Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, the bloody spectacle of this week is not the release of Mel Gibson's gory movie exploiting the suffering of Jesus Christ. In this hemisphere, 600 miles from our shores, blood is flowing in the streets of Haiti with the complicity of the Bush administration. This White House and its agents are like Pontius Pilate, pretending to wash their hands while the democratic nation of Haiti is assassinated.

At least one former CIA asset has been identified as a leader of the band of savage guerrillas. The people of the United States must turn their backs on this conspiracy and demand that the democratic nation of Haiti, the democratic government, the duly-elected President of Haiti be supported by the United States Government and that Aristide be allowed to serve out his next 2 years without any compromise with bands of thugs in the street.

There is only one opposition. The so-called civil opposition is not civil at all. They operate hand in hand with the violence. Stop the violence and support democracy in Haiti.

Mr. Speaker, the Republican economists, the Wall Street Journal and other conservative propaganda organs are loudly proclaiming that the recession is over. They are trumpeting a new prosperity. But there are no jobs for the more than three million who lost their jobs. In my District unemployment is an awful reality. Every worker would like to be employed in a job that allows him to bring home a check big enough to meet his family's needs. However, if you don't have a job, then you welcome the desperately needed unemployment insurance.

The stories of two unemployed workers in my district put a human face on the ugly statistics related to this calamity. John Pleck and Nina Worrell both face an uncertain future because of the Bush Administration's focus on tax cuts for the rich. John's UI benefits expired in December, leaving him with no income. He spends each day searching the ``job wanted ads'' while submitting applications for various jobs. The Democratic plan would provide John with more time to find a well paying job. John's story is heard everyday throughout the United States. In fact, John's current situation is very similar to another constituent in my district. Mrs. Nina Worrell spent 14 years working for United Airlines. Mrs. Worrell has been unemployed for more than a year and has struggled to pay her bills. Her UI benefits also expired in December, leaving Mrs. Worrell with few choices. While she has continued to search for a new job, the unemployment rate in New York has continued to skyrocket. We must extend UI benefits for people such as John and Nina.

The Republican Administration continues to support policies that harm America: Continuation of the Republican war against working families; failure to appreciate contributions of working families to the overall national resources and purpose; the war in Iraq being fought by the relatives of these unemployed Americans.

Democrats prefer an economic stimulus package for jobs. The compassionate, the right action to take, the policy which best serves the national interests and national security at this time is the simple extension of unemployment insurance.

I urge a ``yes'' vote for this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment.

Mr. Speaker, because of an emergency in my district, I missed rollcall vote No. 6 and No. 7. If present I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. And I would like to inform him that I was tardy in arriving because I was informed that the Republicans would not be taking the next hour and that I would be taking the next hour instead.

So I want to continue the gentleman's discussion in the next hour, and I invite any Members who would like to come and join me in that endeavor.

I am going to talk about common-sense legislative priorities, and practically every priority I discuss will be related to budget and appropriations matters. And I want to thank those the three Members. I watched the presentations. And starting with the Technicolor presentation of the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott), I learned a great deal in terms of how you can graphically discuss what is happening in America. The chart with the Social Security was astounding.

I have a good friend, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler), who would like to make a speech that Social Security is not in jeopardy. It will go on for a long, long time, and in the

foreseeable future it will almost never reach a point where it would be out of money. But the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) made those calculations a couple of years ago and he is still making them. He never anticipated the tax cut. He never anticipated the kind of recklessness that this administration has undertaken with respect to taking revenue out of the pot and driving us to a crises with respect to budget matters.

It is hard for people with common sense or ordinary Americans to understand the excesses and extremes that are embodied in the policies of this administration.

I did not hear any mention, but I am sure someone mentioned the fact that the war in Iraq by the most conservative estimates is spending $1 billion a week. That is a conservative estimate. A little arithmetic will let us know. A billion dollars a week, 52 weeks a year, that would be $52 billion a year in Iraq. We have already appropriated $87 billion and previously more than $70 billion. So about three times that amount, the $52 billion, has already been appropriated for the war. We are three times greater than $1 billion a week.

That defies the imagination, when we look at the fact that in the President's State of the Union speech he talked about not allowing the domestic budget to go beyond a 4 percent increase, which means that many domestic programs would have to be cut, while on the other hand he did not attach a percentage or a figure to additional appropriations that he would be asking the Congress for with respect to the war in Iraq.

We ought to focus in on budget and appropriations matters from one hour of the day to the next and from one day of the week and all the weeks and all the months. That is the issue, how are we going to expend the taxpayers' money to make a better life for the American people. We cannot talk about it too much.

Let us focus on the fact that in the Constitution, the Preamble, they talk about promoting the general welfare. We provide for the common defense, but in that same Preamble, they discuss promoting the general welfare.

How do we spend $1 billion a week in Iraq to promote the general welfare, or, really, three times that amount? It is $3 billion being spent somewhere over there. I do not know whether Halliburton is getting the other $2 billion or not. The estimates keep coming out. It is $1 billion a week; but when we add up the arithmetic, we see we get more. So what is Halliburton getting? How are they skewing that?

Halliburton Company admitted that in one transaction two of their employees have gotten a $6 million bribe. In one transaction, two of their employees have gotten $6 million. So we can see how big the figures are and how big the deals are and how corrupt and crooked the deals can become.

At the same time, over here, if we look at $1 billion, we can build 100 state-of-the-art schools for $10 million a piece with $1 billion. Make the contrast.

I heard my colleague from Virginia say that the interest on the national debt over a period of time is going to be $300 billion, and for $300 billion we can create 10 million jobs. Ten million jobs at $30,000 each, 10 million jobs for what we are going to pay in interest on the national debt because of the fact it is being recklessly racked up going forward.

So what is $30,000 a year, you say? That is not enough to inject a mission crunch, but that is more than most Americans are making when we look at the income for families of four. Last week, I think, in Barbara Walters ``20/20'' show, they had a discussion of myths that need to be demythologized, and they talked about are people happy if they have more money. It is interesting that they said that people making less than $30,000 a year, family of four, they are miserable, and between $30,000 and $50,000 they begin to rise, and at $50,000 a year, a family of four can really be happy. The real happiness is not affected after $50,000 on up, but between $30,000 and $50,000 people are miserable, unhappy and to reach a point where a family can really be happy.

I do not know how much science there is behind that. They do a lot of interviews, et cetera, but $30,000 per year can provide 10 million jobs. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott) said that before, and I think it is something we ought to take into consideration.

We are in a situation where common sense has been thrown out the window. Common sense is not driving policy in our Nation.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to continue this discussion in a few minutes, and I appreciate the gentleman having started this, and he has cause to be congratulated for focusing on what matters most, this budget.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to continue the discussion that we have just had in a slightly different vein. I would like to broaden it beyond numbers and figures and talk a little more of philosophy with the understanding that we decision-makers here in the Congress, all of us are very bright people. One does not get to Congress unless they are very bright. So whether it is Republican or Democrat, we have bright and educated people who are. If they make decisions that are wrong, it is not because they are not knowledgeable. So I am not going to question the knowledge of anyone.

I do want to question the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be swayed into a situation where we make some very irresponsible decisions; and beyond irresponsible, we make some barbaric decisions.

I have got barbarism on my mind because I am sort of a captive of a series running on the History Channel right now called ``The Barbarians,'' and they got Attila and the Tartars. They have got all these different obvious barbaric groups that for a certain period of time captured the known civilized world at that time and held it as their own.

I was surprised to see they interjected into these obvious, understood to be barbaric groups that usually assign the concept of barbarism to, they have interjected the story of Hitler. ``Tyrant of Terror'' is the name of that series, and they also put the Japanese war crimes trials in another section.

So what we have is these barbarians who seem to be guys who ate raw meat and they scalped people and they burned cities to the ground. They raped any female in sight.

This series is also saying there are people who have risen to a new level of culture, the people who listen to Beethoven and Bach and go to the opera and who have enjoyed the legacy of great writers, others and Shakespearean translation. Those people allowed themselves to be captured by a barbarian philosophy, to be led by a barbarian, probably the world's greatest war machine.

The German war machine was the world's greatest war machine that probably ever existed. Instead of being a war machine for defense and for the promotion of peace in the world, it was a war machine that was put to the spread of terror; and there are a few decisions, with one or two signatures, the Gestapo could send millions of people to their death.

Conan the Barbarian, Attila the Hun, and all the other barbarians together did not kill as many people as the terror of Hitler did, both in concentration camps, in the case of people they considered undesirable, Jews and weak people and disabled people, and on the battlefield. On the battlefield they slaughtered millions. Russia estimates that the Soviet Union lost about 18 million people in that war.

So here is a very well-advanced group in terms of art, music, literature and, most of all, in terms of science, military science; and they behaved and caused more damage than all the other barbarians put together.

What does this have to do with America? What does it have to do with this discussion? I want to talk about commonsense legislative priorities, and I want to talk about the other extreme away from common sense. There is in the middle irresponsibility, and at the extreme is barbarism. Barbaric decisions can be made in this House in this Capitol, a combination of Congress and the President, barbaric decisions with barbaric consequences.

And we ought to think deeply about that. We ought to think deeply about it because a few hundred years from now historians will be writing and looking back on the history of the world, and I think they would say that the American civilization brought mankind to a level never dreamed of before. Our constitutional civilization brought mankind to a point which is unrivaled anywhere else.

We have the promise to continue to take civilization forward. We have the promise to do what has never been done in the world before. We already have done more for ordinary people. The masses of people live better, with more hope and happiness and necessities being provided than in any other society that has ever existed in the history of the world. We are the United States of America. And I often say nothing else has ever existed like this in terms of wealth and power. The Roman Empire was a village compared to the United States of America.

I think we have great responsibilities as a consequence of that. I think that God has blessed America. God has blessed America in so many ways in terms of just natural resources, land, periods of peace, and on and on it goes, with great leaders who have come forward at the right time to take care of crises and reestablished the Nation on the right route. We have so much that we can appreciate, and I think we are indebted to God as a result.

In fact, I am sure when God looks down on the kinds of things we propose sometimes and the number of children still hungry in America, he must weep; when he looks upon the kind of magnificent medical advances that we have made and still people in need die for lack of good medical treatment, with 40,000 people uninsured in the richest most powerful Nation that ever existed.

So we should stop at this point as we go into the year 2004, which is a Presidential election year, and in addition to considering the numbers and the revenue estimates and the expenditure estimates think very closely about what are we deciding to do with the available resources. Taxpayers should not say I am against big spending; I do not want to spend any more money. The question is what do we spend money for. Are we against big spending if it is going to provide prescription drug benefits for senior citizens or, in the final analysis, for all who need them; if prescription drug benefits are a part of our civilization?

There would be no magic drugs, no wonder drugs if it had not been for the group investment and the investment of government in research and the investment of the government in education. We invented constitutional civilization on the one hand, but we did a lot of great things after that. The Morrill Act, which is little known by most Americans, the Morrill Act established land grant colleges in every State.

Land grant colleges were pretty much patterned after Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia. They were established to go beyond the study of philosophy and art and literature and study practical things. They were established to study agriculture and mechanics. The legacy of the land grant college is that it established throughout the whole United States centers of learning, which were not just centers of learning in the usual sense, but centers of learning which focused on everything there was to be learned about anything that existed in order to make life easier for all of us.

Out of those centers of learning came the production of agriculture. In the world today it is unparalleled what we do in agriculture. That was one of the priorities of land grant colleges. But also out of the land grant colleges engineering feats and devices and procedures and so forth have evolved. Out of the learned world that we created, not by accident but by legislation, we have a dynamic out there which has produced these marvels of science in every area, including the area of medicine.

So it belongs to all the people. It belongs to the people of the United States who are the recipients of that part of the Constitution which talks about promoting the general welfare. We have lost our way, and we need some common sense to go back and reread the Preamble to the Constitution and understand the real meaning of that. They did not say promote the welfare of just the corporations. They did not say promote the welfare of the 1 percent of the richest Americans. They did not say promote the general welfare of people who have college educations. They said promote the general welfare. We as a Nation can stand together and exist only if we clearly understand what that means.

There is a time when we do not hesitate to call upon our citizens to risk their lives in this process of promoting the general welfare and providing for the defense of the country. The very fact that nations do not hesitate to call upon their citizens and demand that they go forward in times of crises when the Nation is threatened: the draft in World War I, the draft in World War II, Korea. On what basis, what right do we have to draft ordinary people, most of them poor, many of them from working families? On what basis can we do that? What moral principle is at work there? It is an assumption that we are all a part of this country. And when the time comes for the country to be defended, then everybody has an obligation. And if we do not have volunteers, the government has the right to draft.

If we accept that, then the government has an obligation to make certain that our families are taken care of, at least to provide a job and the opportunity to earn a living. The government has an obligation to deal with the elderly who no longer can work. Social Security is not a luxury. Social Security is a manifestation of the American civilization.

We were not the first to get Social Security, so I will not say we invented it. There are nations in the world, particularly in Europe, who might have had it first. But as far as the change in American construct and the dedication of our resources, Social Security was a great step forward. Of course, there was Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in a time of crisis, and later on the protege of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, took it further and we got Medicare and Medicaid. Now we want to trivialize some of these great achievements.

At the beginning of the second year of the 108th Congress, I would like us to take a hard look at some commonsense legislative priorities, and those legislative priorities all involve budgets and appropriations. And before we can get to budgets and appropriations, we have to talk about taxes. We cannot talk about any of this unless we go to the core of our problem at this moment in our history.

The core of the problem of decision-making in America right now is the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq can make us or break us. The war in Iraq will make us behave like barbarians if we are not careful. We will make barbaric decisions if we do not get control of what is happening in Iraq.

I will not talk about the rationale for going to war. I will not talk about recklessly pulling out of Iraq at this point. Yes, we do need to take a look at the billions of dollars that we have appropriated. I did not vote for the $87 billion, but I hope that it is going to help those troops who did not have modern bullet-proof vests and communication equipment that they needed. There all kinds of things that have come to light in terms of the way our military treats some of its soldiers that need to be dealt with in terms of this war in Iraq. We are going to make people stay there longer. There are National Guardsmen and Reservists, people who never dreamed they were going to be in a combat situation for a year at least and being told that even after that year we cannot guarantee that they are going to get out.

There are things happening which have nothing to do with dollars and cents that we have to deal with, and dollars and cents are a part of the problem; spending more money on the right things and not letting Halliburton charge enormous prices for gasoline, not letting Halliburton employees pay or receive bribes in order to pay unscrupulous people in Kuwait and other places to overcharge us for services and equipment.

I see I have been joined by my colleague from New Jersey, Mr. Speaker, so at this point I would be happy to yield to him.

(Mr. PAYNE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from New Jersey, I am sure, has had the experience that I have had, that they were glad to get the income tax check from the government because their unemployment was running out. That immediate cash was great, but the unemployment insurance would be far greater, an extension of it, would be a far greater benefit for any family than a sole check for $300. That is the kind of education that we have to give.

