like all other aspects of slavery, the moral fiber of America was challenged by the components of slavery. Thank G-d for Abraham Lincoln. Thank G-d for all the people who lost their lives in the war to end slavery. America has had that burden taken off its shoulder, been able to go forward as a leader of the Free World as a result of that kind of moral threat being removed. So, when you see or hear people talk about teenage pregnancies, it is a serious matter of today, but is not a threat to the moral fiber of America. These people are not demons. The demons were the people who made an industry out of impregnating black teenagers in the slave system, and the breeding pens and the breeding farms. Those were the people who were the demons. We have been targeted unfairly. I hope that the elite oppressive minority can hear some of these appeals. It is not too late to turn back and look at the process of delivering on the Contract With America, the process on demonstrating that you know how to run the government better than the Democrats. I hope the Republicans will turn aside the game plan that involves demonization and later on an appeal to make it racism. Candidates who are announcing now for the presidential race in 1996 have placed great emphasis on the fact that they want to destroy affirmative action, affirmative action. When they add affirmative action and the assault on affirmative action to the game plan, as I said before, and my colleagues know that $722 billion is going to have to be saved over 7 years, you can understand that the days ahead, in terms of decisionmaking about the budget and the targeting of programs that hurt minorities and the targeting of programs that hurt poor people has just begun. Between now and 1996 every candidate running for President will be trying to demonstrate, every candidate running for President for the Republican Party will be trying to demonstrate, that they can go after African-Americans in a more overwhelming fashion and a more targeted and precise fashion, in a more damaging fashion, than anybody else. That is going to be the Willie Horton of 1996. It is time to come to grips with it right now. It is time that we on the floor of this House understood that we do not intend to sit idly by and allow this kind of demonization and appeal to racism to go on. We do not intend to allow the budget to be twisted and distorted in order to accomplish that purpose. We want to show a vision of America that, I think, the majority of Americans want, and that is a vision where we apply the tremendous wealth of this country with the richest nation that ever existed on the face of the earth. There has never been anything like America. The wealth is not something of the past. The wealth is escalating every day. Wall Street is not suffering. We are not on the verge of bankruptcy. people are getting rich faster and faster. Those who have money, the wealth of America is not absorbed by the fact that there is no frontier anymore. There is no frontier in terms of land. But it seems we have a lot of wealth above us, the broadcast frequencies above us. The bands up there that are now being auctioned off have brought in close to $9 billion. The people on the air--and we should stop and think about that resource that belongs to us. There are all kinds of ways in which this country can be protected from bankruptcy. There are many ways in which the deficit can be solved once and for all, and you do not have to increase taxes on individuals. We need a whole system of taxation which does not focus on individual income and throw one group of people against another. In the Congressional Black Caucus budget we shall propose a commission to creatively look at new kinds of tax options, and we should propose some of those tax options to go forward as soon as possible. Why not? As my colleagues know, look at the air waves in a different way, and derive some income through user fees, and let it be known right away. Why not even halt the auctioning process and do some other form of ownership of the frequency bands up there which are going to be very lucrative? And one industry that we know will be very lucrative in the future is the telecommunications industry. One industry that will derive a great deal of profit and revenue will be telecommunications. The industry that the Japanese, and the Germans, and the Taiwanese, nobody in a foreign country can take away from us, is the telecommunications industry. So, let us look forward to making use of the potential that is in the air above us in ways that benefit all Americans. Nobody should buy the argument that you have to cut programs for poor people because we are bankrupt. Nobody should buy the argument that we have to cut HUD in order to save money, that is the only place we can save money. Nobody should buy the argument that the summer youth program, which is a relatively small amount of money, has had to cut down to zero in order to balance the budget or in order to save money. We should not buy those arguments. There are many, many ways to cut the budget and adjust the budget. There are many ways to look for new revenue. All the industries that are based in America that have foreign operations have been let off very lightly in terms of they have taken the jobs away from the workers. The people who own the plants and investors, they reap great profits. There should be some way to get a greater share of those profits and pile them back into the country of origin. There are many, many ways which we should look to new sources of revenue in order to sustain the richest nation that ever existed and to pay for the kind of services, and the programs and the projects that benefit all Americans. The caring majority, which I think is the majority of Americans, will insist, I think, that everybody be given an opportunity for an education, eveybody be given decent housing, everybody be given an opportunity to eat well, that children will have free lunches. I think the caring majority is made up of people out there who need government help. The caring majority is made up of a majority of people who are not people who need government help. They are just people who are wise enough to know that if this society is going to hold together, if you are going to go forward with the maximum civility, go forward and build a society which promotes the common welfare, the prosperity for all, then we are going to have to care about people who do not have housing. People in the caring majority do not necessarily want to live next to homeless people, have them come to their homes and eat, but they want them to have a home and want them to have food. People in the caring majority may not want their kids to go to school with poor children, but they want every child to have an opportunity to go to school. The people in the caring majority care about health care for everybody, and they do not think we are so poor that we cannot have health care systems which provide decent health care for everybody. In the days ahead, as the Committee on the Budget moves to realize its $722 billion in savings, we have to be on a glide path, they say, showing that the deficit is down to $59 billion in 5 years. The horrible kinds of devastating cuts that they will propose must be resisted. We must show that an F-22 fighter plane that nobody needs will cost us $12 billion over the next 5 years, and if we are really, truly worried about bankruptcy and becoming insolvent as a nation, why are we building an F-22 fighter plane, the most sophisticated fighter plane ever devised by the imagination of man. We have already a very sophisticated fighter plane. Put that on a list. Those Americans who think out there that somebody has to suffer, there has to be some cuts, that is the argument we hear, let us spread the pain. We are not spreading the pain. Seven billion dollars comes out of HUD, housing for low-income people, and you are going to continue to build the F-22 at a cost of $12 billion over the next 5 years, and this is a scaled down version of what was proposed originally. If the whole plan was followed and we built all the F-22's that were originally conceived, it would cost us $72 billion. Seventy-two billion dollars. But just over the next 5 years we are looking at $12 saying we cannot afford it. The CIA, $28 billion is the estimate of CIA's budget. If you have to cut something, cut the CIA 10 percent every year for the next 5 years. You will not lose very much. Eldridge Ames and his kind will be taken care of in a less lucrative fashion, but you will not lose any ground in terms of America being secure and competitive. They do not contribute that much at this point. They would still have half of $28 billion, which is $14 billion. Let us spread the pain where it hurts the least. Let us spread the pain by not building another Seawolf submarine, $2.1 billion. If we must make cuts, if we are worried about the future, if you do not want to mortgage our children's future, then there are many ways and places that cuts can be made. There are a whole list of corporate loopholes that we can start closing. The Committee on Ways and Means has produced a proposal for tax cuts, and one set of analysts has looked at it and spoken to me and told me there is $1 trillion worth of tax cuts, $1 trillion worth of giveaways, loopholes in that proposal. One trillion dollars. Let us take a close look at that bill and those loopholes. Let us look at the tax expenditures as closely as we look at the other expenditures. In other words, we are going to resist. The Congressional Black Caucus budget is just a tiny part of the resistance. We will not stand by and allow $722 billion to be saved on the backs of the poorest people in the Nation. We will not allow people who consider themselves revolutionaries to wreck the civility of the Nation, to destroy 60 years of activity and programs. We will not let people go hungry, remain jobless, have less educational opportunity, without putting up the most stringent possible fight. I appeal to the majority in this House, the people who represent the oppressive elite minority, to turn aside from their effort to create a budget and a game plan, a scheme, that envisages America only for a handful of people, only for a small class of people. We are looking at America for everybody, and we do not seek to throw overboard the most vulnerable. We will not continue to try to throw overboard the poor people in America. We will not continue to try to throw overboard the poor people in the cities. We will not continue to throw overboard the African-Americans among the poor people in the cities. We will not look at the most vulnerable population and attempt to demonize them and use them as a way of guaranteeing the next election. There is a vicious set of activities in motion, and it is time for us to get angry and call them for what they are. We will challenge the oppressive elite minority, and in representation of the caring majority, we will prevail. The caring majority will counterattack in 1996, and those who are vicious, unyielding, uncivil, who refuse to try to create an America that belongs to everybody, will find that this democracy cannot be hoodwinked, the people cannot be stampeded into voting against their own interest. The caring majority will stand behind the most vulnerable in our society.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I just want ask the gentleman, at what wage rate would people get work under this bill? Would they be paid less than minimum wage? Would they go back to slavery?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, there is almost 100 percent agreement that welfare as we know it should be reformed. We all want to reform welfare, make the necessary adjustments to allow it to accomplish what it is supposed to accomplish in terms of helping victims. We help victims of earthquakes, we help victims of floods, we help victims of hurricanes. We should help victims of a mismanaged economy which produces a situation where there are no jobs for men and families as a result are forced to go on welfare. All big government programs should be reviewed occasionally. We should certainly look at all programs and look at ways to reform them. We should try to reform programs like the farmers home loan mortgages, which were so badly repaid that the Department of Agriculture decided to just forgive $11.5 billion in loans over a 5-year period. We gave away $11.5 billion in loans for the farm welfare program. We also have welfare for electric power users out in the West and Midwest, where they are using Federal power at within half the rate that we have to pay in the big cities. So that is a welfare giveaway we ought to take a look at and see if we can reform it. We have enormous amounts of welfare for the farmers, and we ought to take a look at that. We are spoiling America's farmers by smothering them with socialism, and we ought to take a look at rich farmers as well as poor farmers receiving welfare. Aid for dependent children is a welfare program for poor children that costs $16 billion. Aid to rich farmers through the farm price subsidy program is not means tested. Rich farmers can get that as well as poor, and there are very few poor farmers left. Less than 2 percent of the American population lives on farms, so most of the $16 billion goes to the welfare program for farmers just as $16 billion goes to needy children. That $16 billion that goes to farmers, we need to look at how to reform that. We need to be serious about that. We should not demonize poor children and poor families suffering as a result of economic dislocations that are perpetrated by people making decisions far beyond their control. Welfare for farmers is not means tested. Millionaires receive government checks. Two recent articles, one in the Washington Post and one in the New York Times, said that city dwellers, they listed the names of people who are city dwellers who never set foot on a farm, who are receiving welfare farm checks. So I hope we are going to reform that as well, because in order to make the budget balance and in order to do things that need to be done, we need to reform that. We need to go back and take a hard look at the savings and loans debacle and the unfortunate steps we took there which did not reform that system. Two hundred billion dollars of the taxpayers' money went down the drain as a result of our not paying attention to reform. Reform is very much needed. The Republican welfare reform program, unfortunately, shows contempt for work. At every level, it refuses to deal with job training, it refuses to make some kind of pledge to provide work for people, it refuses to deal with minimum wages that are necessary in order for people to get off welfare, to make enough money to live on. They have a great contempt for work. It is a big lie that they are interested in having people get off welfare and go to work. They have abandoned the goal of work. It is the Democrats who now carry the goal of work, as we did in 1988. This is not the first time we have tried to make adjustments to the welfare program. In 1988 we attempted to make an adjustment in terms of job training and jobs for people on welfare. The Republican welfare program swindles poor children through the block grant mechanism. It swindles poor children in two ways. When you take away the entitlement for aid to dependent children, it means you are swindling them, because they do not have a right if they are poor, they do not have the Federal Government standing behind them. They do not have the power of the Federal Treasury, which guarantees that no matter how bad the economic conditions may be and how many people may be forced on welfare the money will be made available to meet their needs. They are program. You are taking away an entitlement, so as the numbers increase, we expect 20,000 more youngsters to enroll in New York City schools next year. Enrollment is skyrocketing. Just enrollment alone produces a greater need, so that the block grant will not take care of that increasing need by enrollment. But when economic conditions get worse, the number of people goes up who are eligible. Block grants place the poor at the mercy of State and local governments, and the history of State and local governments is they have been very mean-spirited and very cruel and some of the worst and most corrupt government in the country has been at State and local government levels. We are not helping people by placing them at the mercy of State and local governments. School lunches were created in the first place because State and local governments refused their needs. Mr. Chairman, now we are saying to the children of America, Children of America, there is a fiscal crunch; this great Nation now needs your lunch.