Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank and congratulate my colleagues who worked on this legislation. I also thank my colleagues in general for appreciating the role of libraries and museums.

I also would like to issue a new, repeated challenge to the Members of Congress to take a hard look at libraries and see that we have certainly shortchanged them or overlooked their importance as an institution that gives us the greatest bang for the buck. Our cost- benefits ratio with libraries is probably greater than any institution that we fund anywhere.

I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much. Now that my objectivity has been established, I would like to say that we have been slow to recognize it, but I hope that this bill will help to concretize in our minds the value of libraries and museums to work together.

I happen to live across the street from one of the greatest museums in America, the Brooklyn Museum of Art. I also live one block away from one of the greatest public libraries, the Central Library of the Brooklyn Public Library, where I worked for 8 years as a librarian. I got a master's degree from the Atlanta University School of Library Science, and was a librarian for 8 years before I went into another line of work that led to politics.

But in the history of Federal funding of libraries, everything we have done for libraries, of all the years there has been some kind of Federal assistance it would not equal the price of one aircraft carrier. I think that is unfortunate, because we do get a great deal of cost-benefits ratio, a good cost-benefit ratio from libraries.

I am particularly interested in the library service as the technology section of this bill. That section recognizes that libraries are moving with the mainstream in terms of digitalized and computerized learning, and that it is probably in the forefront. Long before other institutions were utilizing computers, we had a cataloging system that came out of Ohio where we could catalog any book in the Nation and put it through a computer system, and that one cataloging process could serve all the libraries throughout the Nation.

Cooperation among libraries of various kinds has gone on for a long, long time. One of the reasons libraries were able to deliver so much with so little is that they have always had those networks where they cooperate among libraries in a given system, among libraries across State borders, among local libraries and the Library of Congress. They are models of cooperation and collaboration.

We should also realize that in times of recession when we have difficult economic times, the libraries are used more than ever. This is a pattern that started certainly in the Great Depression. It has not changed.

I understand from my colleagues now in library service positions, especially public libraries, the use of libraries has gone up as the recession has set in. People go for very practical purposes: They are looking for books that will deal with changes in their occupations, or for various reasons; it is not recreational reading they go for when times are hard. So we should bear that in mind also, that it is an instrument by which people are able to change their own lives.

We also have had demonstrated over and over again, despite the fact that people who make budget decisions at

the local level often cut libraries first, that surveys in several cities and localities have established the fact that if the public is given the choice, would you pay more taxes for a particular service, libraries are right at the top in terms of individuals are willing to pay more taxes in order to keep their libraries open and keep their libraries operating at a quality level. That has been proven again and again. So in our reluctance to fund libraries, we are running counter to the perception of the public in terms of an institution where we get our money's worth.

Museums, of course, now serve so many different kinds of purposes. When we say ``museum,'' we are not necessarily talking about an art museum. There are museums of all kinds. I have three grandchildren, and my oldest grandson is 5 years old. He has dinosaur books, but when he went to a library and saw an exhibit, he came back and wanted to be a paleontologist. That big word certainly had meaning for him.

I hope that in the future we would be more generous and would be willing to authorize higher sums for these institutions that have proven their worth over and over again.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding to me. I would like to thank the chairman of the caucus, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings), as well as the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee), for sponsoring this Special Order on AIDS. It is focused on AIDS help for Africa, but we cannot really separate AIDS in Africa from the pandemic that is sweeping over the whole world.

We do not hear much talk about AIDS in India, but I assure the Members that it is a big problem there. It is a nation with a billion people and very densely populated, and in a few years their problem will be far greater than Africa's.

We do not hear much about AIDS in China. They have kept it a secret, even from themselves, to the point it has gotten out of hand; and we are going to hear far more, again with a nation of more than a billion people. It is a pandemic sweeping the world.

I stood up and applauded, along with the rest of my colleagues, when President Bush announced a special initiative on AIDS, $15 billion worth of resources behind that initiative, during his State of the Union address. We stood up and applauded.

I would like to keep applauding. I would like to say to our colleagues, let us throw a positive spotlight on this and hope that by continuing to applaud and continuing to hold it up, it will be done and done right; that we will make some corrections on some of the problems we have heard enunciated tonight with the way in which it is being done, in robbing Peter to pay Paul, and a number of other things we have heard behind the scenes about certain people who do not agree with the President, and they are determined to sabotage it in the various agencies. We hope that will not happen.

We hope this represents an example of the better angels in American foreign policy, the better angels of American leadership. Those angels have come forward time and time again, and they have always not only benefited the people that we helped, but they have benefited us.

The better angels sometimes appear in terms of a military force. They went off to Europe to fight fascism, and the boys who died on the beachheads of Normandy and other places there were fighting first of all to get invaders out of a foreign land and to save Europe from fascism, but it certainly was also to save the rest of the world from fascism.

During the aftermath of that war, World War II, we launched a Marshall Plan, a Marshall Plan which I think cost $20 billion in the currency of that time, $20 billion to help save the European countries from economic hardship and starvation, which would have led them into the bottomless pit of Communism. It was one of the best programs in terms of expenditures of money. We got more for our money through the Marshall Plan than from any other program that we had launched to contain Communism.