Mr. Speaker, the word ``outsourcing'' ought to be branded into the minds of every young American. The folks with great hopes that if they stay in school and get an education, become a programmer or technician, that they were guaranteed a job, but outsourcing beyond the movement of manufacturing jobs, which has taken place already and taking jobs away from people who are not educated, entry-level people, the outsourcing is going to take everything. The highest and most complex jobs in science can be outsourced. You can have Russian and Chinese physicists, space experts in Japan, India. They are the people who will be filling those positions while the corporations that we have given the contracts to make big profits because they can get those people by paying them in 1 year what a scientist or a technician would cost for a month here.

That outsourcing is a concept that ought to be branded into the mind of every young American. That is the death knell of our economy because as they do that, they take the last group of jobs that we feel secure about, and take away our consumer spending power. Our economy is driven by consumers, and it seems corporations do not care about that. They are looking at their individual bottom line, how much they can make.

In one of the papers in my area there was a front-page article about the bonuses received by corporate CEOs at Christmas time. One of them got $18 million as a bonus, one got $4 million, $7 million. They want more. In order to get more, they will outsource and lower the cost of doing services. Where do we go from there unless we realize that our jobs as legislators and our job as American citizens is for a way to promote the general welfare in America. That means new laws and new policies and pulling out of trade agreements. Whatever is necessary, we have to promote the general welfare in America first.

The gentleman mentioned India. Members ought to know that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is not now considered the greatest institute of technology in the world, there is one in India that has surpassed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And all over the world, they are seeking the graduates of that institution in India. We let that happen, despite the act which created all the land grant colleges, and how did we let ourselves fall behind anybody in the provision of first-rate education?

Maybe the gentleman can explain that.

It has been 3 years since we have had an increase in minimum wage. It is frozen at $5.15 an hour. On that, you cannot get out of the poverty even if you work 40 hours a week every week of the year.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Payne) for joining me. We are not really covering a wide range of topics. There is a center. We are searching for commonsense legislative priorities, and those priorities will have to relate to budget appropriation and taxes.

Is it perhaps barbaric that the ratio of the salary of the CEO to the worker can be 300 to 400 times as much as the average worker, plus bonuses, investments, et cetera? And to increase that,

you indulge in outsourcing and move jobs overseas to lower markets. Where does it end? Is that greed not approaching barbarism?

There are two kinds of barbaric behavior. One is obviously the kind yielded by the people on the top. Attila the Hun, he and his henchmen yielded a certain kind of power, just as Hitler did. They yielded a certain kind of barbaric power over their people.

On the other hand, the people at the bottom, the masses of the people, might worry also about barbaric behavior that they indulge in.

Certainly in America every individual who is born in this Nation has a right to vote and should worry about the fact that we allow our government and our leadership to get out of control and reach the point where they are doing barbaric things and contemplating barbaric policies. The wiping out of Social Security through the failure to take in appropriate revenue, the raiding of Social Security to balance budgets, and a proposal to privatize Social Security for young people so the amount of money going into the Social Security trust fund would be greatly reduced at a time when the number of people who are qualifying for Social Security would be increased, that is a barbaric proposal in my opinion. We need to meet it that way.

I hate to talk about anger because it seems that anger is not popular these days, but there is a time to get angry. There is a time to get angry. I have quoted on this floor the quote from Shakespeare's ``King Lear'' when King Lear has given away his kingdom to his daughters and had great faith in them that they would take care of him, and they tell him he is in the way and he does not even need bodyguards. It finally dawns on him that they have betrayed him, and they are evil people. He says, ``Fool me not so much to bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger.''

Mr. Speaker, there is a time for noble anger. I think Jesus Christ driving the money lenders out of the temple displayed anger. There is a time for noble anger, and the people on the bottom who are tolerating this unnecessary suffering in the richest Nation that ever existed need to get angry. While they are getting angry, they should get angry with themselves and angry with their neighbors, and anybody that does not vote should be treated as a pariah.

If you do not have a good excuse for not voting, you have degraded yourself. In this constitutional civilization that we have created, the power is really in the hands of the people.

This is a Presidential election year. In the last Presidential election year, less than 51 percent of the people went out to vote. About 51 percent. That means 49 percent did not bother to go to vote for President. You know if they did not vote for President, they did not vote for Senators, a greater percentage did not vote for Members of Congress and, as you go down the line, city council, all this great democracy of ours going to waste. The people on the bottom want to act like barbarians. They want to act helpless and not do anything about it. They want to sit and watch the CEOs make enormous amounts of money while they move the job-producing, life-producing industries out of the country at the same time they demand that your son, your daughter must serve in the defense of the country when the country is threatened.

Those who have the most, the CEOs and the corporations, they have the most to defend. They have the greatest stake. Yet they do not go out to fight like Attila the Hun on the battlefield. They do not go out personally. They do not send their children or their relatives. They call on all Americans to rise to the defense of their country, and they have the right to demand that they do it via a draft. We do not have a draft right now. People say that is a word you should not be using, that it is not relevant. Every 18-year-old male in America has to register for the draft, right now. Every 18-year-old in America. That is the leftover piece, which, if the war in Iraq continues, there is no way to sustain the war in Iraq and to leave it with some degree of accomplishment without increasing the number of troops and probably there has to be a draft if we do not solve that problem.

But back to the greed of the corporations and the greed that has been encouraged by the policies of this administration, this present administration. The Congressional Budget Office has released a new report. It is the kind of thing that some people on the bottom who do not like to read in general, who only want to watch television, you better start reading, barbarians at the bottom, so you know what to get angry about and you know that your days are numbered in this great Nation of ours. Your prosperity may suddenly be over one day if you continue to let these outrageous atrocities, economic atrocities be created.

``The Congressional Budget Office's new report on the Federal budget demonstrates that the return of large budget deficits is more a reflection of diminished revenues than, as some have recently implied, of increased spending.'' We are getting less money via taxes. It is not that big government is spending more. It is that you are getting less money because you have decreased the taxes on the richest people in America.

``CBO estimates that revenues in 2004 will drop to historically low levels, their lowest level as a share of the economy since the Truman administration. Spending, in contrast, will not be at a particularly high level. As a share of the economy, spending will be lower in 2004 than it was in every year from 1975 through 1996.''

They have a little box here at the bottom of the page that says, ``Key Facts That Emerge from the CBO Data. In 2004 as a share of the economy, one, Federal revenues will fall to their lowest level since 1950; two, Federal spending will be lower than in any year from 1975 through 1996, and thus will be lower than throughout the administrations of Presidents Carter and Reagan and the first President Bush. In explaining the shift from a large surplus in 2000 to a large deficit in 2004, the drop in revenues since 2000 accounts for more than three times as much of the fiscal deterioration as the increase in expenditures.''

We are not spending ourselves into a deficit. We are failing to collect taxes from those who have gained the most benefits from our society and can afford to pay larger amounts in taxes. We have a barbaric grab for more and more money. There is a way that we could finance Social Security in the future. There is a way we can end this pressure on individuals and families, even rich families, by changing our Tax Code in a way which focuses more taxes on corporations instead of families and individuals.

Shortly after World War II, corporations were paying nearly 40 percent of the total tax burden. Corporate taxes accounted for about 40 percent of the total tax burden. Individuals and families accounted for about 44 percent of the total tax burden. There were other kinds of taxes which produced the rest. At this moment in history, individuals and families still, despite the tax cuts, are way up there in terms of their percentage of the total tax burden. Corporations are down between 8 and 10 percent. The tax on corporations is down to between 8 and 10 percent. Most of us are not looking in that direction. Neither party has taken a hard look at what it would mean if we were to impose greater taxes on corporations instead of on individuals.

A tax cut is in order for the middle class. I do not agree with people who say we should wipe out all tax cuts. We need to certainly relieve middle-class families with tax cuts. But what you lose when you do that, you can gain from greater taxes on corporations, and they will not feel the pain. It is one way to get back the money they make as a result of outsourcing. They are making greater and greater profits. They produce goods and services at greater profits by going to the cheapest labor markets throughout the world. They come back here, and they sell what they have to offer in goods and services at a level commensurate with our economy. We are paying the same prices.

The difference is in profit, enormous profits that are being reaped by the corporations. The tax problems of America can be resolved if we focus on taxing corporations more and getting the money we need to do a vast amount of retraining and education and the things needed to make our society able to compete in the increasingly high-tech industry competition. We used to

think that no matter what happens, we are going to be the leaders in high-tech industries, no matter what happens. We never dreamed that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would not forever be the greatest of its kind. But the Indians speak English, too. Pakistanis speak English. Their governments made some conscious decisions about how they wanted to educate a portion of their population and they are now challenging us. They are challenging us and the Chinese are learning more and more English all the time. They have an enormous population. If they only educate one-fifth of it. It is an enormous hoard of people who have education and can compete at very low salary levels for any kind of job you might want.

The Soviet Union, of course, has been counted out, but one thing that Stalin and the whole bunch of dictators did was create a massive education system, and the residue of that is still there. They are very educated people. They are learning English, too; and the competition from Soviet scientists will be there for American scientists. There is nothing that outsourcing will leave untouched.

Mr. Speaker, I submit for the Record this first page of the ``Center on Budget and Policy Priorities'' report that I just read from in its entirety.

[From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Jan. 26, 2004]

CBO Figures Indicate Lower Revenues, Not Higher Spending, Account for

the Large Deficit

as a share of the economy, revenues to hit lowest level in 54 years

(By Isaac Shapiro and Joel Friedman)

The Congressional Budget Office's new report on the federal

budget demonstrates that the return of large budget deficits

is more a reflection of diminished revenues than, as some

have recently implied, of increased spending. CBO estimates

that revenues in 2004 will drop to historically low levels,

their lowest level as a share of the economy since the Truman

Administration. Spending, in contrast, will not be at a

particularly high level. As a share of the economy, spending

will be lower in 2004 than it was in every year from 1975

through 1996.

On the revenue side:

CBO projects that revenues will fall to 15.8 percent of the

economy in 2004. This is the lowest level since 1950. (The

figures in this analysis focus on revenues and spending as a

share of the Gross Domestic Product, labeled here as the

``economy.'' The Gross Domestic Product is the basic measure

of the size of the economy. Measuring spending and revenues

as a share of the economy is the standard way that economists

and budget analysts examine changes in the levels of revenues

and spending over time.)

CBO projects that income tax revenues (including both the

individual and corporate income tax) will equal 8.0 percent

of the economy in 2004. This is the lowest level since 1942.

Without the tax cuts enacted in recent years--which will

reduce revenues by $264 billion in 2004, according to Joint

Committee on Taxation estimates--revenues as a share of the

economy would not be close to a historically low level.

key facts that emerge from the cbo data

In 2004, as a share of the economy:

Federal revenues will fall to their lowest level since

1950, during the Truman Administration.

Federal spending will be lower than in every year from 1975

through 1996 (and thus will be lower than throughout the

administrations of Presidents Carter and Reagan and the first

President Bush).

In explaining the shift from a large surplus in 2000 to a

large deficit in 2004, the drop in revenues since 2000

accounts for more than three times as much of the fiscal

deterioration as the increase in expenditures.

Mr. Speaker, we started the evening with colleagues of mine from the Congressional Black Caucus discussing budget matters. I consider my discussion to be an extension of that discussion. Commonsense legislative priorities deal with budget and appropriations and taxes first. This Congressional Black Caucus budget, a budget to leave no family behind for fiscal year 2004, is still relevant. It is relevant in terms of the kind of priorities we set forth. We united with the Congressional Progressive Caucus and produced a budget which we are quite proud of. I am just going to read some of the principles that were set forth in our Congressional Black Caucus budget because it relates to the kind of priorities that we need to establish:

``Basic Assumptions and Principles for an Alternative Budget of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.''

1. A smaller, streamlined and efficient government should be the goal of all lawmakers; however, there must be enough revenue and resources to carry out the vital functions of our complex American society. It is absolutely necessary that we maintain an adequate investment in human development. Education comes first in terms of keeping our civilization moving forward. We are drastically cutting funding for education at the higher education level and at the elementary and secondary education level. No Child Left Behind has no clout because of the fact that the President refused to fully fund the bill.

2. Federal assistance for education, health care, housing, child care, transportation, worker safety and protection, and business development is as vital as support for homeland security and defense. Somehow we get off on these tangents and we define priorities in terms of some buzz words, homeland security and defense. Education is our greatest defense. An educated population is our greatest bulwark against invasion economically or militarily. The high-tech army that went into Iraq would not be possible if you did not have very educated personnel in that army. The kind of projections being made by the homeland security people of germ warfare being sneaked into the country or anthrax and various other destructive actions by terrorists, you need an educated population to deal with those kinds of crises and threats. Therefore, it is very important that we understand that assistance for education is as important as the specific dollars that we label homeland security and defense.

3. The imperative of the government to provide for the Nation's security can be effectively implemented and sustained only if all of the vital investments in human development are assigned priority on a continuing basis. This second session of the 108th Congress must get back to looking at education. No Child Left Behind cannot be the last discussion and the last word on education. We have a higher education bill to reauthorize, and we are stumbling along on that trying to find ways to do the least amount for our higher education students when it is a time when we ought to be doing the most amount for them.

4. While the taxing of middle income and working families must be reduced and maintained at the lowest possible levels, the Federal Government must nevertheless secure the revenue it needs by upwardly adjusting the tax rates on corporate entities and by creatively seeking larger fees from publicly owned resources such as the spectrum, the Internet, and public lands and waterways. We throw away, we the American people give to private interests and corporations some of our greatest resources. The spectrum, the air above us, has made many people rich. We should look at the ways in which we can make better use of these resources for all of the people in terms of selling bandwidths in the spectrum, leasing it, renting it, taxing the Internet. None of that should be off-limits while billions are made by the people who happened by accident to be in a place where they can take advantage of it. If you want taxes, there are plenty of ways to get them without going into the pockets of middle-class families to get that revenue.

5. There should be an end to the tax system as we know it and a revamping which reduces the portion of the tax burden borne by individuals and families to less than 50 percent of the overall tax burden. Corporate entities utilizing the collective and accumulated knowledge and institutional support of the total society will continue to grow and prosper. Such recipients of publicly sponsored research and development protected by the legal system must pay their fair share in terms of meeting the revenue needs of the Nation.

We have other items here related to health, human services, and safety nets. While the recently released Democratic Caucus prescription drug plan with a $25 premium should be endorsed, other health care inadequacies must be addressed in the current budget. We have gone through a process of passing relief for seniors suffering from the need for more money for prescription drug benefits, and we have given them a bogus bill which needs very much to be revamped.