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the action of the House last week in passing the DeLay amendment, which cut an additional $3.5 million from the current year budget for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was reckless, counterproductive, and just plain stupid. In the name of stopping the ergonomics standard, the House made cuts that cannot and will not stop work on the standard, but will hurt health and safety by cutting workplace inspections and consultation visits. Thousands of workers will be hurt, and some may die if these cuts are allowed to stop the effort to make our workplaces less dangerous. Mr. DeLay says we have to send a signal to OSHA not to ignore the moratorium bill. But that bill is not law; we do not have a one-House veto. Mr. DeLay cannot singlehandedly delay progress. And the Senate probably is not going to pass the silly moratorium bill in any event. OSHA is following the law and doing the right thing--precisely what we all tell them we want--working with the business community, checking out their ideas in the field, consulting with ergonomics proposal, just ideas in draft form for tackling the single biggest source of injuries to American workers. Why in the world would we tell the agency not to try to figure out a cost-effective way to protect workers from carpal tunnel syndrome and back injuries? Mr. Speaker, the DeLay amendment to delay protection for workers was reckless, counterproductive, and just plain stupid.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in total opposition to H.R. 1158. H.R. 1158 represents wasteful, inefficient, illogical, and barbaric legislation. It is naked power exercised by the Committee on Appropriations, which has held no hearings, no site visits, and is in no way knowledgeable about what they are doing in this area, or any other area where they have promoted these rescissions. The Department of Labor will stand behind the facts and figures that I cite here. The Secretary of Labor, Elizabeth Dole, a Republican, the Secretary of Labor, Lynn Martin, a Republican, started the ergonomics studies. They started the process, to be continued by a Democrat, but all three have gone through a deliberative process based upon the facts that they see. Disorders for cumulative trauma, like carpal tunnel syndrome, have increased at epidemic rates, up 770 percent in the past decade. In 1993 more than 300,000 cases of repeated trauma disorders were reported. The overall problem of musculoskeletal disorders, including back injuries, is much bigger, more than 3 million cases a year. The economic costs of these disorders is huge. The workers' compensation costs associated with musculoskeletal disorders is $20 billion a year. Mr. Chairman, 56,000 people die every year form accidents on the job or from illnesses contracted on the job, 56,000 people die every year, which is as high as the number of people who are killed in all of the Vietnam War. You can check the facts and figures with the Department of Labor. Over the 20-year history, the more than 20-year history of OSHA, we have saved millions of lives and avoided millions of injuries to workers. OSHA is a deliberative agency, based very much on scientific evidence and the use of information. This process, with the Committee on Appropriations legislative force, is not a deliberative process, it is a barbaric process. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 1158. This bill would cancel $17.1 billion in previously appropriated funds, more than 99 percent of which represent investments in the American people. In return, what will the American people get? If they are low-income, working class Americans, they will get next to nothing; but if they are lucky enough to be among the few percent of Americans making more than $100,000 a year, then they will get a windfall. That is because the Contract With America is bloated with tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, and my distinguished colleagues on the other side of the aisle are pressing forward with this rescissions package to pay for this pork--pork which is considered to be nothing but fatty, gristly meat when served on a plate to the Nation's poor, but somehow is magically transformed into protein-laden filet mignon when served on fine china to the Nation's rich. Let me illustrate how the tax breaks in the Contract With America are a boon for the rich but a boondoggle for the poor. Under the proposed capital gains tax cut, 76 percent of the tax cut, or $10.6 billion, would go to those individuals making more than $100,000 a year. Moreover, a corporate executive making more than $200,000 a year would personally gain more than $3,800, while a family earning between $20,000 and $30,000 a year would gain a mere $5.52--not even enough to put a t-shirt on a child's back. So we can see that all of the promises being made by Republicans-- that people will be rewarded for getting off welfare, working hard, and playing by the rules--are illusory. Now let us take a look at all of the benefits which the American people will have to sacrifice so that the Republicans can spoon-feed the fat-cat freeloaders who belly-up to the Government trough. To give the corporate executive his $3,800 capital gains tax benefit, the American people will lose 1.2 million jobs for at-risk youth during the next two summers. These jobs provide young adults with the money they need to purchase clothes and supplies for school. They also provide lasting gains in employment and purchasing power. To give the corporate executive his $3,800 capital gains tax benefit, the American people will lose nearly 30,000 AmeriCorps members participating in the National Service program. That will be a tragic loss for communities which are benefiting from AmeriCorps' services, and an even greater loss for middle class families struggling to meet the costs of college tuition for their children. To give the corporate executive his $3,800 capital gains tax benefit, the American people also will lose $105 million in assistance to their local school districts and, more specifically, services for 100,000 at- risk children which are designed to help them achieve the highest academic standards. To give the corporate executive his $3,800 capital gains tax benefit, the American people additionally will lose violence and drug prevention programs for 39 million students due to the elimination of the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program. And nearly $175 million will be stripped away from GOALS 2000 Education Reform, robbing 4,000 schools and thousands of parents of the resources they need to improve the education of our Nation's children. As a result of this bill, New York alone will be hit with $1.6 billion in spending cuts. New York will lose $107 million in education funding; $540 million for public housing; $164 million for home heating for low-income people; and more than $160 million for job training and assistance for at-risk youth, displaced workers, and senior citizens. The Grand Old Party [GOP] likes to present itself as the party of opportunity for those Americans who are willing to work. Clearly, that is more fiction than fact, for the wolf is disguised in sheep's clothing. Opportunity to the Republican Party means opportunity not for those who work the hardest, but for those who have the highest incomes. Opportunity to the Democratic Party, on the other hand, means opportunity for everyone, particularly American families who cannot make ends meet and work their way out of poverty despite working long hours at back-breaking jobs. Mr. Chairman, because I prefer to reward individuals for the strength of their character and work ethic instead of the size of their wallet, I must vote against H.R. 1158, and urge every Member of this body to do the same.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentlewoman from Texas. I would like to underscore your last point. The defunding, the placing of zero in the budget for the summer youth employment project is probably one of the most cruel and dangerous and deadliest acts of this oppressive elite minority in control of the Congress now. It shows no vision. It betrays the very vital segment of our population that needs help the most. They follow through on that, that zeroing the budget for the summer youth employment program with a $210 million rescission of the National Service Program. The National Service Program is for a different set of youth but it is basically program-oriented toward young people. The National Service Program is not a program of Bill Clinton, it is not a program that the Democrats fabricated 2 years ago and the Republicans stood on the sideline. I have been in Congress for almost 13 years and we have discussed a National Service Program for 10 of those 13 years. Both parties have come forward with proposals, both parties have worked together. Why do we all of a sudden have to throw overboard and destroy a program which it took 10 years of deliberation and planning to develop? The National Service Program would receive rescissions of $210 million out of the $571 million that they have available for this fiscal year. That is taking $210 million and leaving only $365 million, crippling the program to such an extent that it would hardly be able to operate because it is just getting off the ground now. And then there are bigger cuts coming in the budget that begins October 1 because the oppressive minority has made it quite clear that they want to destroy the National Service Program. The American people have a right to know why. Why? We should challenge the high-technology barbarians and say, You cannot do reckless things like this, you cannot make reckless decisions, you cannot just disregard all reason without explaining to the American people why. A rescission of this magnitude for the National Service Program would renege on the bipartisan congressional commitment of Americans who have already committed to serving their communities. Middle-class families who work hard and play by the rules would be especially hard hit because many of the members of the AmeriCorps are middle class. We designed it so it would not just be a program where young people who are poor were involved. It cuts across all classes. A year and a half ago, Congress mandated a 3-year phase-in for funding 100,000 AmeriCorps members. It called for 20,000 members to begin a year of service in 1994 and 33,000 in fiscal year 1995. This rescission, this heartless rescission, would require the corporation to scale back existing programs already in place, cutting approximately 2,000 AmeriCorps members from the current level of 20,000 and 15,000 from the phase-in level which has already been authorized by Congress. The majority of those reductions would occur in those States with the most AmeriCorps members: New York, California, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Middle-class families with college-age members willing to serve their communities full-time for a full year who are counting on AmeriCorps to help them afford college educations would be especially hard hit if the congressional commitment is not kept. We close with National Service, as just one more example. School lunch programs, summer youth employment programs, National Service programs, programs that would benefit all of America a great deal are being very hard hit by these heartless cuts. On the other hand, the F-22 fighter plane is not touched, and neither is the Seawolf submarine and a huge number of other programs in the military budget. I want to thank the gentlewoman for joining me, and I hope that Americans are listening. There is a vision offered by the oppressive elite minority and there is a vision offered by the caring majority. We will talk more about those visions in the future.

Mr. OWENS. I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas and I will take the last 4 minutes. I just wanted to close out with a note and I neglected to put in before.

Mr. OWENS. I would like to underscore what the gentlewoman has just said. I wonder if the American people realize the tremendous amount of money they have given to take care of natural disasters over the past 3 or 4 years. For the hurricane in Florida, between $6 billion and $7 billion of taxpayers' money from all over America went to help the victims of the hurricane in Florida. The earthquake in California, floods, mud slides, we are talking about close to $7 billion or $8 billion just directed to California various natural disasters. The Midwest flood that took place a couple of years ago, $6 billion of people from all over the country's money went to help take care of those disasters. We recognize people who are the victims of natural disasters are in need and therefore we come to their aid, and it is altogether fitting and proper for government to do this. But the people in our big cities who are the victims of a mismanaged economy which does not provide any jobs also have great needs and we ought to also look upon them in the same way and provide some kind of assistance on an ongoing basis without having to have these frequent reviews and without belittling people who are the victims of the economy and victims of the mismanagement of the economy. We are all one people, and there is no reason why one kind of disaster and one kind of victimization should be treated in a different way from the other people who are also victims. I hope we will take not of that. It is an involuntary stimulus. California did not make the earthquake happen but once the earthquake happened, they got an involuntary economic stimulus. Money was poured in to take care of that need. It also made the economy go again. That is just the way it happens. But we also have disasters of a different kind in our big cities, whether they are Houston, New York, or Newark, New Jersey. I just wanted to underscore that point.