In the area of housing, there is an acute housing shortage in the inner city communities which can only be met in a timely manner by providing

more public and section 8-type housing. For the upwardly mobile poor, there are homeownership programs being sponsored by foundations and the private sector which could be made more effective with Federal assistance.

Small businesses in urban settings have never received the quantity and quality of support provided over the years for agribusinesses. We give far more to agribusinesses. Our farm subsidies are out of kilter. We are still giving enormous amounts of money to less than 2 percent of the population.

Farm subsidies represent one of the greatest swindles in the American budget. The taxpayers should take a look. They should get angry about the fact that we are funding these farm subsidies and they are not going to poor people. The agribusinesses, the corporations have bought up the quotas. They have accumulated the right to those subsidies, and we are really subsidizing large agribusinesses with the farm subsidy. The revenue generated by these large entities could generate greater funding if we dealt with that problem.

International relations means that we have to again, as I said before, focus on what do we do about the war in Iraq. How do we get out of Iraq. Many proposals are being made by many different candidates. The sensible proposals that must prevail are proposals which allow us to leave with order and honor but, on the other hand, leave immediately and trust the rest of the international community to help us accomplish the purposes that we can accomplish productively in Iraq.

At the core of our decision-making this year is the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq will make us behave like barbarians, or we can behave like the extraordinary creators of a new kind of civilization. The constitutional civilization created by America is one that guides us and will guide us out of these absurd and ridiculous atrocities that are being committed in economics and will be committed militarily if we do not get out of the war in Iraq.

Congressional Black Caucus/Congressional Progressive Caucus--Basic

Assumptions and Principles for an Alternative Budget

General Priorities

1. A smaller, streamlined and efficient government should

be the goal of all lawmakers; however, there must be enough

revenue and resources to carry out the vital functions of our

complex American society. It is absolutely necessary that we

maintain an adequate investment in human development.

2. Federal assistance for education, health care, housing,

child care, transportation, worker safety and protection, and

business development is as vital as support for homeland

security and defense.

3. The imperative of the government to provide for the

nation's security can be effectively implemented and

sustained only if all of the vital investments in human

development are assigned priority on a continuing basis.

tax policy

4. While the taxing of middle income and working families

must be reduced and maintained at the lowest possible levels,

the Federal government must nevertheless secure the revenue

it needs by upwardly adjusting the tax rates on corporate

entities and by creatively seeking larger fees from publicly

owned resources such as the spectrum, the internet, public

lands and waterways, etc.

5. There should be an end to the tax system as we know it

and a revamping which reduces the portion of the tax burden

borne by individuals and families to less than fifty percent

of the overall tax burden. Corporate entities utilizing the

collective and accumulated knowledge and institutional

support of the total society will continue to grow and

prosper. Such recipients of publicly sponsored research and

development; protected by the legal system and military might

of the nation and enriched by the great American consumer

market; such entities can and should bear a greater portion

of the national tax burden.

6. Tax cuts for the upper income brackets should be

repealed immediately. Tax cuts for all families earning less

than fifty thousand dollars per year should be implemented

immediately commencing with a large reduction for payroll

taxes for the poorest workers.

education and job training

7. Since the nation's security as well as its future

economic stability and prosperity is directly dependent upon

the quality of education of its citizens, the budget should

greatly increase Federal assistance for education from

HeadStart to Title I, bi-lingual education, Historically

Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Higher

Education Institutions, special education and educational

technology. Since school buildings are essential for the

implementation of all school improvements, the taboo must be

ended and Federal grants for school construction must be

provided. The President's budget is proposing construction

grants (not loans) only for charter schools.

8. Significant Federal initiatives for education reform

such as No Child Left Behind cannot be implemented

effectively while Local Education Agencies are under assault

from state and local budget cuts; therefore, an emergency

targeted revenue sharing for education programs must be

legislated. The Federal government must move beyond its

present funding posture which contributes less than seven

cents of each dollar spent for education while mandating

compliance with far reaching reform programs.

9. Job Training programs must be rescued from the downward

spiral of budget cuts. It must be made complementary and

compatible with our overall education efforts as well as the

changing occupational needs generated by new challenges in

homeland security and global competition for expertise. The

role of the Federal government in job training for youth must

be restored and funding levels increased. A more detailed

analysis of the staffing needs of the Homeland Security

initiative must be coordinated with the Department of Labor.

Technicians to clean up anthrax, other biological warfare

germs; to respond to chemical or dirty bomb attacks; to

translate terrorists communications; etc. must be trained.

Even familiar first responders such as nurses, police and

firefighters are in short supply when a requirement that they

live within one hour's traveling time to their assigned post

is mandated. Big city inner city residents must be trained to

be their own first responders. Funding for this purpose must

be made available immediately.

health, human services and safety nets

10. While the recently released Democratic Caucus

Prescription Drug Plan with a twenty-five dollar premium

should be endorsed, other health care inadequacies must be

addressed in the current budget. Of greatest significance to

the CBC are the President's proposals to have the Federal

government abandon MedicAid and leave it to the states. This

bribing of the states by allowing them to keep whatever they

save as a result of reduced health care for the poor must be

blocked beginning with the budget process. The swindle that

started with welfare reform dollars must not be allowed to

expand.

11. Welfare Reform must be revisited and made more humane

by providing more in cash payments for children. The survivor

benefits rate used by Social Security for payments to

children under eighteen should be used as a guide for

calculating aid to dependent children. Funds must also be

provided to allow any welfare parent who qualifies to attend

college for two years with a job specific goal such as

nursing or medical technician, etc.

12. A coordination and calibration of the services provided

to families under Title Twenty with the goals of assisting

low-income youth under No Child Left Behind must be

appropriately funded.

housing and urban development

13. There is an acute housing crisis in the inner city

communities which can only be met in a timely manner by

providing more public and section 8 type housing. For the

upperwardly mobile poor there are home ownership programs

being sponsored by foundations and the private sector which

could be made more effective with Federal assistance.

14. Small businesses in urban settings have never received

the quantity and quality of support provided over the years

for agribusinesses. Small businesses and related economically

significant institutions such as hospitals and public service

agencies deserve greater loan and grant options. The revenue

generated by these entities would offset the increased

funding.

transportation

15. Mass transit subsidies are provided primarily to assist

working families and the poor. More federal funding is needed

in order to avoid increased costs faced by workers already

hard pressed to make ends meet. Congress must insist that

transit systems receiving Federal aid must provide open

disclosure for their accounting and contracting procedures as

well as their salary and consultant fee rates.

agriculture

16. Billions of dollars continue to be appropriated for

agribusinesses and farmers. There is no need for an increase

in the overall budget; however, specific earmarking of funds

for the poorest farmers; for Black farmers, for loans to

groups that have been discriminated against by the farm loan

programs; these are all items which must be addressed in the

budget.

international relations

17. Foreign Aid dollars are still basically dollars

distributed with a double standard with Caribbean nations and

Africa being greatly short-changed. The CBC will continue to

assign high priority to an increase in funding for these

neglected areas and people.

general

18. Funding for Commissions to study issues such as

Reparations; Disenfranchisement of Federal Ex-Offenders;

Disparities in Sentencing; Disparities in Health Care; etc.

are vitally needed.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 3 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Friday, January 30, 2004, at noon.

Mr. Speaker, reserving the right to object, although I do not intend to object, but I respectfully ask the gentleman to explain his request, and I yield to him for that purpose.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Sam Johnson) for his explanation. And continuing under my reservation, I rise in strong support of S. 1929, which extends the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996 for another year.

The original bill was pioneered and introduced by a great champion of mental health, a person of compassion and vision, the late Senator Paul Wellstone.

This legislation is based on a very simple idea: all health insurance plans should provide the same degree of coverage for mental health benefits as provided for medical and surgical benefits. The 1996 act did not require employers to offer mental health benefits; but it was, nevertheless, a huge step forward in the fight to ensure access for all Americans to comprehensive health care. Under the 1996 act, if mental health care benefits are provided, they have to be equal to those offered for medical care.

In particular, both aggregate lifetime caps and annual caps on mental health benefits had to be equal to those caps for the medical and surgical benefits, but if, and only if, the employer offered mental health benefits.

The 1996 act applies to both fully insured state-regulated health plans and self-insured plans. The act does not preempt State statutes that may provide stronger protections for mental health parity.

The 1996 act did not provide a complete parity. Employers and insurers can still restrict mental health benefits by imposing higher copayments and deductibles for mental health benefits than for medical benefits. There remains much room for improvement. We need to expand mental health parity to cover substance abuse disorders, to stop employers from charging different deductibles and co-payments to mental health services, and to stop employers from imposing different limits for inpatient stays and outpatient visits for mental health benefits. Much work remains to be done; but without this action today, the Mental Health Parity Act will expire on December 31.

I urge my colleagues to support this reauthorization of the Mental Health Parity Act, extend these provisions for at least another year; and I urge us to all redouble our efforts to pass comprehensive mental health care parity in the coming year.

Mr. Speaker, further reserving the right to object, I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

Mr. Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate and thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings) for this Special Order. Nothing could be more timely than our focus tonight on the Republican Medicare Prescription Drug conference report that will be before us for a vote soon.

We also are concerned about the tri-caucus minority health bill, H.R. 3459, which I think is very significant; but that is in the works, and we will not be having a vote on that any time soon. And it will be very much jeopardized if we have the awful fate of having the Medicare prescription drug conference report of the Republicans passed tomorrow or the next day. It is impossible to move forward with a minority health bill which is of any great significance and impact if you do not have the envelope of Medicare.

Medicare and Medicaid are the beach heads for providing universal care in America. And all of us are hopeful we will move forward and provide health care to all those 43 million people who tonight have any health care and that some plan would be developed which is based on Medicare as a start. But what the Republicans have done here is started a slow and tortuous assassination of Medicare.

In the beginning when Medicare was first proposed and passed, very few Republicans voted for it. Over the years Republicans have repeatedly talked about liquidating Medicare. Former Speaker Gingrich made no bones about it. He wanted Medicare to fade away. His phrase was, ``We should make it fade away.''

So we are in the process now under this guise and camouflage of providing a prescription drug benefit of sticking Medicare in the back with a dagger for a slow bleed to death. That is what will happen. The introduction of privatization, the build-up of HMOs, and the role that the pharmaceutical companies have played in this legislation is such that you know we may be discussing the beginning of the end of Medicare. We cannot do that. Nothing else in the area of health care would be go forward unless we have Medicare to build on. We need that very much.

The tri-caucus minority health bill would have talked more about adapting and refining the health care program to make certain that we deal with some of the basic problems in the African American community and the Hispanic community and other minority committees with respect to health care.

I want to bring in a very important event that took place, not many people have heard about, last Saturday. We had, last Friday night and Saturday, a conference on saving young black males. The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings) kicked off the conference on Friday night. And I came on Saturday expecting to stay maybe half a day, but I was so impressed with the audience, the participants who showed up, that I got locked in the whole day and I did not leave until 6:00 because they were so serious, the people who came to participate. Counselors, principals, Boy Scout masters, Girl Scout masters, all kinds of folks who were interested in young people were there.

They were serious because, usually, on these weekends we have a serious panel. You can only hold people's attention an hour and a half. If you are good you go two hours. They came at 8:30 in the morning. They filled up the place. At noon when we had the address by Mr. Davis, of course, the place was packed, and they stayed. And I looked out in the audience at 5:30 and it was still packed. People began to drift home at 5:30. If they are willing to go from 8:30 to 5:30, you can imagine what a great deal of interest and how deeply people feel about saving the black males.

Again and again during that day the problem of health care came up. Some people who are getting the least amount of health care they need are black males. The alienation factor that sets in very early, where they do not feel the system is for them, drives them away from even seeking help in many cases. Then they focus in on the tremendous mental health problem. Studies have showed that the suicide rate among black males is far higher than most people realize because of the recklessness of some automobile accidents and the recklessness of confrontations with the police or other authorities, the number of ways that black males end up dying is driven by the fact that they have a suicide wish. And the hopelessness and the kind anxiety of black males was talked about in terms of nobody is out there to deal with that mental health concern.

I will not diverge too much here, but the fact that large numbers of them are incarcerated, we keep focusing on that. It was 25 percent 5 years ago, and now a greater percentage of black males are in the criminal justice system somewhere, parole, probation or prison. And a large number of those who are in that system, about half are in the system as nonviolent offenders. They are in the system because of drug use.

The problem that we have been trying to address in terms of the use of drugs and the way in which our society criminalizes the drug user, not necessarily the drug sellers or dealer but the user, has led to this tremendous percentage of incarcerated black males.

I must say that the way that Rush Limbaugh has been dealt with in terms of his problem, he had an addiction problem, a pain problem. Whether it is mental or physical, we are not sure whether it is just mental or just physical. Maybe it was both. Whatever it was he used large number of drugs and they were purchased in a way which obviously is suspect. And people have shown a great deal of sympathy for Rush Limbaugh who makes $35 million a year. He certainly does not have the anxieties that black males who have tremendous anxieties about employment and adjusting to a world which is impacted heavily with racism.

Here is a man with anxieties in pain and he used illegal methods to seek relief. I will go so far to say that I think it is clearly illegal. He is hustled off to a treatment center. He is back on the air now seeking sympathy. And the same man has said and his friends have said that we should put people who use drugs into jail. They have the harshest words for them.

So the mental health of black males is not considered in the same league of the mental and physical health of Rush Limbaugh. So racism is a factor that we are concerned with, the racism that drives our society, whether it is the criminal justice system or health care system is still a problem.

In health care racism is a problem. The Tri-Caucus Minority Health Bill is aimed to do a number of things, but one of the things it has to deal with is the disparate health care treatment. And my colleagues have spoken about being too poor to afford Medicare and the kind of drugs they need; but the disparate health care treatment studies have shown that even when middle class blacks have health plans that pay for everything that white middle class persons are entitled to, the system is so racist that they are not offered the same procedures. They are not offered the same treatment. They are not offered the same medications.

Three studies have documented this. It is alarming. Money is not the factor, but somebody along the way decides that minorities do not deserve first class health treatment. This is sometimes decided by nurses, sometimes decided by technicians, the doctor's diagnosis and the determination of whether you get a heart bypass or whether you get a pill indicates the disparity in treatment.

So racism is a factor. It will become more of a factor as we struggle and compete for the existing health care that is out there now. If we do not go forward with Medicare and beyond Medicare, a universal health program based upon Medicare as a beginning, then we will have even more difficulty, and racism will play an even bigger role in determining the poor health care that minorities receive.

There is adequate health care treatment and inadequate health care treatment. Class does not come in and should not be considered as a factor.

Our first step is to make sure that we maintain Medicare as it is. The bill on the floor tomorrow goes far beyond dealing with prescription drugs. It sets up a situation for privatization, for a number of factors which will mean the end of Medicare. And when Medicare ends then minorities in general, poor and middle class, answer to the poor, we will have nowhere to turn. We must fight to the very end to see to it that our colleagues understand how decisive this action will be tomorrow in terms of determining the future of health care in America.

Mr. Speaker, it is near the end of the session, and I have listened closely to the comments of my colleagues just leaving the floor, and I think they were all appropriate at this time for us to take a hard look at money matters most. I would like to discuss a number of issues which relate to resources and money.

I have chosen to sort of use a theme of class warfare. There is no class warfare in America. When we raise that issue, people get excited. I agree with everybody who says there is no class warfare. The problem is the ruling class has completely pacified the swindled classes. The swindled class includes more than the working class, I assure you. The simple-minded notion of the communist, that there is a war of working- class folks against the rich, et cetera, that is very simple-minded. It is much more complicated than that. There are swindled classes in our democracy, and they are not fighting back so there is no war. One of the duties of the Congress should be to make certain that we stir our people up and start a war, an overt war. That is what democracy ought to be all about, a war of ideas and a war of confrontations with policies and principles that guide the way we live.

The whole system of checks and balances built into our Constitution and our government in a very formal way is very important. Those checks and balances have kept the Nation going in some critical times. They have stopped the hysterical from overriding and overruling the logical and the reasonable. They have done a number of things, the formal checks and balances. But beyond the formal checks and balances, democracy has to have a whole lot of informal checks and balances. The labor unions, the town meeting maverick who gets up and challenges the school board. There is a whole set of people who are a part of a checks and balances system. The newspapers, the magazines, the media. All that is part of the checks and balances.

When some part of that checks and balances system goes silent or becomes dormant, then we are in trouble. I think that we have large numbers of people in classes who are silent and dormant, pacified at this point, and that is the problem.

This is my prevailing and my overwhelming thought as we near the end of the first session of the 108th Congress, that we are a Nation that has no class warfare because the ruling class has completely pacified the swindled classes. I think it is important to note that today is election day. In a democracy we should not ever minimize or trivialize any election day. But the Republican majority that runs this House has chosen to bring us back to Washington here on election day when every public official ought to be close to his constituency. If we think voting is important, then any election, whether it is a local election, a State election, it is important. It is ridiculous that we are here today. It is symptomatic of what is wrong in terms of a handful of people making stupid decisions. I think that the leadership of this House has done that in bringing us back here to deal with two ceremonial bills. We did not have to come back because the Nation needed some basic decision to govern, some decision related to the budget or some decision related to the war. We came back for two ceremonial bills. That is part of the problem, the way this House has been run.

As we approach the end of this session, we should reflect on that. In this session, Democrats have been shut out of any kind of meaningful participation. It is amazing how the Constitution is one thing, but the rules of the House are another. There is no check and balance built into the rules. In other words, the rules of the House are established, and there is nowhere you can go to appeal the way the rules are established or the way they are executed. In our checks and balances, we have a problem because the legislative body, the executive body and the Supreme Court, the judicial, are three separate bodies. There are checks on the executive body. There are definitely checks. Both the legislative body and the judicial body can check the executive section of our government. But there is no check on the rules of the House. There is nowhere to go. So we have had totalitarian rule in this House during this session. We have had the least amount of participation and the least productivity and the most totalitarian set of rules here in this first session of the 108th Congress.

As we come to the end, part of the process of swindling all the classes is certainly carried out by the ruling class of the majority Republicans here in this House. It is not a pleasant thing to stand here and say this and admit that we are the greatest and most powerful legislative body anywhere in the world at this point, but the Members of this body are treated in a very trivial manner. We are like ants. Certainly if you are a Democratic Member here, you are like an ant shoved aside.

Recent outrage was expressed by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel), who stormed into a meeting, a conference meeting. He felt he belonged there. The school books and the textbooks still say that legislation is made in a certain way. Both Houses of Congress vote separately, the House votes, the Senate votes, and they come together in a conference committee to iron out the differences. That is what the civic book says. That is the way the Founding Fathers meant for it to happen. But with Republicans in charge of both the House and the Senate, they have chosen to just shut out the Democrats in the conference process, as they have chosen in many cases to bring legislation to the floor on very short notice, with no participation, and on and on it goes.

I am not going to waste anybody's time with a litany of the things that have gone wrong here. But I think the American people, and our colleagues, I am addressing the House, my colleagues, wake up. We are part of the process of allowing the ruling class to continue to overwhelm, pacify, and exploit the swindled classes.

I think it is important to look at the end of this session in terms of unfinished business, and some of that was discussed by my colleagues who preceded me. It all fits together. What is happening and not happening in one area flows into another, just as all the elections that are taking place at the various levels, State and municipal today, are interwoven with what we do and what we can accomplish here. Local governments are very important. They have an impact on people, probably greater than any other level of government.

I have served in every level of government. I served as a commissioner in

New York City government. I served as a State senator in the State legislature, and I am a Member of Congress. Having served at all three levels, nothing is more important than the people who are on the front lines, who are the most important in the dialogue and delivery of policies and services and programs to ordinary citizens. They are on the front lines. It is the hardest job level in terms of governing that we have, the local level. Therefore, we should not trivialize city council elections, local county legislature elections. We should not tear our Congresspeople away from that and bring them to Congress and have them do nothing and not have them participate in the process of the citizens dealing with that level of government in an appropriate way. We are making people suffer a great deal at the local level. We are setting our legislators up in counties and cities for very difficult jobs in terms of the way in which we are managing the resources of the Nation.

One of the unfinished agenda items is the appropriations process. The appropriations process is far from finished, including a very important area, Health and Human Services. The Health and Human Services appropriation has the appropriation for education. At the local level, nothing is more important than education. I want to salute my city's mayor. He is a Republican, but I will engage in some nonpartisan or crosspartisan praise here.

The Republican mayor certainly has kept his word in terms of making education a priority. I have watched skeptically as things have developed in his administration; and the issuance today of a $13.5 billion proposed capital budget for schools, building, renovation, restructuring, equipping with modern equipment, I think, was a step to show that for this mayor, education remains a high priority. I am not so naive as to believe that the development of the budget and the announcement of the capital budget of $13.5 billion means it is going to be achieved, that the funds will be there to carry it out; but he has made it a priority.

From some sources, some of that money will be found. It ought to be found, some of it, for school construction at the Federal level. Tip O'Neill said, ``All politics is local.'' All taxes are local. The only retreat to this whole business of the Federal Government has no role in education when it is convenient for us, it ought to be well established now that the Federal Government has a major role in education and has played a role throughout our history from the time Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia. If we had not had a major role in later on taking that University of Virginia model and expanding it into the land grant colleges, the education level of the American people at the time of World War I and World War II would have been inadequate for the challenges that it faced.

Not enough credit is ever given to the fact that there was a very educated population that made the productive capacity of America overwhelm Hitler. There was a very educated population even that hit the beaches of Normandy, engineers and a whole set of people who probably would not have been there with the same competence if there had been no land grant colleges spread throughout a whole Nation where we were teaching more than Latin and classics and English composition, but also teaching engineering and agriculture, et cetera. Education has always played a role.

We finally, under Lyndon Johnson, began to give aid to elementary and secondary education. This President as he came in made a statement and took action which showed that he considered education a great priority. No Child Left Behind is a law which was the outgrowth of the President mobilizing, marshaling all of the Members of Congress behind a bill that passed overwhelmingly. It certainly makes a great commitment to continue the role of the Federal Government in elementary and secondary education.

The problem is that before the ink was dry on the President's signature for the bill, he moved away from his commitment to provide funding at a level that would make the bill work, make the law work. The $6 billion that was promised is not there. That is part of our problem. The appropriations process for Health and Human Services is stalled, partially because there are some people who are trying very hard to regain that committed $6 billion or some portion of it. The appropriations process is stalled for Health and Human Services, I think, primarily because the majority party knows that it cannot go to America, it cannot go back home and admit that we have neglected certain basic needs in education.

We have maybe complicated the problem by adding mandates, requirements through No Child Left Behind that we are not willing to fund and made life miserable and more difficult for teachers and students, and school reform is suffering instead of being benefited. So the appropriations process with respect to Health and Human Services should go forward. I hope it will go forward with a break in the logjam that creates the funding stream that is necessary to make No Child Left Behind live up to its promise.

Another unfinished business here, I hesitate to even bring it up because it has not been discussed at all anywhere in any meaningful way, that is, the increase in the minimum wage. It is still stuck where we were more than 3 years ago at a $5.15 minimum wage. There is nothing on the floor, nothing at the committee level that deals with the increase in the minimum wage. It is just tossed aside as being inconsequential.

What does this have to do with swindling people? The working class, the working people at the very bottom are the ones who make the minimum wage. There are many more than you would imagine, more than 10 million in this country still at that level. $5.15 an hour. Those people are being swindled. Those people should be protected more by the government, if that is the only way we can get the wages up, deal with the realities of the 21st century and make certain that employers pay a minimum wage. It is not a living wage. Some States have passed what they call a living wage. They have calculated how much the cost of living is, and they have come up with a living wage. New York has one which they passed, but they are not implementing. It is 2 years away before they fully implement it. But they recognize that families cannot make it on $5.15 an hour, even when two members are working in a family of four. $5.15 an hour will not produce enough to take care of a family. So minimum wage is very important, if you care about working families, if you care about people at the very bottom.

Ninety-five percent of the troops in Iraq come from working families. Ninety-five percent of the troops in our military come from working families. They happen to be on the front lines now, but they are a class. They are mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and they are children trapped in a situation where they cannot realize a decent wage. I will talk more about that later.

In health care, the same thing is true. They cannot depend on the government to help guarantee that their families back here have decent health care. Health care bankrupts the average middle class family. We are not talking about the poor. The very poor, thanks to Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society programs, Medicaid, for which not a single member of the Republican Party voted, Medicaid, Medicare, a fundamental safety net for health care for the poor.

But there are many who fall outside that net, and some of the people who fall outside that net are not working families in the usual sense. They are middle-income families who, for various reasons, do not have insurance, and when they have to start paying for medical care, some have gone bankrupt as a result of trying to pay for health care costs, a burden that no family should be asked to bear in certain cases. So we have the unfinished business of health care. Prescription drug benefits is on the table somewhere. That is just for senior citizens. We just started. The need for universal health care, the need for a single- payer plan, that is like minimum wage. Nobody will discuss that around here. All the industrialized nations of the world have something close to universal health care, but in our great American democracy, the richest Nation that ever existed on the face of earth, we will not even discuss a universal health

care plan. This 108th Congress is no different. A discussion of the prescription drug benefit is frightening because there is an attempt to try to make that a means-tested program with overtones of welfare that would drive a wedge and set up divisiveness among our senior citizens and the families who have to support senior citizens.

Transportation, I understand, is stagnated. We will not have any major action on that. Home security and terrorism, two things that are high on the agenda of this administration, have made no great breakthroughs where they are needed most. I still have police stations in my district which have telephone systems that can only take three calls at a time. The police precinct serves something like 200,000 or 300,000 people in a New York police precinct, but the phone systems are so old that they can only take three or four calls at a time. We do not need a 9/11-type emergency to show us that we have got a problem. Everyday citizens are complaining about the fact that that system does not work. We do have 911, a number of ways to deal with that, but why such antiquated systems?

The firemen who lost lives in great amounts, more than 300 firemen died in the September 11 World Trade terrorism attack. They still do not have equipment that is up to par in terms of communication. Many of them died because the communication equipment was inadequate, and they could not be warned properly about what was happening outside as they went up the steps to rescue people. A simple matter of radios that were not tuned in to the frequency of police radios and things that we have known for some time were a problem. Those problems are not being corrected. In the House and the Senate, many Members have talked about security in our ports and how vulnerable our ports are, and I heard on some television station today about a new program that is being launched by the Secretary for Homeland Security, and that is welcomed, but it is just beginning to creep off the ground, slowly, because we have our priorities diverted into other areas. Each one of these items would be getting far more attention and could be dealt with in a more realistic way if we did not have the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq is a blunder, a quagmire that sucks down dollars. It sucks up the energy and the attention of the highest policymakers in our government. It destroys lives unnecessarily. So the great evil that hangs over this 108th Congress at this time is the great blunder of the war in Iraq.

Accountability for the war in Iraq is unfinished business. We do not, as a Congress, have the accountability that we should be able to expect. As part of a system of checks and balances, certainly we should get more information, we should have more dialogue, we should be told more about what the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) had called an exit strategy. She talked about a plan to train people, the Iraqi police force, the army. When are we going to declare that we have sufficiently done that and say we can go home. There are a number of questions that she asked earlier tonight that go to the heart of the accountability question. Beyond the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and they complain that they do not have respect and they are not given the kind of accountability that they deserve, but there ought to be more general accountability to the Congress and the American people about just how we spent the money. Seventy-nine billion dollars was appropriated earlier. Now, another $87 billion, and yet the question with respect to the helicopter explosion, and it is pretty much conceded now that it was a Stinger-missile-type, shoulder missile which we call our Stingers. We perfected that in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. We taught the Taliban how to do that. We gave them those modern weapons which helped drive the Soviets out, but we learned they are very skilled. The terrorists who came out of the Taliban in Afghanistan are very skilled in the use of shoulder missiles; plus I understand that they are so well-designed that they are fairly easy to use. The helicopter was probably hit by that kind of surface-to-air missile fired by one or two people. One question being raised is did the helicopter have a device that has been designed to protect aircraft from heat-seeking missiles? Was it equipped with it or was it not? And the very fact that the question is being raised and there is no immediate answer tells me that it was not. If it was equipped and it failed, we would have known. We would have been told that by now: It was equipped properly, but it failed.

There are some other questions about how the troops inside the helicopter were protected. And these kinds of micromanagement questions are being raised all the time. The bulletproof vests, there are two types, they say. One just protects them from flak and shrapnel. Another protects them from flak, shrapnel, and bullets. And many of our troops only have the old one. And on and on it goes. My colleagues who have visited Iraq, Republicans as well as Democrats, this is not a partisan matter, are very upset by the shabby way in which some things have been done. We should have a chance to talk more openly about what is going to be done to correct all of this or what exactly is happening. If Rumsfeld is the kind of person who just does not want to talk to Members of Congress, it is one more reason to call for Rumsfeld's resignation. Several people have called for his resignation. I would like to add my voice to that. I think in a situation like this, he should have been asked to resign long time ago. The President is elected. The buck stops with the President. But we ought to say to the President that if he wants to show that he is trying to deal with this problem, then he has got to get rid of the chief planner, the chief policymaker, the person who made the mess. It does not make sense to keep Rumsfeld on as the Secretary of Defense if he wants to convince us that he is trying to solve this problem. We would like to have a dialogue with the President about why he insists on keeping Rumsfeld there when such a mess has been made on so many different levels. The failure to plan for postwar, what happened after the war, is totally unacceptable. It is an outrage because we have been in these situations before. There was so much experience and so much knowledge available, so much history, that we cannot comprehend how basically intelligent men and women could have done such a bad job of anticipating what happened. These are not basically intelligent people; these are brilliant people. Intellect was not a problem. The problem is mindsets and old men indulging in juvenile fantasies about war. All that is part of what has happened, and I make these charges and statements, and I would love to have a dialogue with somebody to tell me they are not true.