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, no discussion is more important than the one that is now under way here in Washington concerning the budget and all matters related to fiscal appropriations policies. The discussion that we have just heard is a very vital one. It relates to one small facet of the total budget and one small portion of the Contract With America. The question of school lunches and whether they have been cut or not has been thoroughly discussed and we will have some more discussion on it. It is very important because in the process of trying to save money on school lunches, there has been some trickery. We are moving under the cover of a block grant and we are talking about giving additional money to take care of inflation. We are not discussing the fact that an entitlement is being taken away, an entitlement. Every hungry child who has a certain income level is entitled now to a free lunch, which means that no matter how large that number increases and how great it becomes, the free lunch will always be there for the hungry child. In the block grant process, there is a finite number of children who can be fed. The Federal Government has only provided a finite amount of money. There is no supplementary budget at the Federal level that you can fall back on. You cannot go to the treasury of the Federal Government. They have washed their hands of the process once they give the block grant. So it is up to the States. It is up to the local government to pick up at that point and that is a part of the discussion. We can talk more and more about that but it is only a small part of the total picture. Let us not talk so much about what has been cut so far, although that is important, the fact that school lunches are on the block and they are being squeezed in devious ways to save money. The fact that the summer youth employment programs, one of the most basic, practical, and concrete programs ever devised by the Federal Government where teenagers are employed during the summer, that also is on the chopping block. In the rescission process, they have put zero in the budget for the remainder of this year, reached into the current budget, money that has already been authorized, programs that have already been authorized, money that has already been appropriated is now being taken out of the current budget for the year which ends on September 30, 1995. That is called a rescission process. It is a cruel process of having people who anticipate that they are going to get certain kinds of programs and funding suddenly wake up and discover that it has been snatched away in this budget year, before we get to the process of the next budget year, 1996 budget year, which begins October 1, 1995. So we are cutting programs which have relatively small amounts of money attached to them when you look at the total budget and benefit large numbers of people, programs that have been demonstrated to be workable, programs which go straight to the heart of the matter and serve the poorest people in the country. We are cutting them, and one of the questions is, why are we cutting these programs and not cutting other programs? And I will get to that later. I think it is important to understand that the budget-making process is a vital part of a bigger process whereby we are defining our vision for America as we see it, as we go forward the year 2000 and beyond. What happens this year will determine what is going to be happening in the next 10 to 20 years. This is a pivotal year. It is a pivotal year because the majority in the Congress that has just taken over has made it a pivotal year, and we should not back away from the challenge of making a lot of very basic decisions which will set the course of America for the next 10 to 20 years. We will not back away from it. Let us just understand that everything that is being done; those things that have dollars attached to them, and many of them that do not have dollars attached to them, are a part of a process to prepare America for a future that is going to be a future basically to serve a small elite group of people or a future America that belongs to everybody. I say it is a conflict, a battle, between the oppressive elite minority and the caring majority. I think there is definitely a cleavage here, unlike any we have seen before. There is a group, which I call the oppressive elite minority, who have a great deal of education, a great deal of understanding about now to use power. They have a great knowledge of how to use information. They know how to control and make very good use of compassion. The oppressive elite minority has a distorted vision of what America should be all about. This oppressive elite minority, in charge of Congress now, has a vision which seeks to throw certain groups of people overboard. It has a mentality of triage. It is basically saying that there are some things that are not in the American dream for all people. In fact only a small group should benefit. This kind of philosophy is a distortion, in my opinion, of where we ought to go. It is the wrong vision. They are clear on where they want to go. They are forceful about where they want to go. But I say that they are very wrong. it is a mean-spirited approach. In fact, you can go further and say it is a dangerous and deadly approach because of its basic assumption that we cannot build an America that serves all people, we cannot have an America which provides freedom, peace, justice, and opportunity for everybody. The patterns that they are laying out is a pattern which says we can only do it for an elite oppressive minority. The budget cuts are the center of this whole process of redefining what America is all about. The budget cuts are at the center of the vision that is being laid out by both groups. I think we should accept the challenge that is being laid down by the majority party in the House of Representatives. A challenge that they are laying down is that they have a vision for the new world order, they have a vision as to where America should be going, and we would like to offer an alternative vision. I am the chairman of a Congressional Black Caucus alternative budget committee, and we are going to accept the challenge of offering an alternative budget, and that budget will be very much a vision of where we think America should be going between now and the year 2000 or 2002. Certain rules are being made about how this budget is going to be handled. The rumor is that we cannot bring any alternative or substitute budget to the floor of the House unless that budget shows where we are going to balance the budget by the year 2002. If we cannot balance the budget by the year 2002, we will not be allowed to put it on the floor is the rumor. It has not been finalized yet. Well, we accept that challenge. If we have to prepare a balanced budget by the year 2002, that is the only way we can present the Congressional Black Caucus budget alternative, then we will bring to the floor a budget which will be balanced by the year 2002, but in the process of balancing the budget we are going to demonstrate what the vision of a caring majority is. We are going to show how a budget can be balanced by making cuts of programs that are really not in the best interests of the great majority of Americans. The budget that we will bring forward will have the support of the great majority of the American people because there is a caring majority. The people who came out to vote on November 8 do not represent a mandate, did not offer a mandate, they do not represent a body on which a revolution can be based. We had about 38 to 39 percent of the people who were eligible to vote in America who came out, and half of those people voted for the party that won the majority. The half of 39 percent, 38 percent, is certainly not a majority of Americans. The Americans who did not come out to vote, in a large number who came out to vote and did not vote for the winners, they constitute the caring majority. The caring majority is made up of people who are not wise enough to come out to vote and who did not protect their own interests in the proper way, but the caring majority also includes a lot of enlightened people who do vote and who do not identify with the policies of the elite oppressive minority who won the majority of the seats in the House. The caring majority is made up with people who are not necessarily homeless or do not even have the problem in getting shelter or buying homes, but they recognize that there are homeless people in America, and they want to see the America which provides the opportunity for everybody to have a decent home. They may not want to live next to homeless people, and that should not be the test of their compassion. The test of their compassion and their membership in the caring majority is do they believe that every American ought to have a decent home, an opportunity to have a decent home? A caring majority is made up of people who are not hungry, people who have plenty to eat and have good jobs, but the caring majority includes people who have good jobs, plenty to eat, who are willing to look at people who do not have jobs and do not have enough to eat, and they are willing to support public policies which are going to provide employment for all people. They are willing to support public policies which will allow everybody to earn an income and be able to provide the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. The caring majority is made up of people like that who are voting and who will be on the side of those who are in need and who are being affected by the safety nets which are being removed by this oppressive elite minority. We have a vision of America that is very different from the vision of the oppressive elite minority. We are not afraid to offer that vision. On the other hand, we recognize that shortcomings of a vision of the elite minority, it is a vision of America for the few. It is a vision of America for the privileged. It is a vision of America for a new computer class. The cutoff is whether you can own a computer or not, I suppose from the kinds of language used by this oppressive elite minority. Traditional working class people are not included in the vision of this elite minority as to who America should exist for. They do not include construction workers, for example, who always are a part of the middle class. They made good salaries in the past, and they have been supported in the past by both parties. In fact, most construction workers a few years ago we would say would definitely fall in the Republican Party. They had that kind of outlook on life. They were part of the establishment, making very good salaries, and we are surprised and shocked that the new oppressive elite minority in control of this Congress is moving rapidly to take away basic benefits from construction workers. The repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act is high on the list, high on the agenda, of the oppressive elite minority/majority now in control of Congress. They do not want to see construction workers paid decent wages. They want to take out the Davis-Bacon Act which controls the situation which can easily be exploited if it is not there. They do not want to have much to do with organized labor in general. Our great middle class, the greatest portion of the American middle class, have been working people traditionally. We created a phenomenon that never existed in the history of the world when we began to pay millions of workers decent wages. We created the great American market, the great American consumer market, which sustained this country and built our capitalism into the strongest system of democratic capitalism in the world. Everybody wanted to get into the American consumer market, and we have allowed in many cases too generously--we have been too generous in allowing the Japanese to get into the American consumer market, the Germans to get into the American consumer market, everybody comes along with products, rushers to the great American consumer market to sell products and to benefit greatly. Japanese riches have been built on that openness of our consumer market. That consumer market would not exist if we had not had the American labor movement, if we had not had a situation where the forces combine, the workers themselves, and enlightened Government starting with FDR, and an acceptance by the Republican Party, acceptance by the corporations, that it was good to have labor peace, it was good to pay decent wages, and we went forward all together under that system. But, no, we want to turn the clock back and stop that in this present Congress controlled by the oppressive elite minority. The oppressive elite minority's leadership right away took the Education and Labor Committee and changed the name. They wanted to immediately insult labor by taking labor out of the name of a major committee on Congress so we no longer have any committee of Congress that has the word ``labor'' in it. They proceeded to Relations Act. All kinds of things are moving forward to oppress and to squeeze the traditional middle class of working Americans, working Americans who do belong to the middle class. They want to redefine the middle class and push down those who before, who heretofore, have belonged to the great middle class. Public education is now under attack by this oppressive elite minority. The leadership of this Congress, majority of this Congress, the leadership now wants to eliminate the Department of Education. They have gone after education programs with a large number of rescissions already before we get into the process of making the budget for next year. They want to pull back funds for large numbers of programs in this year. They propose first to cut Head Start, and then when they were forced to back away from that, they have cut title I programs. The most basic Federal aid to education is funneled through title I, formerly called chapter 1 programs. Public education is under attack, and after many years under Ronald Reagan and under President Bush, after years of recognizing that America had a problem with education, and after every President starting with President Reagan, attempted to move forward in some way to establish a Federal presence in education. We are now ready to recklessly retreat, recklessly eradicate all the work that has been done by Reagan, Bush, and Clinton and tear down the Federal involvement in education, just wipe out the Department of Education. We will be the only industrialized nation which does not have a centralized Department of Education to provide some guidance and some direction for the education function. We will rapidly begin to decline in our ability to compete once the Department of Education is gone. But the oppressive elite minority is blinded by their own ideological biases, and they want to wipe out the effectiveness of public education. They are going to look to other ways to provide education, those that they think should be educated. The rest they will throw overboard, the billions of dollars. The riches of America will not be used for one of the most fundamental functions of society, the education of the populace. Nothing is more important to our national security than the education of the populace. The education of the American people will keep them competitive. The education of the American people will maintain civility and lessen friction, lessen crime, lessen disorder. The education of the American people is the most important function of Government as we go toward the new world order. Far more important in our national defense and our national security is education than new weapon systems. But we define what we are all about, as I said before, by the steps we take in our policies and especially in our fiscal policies, budget policies, and other monetary policies. The steps that are being taken now are clearly defining what I call a high tech, a group of high technology barbarians, well educated people who understand how to use information, but who lack compassion, and in the final analysis, because they lack compassion, they lack the vision necessary to carry us forward and build on the greatness that already exists in America. The vision of a caring majority is very different from the vision of the oppressive elite minority. The vision of the caring majority sees the possibility of peace, justice and opportunity for all of the people. We do not see America going bankrupt. We do not want to preach scarcity. We are not Bangladesh. We have the resources necessary to provide for a society and an economy that can support peace, justice and opportunity for all of the people. We can provide health care for all of the people. We can provide housing for all of the people. We can provide employment for all of the people. The resources are there. The caring majority is there. And given the opportunity, we are going to find a rejection of the kind of policies and programs being put forward by this elite, oppressive elite minority. Democratic capitalism allows us to do the kinds of things that are needed to produce a society with opportunity for all and with justice and peace. Democratic capitalism is a good umbrella, an umbrella under which we may construct the most successful social order ever created. The skeleton of Democratic capitalism has the ability. It is able to adapt. The system is responsive to innovations. We are not stuck in a situation where we can look forward to going to a bankrupt treasury in the year 2000, because Social Security is there, if we do not take radical steps now to end spending for programs that benefit people. The responsiveness is there. We can do a great deal of things under our present setup. We are the greatest