The punishment of corporate crime is part of an economic swindle, probably the biggest swindle that the swindled classes suffer from, and I repeat, what I am talking about tonight is there is no class warfare in America. There is a ruling class which has completely pacified the swindled classes, and the present administration here, along with its Republican rule in both Houses, have demonstrated how the ruling class can be very efficient and very effective in executing its policies, even when the policies are wrong. Tax cuts to make the ruling class stronger and more powerful at a time when the economy is in trouble.

Yes, the economy suddenly surged forward, more than 7 percent growth in the last quarter, but that is more disturbing than if the economy was just dragging along. When we look at the surge forward that took place, and we look at the number of jobs that still were lost in the last quarter, 47,000 jobs to make up the total of 3.2 million jobs that have been lost since the Bush Administration came into power, we are having a terrible economic situation develop where the economy can improve, profits can go up, wealth can increase, but there are no jobs for the working families. There are no jobs for college graduates soon because our jobs are being exported. The ruling class has decided they can get computer specialists, they can get Ph.D.s, they can get all kinds of people by traveling around the world, and they can get them for less than one-quarter of the price that they pay here. Computer specialists, now the best school for training for computers is not MIT, computer and related matters, not MIT and some of the first-rate American

universities. At the very top is the University of India, and everybody is clamoring for their graduates from our corporations. Beyond that, at lower levels, people who can do computer work are the beneficiaries from India, Pakistan, a few other places. They just merely have to learn English. They can be beneficiaries of lower-level jobs related to computer services.

And, also, simple matters like telemarketing, telemarketing now is being outsourced at a very rapid rate. Listen carefully, if my colleagues have the occasion when somebody calls them about an item, especially something related to a big corporation, a utility, listen carefully and sometimes we do not have to listen carefully. They have been trained to disguise their voices, and those who call Brooklyn from India, some of them have got a Brooklyn accent, but I picked up phone the other day and there was a person talking from AT&T who had a bit of an accent. So I said, ``Where are you calling from?'' And she said, ``Why are you asking that?'' I said, ``Are you calling from India or Pakistan? Where are you calling from?'' So she got a bit ruffled and she fell into her real accent. So I knew very well she was not an American, and she was calling from some foreign place, having learned to speak English very well.

Telemarketing is not a great job. That is one of the jobs where we might call it an entry-level job. A lot of college graduates have got out of college and drifted around, cannot find anything else. Telemarketing is one of the places they go to get a start. A lot of people who have not been to college can find a lot of jobs in telemarketing. Telemarketing jobs are going rapidly, and it will go right up the ladder. Anybody who thinks they are exempt because they have a Ph.D. or a master's degree are going to find that the master's degrees of India and Pakistan, even Russia, China, those master's degrees and Ph.D.s will be competing at much lower wage levels if we do not do something about policy.

What we do in our government has to deal with the fact that we have got a standard of living that is being steadily eroded by this kind of exporting of jobs. But corporations are doing that, and there is no countervailing force. We waste our time here on ceremonial bills and do not even tackle the problem.

Finally, the failure to punish corporate crime is one of the greatest swindles of all that has taken place in the last few years, one of the derelictions of duty that has taken place, the worse dereliction of duty that has taken place in the last few years.

The failure to deal with corporate crime, to have the appropriate investigations, to have the appropriate follow-up and to punish people who have been stealing from the investing class, the middle class, the investing class, people who are well off enough to have invested some portion of their income, they are the worst victims; not the working class, but the middle class, upper-middle class in particular, who had extra income to invest.

I do not know what the figure is, but my colleague who just left the floor from North Carolina said it is $4.6 trillion; $4.6 trillion has been lost in investment income. It is an astounding figure.

People have lost that kind of money, many of them. Of course, pensioners, people whose pensions got caught up in this. But $4.6 trillion has been swindled away. These people have been swindled, and they are not really fighting back, and nobody is fighting for them. The ruling class has prevailed, and they do not even call hearings in Congress to really deal with it in a forceful way.

Enron, the criminals at Enron are still at large. There are a few that they put in handcuffs and paraded before the cameras, but it was a massive, massive swindle. WorldCom was even larger. Then every day there is some new revelation about the way in which the banks are in collusion with these swindles. Even the stock market has finally been exposed to be riddled with conflicts of interest and all kinds of questionable dealings that resulted in income being lost by this class of people that had enough money to invest.

Investors have lost a tremendous amount of money. The ruling class has completely prevailed over these investors, and the investors, the middle class, upper middle class, educated people, they are now part of the swindled class. They join the ranks at the very bottom who cannot even get an increase in the minimum wage.

If there is anything that stands out, it is the way we have failed as a Congress to protect our people from the ruling class swindles that have taken place. The greatest economic swindle on jobs is the worst. Corporate swindles against small investors is probably the most far- reaching and the most devastating in terms of the volume of stealing that is taking place.

We have got a surge with our jobs lost which shows we are going to have more of a swindling taking place at another level of what used to be the middle class. We have lost manufacturing jobs. We have given up on that.

We joined in the great argument in many cases. The great argument was that we are America, we are ahead of everybody in the area of high-tech production. We will be the high-tech gurus of the world. We will provide high-tech services. And we still do lead everybody else in terms of nations. But the assumption that this is automatic, that, as we surrender manufacturing jobs, that automatically we will benefit from the new world order, where global trade will mean trading services as well as trading goods, and we will trade our services, we will provide the innovations, we will provide the science, all of those assumptions might have made sense 10 years ago; but you would have to be blind not to see that China is not waiting to develop its high-tech class, its high-tech workers. Russia certainly always has had high-tech workers; they have just been out of the world markets, and many other nations have, as a matter of national policy, set out to take over certain sectors of the high-tech economy.

It is not by accident that China sent a man up in space. They have been sending up satellites for some time. The man in space in China is just one more piece of evidence that shows you how hard they are working at this high-tech development of high-tech personnel brain power.

The brain power is the question, not military power. Military power is backed by brain power. That is why we won the war in Iraq so rapidly. It was by a tremendous amount of brain power that went into developing the weapons system. But that is not the way of the future. We have done it probably for the last time, made the mistake of believing we can really gain a greater foothold for democracy or for our economy or anything by military action against a nation as large as Iraq. It is a pitfall, a bottomless pit that we have fallen into, and we must get out of it and get out of it with honor. But we cannot do that unless we make some radical changes in the way we do things, the swindle I will come to later, because lives are being swindled away from American citizens.

The refusal to consider the minimum wage, I want to come back to that. The refusal to consider the minimum wage increase is the most hard-hearted, cold-blooded piece of mindset that we are faced with. It originates from Democrats and Republicans, unfortunately.

We have an economic guru, a person who has been guiding our economic policy in this country for some time now, Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan does not believe in the minimum wage. Alan Greenspan thinks we should not have a minimum wage. He is a disciple of Ayn Rand, the individualist, great fascist, rugged individualist, in my opinion.

Ayn Rand said the government should never be involved in the lives of people, it should never interfere with business; we do not need government until we have a war. Ayn Rand said we need government only for wars. So the government should use its power to send soldiers off to die to protect the rugged individuals, the capitalists, the Greenspans, the Rands. People should go off to die to protect them, but it should ignore their health care, ignore laws which establish minimum wages and allows them to earn a decent living. All that should be ignored. It is all unnecessary.

I marvel at how long they have gotten away with this and how revered Mr. Greenspan is in this Capitol still by Democrats and Republicans. He has

been reappointed twice by a Democratic President, and nobody wants to touch Mr. Greenspan.

I think we should dwell for a moment on the fact that all the surveys show that the soldiers fighting in Iraq, like the soldiers who died in Vietnam, like the soldiers who died in Korea, mostly come from working families, people who would benefit from government actions such as an increase in the minimum wage.

We have a situation where basic questions need to be asked, about whether or not an individual should have the right to refuse to go to war. We had a draft in the case of Korea; we had a draft in the case of Vietnam. If this administration is reelected, and I say this standing here on this 4th of November, 2003, if this administration is reelected, there will be a draft, because there is only one way to solve their problems, and that is more manpower.

I would like to see them put more manpower in Iraq right away, because I think part of the solution to the problem in Iraq is you have to secure the place and you need bodies to secure the place. You need soldiers to secure the place. For political reasons they want to keep the number of soldiers involved in Iraq down low, but by that political decision we are going to lose more lives. Every life lost in any war is unfortunate, but a life lost in the war in Iraq, a war which never should have been, a blunder, a disgrace, that life is much worse, the tragedy is much worse, because it is needless. We are going to lose more people because of the politics of not putting enough troops in place to secure Iraq.

While I am on the subject, I would like to mention there is a conference being scheduled by my colleague, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis), sometime next week, I think it is the 14th of November, a conference on the black male and the problems faced by black males in America. Of course that conference will have to deal with the first and greatest problem, the tremendous unemployment problem faced by black males, by young people in general; and our society as a whole better take note that things that happen to blacks always get multiplied and transferred into the larger society.

There was a time when drug addictions and problems related to drugs started out in the African American community. The hustlers and the criminals and organized crime took advantage of the weaknesses in the African American community. They got a base there. They capitalized and expanded and got such a tremendous base until there is nowhere in America right now, small towns, large towns, nowhere, where the menace of drugs, particularly for young people, is not there.

So the menace of unemployment on a mass scale, unemployment of a group of people, will not stay just with the black males. But right now it is very high, 25 percent. Before you get into the figures of how many unemployed there are, look at the figures that relate to the lack of jobs and the lack of any stabilizing factors in their lives, like the figures, the numbers in prison, on probation and on parole. Staggering numbers of young black males are in prison, on parole or on probation.

Even Secretary Rumsfeld brought up the subject of education in one of his interviews, where he talked about the dilemma that we face as we fight terrorism in the world. The dilemma is that the terrorists are always training more people. They have sort of an unlimited supply of potential terrorists; and they are even training them formally, openly, in the madrassas, madrassas, particularly he mentioned madrassas of Pakistan.

Well, that is an appropriate observation, because the Taliban came out of the madrassas of Pakistan. The Taliban did not organize themselves by themselves, but the cannon fodder, the personnel of the Taliban, are graduates from the madrassas of Pakistan. These are schools that were set up by the fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists. They taught them reading, writing, science, and hatred. They still are going.

I visited Pakistan. Because I have a large Pakistan community in the lower part of my district in Brooklyn, they kept inviting me to come visit. Three years ago I visited Pakistan. Because I was most interested in education, I was taken around to various places, three cities, and talked to people, visited schools, et cetera. It became apparent to me after one day that they had no respect for their education system.

Public education was a very low priority in Pakistan. So the public education was receiving pennies, while they were spending money heavily, of course, on the military and in a number of other places. But public education was still being treated as though it was trivial, inconsequential. So the madrassas, the religious private schools, step in and fill the vacuum by providing reading, writing, science, math, food. You get a meal. A mother who sends a child, they are mostly males, sends her son to a madrassas, knows he is going to get a decent meal, be taken care of all day, and get basic education.

If you have no public school system, then who can blame a mother or father for sending their child to what does exist? The madrassas of Pakistan and a number of other places, these madrassas, by the way, are able to do what they do because they get funding from Saudi Arabia and some other rich oil countries, but mostly Saudi Arabia, because they are based on the Wahhabi sect. I am not well versed enough to know whether it is a sect or not, but there is a group that pushes what they call Islamic fundamentalism. It is based in Saudi Arabia, and they have financed these madrassas in Pakistan and other places. So they will keep going. Our ally, Saudi Arabia, has not indicated they will stop funding it.

But for a parent, it is an alternative that makes sense, if you do not have a public education system. The public education system in this country in areas where the black males are concentrated has been treated as a low priority, trivialized.

Obvious problems have not been dealt with. You can look at the physical facilities and the lack of equipment and supplies and books and before you get to the quality of construction and see that there is a great difference, it is almost as if you had de jour, de jour segregation in our big cities. When you look at the contrast between the way our big cities look in one section versus in another, or the way our big city schools look in the cities, the inner city versus the suburbs, you can see the great difference, as if somebody had consummated a decision to give inferior education to the African American students and to not deal with their needs.

The greatest need, of course, is outside of school, and that is income. Families need income in order to support children in school. School children's families are struggling to survive and are inevitably going to suffer. They are going to suffer. I do not see that it is inevitable that they will not succeed, because I came from a very poor family. My father never earned more than the minimum wage, and he had eight children. So you cannot get much poorer than we were and, yet, just about every member of my family has to some degree achieved some degree of success.

We have those stories of very strong families and people who overcome. The African American community would have withered away a long time ago if we did not have these people who overcome: the super people. But that is not human nature. Most human beings faced with tremendous adversity do not overcome, they succumb. They succumb to drugs, they succumb to the easy money on the streets selling drugs or other kinds of crime, and our dilemma with the black male conference is that we do not know how we are going to get out of this without the help of government. It is such a monumental problem, such a huge problem, we do not know how to get out of it.

Of course, the prejudices in our policymaking do not help at all. The fact that our prisons are already full of people who really should not be there and that many of the black males who go back on the street after serving time in prison, never should have been put in prison because they had drug problems, drug addiction problems. And all intelligent people agree that the first avenue of attack for a drug addiction problem ought to be treatment. But these people have never been in treatment in large numbers, and it is generally considered a luxury to provide treatment for a drug addict.

Of course, if a drug addict happens to be Rush Limbaugh, not only does he

get the best treatment in the world because he can afford it, but he also does not admit that he is an addict. I do not know whether what he did was criminal or not, but I do take exception, and I resent the way in which the information about Rush Limbaugh's situation is being handled. I know of many young people who have been put in prison and served terms for the kinds of things that are implied in Rush Limbaugh's behavior. Definitely, he was an addict seeking drugs that were not prescribed, or seeking amounts of drugs that were not prescribed.

I have been told that it is intemperate, it is bad manners, it maybe is uncivilized to criticize Rush when he is down, but if there is anybody who ought to be criticized when he is down, it is Rush Limbaugh. Heartless, merciless, he specialized in ridiculing people. He is the kind of person who calls for drug addicts to be put in jail. So why not comment on the fact that there is one standard for the black males and females who happen to get caught up in drug use, drug users, and another standard for another set of people. The swindled set of people. There are large numbers of blacks, but the number of whites is increasing all the time. The number of other groups is increasing. The number of females is steadily increasing who are caught up in using drugs, and they get into the criminal system that refuses to provide adequate treatment, but will spend $15,000 or $20,000 a year to keep them in prison, and $15,000 is a low figure. Some prisons in New York and a few other places, it is $30,000 a year to keep a person in prison. Half the people in prison are there for nonviolent crimes relating to drugs. But Rush Limbaugh can go to a private place and people are afraid to say he has committed a crime.