system that has yet been devised by man. And we must use it with imagination and creativity. And most of all, we must have the compassion to understand that we do not need to throw any group of people overboard. This is the first and the most vital step. Make the assumption that the richest Nation in the history of the world can create, it can generate a society which provides peace, justice and opportunity for all. Now, am I running away from the hard job of discussing the budget? I have not mentioned very many numbers at this point. Let's talk about numbers, the problem of funding. The problem of money, of taxes, is a monumental problem today. It will be a monumental problem in the future. It is a permanent challenge. We will always have to struggle to produce the revenues necessary to finance the activities and the functions of government and society that we deem are necessary. It is an ongoing problem. We will have to rise to the occasion. We will always have to raise revenue. We will have to eliminate waste. We have to set the right priorities. We will always have to be improving efficiency and increasing effectiveness. Any organization or any activity that has ever been devised by human kind has a problem with efficiency and effectiveness. It has a problem with waste. The species Homo sapiens, human kind, is not an administering animal. We are not naturally good administrators. Administration and management is something that human beings have to work at all of the time. It is a permanent, ongoing activity. I am not going to say that there is not waste in the welfare program. I am not going to say there is no waste in the school lunch program. I am not going to say there is no waste in any function that is operated by government, just as there is tremendous amount of waste in the private sector. In fact, the private sector has shown us it can be the most wasteful and the most inefficient and the most corrupt sector of our society. The savings and loans collapse, the savings and loan swindle, showed us how monumental waste and corruption and inefficiency can exist within the private sector. So mankind, homo sapiens, are no more effective in the private sector in administration and management than they are in the public sector. It is a problem that we have to confront. Let us go forward and deal with new ways and deal with the problem of money. First, budget cuts. Am I afraid to talk about budget cuts? Do I think we should not cut the budget? There is no room in the budget for a downsizing and a decrease in expenditures? No, I would not take that position. There is a tremendous amount of waste in the budget. But we define ourselves and we show where our souls are when we make the choices as to what to cut. Why are we going on and on, day in and day out, about the cutting of the school lunch program and there is no discussion of some cuts of the CIA and the intelligence budget? The CIA and the intelligence agencies have a secret budget. They will not even tell the American people what the budget is, yet estimates by all sources have placed it at no less than $28 billion. The intelligence budget is no less than $28 billion; probably more. At a time like this in our history when there is no evil empire anymore and the Soviet Union is struggling just to exist, it cannot be an aggressor or threaten us in any way, why do we need a CIA budget of $28 billion? If the people who want to downsize government and want to streamline government, if they want to do it in order to give a tax cut, if they want to grandchildren do not have to pay all of these bills in the future, if they want to seriously and sincerely deal with those problems, then why are they not discussing a cut in the CIA and the intelligence budget? Why not cut it just in half? You put zero in the budget for the summer youth employment program. That is bold and daring. They consider that bold and daring. I think it is an act of cowardice to cut the summer youth program for teenagers overnight, pull out the money and say it is zero this year and next year it will also be zero. I do not think that is an act of courage. It would be an act of courage to say let's gut the CIA budget and the intelligence budget in half to $14 billion. We will have 14 billion to distribute for these other programs or to go to the deficit or to give a contribution toward the tax cut. CIA, who don't we cut it? Why are we discussing the school lunch program and not discussing the CIA and the intelligence agency? Why are we discussing the school lunch program endlessly and not the Seawolf submarine; 2.1 plus billion dollars, $2.1 billion to build a submarine that everybody admits we don't need at all? We don't need it to fight a war. It is only there to maintain the profits for the manufacturer at a certain level; to provide some jobs. And if you want to take $2.1 billion, you could provide twice as many jobs if the object is just to provide jobs. The object is to provide profits also for people who certainly do not need to be milking the American taxpayers for more profits. So why not cut the Seawolf submarine? We are talking some heavy dollars when you talk about the CIA and the Seawolf submarine. Why not cut the cheap electricity that that the people in the Northwest and the Midwest have from dams that are built by all of the taxpayers with all the taxpayers' money? There are some people who are paying one-half the price for electricity as my constituents are paying in New York. Do they deserve the bargain of one half the cost for their electricity? They are Americans just like everybody else. Why not market rates for everybody? If you raise the payments of the people who are getting the bargain in electric use and raise it to market rates, and let the Federal Government take back that money that it invested in the dams and the water projects and distribute throughout all America and let us all benefit from it, let's all get a benefit of the efforts of our Federal Government. Why are we not discussing a cut or a retrieving of the bounty that the people of the Northwest and the Midwest have enjoyed all these years? People say they want government off of their backs and yet they are the beneficiaries of some of our biggest government programs for the longest number of years. And how about the Department of Agriculture? We are not discussing the biggest welfare program in America. The longest-running and the most lucrative welfare program in America is the farm price supports. The Department of Agriculture handed out $16 billion plus just for farm price supports last year. Sixteen billion is about the same size as the program that feeds millions of children on welfare. But in our population, gentlewomen and gentlemen, we only have a farm family population of 2 percent. Only 2 percent of the total American population is still in the classification of farmers. Most of the billions of dollars that we are handing to the farmers or to the agribusinesses goes to corporate agricultural business. Most of it goes to rich farmers. Tremendous amounts of money could be saved if we would take the rich farmers off of welfare. In the State of Kansas, for example, in most of the rural counties, according to the New York Times, farm families that are there and farmers who are part of the program have averaged between $20,000 and $40,000 a year that is being handed to them every year for doing nothing. A $20,000 to $40,000 check that comes on top of all of the other money that they make. And there is no means test. When you are trying to get aid for dependent children on welfare, you have to meet a means test. You have to show you do not own anything and you have no bank account. In the Department of Agriculture programs and the farm price support programs and the Farmer's Home Loan mortgages and all of these benefits that have been heaped on our agriculture sector for the last hundred years, you do not have to show any means test. Now, I do not want to be misunderstood. I think that the American agricultural industry is the greatest industry in America. I think it is probably one of the most effective industries in the world. There is no other nation that begins to come close to the American farmers, the American agricultural industry, in feeding its population, the population of America. It probably could feed a large sector of the total world if the economics were different. We have the capacity. Our Department of Agriculture has done a magnificent job. And the Department of Agriculture, the whole agriculture program in America, is a sterling example of what can be done by government. Government operated from one end of the spectrum to the other. Government funded the land-grant universities. Government funded the experimental stations for agriculture. Government funded the county agents that took the results of the experimental stations to the farmers in the field; very effective use of science and technology and for that reason, it is a hugely successful industry. Now that agriculture is such a huge and successful industry, why are we continuing to have government play such a major role in agriculture? Why not have the government step out? They talk about abolishing the Department of Education. Why do we not downsize and streamline the Department of Agriculture? Do you know that the Department of Agriculture is the second largest bureaucracy in the Federal Government? It is second only to the Pentagon in term of the number of employees. The Department of Agriculture, they have done a great job. It is a marvelous success story. Private industry can now take over. We could downsize the Department of Agriculture, set a means testing procedure so that it provides aid and assistance only to the farmers who are the poorest farmers. We could privatize part of the Department of Agriculture. There are a whole set of experimental programs, there are research grants, private industry could take that research and development function at this point and do a job just as well. So, instead of continuing to discuss on and on the school lunch program, why do we not discuss the downsizing and the streamlining of the Department of Agriculture? Why do we not discuss the elimination of $16 billion in farm price support payments; welfare for the farmers? Why do we not deal with the farmers on the dole? Why do we not deal with cuts of the F-22 fighter plane? Why do we need an F-22 fighter plane which was originally projected to cost the American people $72 billion. The F-22 fighter plane is manufactured in Marietta, Georgia. The F-22 fighter plane was originally projected to cost $72 billion. We have paid out about 12 billion already for planes and we are projecting over the next six years about $17 billion more in expenditures for F-22 fighters. If you want to keep America from going bankrupt, if you want to keep our grandchildren from having to pay the debt, then cut items like the F-22 fighter. If you need an F-22 fighter plane, it is the most sophisticated thing ever developed in fighter planes. But do we need it? No. The second most sophisticated fighter plane we already have. We own the second most sophisticated fighter plane. We do not need to have another one more sophisticated, because we are not our own enemy. The Soviet Union is not developing any more fighter planes. They are not developing fighter planes that would even contest the one that exists already. Why keep manufacturing a brandnew one called the F-22? So let us save over the next 6 years $17 billion that could be applied then to fund the Summer Youth Employment Program, to make certain there is no we do not kick people out of nursing homes, to guarantee that we do not remove home care from people in great need. Let us go forward and examine all of these expenditures if we really are sincerely interested in the most effective and efficient budget. Mr. Speaker, this is a simple discussion, and I hope the American people are listening closely. Listen to the numbers. In addition to philosophy, it is very important that we understand the numbers. The numbers that are being poured into the defense budget are huge numbers: $17 billion more for F-22 fighters, $2.1 billion for another Seawolf submarine; $28 billion for the CIA; B-2 bombers. We could go on. The majority in this House want to spend another $50 billion for defense. The majority in this House want to spend another $50 billion for defense, while they are telling us they must trim school lunches and they must make more efficient programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Finally, we have new revenue options. Our vision, the caring majority vision versus the vision of the oppressive elite majority. Their vision is we are in a situation where America is on the verge of bankruptcy. To hear the elite, the oppressive elite minority Members talk, we are almost at the stage of Bangladesh. We cannot exist much longer if we continue to try to build a society which is there for everybody. We have to start dumping people overboard. We have to rein in the safety net. Even Ronald Reagan acknowledged that there is a safety net that is needed, that we are now about to dump. The high technology barbarians who are in charge now have no compassion for those people. Yet, every day there are new developments which show that far from being bankrupt and far from having our resources exhausted, America, the Democratic capitalistic society, America has all kinds of new potential for producing revenues. We have just realized $9 billion by selling invisible frequency bands in the sky. Spectrums in the sky which you cannot even see have been sold to the tune of $9 billion, and that process has not ended. By just selling the air over ourselves, we have made money. And in the future, of course, we can always tax the income that is made off of those operations as normally the profits are going to be taxed, any profits made. So we have generated out of nothing. It shows you do not need land. You can take the air and sell it. If you are a nation, the power of nationhood is that you own the air. They used to own the land, and we have given away a lot of the land. That is a chapter in American history which was very successful. You gave away land, you produced free enterprise, and you made great millionaires and produced a middle class. We have done a lot of great things in the past. We have given away too much in some cases. We have given away property that had minerals on it, up until very recently. We are still giving away property that has gold on it and we do not require that the people who mine the gold pay us a royalty and give us back some of the benefits of the lands that the Government and the people own. The people have to assert themselves, and the people are going to have to insist there can be no more nonsense on giving away public lands and not demanding that the public have some percentage of the profits realized from the minerals that we get from those public lands. We could also gain more revenue if we would stop giving away the fruits of Federal and government research. Military research has spawned a whole host of hundreds of new products. We have not reached out and placed the royalty on those products to come back to the public Treasury. We have just given it away. Many of you know, everybody knows of a few products. Television was really perfected by our government research, not just the famous product super glue, which everybody knows was developed by the space program. There are hundreds of products that were produced as a result of government research, and we, the people, who paid the bill to do the research, we get no benefit from those products. That is a source of revenue. We could reach out, and instead of worrying about going bankrupt and putting the elderly on the streets, out of nursing homes, cutting back on Medicaid and Medicare, cutting back on school lunch programs, let us be more creative about claiming what belongs to the people. I am not in favor of new taxes on income. I am not in favor of new personal taxes. But there are ways to get revenue that we ought to closely examine, which have nothing to do with personal income taxes. There are all kinds of loopholes. At a later date we are going to list those loopholes. The Congressional Black Caucus' alternative budget, we intend to close the loopholes that corporations live by in order to maximize their profits and escape paying a just share of the taxes. Corporate taxes, the share of the overall revenue burden borne by corporate taxes, has dropped drastically in the last 20 years. We need to get back to having the corporate world carry their share of the taxes. I am going to yield in a few minutes to a colleague of mine, but I want to make it clear that we are talking about the overall program of the new majority in Congress. We are talking about the fact that the budget process, the rescissions that are now being made right now, the budget that is going to be brought to the floor in May, all of that is part of an overall grand design that is a design, of course, a distorted vision of America, being driven by high-tech barbarians who have no compassion and are really on the wrong track when they conclude we cannot have an America which is for everybody. Contrasted with their position, the position of the oppressive elite minority is a position of the caring majority. We are going to produce a budget, the Congressional Black Caucus is going to produce a budget, which reflects a vision of the caring majority. To talk more about budgets and the rescissions that are now at our doorstep, heartless, cruel decisions that are being made through this rescission process, is my colleague from Texas. I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas [Ms. Jackson-Lee].

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to make one more plea for justice. I want to again beg the leadership of this Congress to abandon its reckless demolition of the programs that have helped to make America great in the eyes of the whole civilized world. The way we as a nation have treated the least among us is the vital ingredient of our greatness. This is a plea for honest decisionmaking. Yes, there is waste in Government and it must be removed. But school lunches and summer youth employment programs are not wasteful. These are the Government programs that work. These are the programs that are still very much needed. The CIA is not needed at the level of $28 billion a year. The farm price supports for rich farmers are no longer needed at the level of $16 billion a year. We don't need another Sea Wolf submarine. We certainly do not need to spend billions of dollars for F22 fighter planes. The F22 enterprise in Marietta, Georgia represents a long-term overwhelming pork barrel. For this same amount of money we could employ twice the number of people in the civilian sector creating infrastructure and services that are needed. The F22 is Republican pork. In the Federal budget this is a huge hog that deserves to be slaughtered. The F22 is Republican Pork The F22 Pork not for me and you The F22 Toys for skies blue Empty of any Enemy crew The F22 Jobs for just a few The F22 Rich Georgia stew Pork pork pork Not for me and you Off the orphans Starve the kids Save the contracts Roll out the bids Bully the poor Be a hi-tech dog Eat the best meat High on the hog For the peach Who gives a hoot The F22 Pork is now The Georgia State fruit Pork pork pork Where they grew The F22 That's the Speaker's Hometown too The F22 Pork pork pork Not for me and you.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to make one more plea for reason and justice in the fiscal decisionmaking process of the 104th Congress. Mr. Speaker, through the rescission process, to immediately cut the Summer Youth Employment Program is a reckless and barbaric act. First, planned school lunch cuts and now the overnight zero in the budget for summer teenage employment. This savage cut again dramatically demonstrates the Republican contempt for the work ethic. We say we want the poor to work and then we wipe out the Jobs Program for teenagers. Instead of saving money by compounding the sense of hopelessness among our youth, let's save money by cutting the Sea Wolf submarine; let us cut the CIA and the intelligence budget from $28 to $14 billion. If we cut farm price supports in half we could save $8 billion. If we discontinue the unnecessary manufacture of the F-22 fighter plane we could save $17 billion over the next 6 years. Using reason and a sense of justice there are effective cuts that can be made to reduce the Federal budget. But the hi-tech barbarian approach is a dishonest approach, an overwhelming bully power approach. Fiscal decisionmaking becoming a form of legalized corruption. Let us please stop the madness now.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, American Agribusiness is one of the most successful industries on the face of the Earth. Due to the vision and foresight of the Congress which enacted the legislation which created the land grant colleges, the agricultural experiment stations, and the county agents, Government research and development made it possible for our farmers to leap way ahead of the rest of the world. No other nation's agriculture industry is even close to the United States when it comes to farm output and efficiency. Let us applaud the Department of Agriculture and all of the nameless workers who over the years have done such a magnificent job in supporting our farmers. But now, Mr. Speaker, most of that work has been done. The mission has been accomplished. We have a monumental success and we can relieve the taxpayers of the burden of helping the agriculture industry, especially the rich corporate farmers. Let's have a means test and from now on let's support only the few remaining poor farm families. Let's stop the indiscriminate subsidies. Let's end the crop insurance. Let's stop the special mortgages. Let's leave the marketplace alone and end the crop subsidies and price supports. Let's get the fat farmers off the dole. The time has come to drastically downsize the Department of Agriculture. We must end farm welfare as we know it. We owe it to the American taxpayers. In this Congress let's work hard to get fat farmers off the dole. The following poem summarizes the seriousness of the situation: Farmers on the Dole Republican patriots Come play your role Keep fat farmers On the dole Helping cuddly honey bees Coddling cattle grazing fees Meat a city orphan Never eats Dole for welfare Dole for cheats Congress sink your fork Deep into Republican pork Hyprocisy over all Drives you up the wall O beautiful spacious skies Small town editorials Festering full of lies Farmers on the dole Farmers on the dole Hi-ho the dairytake Rich farmers on the dole Decades over And over it repeats Dole for welfare Dole for cheats The story's never told About farmers on the dole Seeds not sown Wheat not grown Plow the dollars Deep in the dirt Hide the shame Cover hypocrisy's hurt Farmers on the dole Farmers on the dole Confess to free money's role Rich farmers on the dole Mortgage the barn Until it drops Timid taxpayers Insure the crops Rural swindlers High on the hog Food for the homeless Thrown to the dog The story's never told About farmers on the dole Republican patriots Come play your role Keep fat farmers On the dole.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the Republican assault on public broadcasting represents outrageous overkill by the elite oppressive group that presently holds power in Congress. The benefits of public broadcasting far outweigh the costs. Probably nowhere else in the budget do we achieve a better cost-benefits ratio. American taxpayers definitely get their money's worth from its investment in quality programs on a vast array of topics, subjects, and issues. Like any complex institution public broadcasting can certainly be improved. It must end the trend toward more advertising. There is a need to stop catering to established commentators who have already become well known through commercial media. Instead of repeating the same voices and faces, public broadcasting should give us new ones. Certain producers should be told ``5 years and you're off'' in order to make way for younger talent. The exception to this rule, however, must prevail in the area of children's programming. Some excellent programs for this group will never be picked up by commercial media. We must protect the rights of future children to enjoy Big Bird and Barney. Let us save money somewhere else in the budget, starting with bank bailouts, Mexican bailouts, and welfare for rich farmers. Taxpaying parents are ready to revolt if the Washington budget axe fails on Big Bird and Barney. Protect Big Bird and Barney Big Bird and Barney Must Go To help hungry bankers In Mexico Leadership plays its role Guiding big bankers To the dole Twenty billion plus Won't make jobs for us Please children don't cry Democracy didn't yet die Brave knights are riding Budget axe monsters Can't keep hiding Big Bird and Barney Must go To help hungry bankers In Mexico But babies don't cry Our voting parents Will counterattack To win Big Bird and Barney back.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, all of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus are very concerned about the latest development with respect to an announcement that affirmative action and the elimination of all aspects of affirmative action has been placed on the agenda of the Republican Party. That concern is expressed in many different ways. Several of my colleagues were here yesterday, and they talked about the details of affirmative action from a very legalistic perspective. Several of them are lawyers and they understand the legal wranglings related to affirmative action, some are very familiar with the history of affirmative action laws, and they gave an interesting and useful background on affirmative action. They make their contribution in their way, and I am, on the other hand, concerned about affirmative action from another point of view, the moral implications of the assault on affirmative action that is being projected by the Republican Party, by their leadership. I am concerned about the fact that when you couple an assault on affirmative action with the nastier parts of the Contract With America, and the Contract With America is just beginning to manifest itself in all of its barbarity, and I use that word deliberately, because the aspects of the Contract With America which are going forward now have to do with taking school lunch programs away, limiting school lunch programs, and denying the entitlement to a free lunch to children in need. It has to do with rescissions which are taking place to wipe out the summer youth program, one of the most practical, successful and much needed programs that we have, employing teenagers, young people during the [[Page H2381]] summer. There are all too few jobs already, but in the rescission process the committees have begun to eliminate, first they want to water down this year's program and cut that drastically and then they want to eliminate it completely and on it goes. There are education programs, child nutrition programs, programs that are very vital to poor people and certainly vital to the people in my district that are being cut. And this is just the beginning. It is the beginning of a process of finding in the budget the money needed to give a tax cut which would go mostly to people who are very well off. It is a revision of a process of finding money in a budget in order to increase the defense budget, and if there is any part of the budget that does not need to be increased, certainly it is the defense budget. I think a recent poll shows that the American people in their great wisdom, the common sense of the American people is astonishing, they have in a poll indicated, a large percentage, I think about 60 percent indicated that things should stay the way they are. I do not want to quote the numbers but the overwhelming percentage of people who responded to the poll felt that things should at least stay the way they are or there should be a cut in defense. The smallest group of people who responded, the smallest category of people who responded were people who wanted the defense budget increased. So the leadership of the majority party here is out of step with the common sense and the wisdom of the American people. But their being out of step and having the power, of course, they have the votes, does not mean they are going to cease the folly of increasing the defense budget at the expense of much needed programs like school lunch programs and summer youth employment programs. So, I am very troubled by those cuts, and those cuts are not a game of Republican versus Democrats. The Republicans make one move, Democrats make another. These are cuts which go to the heart of what the Federal Government is all about in terms of providing a safety net for people who are most in need. We are going to snatch away this safety net, we are going to kick people out into the streets. We are going to do some horrendous things in an attempt to balance the budget and in an attempt to find money for greater defense expenditures and for a tax cut for people who need a tax cut least of all. Those are terrible prospects. But when you add to that an announcement that we are going to have an assault on affirmative action, we are going to make affirmative action a major issue in the coming 1996 election campaign, it means that the Contract With America authors and the people who signed the contract, the leadership promoting the contract, the people who are pushing these tremendous domestic cuts and the defense increase, they are not willing to take their package and go to the American people and say well, this is the way we see it, we agree, we disagree with the Democrats, we are in charge now, we are able to push our program through and, therefore, you pass judgment on it. I think it would be fair, although I profoundly disagree with the tremendous budget cuts and I disagree with the thrust and essence of the Contract With America, I still think it is a legitimate opposition program, and the opposition, I call them the elite, oppressive minority. The elite oppressive minority, should take their program to the people and have them pass judgment on it at the ballot box. But when the elite oppressive minority decides that it wants an insurance marker, it wants to guarantee victory by moving into another arena, by attacking affirmative action, already we have an attack on immigrants, now we are going to add an attack on affirmative action, we are adding something to the brew, we are pouring poison into the situation, and saying that we are going to resort to exacerbating racial tensions and playing on racial fears in order to win the 1996 election. It is race-baiting, it is the oldest trick in the world. It is scapegoating and it is going to be, you know, Willy Horton to the maximum degree. We are going to have a situation where people do not think about the budget cuts. They will not think about the merits of the Contract With America. It will just be gut reactions to a racist appeal. That is the way I see the announcement that affirmative action is now going to be a major target between now and 1996. I hope we do not go that way. I hope that the leadership of the majority party here in the Congress will reconsider. I hope that we will go forward and have a contest in 1996 which will be on the merits of the programs offered by the Contract With America, authors and signers versus the Democratic Party, its President, the opposition here in Congress, and that we will have a decent election based on what is best for America and having people make that choice. I do not think we will have a decent election. I think we will go down the road toward disaster if we wage a full-scale attack on affirmative action and we make the next election a racial referendum. It is something that is very tempting. The easy road to power or the easy road to a consolidation of power is very tempting. The people who are the cause of the problems in Yugoslavia, the Serbians, the Serbians who put in motion ethnic cleansing, they wanted an easy road to power, the easiest road to power to exacerbate and excite people's racial fears and to pray on racial tensions. The people in Rwanda, the Hutus, the Hutus sought an easy road to power by exacerbating the differences between the two tribes and the Tutsis. All that started as a matter of political expediency and they were using it to consolidate power. It got out of hand and it became such a frenzy until it spilled over into the streets and people went out and massacred people. It is estimated that 500,000 people were massacred. The Hutus massacred 500,000 Tutsis. It all started with some egomaniac in power, politicians in power who wanted to consolidate their power and made an appeal to the worst in people in order to do that. You might say well, your exaggerating, that could never happen here. No, it could not happen here, overnight certainly, and it will not happen here between now and 1996. But whenever the easy route to power is taken, whenever you choose to play on racial fears, there is no way you can guarantee you are going to be able to turn it off when the time comes to turn it off. The appeal to racial fears at this point in our history I think would be a disaster, and I want to take the time to make my appeal. You know, 100 seems to be a magic number, so if I have to come here to the floor 100 times to make 100 appeals for justice and 100 appeals for us to turn aside from this course of action, then I will do that because I think it is just that important, I think it is just that dangerous that the movement toward racism in our next election will set in motion something that would be disastrous for our country. At a time of maximum prosperity in the richest nation that has ever existed in the history of the world, as we move into the 21st Century Americans must not yield to destruction of our society through the use of a barbaric political process. If we cannot do it any other way we certainly should not resort to playing on racial fears. When you combine an assault on affirmative action with a Republican Contract With America, you create a kind of scorched Earth approach to the reordering of our society. Government by an elite minority, for the benefit of the elite