I would like to read a bit from an article that appeared in the Miami Herald on October 12 related to Rush Limbaugh's situation. The article was written by two reporters, and I will not submit the entire piece for the Record, but I want to read some sections. Lisa Anderson and Raoul Mowatt wrote this article and I quote from certain sections of it. One quote: ``Limbaugh did not specify if the medicines he abused had been prescribed. And he did not address allegations by his former maid, Wilma Cline, that she had procured OxyContin, Lorcet and other painkillers for him.''

``At the present time, the authorities are conducting an investigation,'' Mowatt said, ``and I have been asked to limit my public comments until this investigation is complete.''

Quoting again, from the article, ``I do wonder if it is going to cause any softening in the way he perceives personal failings and weaknesses in others,'' said Rendall, who coauthored the book ``The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error.'' A critic of him said, ``I wonder if this is going to cause any softening in the way he perceives personal failings and weaknesses in others.''

Maybe we should all pray for Rush Limbaugh. Why not pray for him as we pray for other addicts. But I think somewhere there ought to be an acknowledgment of the fact that he is an addict and some request for forgiveness.

To continue from the article, ``He has been incredibly uncharitable. He has relentlessly exploited the personal weaknesses and failings of others. He has not extended the same understanding one suspects he would like to be getting right now,'' said Rendall. ``Some of his listeners are bound to be shaken by the fact that Rush has feet of clay.''

``While humility has never been the style of the bombastic Limbaugh, a dose of it might not hurt his image,'' said Harrison, another person who was asked to comment. ``Well, I guess he has to now join the rest of humanity and fess up to the fact that some of us are not as strong as others. If he is a hypocrite, well then so be it. He is not the only one.''

``Indeed, Limbaugh hardly is the first prominent conservative figure to tumble from the realm of sanctimony to shame. Once wildly popular television evangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert famously fell from their pulpits in the late 1980s, undone by missions of adultery and addiction to pornography, respectively. And just 5 months ago, former Reagan administration education Secretary William Bennett, best-selling author of such moralistic tomes as ``The Book of Virtues'' was revealed to have a major gambling habit. In Limbaugh's case, many thought his conservative listeners would be compassionate. This is a beloved man to his listeners. It would only draw them closer like a family gets closer in a time of crisis. The worst thing Limbaugh could do is to return to the air in too chastened a form,'' said one commentator. ``The only thing that can destroy Rush Limbaugh's career is Rush Limbaugh suddenly becoming a boring person, and it doesn't seem that he is about to become that,'' implying that to be compassionate is to be boring. To be tolerant is to be boring.

The excitement of Rush Limbaugh is that he has no mercy on people in trouble. It is another way in which the ruling class dominates the swindled classes. Rush Limbaugh is a jester. He is a joker. The kings had jesters, you know, and jokers. Sometimes they were very well paid. He stands for the ruling class and provides laughs for them by denigrating the poorest people who are being swindled at the bottom.

The great education reform swindle takes place because we do not recognize the problem that I just cited in Pakistan. If we do not educate people, we run the risk of them falling into the hands of a Taliban. I am not going to make any extreme projections, but Islam is the fastest growing religion in America today, and the people who are converting to Islam are black males. If you want to know what is relevant, how to relate one thing to another, black males are the people converting to Islam faster than anybody else. I am not saying that they are ready to rush out and become terrorists and join the Taliban, but it is an interesting development. They see something there that I do not quite understand, but it ought to be watched and understood.

People who are treated like dirt, if they are drug addicts, of course, they are even below that level, they are going to respond, the whole class is going to respond in ways which are not healthy for America. The great health care swindle goes on, the people who are going bankrupt, and a lot of them are middle class and upper middle class. I mentioned them before.

But the biggest swindle, of course, is the war on Iraq swindle. The war on Iraq swindle is the most outrageous of all. Dollars and lives are going down the drain, and the people who are running the operation refuse to be accountable to the Congress of the United States, and the leadership of the Congress of the United States refuses to make them accountable. They do not demand. The leadership is the Republican majority. They do not demand that the people come here and tell us what they are doing, how they intend to proceed with the spending of $87 billion, and when we can expect an exit.

The gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), who was on the floor earlier, cited the fact that if you took the $87 billion and divided it among the Members of Congress, it will be above $200 million for each congressional district in America; that $87 billion would be more than $200 million. And he talked about all of the things we could do with that in terms of building schools, supporting better health care, et cetera. But those dollars are swindled away from the American people who are going to have to pay the bill with interest later on.

We have the swindle that refuses to spend dollars on targeted revenue-sharing back to our localities that are in trouble who are cutting the budgets of schools and services, so those localities can get through this recession, which they say is almost over; that kind of cooperation is needed. As I said before, disdain for the municipal elections, the local elections that are taking place today, that disdain is reflected in the way we appropriate money. We have not come to their aid. The Federal Government is the one place that does not have to balance the budget. New York City, New York State, 42 of the States were in such budget trouble that they had to cut the school budgets and, in some cases, the school year was cut. But the Federal Government has not come to their aid.

So as we end this session, as we are nearing the end of the session, I would like for my colleagues to reflect on the

fact that there is no class warfare in America. The ruling class has completely pacified the swindled classes.

I want to end it with a little piece that summarizes that. It is a rap poem I put in the Congressional Record on Wednesday, July 16 called ``Let the Rich Go First.'' This is as a result of my anger when on July 10, there was a vote to stop the expenditure of funds which were being allocated for the study of the Wage an Hour Act to cut overtime and that vote was defeated by the Republican majority. At a time when we were voting to stop paying overtime to working families, shortly after that, it was announced that the soldiers in Iraq would have to be kept there longer than expected. Instead of 6 months, they may be kept there for a year. Reservists would be in for a year instead of 6 months. So overtime for the people dying and fighting in Iraq, we are fighting overtime for payment of working families.

``Let The Rich Go First.''

``Working families keep your soldiers at home, for overtime in Iraq no cash, no comp time, not even gratitude, Republicans intrude to exempt all heroes, no combat rotation, life on indefinite probation, scrooges running the Nation. To the front lines let the rich go first, for blood they got a thirst, let the superstars drink it in the glorious trenches; leave the disadvantaged on the benches. Welfare moms have a message for the masters: Tell Uncle Sam his welfare pennies he can keep for food stamps we refuse to leap through your hoops like beasts; just promise to leave our sons alone and we will find our own feasts. To Uncle Sam we offer a bargain: don't throw us dirty crumbs, don't treat us like bums and then demand the full measure of devotion; our minds are now in motion, class warfare is not such a bad notion.

Your swindle will not last. Recruiters we will not let pass. Finally we opened our eyes, each family is a private enterprise. Each child a precious prize. We got American property rights, before our children die in war. This time we will choose the fights. Let the rich go first: They worry about the overtime we abuse; the battlefields they always choose. Their estates have the most to lose. Let the rich go first.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 46 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, November 5, 2003, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, because of an emergency in my district, I missed rollcall vote #354, #355, #356, #357 and #359. If I were present I would have voted ``nay'' on rollcall vote #356, #358 and ``yea'' on rollcall vote #354, #355, #357 and #359.

Mr. Chairman, I hope we are not exporting to Iraq the kind of democracy which would allow a minute and a half only for a Representative of more than 650,000 people to speak. We need more time to excuse how we are going to spend $87 billion. We have enough money for our troops to last until next spring. What is the hurry?

Sixty percent of the American people are against this $87 billion blank check to an administration that has mismanaged the war against terrorism. Sixty percent. I speak for the majority here. The American people want us to issue a mandated RFP to Secretary Rumsfeld and the White House: give a proposal that makes more sense. We have better proposals that we can put on the table for the expenditure of $87 billion.

What could this Nation do with the energy, the brainpower, and the billions of dollars being invested in the great deadly blunder in Iraq? That is what it is, a great deadly blunder. That is what we have done in Iraq. We have put all of our energy, all of our money, all of our effort into a place where we will not increase the safety of the American people; we will not fight terrorism appropriately.

With this kind of huge giveaway package, the American people could have more effective initiatives to eliminate terrorism. We could have more money going to Pakistan, for instance, where we have a battle in that country for the hearts and minds of people. We have half the population on our side, half not; but we are not giving them billions of dollars to win the war for democracy in Pakistan.

With this kind of package, how can we strengthen the homeland defenses, our ports and the number of areas that are still vulnerable? This is a great waste, and the American people know it. The majority say no, and I am with the majority.

Mr. Speaker, we are all glad that Saddam Hussein has been dethroned. It is better for the world. It is better for Iraq. But the cost is too great and has been too great in dollars, and we now are considering another $87 billion. We have already invested more than $70 billion. The regular defense budget is also enormous, and that has been expended, and there is no end in sight. We will have more requests for more money.

The cost has been too great. We have not achieved any greater amount of security from terrorism. In fact, we are less secure from terrorism now than we were before we invaded Iraq. We have been forced to concentrate all of our energies, all of our priorities, our best minds, everything has been concentrated in Iraq, ignoring the threat in Afghanistan and the borders of Pakistan.

The overwhelming burden of the Iraq blunder, however, has been placed on the backs of working families. The actual troops out there are from working families. We all support our troops. We all want to do whatever is necessary to make certain that those troops come home. We want to do whatever is necessary to support them to guarantee that they have a chance to come home. The overwhelming burden of the Iraq blunder, however, should not remain on the backs of working families. Mismanagement should not cause more unnecessary suffering and more death among working families, relatives of people who are from working families.

The New York Times documented what we all knew already, that more than 90 percent of the members of the military are from working families. More than 90 percent of the people in Iraq are from working families. This is true for the war in Iraq, as it has been true for most other wars.

We know in the Civil War, the people who had money could buy their way out of the draft and pay someone else to go in their place. But, in general, draft boards and drafts in cases of the war in Vietnam and Korea and so forth have ended up selecting large numbers of working family members.

The greatest generation that celebrated winning World War II had many components, class-wise, but the overwhelming number of people who lost their lives in World War II were also people who were in working families.

Working families are very special to America. Working families have a right to make a claim on America. And what concerns me, and the reason I am here today, is that we do not seem to understand the importance of working families, the people who are in charge, the people who are in power continue to treat working families as if they were expendable, that they are not important.

We heard some discussion of the welfare bill before today. It was technical, and it was probably difficult to understand, but that is one of the greatest harassments of working families you are going to find, the present welfare legislation, which provides a family of four is given a subsidy of $6,000 or $7,000 per year, while at the same time we give subsides to agribusiness of more than $250,000 per year. One more treatment, one more example of the treatment of working families.

We need to take a hard look at this war in Iraq and what it is doing to us. We need to stop the war for many reasons. We need to stop the war because it is absorbing large amounts of cash that can be used for other purposes, for purposes that we need here at home to improve our economy and to improve the lot of all of us, including the lot of working families.

This great Nation's survival and its freedom are directly dependent on the courage and the devotion of men and women from working families. The blunder has been committed already. We are mired in a deep pit. We cannot leave now. The sons and daughters of working families must remain on the dangerous front lines. But at least we could support those troops in a better manner, not in the current superficial manner being mouthed by so many while at the same time they undercut our troops.

We need to understand that in very concrete ways, we are betraying the troops in Iraq who are from working families. The kinds of programs that have been promulgated by the Republican leadership are outrageous. Patriotic and meaningful support means that we must address some of the following issues, and we must do it immediately:

The conflict must be better managed so that there is multinational participation in the decision-making and a clear exit strategy to bring these American troops home. The best we can do for our troops, the most important thing we can do for them, is to bring them home. It has to be an honorable exit. We do not want to leave the job half done. We have to make certain that no other leader like Saddam Hussein is ever able to take control of Iraq.

We want to encourage democracy as much as possible. The first step toward doing that is to share the decision-making with other nations and have other nations get involved because they know they can participate in the decision-making. They will then commit troops and commit equipment and other things. And, most of all, they will be there to send a message to the Iraqi population that Americans are not trying to take over their country, occupy their country, and control the tremendous oil fields that lie beneath that country. That would be one way to say to working families, we care about the troops, we care about your son and daughter. We are going to make that effort.

With regard to the United Nations, this administration has only offered a cold shoulder, despite the difficulty that we are in. We are not moving to try to convince the rest of the world that we are ready to share decision-making with Iraq. We are ready to go some extra lengths, swallow our pride, do some things we said we would never do, put away our anger, and do what will promote a solution, the fastest possible solution in Iraq. That is what we can do for our troops. They deserve it.

There are some other direct benefits that the sons and daughters of working families over there deserve. They deserve adequate equipment and they deserve troops, a troop contingent, enough troops to make it safer for them. There are not enough troops in Iraq. They are not adequately equipped.

We heard some speeches before from some visitors who went over. I found them very interesting. John Murtha, who has been on the Committee on Armed Services for two decades, made the same trip, came back and was incensed and angered by the fact that the morale was so low and obvious needs in equipment and supplies were not being met. And he immediately demanded that the President fire the people who were in charge of the war in Iraq.

John Murtha, the gentleman from Pennsylvania, who has long experience in the Committee on Armed Services, saw an outrageous performance in terms of the leadership who planned and executed the war in Iraq.

Rotation rights have been sort of dismissed. Even in the war in Vietnam, there was a right of a soldier not to be placed at risk for more than a year. A year in combat, placing your life at risk, was all that was demanded. You could rotate out of Vietnam after a year. Those rights have not been guaranteed to the people in Iraq, soldiers, regular soldiers or Reservists.

The worst thing is the people who are in the Reserves, who thought they were going for a 6-month stint, have now

had their time extended. Worse still for the people in the Reserves there is no economic justice. People in the Reserves gave up jobs. They were not career people. Yes, they signed up, and they knew that they would have to go in case of an emergency, but they were not career military people. And they did not want to give up their income and their jobs, leave their families indefinitely, but they had to do that. They were forced to do that.

We have behaved so abominably toward those working families that a Washington Post article of yesterday describes it as unacceptable, almost atrocious. It is a legislative atrocity that they described. I am going to read from this article in which the Washington Post described what is being done to Reservists in this war in Iraq. ``A proposal to close any pay gap faced by civil service employees who are called to active duty in the military reserves will not be considered by the House and Senate negotiators working on the fiscal 2004 Defense authorization bill.''

Now, this brings it home to us. We mouth our concern about supporting the troops and here is an example of how little we are supporting the troops, especially the Reservists, how we hold them in contempt really.

``In May the House Government Reform Committee approved an amendment sponsored by Representatives Tom Lantos and Chris Bell aimed at requiring Federal agencies to make up the difference between civil service and military pay for those on military duty.'' The provision was one of several civil service changes but, hear me carefully, a civil servant working for the Federal Government, who happens to be in the military Reserves, goes to Iraq; he is paid at the same rate as any other soldier, but he left a job that was paying far more. He left a family that had been nurtured on an income of more.