minority, becomes the driving philosophy. We would have to call it the way we see it. I do not think it is exaggerating to say that we have a high-technology, a group that has a great knowledge of high-technology, and they will use electronic witchcraft to promote this oppressive elite minority. And now they want to spread, use that power to spread a racist, anti-immigrant brew throughout the minds of America, to poison the minds of the American voters. The goal of this oppressive minority is to turn democracy on its head by stampeding the majority into voting against its own interests. Assaults on affirmative action, attacks on immigrants, these are actions which are the key elements of a stampeding kind of approach to politics. You do not want people to think, you would want them to feel a gut reaction and act as a result. [[Page H2382]] I think all poor and disadvantaged people whose needs inconvenience the needs, and the programs which serve poor and disadvantaged people inconvenience this oppressive elite minority, I think they become targets as a rule of wanting to get them out of the way, they become the targets of a rather ruthless set of actions. The rescissions that have been announced, the bills that are moving through committees that block grant school lunch programs, and block grant child care programs, and block grant child nutrition programs, and WIC Programs--block grants become a kind of a swindle. We know from experience that when the Federal Government moves from entitlements at the Federal level to block grants at the local level it means that you are setting up a situation where the responsibility to provide for all of those in need will be taken away. You do not have to have an entitlement. If you have a block grant, the State will spend as much money as it has and when the money runs out, no matter how great the need is, it will not spend any more, and the people will have to do without, whether it is hungry children or people in need of child care or any other block-granted function. So the block grant is not just an administrative move, it is not an administrative convenience. The block grant is a swindle that is perpetrated. You start the block grant with an amount of money at one level and you stop. And as the years go by, the block grant is cut. It automatically is cut because no money is added to it to keep up with inflation, and then, of course, sometimes the Committee on Appropriations actively begins a process of cutting. This is the history of block grants, so we have no reason to believe that block grants are not just another way to swindle people out of their entitlements. People who are in great need will be forced to go without as a result of the block grants being instituted. The most specific and the most intensely pursued target of the oppressive elite minority are not just the poor and the disadvantaged. That in general is the way this is being approached, is that all poor and disadvantaged people become obstacles in the way. Their needs inconvenience this oppressive elite minority that is in charge. But among the poor and the disadvantaged, the minority that becomes the group that becomes the biggest target and the most intensely pursued target becomes the American of African descent. The Americans of African descent, the people who are the descendants of slaves, are in a very special category. It is not that we are the only beneficiaries of affirmative action; affirmative action, of course, benefits a lot of other people other than African-Americans. You know, women are the beneficiaries of affirmative action, Asians, Hispanics, a number of people benefit from affirmative action. And they will be hurt in the process. But I think the drive and the focus and the intensity of the move is focused on African-Americans, and that is the way we see it, and that is why we are responding with such intensity. It was the African-American population, the descendants of slaves, who fought the battles during the civil rights era during the fifties and sixties, and we fought for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. We fought for set-asides. We have pressured and pushed and gotten Presidents to issue Executive orders on affirmative action. We have been on the cutting edge, and we are the driving force, so any attempt to wage an assault on affirmative action is an assault on African- Americans, people of African descent. That is the primary thrust of what is happening here. The Contract on America, which started by focusing on the destruction of all poor and working families, has now added an assault on affirmative action to its blitzkrieg. This new aggression makes it crystal clear the primary objective, the No. 1 target, of the oppressive elite minority are African-Americans, the descendants of slaves. If you crush the African-Americans, if you crush the core of the resistance to the planned tyranny of the oppressive minority, this is the merciless logic, crush them first, this is the merciless logic of the opposition, and when the blacks are silenced, the other components will fall in line. Some people will acquiesce after the blacks are silenced. They will acquiesce with a guilty conscience, but they will acquiesce. Many others will find it convenient and comfortable to be bought off or sell out. This is a scenario we see. In the 1996 election, they will turn the election into a racist election. You stampede people into a situation where you consolidate power not on the basis of the programs that you have come forward with or your ideology or your achievements, but on the basis of deep-seated primitive racial fears. While others stumble about in confusion, I think African-Americans clearly see what is happening. We see the enemy converging down upon us. Our intense reaction is based on the fact that we understand. We are not going to wait until it unfolds, and, you know, the details are in place. The very fact that at this particular moment you get an attack on affirmative action, a concerted assault, tells us a great deal, and we understand the implications. The Contract With America is a contract against us to begin with, and then the assault on affirmative action continues that attack. The combination of budget cuts and assaults on affirmative action are definitely designed to bombard the African-American community until it becomes a kind of political Hiroshima, beat it to death. The goals of this oppressive minority, the goal of the oppressive elite minority which is in charge now, is to paralyze us and incapacitate us. They want to bring African-Americans to the point where they are incapable of ever counterattacking. We cannot finish the fight that we have begun for full rights, and we cannot pursue the fight that we started for equal justice if we are the subject of this kind of ruthless attack in 1996. The goal of the ruthless elite, this oppressive minority, is to terminate our vanguard role, to destroy our leadership position in the struggle for justice and opportunity, which African-Americans have traditionally occupied. The situation is that serious, and I would like to plead to the leadership of the Republican Party, the leadership in control of this House, to drop their agenda for the assault on affirmative action. I would like to plead for a different approach to winning the 1996 election in line with the merits of your case and not igniting a racial war that none of us will be able to control. I would like to also, if you are determined to pursue affirmative action and the assault on affirmative action, I would like to also make an appeal for you to take a close look at why we need affirmative action. Affirmative action is a set of activities and programs which are designed to, in the present again, compensate for past wrongs. Affirmative actions are put forth by nations and groups and not be individuals. Individuals who are living now may not have been guilty of the wrongs that led to the implementation of affirmative-action policies, just as the average German alive today is not in any way guilty for what Hitler did in World War II. Nevertheless, his nation is responsible, and his nation pays reparations to those people who were victims. The Nation is a continuing entity in the same way America, the United States of America, is a continuing entity, and we are responsible for the wrongs that were done to a group of people, the African-Americans who were brought here against their will and thrown into slavery. I appeal to all concerned to take a hard look at slavery and not make us force the issue of an examination of slavery and what the implications are. We ought to be concerned about what we did to African-Americans. We ought to be concerned about the descendants of the victims of those crimes. We ought to be concerned about the fact that certain people are the descendants of the beneficiaries of the slave industry. Slavery was an industry, and it went on for 200 years in America. And, therefore, I think, you know, great masses of people were wittingly and unwittingly beneficiaries of the economy that was generated by slavery. It made America richer faster. It built a lot of the institutions that we have, not just in the South. They hang slavery around the neck of the South and leave it there, but in New York City we had [[Page H2383]] one of the largest slave ports in the country, I think the third largest place where you had slaves brought in in the early days of America, which was New York City. It was a port where slaves came in in large numbers, and New York City was built by slave labor. Large numbers of slaves were imported into that area. So it is not just one area of the country. It is the whole country benefited from the slave industry. I think it is fitting and proper to discuss slavery and the crimes involved in slavery as we look at affirmative action. Affirmative action is designed to correct past wrongs. Past wrongs, the most immediate past wrongs were 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the 13th amendment when we had a long history of discrimination, oppression, Klu Klux Klan, lynchings and all kind of things happened for a whole 100 years after slavery was ended. But before that, you had 200 years of slavery. When you put it all together, there is a need to do something, to atone for those sins and to compensate for those crimes. Slavery in America lasted for more than 200 years. The slave industry, as I said before, encompassed more than half the world. It was not just America. It permeated the lives of the citizens of all of the nations of Europe, Africa, South America, North America. Slavery was a dominant driving force at the heart of the economy of the Western World for more than 100 years. At that period of history the slave trade and slave labor was far more valuable than gold, diamonds, oil. Slave labor was a primary means for the accumulation of vast amounts of capital. Slavery was a monstrous, enduring, all-encompassing, overwhelming crime, and it occupies a unique place in human history. In duration, no other crime of that kind against a group has lasted for so long, more than 200 years, that America's slavery lasted. In volume, the number of people involved and the amount of human misery generated and the amount of murder and other phenomena, torture, not other phenomenon matches this global crime. Now, as I spoke here last week, I mentioned in the process that merely crossing the Atlantic, large numbers of slaves perished, and I started that as an introduction to my discussion of slavery as a background for justifying affirmative action. Large numbers of people perished crossing the Atlantic. It was just a figure that I thought was interesting. I mentioned that 200 million people perished in the Atlantic slave crossings, because that is a figure I have heard repeatedly, given by certain historians and lecturers, and this aroused a lot of interest. So I want to just take a moment before I continue to mention the fact that I had gotten a large amount of inquiries and a large amount of comments about the statement about the large number of people who had perished in the crossing, just crossing the Atlantic, a large amount of slaves. There were people who called who merely wanted to use racial epithets and let off steam, and I want to tell them I do not appreciate that. I prefer for you to keep your dirt at home. We are not interested in your racial epithets. You know, other people who called seriously wanted to know, you know, how such a large figure was generated. On some well-known TV show, they ridiculed the number and talked about it and generated a lot of interest, and I am glad that we started a dialog about slavery. I am glad that the process has begun. The figure of 200 million certainly was questioned. I got serious people, some historians and experts who were upset about the fact that that figure was being used. But they also, some of those same experts who called and discussed it, said that they understood where I got the figure from, that there are a set of people, historians and experts on the subject, supposed to be experts, who take the position that the number was that high. In fact I really read it as recently as last June in a New York Times column, if you want to know where the figure came from. It is not just from the column that I referred to, I had heard it many times from various people whom I heard talking. I did not know there was so much controversy. I did not even think about the fact that the figure seems to be a little large due to the fact that the capacity of the slave ships was limited and all the other things. I just have heard it mentioned so many times I recited it as a fact. In this New York Times column that appeared on June 19, 1994, just this past summer, there was a statement which explains some of what has been happening. It let me know that among the people who are supposed to know the subject very well, there is a lot of disagreement. I will read one quote from the article. It says, Estimates of how many blacks were lost at sea in roughly 400 years of the slave trade in the Americas vary widely. Some place the figure between 100 and 200 million; others say perhaps as many as 14 million. Whichever is true, many historians note that the number of enslaved Africans who died at sea was so great that sharks learned to follow the slave routes because they fed on the bodies thrown overboard. That is an article in the New York Times, June 19, 1994, page 25, column 1. It is a longer article about the whole matter of slaves who perished at sea. But among the historians, there is a great deal of controversy. I do not want to get into the middle of that. Some say one of reasons you have such wild estimates, differences are so great, is that some historians and experts are estimating the number of people who were lost due to slavery over a period of 400 years, not just the 200 years that the North American slave trade existed, but the period of slavery extended over 400 years. They are not looking at just slavery as it affected North America but also the slave ships that went to South America, the Caribbean, and all over. That is how they get some of the divergence in their totals, the differences in their totals. They also say many experts refused to accept the records that are available and that the citations of some historians who have looked at the record that are available from the British and the French, Portuguese and the Spanish, that these records are a joke, that they are not reliable, that slavery has always been a kind of a bandit unground operation. Even during the period when it was regulated--most of the time it was not regulated--but during the period when nations attempted to regulate slavery, the records were ridiculous because they made rules and nobody checked or tried to enforce them. The British, for instance, had a rule that any slave ship could only carry slaves in relation to their tonnage. It could only carry a certain number of slaves. The size of ships determined the number of slaves it would carry. Therefore, the number of slave berths on the ship had to be in accordance with the tonnage of the ship. Immediately, it was noted that most of those same ships, they doubled the number of slaves that they carried regardless of the berths.They crowded, put two people into every berth for one. That kind of practice was a regular practice. They noted that when they recorded their cargoes, they just told the lies and they did not record their cargoes. Sometimes when they arrived in parts, what they recorded as the number of slaves on board had nothing to do with the real number, and some ships off loaded slaves before they got into ports where they kept records. Pirates took ships, in many cases, and did not obey any regulations, and they landed cargoes in various places. On and on it goes. There were so many holes in the recordkeeping until these people have estimates that are far greater than most conservative estimates say, the records were ridiculous and could not be relied upon. That was the matter of legal slavery, there was illegal slavery. After the practice was outlawed, there was no attempt to regulate it, it was just outlawed, it went on for many, many years, decades after it was outlawed. There were no regulations, and nobody attempted to abide by regulations. So you have wildly gyrating numbers. I would say this is a debate that I will leave to the historians and experts on slavery. I did not mean to get off on [[Page H2384]] that tangent. I think I will stop counting at 10 million or 20 million. You know, when you are dealing with human beings, human suffering, human murder, 10 million, 20 million, that is enough for me. I will not argue about the rest. My example was that here was such a horrendous crime, starting with the slave trade and the delivery of the cargo from one continent to another, that we ought to take a close look at it as we deliberate about affirmative action. It was one of the most cruel and inhuman tortures ever inflicted on mankind, this transport from Africa to New World in packed slave ships. It was only the beginning of the kind of torture and pain and suffering that the slaves endured. When they arrived at the markets in America, of course they were sold at auction, they were declared property of the slave owner, and once that happened, the daily lives of the slaves in America was as bad as any torture that the devil in hell could heap upon the backs of the worst sinners. In their daily routine, slaves were forced to endure hunger, filth, rape, torture, murder. The life of a slave was often treated with less sanctity than the life of a horse. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, more than 200 years in America, the crimes against slaves went on and on. It was a unique kind of human destruction. The object of the slave industry was not to incinerate or destroy the body of the slave, the object of America's slavery was to obliterate the soul of the slave. They wanted to keep the body, make it a more efficient beast of burden, but they wanted to destroy the human soul. Slave owners were seeking to breed, to condition, to train the world's most efficient beast of burden, enhance and build up the slave body but destroy and obliterate the slave's soul. This was the monstrous mission of the slave economy. It was illegal to teach a slave to read. Strict punishment was inflicted upon anyone who tried to teach a slave to read. No sense of family was permitted to slaves. Slave children were regularly sold away from their mothers. Most slaves were never allowed to know who their fathers were. And on and on it goes. I am not interested in giving a lecture on slavery. What my concern is is that as we look at affirmative action, the set-asides, all the kinds of things that we have done in the very recent past, in the last three decades, in the last three decades we have taken some steps to begin to deal with the impact, the fallout, the results; some of the results, that is, of what was done during that period. This is only in the last three decades. So after three decades of taking steps which were positive steps, removing the barriers of segregation, establishing set-aside programs, establishing affirmative action programs, promoting diversity in the marketplace, we have done some wonderful things in the last three decades. But we had two centuries of the institution of slavery. After that 100 years, another century of oppression. My point is, we as Americans, black and white, should take a closer look at the origin of the wrongs, the nature of the wrongs, the nature of the crime, the nature of the since that affirmative action is seeking to overcome. We should take a closer look and we should perhaps establish a commission to look at slavery and is implications, to look at maybe the need to go beyond affirmative action, do something different from affirmative action, maybe reparations. There is a bill that is introduced every year by my colleague, John Conyers, which deals with setting up a commission to study reparations, just to study the possibility of reparations for the descendants of slaves because the descendants of slaves are descendants of victims. Maybe we should take a close look at that. Maybe we should do that in some kind of reasonable way and not shout at each other about it. If we have an assault on affirmative action on the one hand and demagogues in the streets trying to arouse people's racial fears, then we will have to answer with other shouts and screams about the victimization and the cruelty, and I do not think it is the best way to approach this. Let us look at it in a reasonable atmosphere. Let us look at it with a commission. Let us take a look at whether affirmative action meets the need. The President has said he wants to review affirmative action programs. My answer to that is, good, my response to that is, good, Mr. President. Review affirmative action programs, and you may find there is a need to strengthen many of them or you may find that many of them are not adequate to accomplish the purpose we want to accomplish and we want to do something stronger, something beyond the affirmative action. I hope that we could enter that kind of dialog and could have a look at affirmative action in a positive way instead of the use of affirmative action as a weapon, the use of affirmative action as a short cut to power, the use of affirmative action to poison the atmosphere, the use of the assault on affirmative to whip people into a frenzy and to have American voters stampede on election day against their own interests. Let me just take one more step that I am sure will not be a pleasant one for most of you. In examining slavery, you are going to find many, many very interesting things. Maybe we ought to have parents teach their kids about slavery and not have them learn about it in the streets because there are horrors that need to certainly be discussed in gentle tones. We are very concerned at this point, some people have made us very concerned about teenage pregnancy. Teenage pregnancy is always an evil in my opinion. It is a double evil because you destroy the life of a child who is the mother, not prepared for that kind of responsibility, and you certainly destroy the life or run the risk of destroying the life of the child who has to be raised by a child. No one would like to see teenage pregnancies reduced as much as I would or people who have large numbers of pregnant teenagers in their districts. No one would like to see welfare not be used as a tool to perpetuate teenage pregnancies. I think that there have been some abuses in this area. There is a need to take a hard look at it and to approach it in a reasonable manner and try to do the things that are positive to end large numbers of teenage pregnancies. I think that the wrong way to approach it is to demonize teenage mothers and make them all monsters, teenage mothers suddenly become monsters and some people sort of imply that it is a threat to the moral fabric of America, these teenage pregnancies. I think that there was a time when teenage pregnancies were a threat to the moral fabric of America. I am just going to close with an example of the kind of way in which teenage pregnancies were once a threat to the moral fabric of America. During slavery, teenage pregnancies were promoted by slave owners. During slavery, it benefited the industry to have teenagers become pregnant as fast as possible. During slavery, every girl who was a slave was expected to become a mother as fast as possible. The horrors of this need to be considered. We had a threat to the moral fabric of the Nation. We should be thankful that we ended slavery. We should be thankful that there was an Abraham Lincoln. We should be thankful that there was a 13th amendment, the Emancipation Proclamation. We should be thankful that we, in 1995, are out of all of that grotesque, those grotesque practices, because they were horrendous and unbearable and it was a threat to the Nation. But the people who are in control of the present society and who determine what happens to teenage mothers in many cases need to hear that they are in control. If teenagers had some hope, if teenage males as well as teenage females could look forward to a future where a job was possible, if they could look forward to going to college, those who have what it takes and those who qualify, that they are going to be able to get into college without having to have that determined about whether or not their parents have money, if they are going to be able to enjoy the benefits of the Pell grants which are being threatened, enjoy the benefits of certain other higher education programs that we have right now which are being threatened by the budget cuts, if they when they come out of college because we have an economy which is doing the things necessary to keep the quality of life at a certain level and, therefore, you need people for that purpose, then we would have a different story in terms of teenage pregnancies, if young people could look forward to a better life. There is a great concentration of teenage pregnancy among black youth, black teenagers. But I assure you, just like every other social ill in America, if we do not attend to it, if we do not provide some hope for black teenagers, the same kind of problem will drift into the white community and the other ethnic groups. It will result in the same, it will have the same result. No hope, an economy which offers no hope, a world which does not care about allowing people to develop to their fullest capacity, that will produce the same results in any ethnic group eventually. But the present situation that we control, we are not providing any jobs. We have just taken steps to cut off teenager summer jobs. The Department of Labor has just transferred from the category of jobs for urban youth, they have transferred that money, large amounts, into a category for displaced workers. Displaced workers need it. We ought to have the guts to go at the appropriate amount for displaced workers and not take the money away from teenage youth in the cities to go to displaced workers or anybody else. All of these policies add up to a control of the economy, a control of the society which determines the lives of these teenages. In a less direct way, slave owners determined the lives of teenagers. Slave owners had direct control of the life of their slaves. They had direct control of the lives of the teenage girls. And here is how they behaved. And here is something we still, a crime we still have to atone for. ``When a girl became a woman''--I am reading from a book called Bullwhip Days, ``Bullwhip Days, the Slaves Remember.'' It is an oral history and Bullwhip Days was compiled by the Federal Writers Project. During the depression, the WPA funded writers to do projects so the Federal Writers Project went out and they interviewed slaves. They determined that there were a limited number of slaves who still were alive. People who had been born slaves, lived as slaves. They went out and they interviewed them. They recorded the interviews. And then the results of those interviews, some of those, these are excerpts that were taken from those interviews of actual slaves. So I am going to read in the next few weeks from Bullwhip Days. I am just going to read a small section of it today dealing with teenage pregnancy. ``When a girl became a woman,'' this is the voice of a slave talking, ``when a girl became a woman, she was required to go to a man and become a mother. The master would sometimes go and get a large hale, hardy Negro man from some other plantation to go to his Negro woman. He would ask the other master to let this man come over to his place to go to his slave girls. A slave girl was expected to have children as soon as she became a woman. Some of them had children at the age of 12 and 13 years old. Negro men six feet tall went to some of these children.'' Slave masters were in control of the lives of the teenagers. Part of the industry was to make the teenagers pregnant. That was from a slave named Hilliard Yellerday. From the voice of Hannah Jones, Hannah Jones talks in very crude terms: Ben Oil had a hundred niggers. He just raised niggers, on his plantation. His brother-in-law, John Cross, raised niggers, too. He had a hundred and twenty-five niggers. He had a nigger farm. His older brother-in-law, old man English, had a hundred niggers. Dey all hes' had nothin' else but niggers. That was what their business was, raising niggers. Hannah Jones. Lewis Jones, the voice of Lewis Jones: My mammy am owned by Massa Fred Tate and so am my pappy and all my brudders and sisters. How many brudders and sisters? Lawd A'mighty! I'll tell you, `cause you asks, and dis nigger gives de facts as `tis. Let's see; I can't lect de number. My pappy have twelve chillun by my mammy and twelve by anudder nigger, name' Mary. You keep de cout. Den, dere am Lisa. Him have ten by her. And dere am Mandy. Him have eight by her. And dere am Betty. Him have six by her. Now, let me `lect some more. I can't bring de names to mind, but dere am two or three others what have jus' one or two chillun by my pappy. Dat am right--close to fifty chillun, `cause my mammny done told me. ``You've got to understand, the master told my pappy that he is the breeding nigger.'' He is the breeding nigger. Lewis Jones. Finally, I close with John Smith, another slave. The voice of John Smith: My marster owned three plantations and three hundred slaves. He started out wid two `oman slaves and raised three hundred slaves. One wuz called ``Short Peggy,'' and the udder wuz called ``Long Peggy.'' Long Peggy had twenty-five chilluns. Long Peggy, a black `oman, wuz boss ob de plantation. Marster freed her after she had twenty-five chilluns. Just think o'dat--raising three hundred slaves wid two `omans. It sho' is de trufe, do.' And that was the voice of John Smith. Every time a teen-aged daughter or granddaughter or great granddaughter of these two women became of age, they had to become pregnant and have children as part of the slave industry. I think pregnancy, teenage pregnancy under those conditions, was a threat to the moral fiber of America. If it had continued, of course, this Nation would have gone down, down, down, and not been able to supply the moral leadership for the free world. We ended that kind of condition, but the results of it en masse, it was not just done in this one plantation. It was all across the South, breeding farms, and nobody ever talks about this. It is just one aspect of the crime of slavery, one aspect that needs to be brought to light, and you can take a look at it. We may take a look at rape, we may take a look at torture, we may take a look at murder, we may take a look at all the efforts made to deny the slaves the right to learn to read and write even after they were freed. We may take a look at the Ku Klux Klan. I hope we do not have to take a look at all these things in defense of affirmative action, to prove how great the wrong was. But if affirmative action and programs like affirmative action exist to correct past wrongs, then people need to understand how deep and how broad and how ugly those wrongs were as part of the discussion. If we are going to have a discussion to eliminate and erase, if we are going to denigrate and castigate people who are the beneficiaries of affirmative action today, then take a look at their ancestors and what they had to go through. They are descendants of the victims, and there are other people who are descendants of the beneficiaries. People benefited. They got rich from slavery. The economy boomed in many places. The descendants of the beneficiaries now want to further punish and persecute the descendants of the victims. This is an odd way, perhaps you think, to approach the discussion of affirmative action. But I think that it has to be done if we are not to commit a sin, an error, a set of crimes greater than even slavery was. If we set off racial wars, if we play on racial fears, if we heighten the race fears in the country just to win the next election, we may set in motion something we can never stop. In one election we had Willie Horton, now we are going to have an assault on affirmative action. If they keep working these appeals to race, where do we go from there? We have seen what happened in Serbia when people played the race card. We have seen what happened in Rwanda when people, leaders, demagog played the race card. We have seen what happened in Germany when demagogues played the race card, the religion card, sent one group off after another in a scapegoating process. That is the direction we are headed in, and some of us are alarmed, so alarmed that we come to you with these very unpleasant discussions. We need to take a look at what wrongs were committed and be chastened by that as we go forward. Let's stop the people who want to destroy America with race-baiting. Let's stop the assault on affirmative action now.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, it is customary for the Congressional Black Caucus during this observance of Black History Month to allow Members to speak about whatever aspects of black history they wish to speak of. We have had a number of different testimonials to black history. I would like to stay close to the theme that has been developed by the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History. Some of my colleagues have dealt with that theme, but I would like to focus on it in more detail and try to relate it to what is currently happening here in the Congress. The theme that has been set forth by the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History is ``Reflections on 1895: Douglas, Du Bois, and Washington''; ``Reflections on 1895: Douglass, Du Bois, and Washington.'' I suppose the association chose 1895 because 1895 is exactly 100 years ago. We are in 1995, and they chose to reflect on 1895, and I think it was a stroke of genius that they put Douglas, Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington together, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Frederick Douglass. These are all giants in black history. These are all people of great stature. They happened all to be alive in 1895. In 1895 it was the last year of Frederick Douglass' life. He died in 1895. In 1895 Booker Washington was alive. In 1895 W.E.B. DuBois was alive. W.E.B. DuBois was born in 1868, and he died in 1963. Booker Washington was born in 1856, and he died in 1915. Frederick Douglass was born in 1817, and he died in 1895, a hundred years ago. I was very much influenced in my life by a book that I stumbled across in the library when I was in the sixth grade called, ``Up from Slavery,'' the autobiography of Booker T. Washington. I have also read the writings of DuBois and Frederick Douglass. We are now in 1995, and the question is of what significance is 1895 to us here in 1995, of what significance are the lives of these three giants in black history? In 1895 you were past the Civil War, the end of the Civil War, a little more than 25 years. The Civil War, what I choose to call the War Against Slavery, had ended, and in 1895 we had gone through a period in history which is called the Reconstruction, an all too short period where the duly freed slaves were now allowed for a brief time to participate in civic affairs. They actually had the majority in some State legislatures, and the legislature of the State of South Carolina passed some of the most far-reaching social legislation in the history of the country until the New Deal. The legislation of South Carolina performed magnificently, and many other legislatures. There was a whole period where blacks struggle to grapple with the running of towns, counties, and there were blacks who came to Congress also during that period. But by 1895 this had all come to a crashing halt. In 1895 of course Booker Washington was very much alive, as I said before. That was the last year Frederick Douglass was alive. Frederick Douglass died with a broken heart. He had seen all of the hope of Reconstruction come crashing down, all the hope of progress, of true freedom, of onward and upward advancement for the people of African descent, the former slaves, all that had come crashing down. The Freed Man's Bureau, which was established shortly after the slaves were freed, had been wiped out. The Freed Man's Bureau was possibly the first social program ever authorized by the Federal Government. That had been wiped out. All attempts to do anything to help the newly freed slaves assimilate had been abandoned, and not only were there no attempts by the government of the established order to assist the slaves or the former slaves. There was a great deal of hostility that had been projected by 1895 in slaves, and slave leadership, and slave-- the former slaves, their leadership in society, their institutions. All were struggling in a hostile environment. I would like to just comment on the most recent giant who watched all of this happen. DuBois was born in 1868, so he saw the Reconstruction, the last days of the Reconstruction, the first Reconstruction period. He saw it crumble, but DuBois was an exceptionally advantaged individual. He happened to have been born in Massachusetts, an environment which encouraged him to go forward and get ahead. So, W.E.B. DuBois became the first doctorate. He was the first person of African descent to get a PhD from Harvard, and he was a great intellectual, wrote many books and saw himself as being very important in trying to reconstruct the soul of black folks. He wrote one book called, ``The Souls of Black Folk'' because he understood that one of the objectives of slavery had been to obliterate the soul of black folk. The whole institution of slavery was designed to destroy the humanity of the slaves. A slave was to be an efficient beast of burden, and slavery could not do that as long as you were dealing with a human being. You could not let slaves operate as if they were human. You could not allow them to have families. So it was, you know, deliberately that every effort was made to tear families apart. First officially and formally it was against the law for them to get married. They could not get married. They had to devise their own means of being married for short periods of time, but those were only short periods of time where they had their own arrangements among families because families were torn apart frequently by being sold. One, traditionally very young children were taken from their mother's arms and sold into slavery far away. There was no such thing as a mother or a husband being kept with a wife because he happened to be the father of her children. They were sold like animals. So, you know, the need to restore the soul of the people of African descent was a major preoccupation of DuBois. You have to reconstruct institutions, construct new institutions, because in order to make the slave more effective and efficient as beasts of burden they were cut off from their past tribal customs. They were deliberately loaded on slave ships and brought over here in arrangements which placed slaves next to each other from different tribes so they chaos prevented any revolt or any kind of getting together to do anything. So all of that had to be counteracted in the view of DuBois. Booker T. Washington took an approach of you have to develop certain kinds of means of coping with life as it is. Booker T. Washington was a very practical man. He founded Tuskegee Institute and felt that the first thing the slaves had to do, the ex-slaves, former slaves, had to do was to learn skills, occupations; you know, job training, and less emphasis should be placed on learning the classics, learning the right poetry or dealing with music. The things that DuBois was concerned with was of no concern to Booker T. Washington. Self-help and building a practical economy within the eternal communities of slaves was a preoccupation of Booker T. Washington. He was criticized for not espousing a form of education that would help blacks to become poets, and intellectuals and philosophers. I think some of the criticism is valid, but I think the combination of DuBois' approach and a Booker Washington's approach was that really would have worked best instead of fighting each other, instead of two schools of thought being developed. It would have been great if they could have come together. Frederick Douglass, the earliest of the three, is a person I would like to focus on. He died in 1895, as I said before, and Frederick Douglass was born a slave. Frederick Douglass was born in a time when it was illegal to teach slaves to read. So the very fact that he learned to read, the very fact that he educated himself, became a great writer, became a great orator, a great thinker, a great organizer; all of that is due to an exceptional set of talents that this individual possessed. He died in 1895, as I said before. This is 1995. Some of the things that are happening right here in the Congress right now remind me of the era of 1895 and the period leading up to 1895 when the Reconstruction benefits had all collapsed and the people of African descent experienced a great setback. We have forces at work now which are attempting to set back the progress made by the people of African descent, the descendants of slaves, the victims of one of the most heinous crimes ever committed against humanity. There are attempts being made to roll back the clock and take away programs that provide life and death sustenance to large numbers of people who are poor because of the fact that they are trapped in situations where they cannot go forward. A mismanaged economy has taken away the jobs, and various other problems exist, and these are people who comes from a slave background. I am a descendant of slaves. A Mexican who comes across the border in California, no matter how poor they are, they have far more than the slaves brought with them, because they have some sense of family that they left in Mexico. They are often coming to people that they know in this country, so the poorest person crossing the border has something of value that slaves did not have. All that was taken away. No descendant of a slave can say they can go back in history and lean on ancestors who had this to pass down, no inheritance, no help whatsoever. That is the lot of people of African descent. They had to make it all by themselves. I say all this because I understand that in addition to the whole series of onslaughts being waged against certain programs that benefit people of African descent, we now have a threat on affirmative action. There is a coming onslaught against affirmative action which will also finish off some of the benefits gained through what I call the second reconstruction. The period leading up to 1995 has the civil rights in it, the Voting Rights Act, a number of other progressive steps taken to compensate for all that was not done when the slaves were set free. Now we are talking about a colorblind America. Suddenly we want nobody to be given any extra assistance. We readily understand the need to assist people who are victims of earthquakes. We readily understand the need to assist people who are the victims of floods or people who are the victims of hurricanes. We rush to give assistance to those victims, but we do not want to give assistance to victims trapped in big cities, mismanaged economies where jobs have been taken away, and they are also victims. We do not want to give the same kind of assistance. We also do not want to give assistance in recognition of the fact that there is a slave history. I want to end on this note, because there will be a continuation of what I have started here. I want everybody to know that Frederick Douglass is most famous for a speech he made in Rochester, New York. He was invited on the 4th of July to address a great gathering there. He was a former slave, but he was invited to address a gathering there. He was known as a great abolitionist, a great orator. And during his address he asked some very blunt questions: Why do you invite me here if you are not interested in helping to end slavery and end the effects of slavery? Why do you invite me here to celebrate freedom, when at this moment dastardly deeds are being done all across the Nation to my people? Why do you invite me? His confrontation with those who had invited him was so forthright that there was a riot in Rochester. He had to run for his life. I am afraid that those who want to attack affirmative action and those who want to combine the onslaught against social programs and the onslaught against education programs and all of the things that are going to drive us back in time and eliminate the benefits of a second reconstruction for people of African descent, I want them all to know, we are not going to sit still and take it quietly. We are going to come like Frederick Douglass and make all of those who want to see the world in very simple-minded terms only today is important. They want to erase 200 years of slavery, 200 years of crimes against humanity, unlike any that ever existed. We do not talk much about this in the African-American community. Nobody wants to dredge up slavery. My parents did not want my teachers to teach me anything about slavery. They felt ashamed of it, the victims being ashamed. I as not ashamed. I was a victim. But for every victim or descendant of victims, there are descendants of criminals, the people who perpetrated that. We do not want to get into that if we are not forced into it. If you force us into it, we have to review what does America owe for all of those years that it officially permitted slavery to exist? In the Constitution, slavery is recognized. A slave is considered three-fifths of a man in the Constitution. So our Government and all that has come after our Government has to bear the burden of blame for letting the institution of slavery exist long after it was established. What about the 200 million people who were lost in the Atlantic crossing? Very conservative estimates say the slave trade, just the crossing of the Atlantic, bringing the salves across, there were 200 million people who died coming across. So great was the number of people thrown overboard, that it altered the ecology of the oceans. The sharks even now follow after ships along a trail seeking the flesh that was thrown overboard in all those years, 200 years of the slave trade. Once the slaves found themselves in this country, they were treated, of course, like beasts of burden. We have all of that that we will be forced to dredge up and forced to discuss. Repatriations. Repatriations are due, but people consider that out of the question, to talk about some kind of compensation for all those 200 years of free labor and for the 100 years after that of illegal segregation and other kinds of repression. We do not want to deal with that, but we will be forced to deal with it if you are going to attack affirmative action, if you attack the programs that help the most needy people in our communities. We will be forced to have a review of what it is owed, what does this country owe, what do individuals owe, and how might some of these same individuals who insist on persecuting the decedents of slaves, the victims of slavery today, how might some of them fare if we had some genealogists to go back in their history and check and of their ancestors participated in the rape and the murder and the torture that went on daily in slavery. The production Roots that appeared on television was a disinfected, sterilized, cleaned-up version of slavery. Slavery was the closest thing to hell, and it endured on and on, decade after decade, for 200 years. Nothing like it ever existed, and we hate to have to deal with it. But on this occasion of the observance of Black History Month, I serve warning on all of those out there who want to wage war on little meager efforts to compensate like affirmative action, a very piddling effort to compensate for that heinous crime, all of those who want to take us on, we will be forced to defend ourselves by requesting a review, a thorough review of the crime of slavery and the implications of that crime on all the descendants, the victims and the perpetrators.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Virginia, and I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Watt].

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey. I yield to the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Scott].

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Louisiana. Month, I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Donald Payne.

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentlewoman from Texas, and I yield now to the gentleman from Louisiana [Mr. Jefferson].

Mr. OWENS. I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina. Continuing our special order observance of Black History Month, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas, Ms. Sheila Jackson-Lee. (Ms. JACKSON-LEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)