If the Federal Government still had him on the payroll, it would cost them a certain amount of money. If they continue to pay him at the same rate, it does not cost them any more money, it just keeps him at the same rate while he is off doing his duty for his country under very difficult circumstances. But they did not agree to that.

``The provision was dropped when the Armed Services panel put together the House version of the defense authorization bill. That version sets out guidelines for weapons and equipment purposes and for troop strength. The Lantos bill amendment stalled because of its cost: $160 million over 5 years including $75 million in fiscal 2004.''

Hear me carefully: It would have cost the government, the Federal Government, $160 million over 5 years, including $75 million in fiscal 2004. But if those same people had remained in their jobs, they would have been paid the $160 million over 5 years and $75 million. And the Federal Government was not called upon to do any more than they would have done if there had been no war in Iraq. I find that atrocious. I find the behavior of this Congress under the Republican majority leadership to be atrocious.

More important, in another outrageous observation, however, were objections from the Defense Department, which argued that making up differences in pay for civil service employees would undercut military morale. You have two sergeants, one a career military and one a Reservist doing the same job. And essentially the government is paying the civilian employee more for that service than the career military guy. That is the heart of the Defense Department objection. Listen to that carefully. It would undercut military morale to have a citizen who was earning an income at a certain level from the Federal Government, who was there against his will, he did it out of duty, has been shipped to Iraq, and he is in units along with career military people.

Now, if you are a career military person, you know what the pay scale is. You have accepted the pay scale. Your family is probably getting some benefits that the civil servant family is not getting. There are a number of ways in which a career person has adapted to a situation that they voluntarily went into. But the Reservist, who happened to have been a civil service employee for the Federal Government, has to hear that he would undercut morale if the government paid him at the same rate that they were always paying him.

About 200 private sector employers, however, and 50 State and local governments make up the difference in pay for their worker. Listen carefully: The Federal Government, the men and women in charge of the blunder in Iraq, who created a situation requiring all these Reservists to go, they are doing less than 200 private sector employers, 50 State and local governments, which now make up the difference in pay for their workers when the workers are forced to serve as Reservists.

This is outrageous. It falls right at the doorstep of us Members of Congress and Members of the other body. About 65,000 Reservists are employed by Federal agencies. Mr. Speaker, 65,000 is a large number that we are depriving of income, we are depriving those working families of their income at a certain level, forcing them to accept the pay of the military service that they are in. Sixty-five thousand Reservists are employed by Federal agencies making the government the single largest employer of Reservists. An additional 48,000 Federal technicians are required, they do not have a choice, to be members of the Guard as a condition of employment.

So we have a huge contingent of citizens, who happen to be Federal employees, who are treated like dirt. Our government, our Federal Government treats this huge number of people and their families like dirt. Working families should not have to bear these kind of burdens. This is a legislative atrocity.

Madam Speaker, I submit this article in its entirety into the record. It is entitled ``Pay Gap Remedy for Military Reserve Appears Doomed,'' in the Washington Post, Monday, September 29th.

[From the Washington Post, Sept. 29, 2003]

Pay-Gap Remedy for Military Reserves Appears Doomed

(By Stephen Barr)

A proposal to close any pay gap faced by civil service

employees who are called to active duty in the military

reserves will not be considered by House and Senate

negotiators working on the fiscal 2004 defense authorization

bill, according to congressional aides.

Most lawmakers feel that the issue was evaluated by the

House Armed Services Committee during its deliberations and

is now closed, the aides said.

The proposal, pushed by a group of House Democrats, ran

into opposition because of its cost, as well as concern that

it might cause morale problems among regular military troops.

In May, the House Government Reform Committee approved an

amendment sponsored by Reps. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Chris

Bell (D-Tex.) aimed at requiring federal agencies to make up

the difference between civil service and military pay for

those on military duty. The provision was one of several

civil service changes proposed for the Defense Department and

forwarded to the Armed Services Committee.

But the provision was dropped when the Armed Services panel

put together the House version of the defense authorization

bill, which sets out guidelines for weapons and equipment

purchases, military benefits and troop strength.

The Lantos-Bell amendment stalled because of its cost--$160

million over five years, including $75 million in fiscal

2004--and because it could have triggered jurisdictional

questions that would have given the Government Reform

Committee a voice in shaping the defense bill, a

congressional aide said.

More important, however, were objections from the Defense

Department, which argued that making up differences in pay

for civil service employees would undercut military morale.

``You have two sergeants, one a career military and one a

reservist, doing the same job. And essentially the government

is paying the civilian employee more for that service than

the career military guy--that is the heart of the Defense

Department objection,'' the congressional aide said.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said there would be no comment on

the issue.

Supporters of the Lantos-Bell effort argue that National

Guard and reserve families are increasingly at risk of

financial hardship because reservists are being called up

more frequently since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The Army recently issued a policy requiring Guard and reserve

troops to serve 12-month tours in Iraq, meaning that most

Army reservists will be mobilized for more than a year.

About 200 private-sector employers and 50 state and local

governments make up the difference in pay for their workers

and the federal government should serve as an example of the

importance of assisting reservists, an aide to Lantos said.

But other congressional aides said the issue needs more

study. It might be more appropriate to use pay supplements to

offset income loss for specific occupations or individuals

rather than to take a blanket approach, they said.

Recent studies indicate that between 30 percent and 40

percent of activated reservists face a loss of income during

mobilization.

About 65,000 reservists are employed by federal agencies,

making the government the single-largest employer of

reservists. An additional 48,000 federal technicians are

required to be members of the Guard as a condition of

employment.

The Office of Personnel Management has called on federal

agencies to shoulder the cost of health insurance premiums

for employees called to active duty. At last count, about 80

out of more than 100 federal agencies had agreed to pick up

the premiums.

Madam Speaker, just treatment for working families left behind ought to be a major goal of a government that has asked people to go and fight in Afghanistan or in Iraq. Just treatment for working families left behind. What is involved in just treatment? I serve as the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. And I am on that committee which has jurisdiction over the minimum wage, over the Wage and Hour Act, and other safety programs related to persons in the workforce. We have had constant harassment since the Republican majority took control of the Congress on all of these fronts.

On the minimum wage, we are still at $5.15 an hour. In the last 3 years, the Republican majority has refused to allow us to bring a bill to the floor to increase the minimum wage. That is what we think of working families that we send off to war in times of war. They go. They die. They fight. They get wounded. They are the backbone of the security for America. But we do not want to increase the minimum wage beyond $5.15 an hour. We have had constant harassment on overtime pay and recently that was sort of intensified. But they do not want to pay people cash for overtime. They want changes in law, so that employers can pay you comp time if they so choose. It is not your choice. It is their choice. Comp time, taking the cash out of your pay check and food off your table, but offering you comp time at some future date they choose.

They pushed that very hard. And even now, although we stopped it in the Congress by executive fiat, the law is being changed to eliminate certain categories of people as being eligible for overtime.

A jobs program is not in sight. Unemployment goes galloping on, and we do not have a jobs program.

Health care, the papers all reported yesterday or today that the number of people who are uninsured in America has jumped dramatically, gone up. Those are working families that are uninsured.

Poverty, three or four days ago, it was reported that poverty has greatly increased. These are the families from which these soldiers come. These are the families that supply the troops out there that we say we care about.

Madam Speaker, at this time I would be glad to yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland).

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman and I would like to add to that discussion on veterans.

Most of us in the House of Representatives were shocked 3 weeks ago to discover that there was a provision where veterans who go to the hospital must pay for their food, their meals. And we immediately passed legislation to end that. I do not know whether it has been signed by the President yet or not. It is just one more administrative atrocity. I use the word atrocity, and I think it is appropriate. It is an atrocity to have veterans treated as they are. Some of my friends earlier are talking about ``you have to go to Iraq to know exactly what is happening.''

I suggest to those who want to know what is happening, go to Walter Reed Hospital and visit the wounded. The wounded also suffer. And in many cases those are wounded one week, and in a few weeks are dead. You can get a good example of what is going on if you look at veterans who, the minute they are off the roster of the Army, they will get no pay. They will be put on disability. Some have totally lost everything in terms of limbs or the capacity to work. They were put on disability, which is a far cry from the salary they earned as a soldier.

So my simple plea is that working families who fight for the security and peace abroad deserve survivable and living wages and a reasonable chance to pursue happiness here at home. We are investing tremendous amounts of money in the rebuilding of Iraq in the Armed Forces, and we are neglecting the needs of our own people in catastrophic proportions.

On March 3, I summarized my concern with the waste of American cash in a rap poem which I call Stop The War--We Need The Cash.

Stop the war, we need the cash.

Tank battles escalate into nuclear ash.

Stop the war.

We need the cash.

Give Medicaid families some of Rumsfeld's stash.

Throw the empty body bags in to the trash.

Stop the war.

Welfare mothers rush to cry.

Soldiers from the ranks of the poor will be the first to die.

Stop the war.

Vietnam had profound lessons to teach.

Empires lose when they overreach.

Stop the war.

One of the greatest monuments related to heroes is the Vietnam War Memorial monument here in Washington. That monument makes a statement that has never been made by any other military monument in the history in the world. Instead of unknown soldiers in a tomb, they have put the names of every soldier who died in Vietnam on the wall for you to see. They have given those individuals a person. They are there. And you must confront the fact that wars take individual humans in large numbers, in the case of Vietnam, 58,000, but regardless of numbers, the individualization of a process, the Vietnam Memorial Wall does that.

The poor are up there. The youngsters who came from welfare families. The numerous youngsters who came out of the big cities because when the draft was on, the largest proportion of young men who went to Vietnam came out of our big city slums. We must stop and think for a moment about the way those soldiers and everybody who was enlisted are treated in terms of the technicalities and administrative requirements of the veterans administration.

They have categories, Category 7, 8, people who served in combat under great risk are given preference. They are different from others. But I say that anybody who has served in the military for the benefit of his country deserves equal treatment, because once you put the uniform on and you take the oath, your life belongs to the military, to the Nation. And where you go and what you do is determined by forces that you have no control over.

If you were needed behind the lines to catalog munitions or run a computer, then you were assigned there because you were needed there. The fact that you were not put on the front line does not make you any less than the people who were put on the front lines, because you could not make that decision.

So everybody who put a uniform on and took the oath should be treated as a hero. They are a small percentage of the rest of us. Even in World War II when such large numbers went to war, the percentage of those who actually went to war was still a small percentage of the overall population. They deserve to be treated as heroes. Those who went to Vietnam deserve to be treated as heroes, regardless of how many hours they spent in combat under fire. They were all heroes. They come from working families, as I said before, most of them; and this classification scheme, these technicalities about how much copayment you have to pay if you are a Category 8 versus Category 7, whether you are eligible at all is part of the insult that working families have been forced to endure; and we should fight against it.

Righteous indignation is in order. The treatment of working families in America is an outrageous abomination and we should fight. We fight on the front lines, and we die on the front lines. We should fight our government.

We should fight Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan is against the minimum wage law. Alan Greenspan has been the economic guru of Democrats and Republicans for a long time. Did you know that Alan Greenspan thinks that we should not even have a minimum wage law? Part of the reason we cannot get a minimum wage law to the floor is we have the guru of our economic system saying we do not need a minimum wage law. This is outrageous.

Alan Greenspan happens to be a disciple of Ayn Rand, a woman who was a great individualist, who felt that government was not needed, group action was not needed except in times of war or when you need the police. So when her physical body was threatened, she believed in the group process, we should have police, we should have an Army. Any other time, individuals should be totally left alone; and if they cannot make it, let them die. So that man is a disciple of Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan. He is one of the reasons we cannot move. Philosophically, there are too many people in Washington who agree that minimum wage laws are not important.

Examine the tax cuts of that situation in terms of what happened at the New York Stock Exchange. The New York Stock Exchange has a big brouhaha because the man who headed the stock exchange, Dick Grasso, had a severance package of $140 million and he wanted another 48; and they made a big brouhaha, and headlines were formed about how dare he ask for another $48 million. Well, what about the first $140 million? These astronomical amounts of money are being tossed around by the people who belong to the kleptocracy. At the time I call them kleptocracy, call them oligarchy, whatever you want to call them. They are the ones who want a tax cut. They do not need a tax cut. It is obscene the kinds of figures that we have heard that corporations throw around among themselves, Enron, WorldCom. The head of WorldCom, one of the directors got a $400 million loan from the company, $400 million. Can you imagine a loan of $400 million? Surely if you get a $400 million loan, it is understood by those who loan it to you that you are never going to pay it back.

But this goes on, and these are the people who will show great indignation if a welfare mother gets extra food stamps. This is the kind of mental attitude that we have allowed to develop.

The workers who are on the front lines in Iraq, Afghanistan and everywhere else have to know they have to come forward and fight, fight this kind of oppression.

On Wednesday, July 16, as a result of my anger following the attempt to stop the payment of overtime to workers, I wrote the following and enter it into the Congressional Record:

``Mr. Speaker, the July 10th vote to allow the expenditure of funds to implement radical changes in the overtime provisions of the Wage and Hour Act was an outrageous and devastating attack on working families.

Compounding the horror of this action is the recent announcement that our present complement of soldiers in Iraq, 90 percent of whom come from working families, will be forced into combat overtime for the indefinite future.''

At the same time we were fighting overtime payment for workers here, we were announcing, the President was announcing, Rumsfeld was announcing that they would be extending the time of the soldiers indefinitely.

``Not even the 1-year rotation rule of Vietnam will be applied to relieve their long ordeal under extreme heat and guerilla warfare duress. Overtime in the dangerous defense of the Nation is being mandated without controls while at the same time overtime wages to feed working families is being subjected to new schemes to reduce take-home pay. This is an unacceptable continuation of the gross exploitation and oppression of working families by the Republican scrooges who presently dominate the Congress and the White House.''

I summarize my statement in a rap poem, which is called ``Let the Rich Go First.''

Working Families

Keep your soldiers at home,

For overtime in Iraq

No cash

No comp time

Not even gratitude,

Republicans intrude

To exempt all heroes,

No combat rotation

Life on definite probation

Scrooges running the Nation.

To the front lines

Let the rich go first--

For blood they got a thirst,

Let the superstars drink it

In the glorious trenches;

Leave the disadvantaged on the benches.

Working Families

Let the rich go first:

The battlegrounds they always choose

Their estates have the most to lose;

Send highest IQs to

Take positions at the front,

Let them perform their best

High-tech warfare stunt;

Working Families

Keep your malnourished sons home--

Harvard Yale kids should roam

The world with guns and tanks,

Reserve gold medals

For the loyal Ivy League ranks.

O say can you see

Millionaire graduates

Dying for you and me?

Welfare Moms

Have a message for the masters:

Tell Uncle Sam

His TANF pennies he can keep

For food stamps we refuse to leap

Through your hoops like beasts;

Promise to leave our soldiers alone

And we'll find our own feasts.

To Uncle Sam we offer a bargain--

Don't throw us dirty crumbs

Don't treat us like bums

And then demand

The full measure of devotion;

Our minds are now in motion

Class warfare

Is not such a bad notion;

Your swindle will not last

Recruiters we won't let pass,

Finally, we opened our eyes--

Each family is a private enterprise.

Each child a precious prize;

We got American property rights,

Before our children die in war

This time we'll choose the fights.

Let the rich go first:

They worry about

The overtime we abuse;

The battlefields they always choose

Their estates have the most to lose.

Let the rich go first!

I have stated a divine right of parents that nobody's ever bothered to talk about. We assume that the government, like the kings and the queens of old, have the right to conscript in a time of war and take their sons and daughters. Why do we not have a movement which challenges that? Governments that do not bother to provide food, clothing and shelter for poor youngsters have no right to later on claim their lives in wars that they had no decision-making power to start or stop.

It comes down to a class warfare. There is class warfare in America. The rich have declared war. The powerful have declared war on the poor. The poor do not fight back. They do not know that they are being constantly abused. It is time we took a hard look at how much they are abused in times of war. Like the blunder in Iraq, it is a life and death matter. They are going to die if they do not fight back.

America is a promised land, and America's promised land is being grossly mismanaged. We are as a promised land as man can ever get, human kind will ever get. We have the greatest potential of anything that ever existed on the face of the Earth. While managing a society that provides justice for all provides the right to pursue happiness and the opportunity to pursue happiness for all. That is possible in America, but America's promise is being grossly mismanaged by this Republican administration. The war in Iraq is the most dangerous mismanagement this country has ever experienced.

Preoccupation with $87 billion for the war dooms any realistic effort to revive the economy. There are alternatives, but this mismanagement team will never consider those alternatives.

There was a bill offered by a friend of mine, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), which says if we are going to spend 20-some billion dollars in Iraq to rebuild Iraq, then let us spend an equal amount in the cities and the States to improve our economy. That is a good idea. There are other good ideas along those lines that have been offered.

I think several months ago I offered a bill called the Domestic Budget Protection Act, H.R. 1804. The essence of the Domestic Budget Protection Act is we should have a situation where the domestic budget, the budget for education, for highways and schools, and the budget for health care is not in the same category with the budget for the war. Let the war pay for itself in some other way, and H.R. 1804 says that we should pay for it the way we paid for part of the Vietnam War and part of the Korean War and to some extent World War II. We placed a tax on the profits of corporations. Let a tax be placed on the profits of corporations to pay for the war so that no money is taken out of the other revenue that comes in and there is no threat to the domestic budget from the war budget. That is not a radical idea. We have done it before. Let us consider it now and do it now.

I also had another act which was a twin for that, and this is called the Emergency Targeted Revenue Sharing Act of 2003, H.R. 2335, and that is a simple act which says that we should spend the same amount of money in the States and the cities on job creation programs, education, health care, et cetera, that we spend in Iraq. The gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) says $20 billion, I said $9 billion was at the time the amount we were proposing for the war in Iraq.

The principle is pretty clear, as my colleague from Ohio stated. We are suffering greatly in our cities and our towns. Our schools are suffering. People are being laid off. Terrible things are happening in terms of taxes being raised on ordinary local people. At the same time, the Federal Government is cutting income tax for the richest people, for the Dick Grassos who earn $140 million and want another $40 million. They are getting tax cuts for the WorldCom president who can borrow $400 million. He is getting a tax cut. For all the Enron criminals who squandered large amounts of money, they are getting tax cuts. But for those who are out there searching for jobs, they are sinking in a quagmire of poverty. The report that came out a few days ago said poverty is increasing. The number of people who are uninsured is increasing. It is not surprising, they are both very much related.

We want to support the troops. The first way we can support them is to support their families. We should manage the war and the economy better, manage the war and the economy better.

The team now in charge is not capable of managing better. I have here an advertisement that appeared in the New York Times last Friday. It is a big, full page advertisement that reads: ``Donald Rumsfeld betrayed my son and our Nation; it is time for him to go.'' It is written by a person who has three sons in the military, three sons in the military. Two of them are in Iraq.

His name is Larry Syverson of Richmond, Virginia. I am going to read it all and submit it for the Record.

``I am a patriotic American with three sons in the military, two serving in Iraq. Brandon is a master gunner near Tikrit. Bryce is a gunner stationed in Baghdad. I'm proud of their service, but I'm angry with those who have led us into what can only be called a quagmire.

``Donald Rumsfeld had day-to-day authority for planning the war and its

aftermath. He was the chief architect, and it is his house of cards that is tumbling today. Months after the President declared `mission accomplished,' Americans are being killed almost daily. On April 13, Rumsfeld said: `Every hour that goes by, it's getting better and more peaceful and more orderly in Iraq.'

``We know that is not true. Rumsfeld's bad planning has left our troops poorly equipped and vulnerable in an increasingly hostile environment, and Americans are being asked for an additional $87 billion for Iraq. We now know that the President and those who serve him misled us about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's supposed nuclear program, about a link between Saddam and September 11.

``I'm in awe at the courage of my sons and the honorable service they give, but the leaders they serve have not acted honorably. They have failed my sons. They have failed all of us. At the very least, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must go.''

Now this is an ad that appeared in The New York Times and is paid for by MoveOn.org that says we can win without war.

We have a situation where very high-powered leaders with very high- powered advice, almost unlimited funds to pay for the personnel to do the planning, have placed us in a situation which is a quagmire. There is an overwhelming blunder that has taken place in Iraq. Did we not know about the dilemma of Robert McNamara in Vietnam? Were the people who did this not able to read? Did they not see the clippings and the media representations about the war in Chechnya, the Russians trying to contain a very small population, compared to the 24 million population of Iraq? Did we not see that and understand what that was all about? Did we not understand what happened to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan? Did we think the Soviet Union was driven out of Afghanistan because we supplied the Taliban, the al Qaeda at that time, the Mujahadeen? We supplied them with modern weapons. We supplied them with training. We spent billions of dollars that were never recorded in Afghanistan to defeat the Soviets.

I invite anybody who would like to hear more about that to read a book called Charlie Wilson's War. Charlie Wilson's War has gotten very little publicity in terms of what it deserves. Charlie Wilson's War is a story of a Congressman named Charlie Wilson from Texas. He is still alive. He was an amazing character and should be given some kind of medal for being the Member of Congress who controlled and manipulated billions and billions of dollars. He has the record for what he controlled and manipulated, using the CIA and other mechanisms to get money into Pakistan to be used against the Russians in the war in Afghanistan.

Eventually, the modernizing of the Mujahadeen and the Taliban, including Osama bin Laden, who was there at the time, the modernization of that group led them to the point where they were able to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Stinger missiles were supplied in tremendous numbers through the efforts of Charlie Wilson. It is something everyone should read. But did Rumsfeld not read it?

Westmoreland, in Vietnam, kept offering optimistic reports and blowing up the body bag numbers for the enemy. Did he not read about that? Later, we found it was not true. The number of enemy that General Westmoreland claimed were being killed in Vietnam was far less than were being killed. Therefore, it threw off all our calculations, and the North Vietnamese were later to mount a tremendous counterattack, and we had to scramble to get out of Saigon. Did no one read that?

Does anybody remember the Tet offensive, the Tet offensive in Saigon? At a time when President Johnson said we were winning the war, the Vietnamese guerrillas, with the help of North Vietnam, launched a massive weekend guerilla attack which shattered once and for all any hope that we could ever win the war in Vietnam. It was called the Tet offensive. In the environment of Iraq it will be easy to mount a Tet Offensive type operation. They have already started down that road.

The guerilla attacks are getting more intense in Iraq. There was an 8-hour firefight yesterday, an 8-hour firefight with the guerrillas yesterday. This is not a hit-and-run suicide bomber situation. They are moving into other levels.

Now, should we cut and run? That is not my proposal. I propose that we immediately move as rapidly as possible to create a situation which will head off the support for these guerrillas. The way to do that is to be able to get help from other nations. Let it be known clearly that we are not oppressors, we are not occupiers, we do not intend to stay there. We need to get help from other nations, move rapidly to establish a constitution for Iraq, and while we are doing that, send in more troops.

We cannot play games the way we are playing now, pretending we do not need more troops. The way to stop the guerrillas is to have more troops. The way to stop the sabotage of the oil wells, the way to stop the sabotage of the water systems, the way to stop the sabotage of the electricity systems is to have more troops to guard them. You cannot escape the need for more troops on a short-term basis.

Naturally, Mr. Rumsfeld does not want to be in a position of exposing that his calculations were all wrong. God forbid he should become a person who has to call for a draft. But he puts our soldiers in harm's way by playing such games, by not agreeing with the generals who are afraid to say so in public but they tell us behind the scenes they need more troops. We need more American troops while we are waiting for those others to come from other nations, who might show up and they might not.

We must understand the degree of the mismanagement. Robert McNamara was a genius, but he got caught up in a situation in Vietnam which drove him to ignore all of his common sense and all of his genius. Lyndon Johnson was a political genius, but ego and the belief that America must never allow itself to be defeated led to a quagmire in Vietnam. Fifty-eight thousand died in Vietnam.

The numbers are much smaller in Iraq, but every life is sacred. And if we do not move now in a decisive way, the numbers will go up, and every soldier killed will have died in vain. I do not think this blunder in Iraq is worth a single American life, and since we are there, we could not avoid being there, let us try to limit the number of lives that are being lost.

So I say to the working families of America and the people who care about all of Americans, who care about our troops who are out there suffering, really care about the troops and not just waving flags but refuse to provide the kind of support the troops need, as veterans, as soldiers out there who need flack jackets at work, and there are a number of things going on which are detrimental to our troops in the field and certainly affect their morale when they look back home and see their families being treated like dirt, I say to all those people who are watching this to not give up.

Now is the time for us to come forward and place ourselves on the front lines for the defense of America. The greatest Americans are the Americans who want peace. The greatest Americans are the Americans who will tell the truth and who will fight the myths that are endangering our security. It is a myth that Iraq is a center for fighting terrorism. That is a myth. We have said it is a center, but it is only a quagmire, a trap, an ambush. The real center is still wherever Osama bin Laden and his network is located, and that network is still our greatest threat in terms of our security. That is a myth. We should fight that myth.

We should fight the myth that the United Nations has nothing to offer; that France, with its French fries and American fries, does not deserve to be a decisionmaker in this situation; that Russia only wants to get involved because it wants to get the money back for its contracts; that Iraq cannot pay for its own reconstruction. That is the biggest myth. Iraq has oil fields beneath the surface that can pay for any reconstruction they need to take. The problem is that many of the people involved in this war are trying to secure the oil of Iraq for the oil barons and the companies that already are involved. They want theirs off the top. They do not want an agreement which says Iraq should pay its own way because they have plans to take their commissions off the top.

There was a time when the Middle East oil flowed out of the Middle East and each country only got 12 cents on the barrel. The rest of it flowed to Great Britain or France or some other country, the dollars. They want to go back to that. They do not want to admit that Iraq can pay for its own reconstruction. We can set up a situation where they wait maybe 10 years, 20 years. Who cares? Charge them low interest. They can pay for their own reconstruction.

We need to come forward and be as fervent, as dedicated as the people who support Donald Rumsfeld. They have fervor. They are bold. But they are wrong.

We need to be fanatics for peace.

We are citizens who ought to volunteer to do our part.

Never mind looking for a military Purple Heart.

We are fanatics for peace.

Our holy assault must never cease.

The Constitution light still shines.

We should launch spit into the fascist face.

Our maneuvers will launch the human race.

Pledge allegiance to the human race.

Pledge allegiance to the civilization that our children

deserve.

This is the cause we swear to serve.

Victory without blood in Ghandi's name.

Celebrate Mandela's fame.

The spirit of Martin King again will reign.

Resist a government that has now gone insane.

Commanders of abuses must face the Nuremberg nooses.

We are fanatics for peace.

Run and broadcast the brave news.

Divine mobilization is what working families should choose.

Surrender we unconditionally refuse.

Our vision will not decrease.

Our passion will never cease.

We are fanatics for peace.

We are the greatest Americans.

We want peace.

Madam Speaker, the article I referred to earlier is as follows:

I'm a patriotic American with three sons in the military,

two serving in Iraq. Branden is a master gunner near Tikrit.

Bryce is a gunner stationed in Baghdad. I'm proud of their

service. But I'm angry with those who have led us into what

can only be called a quagmire.

Donald Rumsfeld had day-to-day authority for planning for

the war and its aftermath. He was the chief architect and it

is his house of cards that is tumbling today. Months after

the President declared, ``mission accomplished,'' Americans

are being killed almost daily. On April 13, Rumsfeld said:

``Every hour that goes by, it's getting better, and more

peaceful and more orderly in [Iraq].'' We know that is not

true. Rumsfeld's bad planning has left our troops poorly

equipped and vulnerable in an increasingly hostile

environment. And Americans are being asked for an additional

$87 billion for Iraq.

We now know that the President and those who serve him

mislead us about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's

supposed nuclear program, about a link between Saddam and

September 11. I'm in awe at the courage of my sons and the

honorable service they give. But the leaders they serve have

not acted honorably. They have failed my sons. They have

failed all of us. At the very least, Secretary Donald

Rumsfeld must go.

Mr. Chairman, in his first month, the President called together all Members of the Congress to support a bipartisan education bill. He said that he was willing to do two things: promise additional funding for education of no less than $6 billion, and he was also willing to take vouchers off the table as a part of Federal policy.

Now, we hear the Republican majority sneaking vouchers back onto the table. They are going to reinstitute the drive of the Republican majority to privatize education.

When the Republicans took control of the Congress, there were two former Secretaries of Education who reported to testify at our Committee on Education and the Workforce, Secretary Bennett and Secretary Alexander. They wanted to abolish the Department of Education. And because there was such a public outcry against the abolishment of the Department of Education and against the low profile of the Federal Government in education, Republicans decided to turn that around and camouflage their intent. They pretend now to be advocates of public education while guerilla warfare behind the scenes goes on.

And what we see now is an act of sabotage where vouchers are put back on the table at a time when education reform is already in great trouble. We are in trouble because of the lack of funds. School districts are shutting down early. In D.C. several years ago, schools started late because they did not have money for school construction or they had given money to private industry to do some construction. They had not done it well, and they had to shut down on the basis of safety. Private industry does not solve any problems for education. Enron shows that private industry can get us into greater trouble.

The Republicans have returned to their agenda for long-term privatization of education. This is the opening salvo of their new guerilla warfare. This first strike in Washington is very serious indeed. I do not want vouchers in New York. People do not want vouchers in New York. That is why we have to stop vouchers right now here in Washington.