We fought a war in Korea, we fought a war in Vietnam, always to stop the tide of Communism; but we paid billions and billions of dollars more, and we paid in lives. The Marshall Plan, which was a nonviolent plan, a plan using the economic might of America to go to the aid of people of Europe, was effective in stopping Communism in Europe. So we have reaped benefits from the better angels policies that we have put forward.

Here is a chance to do it again. The pandemic is sweeping the world. We are helping to save ourselves. I speak as a Congressman from a district which is at the epicenter of the North American AIDS epidemic. The epidemic in North America, the epicenter is in Brooklyn; it is in Brooklyn in part of my district, an area called Brownsville and Fort Green, east New York, east Flatbush. There is a heavy Caribbean population in part of that area, and a large Haitian population in part of that area, so these things are not so foreign to us. Haiti is not that far away and the Caribbean is not that far away.

We need to think in one other dimension, that is, that microbes are the most powerful force in the world, the most powerful living forces in the world. If Members have not read some of those books about microbes, how numerous they are and how they continue to multiply and change and mutate, then Members ought to become conversant with that.

Microbes, the germs that create the AIDS problem, are constantly changing and mutating. If we do not move, as one of our speakers has said, if we continue the dribs and drabs and do not move in as rapid a way as possible with all the available resources that we can muster, we may have a situation where the microbes mutating will end us up with something far more dangerous than we have now.

AIDS is very complicated. One has to have intimate contact with a person to get AIDS from a person. There is nothing to say that the mutations will not take place and we will have some creatures flying in the air. The process of the way microbes mutate and viruses develop and so forth is such that it is not inconceivable that we could have a much worse problem affecting, or with the capacity to impact, much larger numbers of people.

So when we help the people of Africa and anywhere else struggling under this problem at this particular point, we are also helping ourselves. We need to understand that. We are helping ourselves when we use our resources in this way to guarantee some kind of better quality of life, some kind of opportunity for people to be able to cope with it. With the help of outside forces from the high-tech world and the modernized, industrialized nations, maybe they will have a chance to get a grip or handle on it and be able to cope.

These same countries are the places where Osama bin Laden and all the other terrorist leaders of the world will be recruiting people as they sink deeper into despair, as we have more and more orphan children. We have wars raging right now in many parts of the world, and children soldiers. Children soldiers are the backbone of those wars. So we cannot separate out the effort to stamp out AIDS from the other problems of the world. We can help ourselves a great deal if we listen to the better angels of our nature. If we use our resources to help people, we will end up helping ourselves a great deal. I think that is to be remembered as we go forward.

Let us support the President and urge him to make certain that the problems that have been identified here are ironed out as rapidly as possible. Let us make sure that our credibility is not questioned because of something we are proposing that we are not delivering. Let us get all of our colleagues on board to try to stamp out this scourge that affects the whole Earth and could easily come home and affect large numbers of our own people.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of what we call the Mink substitute.

I miss the voice of Patsy Mink ringing in my ears. I used to be reminded when she talked of the quote from Shakespeare's King Lear, ``Fool me not to bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger.'' She was always full of anger about the great swindle of this welfare reform bill, about the denial of education opportunities, about the insistence that we pay the lowest rates and we allow the States to squirrel away whatever they save.

There is a standard that compassionate America has already created. If we look at the amount of money received per child in the survivor's benefits program when a Social Security recipient dies and their children receive benefits, it averages out to a child receiving $558 a month. One child receives $558 a month, or $6,706 a year.

In the welfare programs, we have pushed it down to that of the great model, which was Wisconsin, which was giving a family of three less than $500 a month. A family of three was receiving less than $500 a month. This, they say, is progress.

We are taking the children, and it is for our children, and giving them the minimum. And I do not understand why we declare it such a great success.

The food pantries, the soup kitchens in my district and in New York in general are overwhelmed with the number of people who are there now. Homelessness is greater than ever before. Half the people eligible for food stamps are not receiving them because of the hostility in the way the program was administered under Giuliani. In an attempt to save money they have thrown the whole thing out of kilter. And those who could qualify are not even bothering to try anymore.

So here we are in a situation that, despite all this emphasis on not a welfare check, but get a job, it is a situation where the only subsidy the U.S. approves of are farm subsidies, where a farm or agriculture business is eligible for as much as $270,000 per year in subsidies, which is a handout. It is a handout. Yet we want to reduce the family of three down to less than $500 a month and then call that a success. And then we will not allow them to get an education in order to be able to fill the jobs that are available.

There is a nursing shortage in America. If my colleagues have not heard about it, I do not know where they have been. There is a nursing shortage. Many of the women whose children are on welfare, if they had the opportunity to get the proper education, would qualify for those jobs. But we do not allow that. We do not allow them to go to junior college or college, and accept that as legitimate. It is an easy way, and anybody with common sense would realize, that the easiest way to move a person off welfare and into a decent job would be through the education system. But that is not allowed.

Mrs. Mink said this is part of a great swindle. The governors are able to take the money they save and put it into a slush fund, in their petty cash drawers. We are swindling from the poor in order to take care of the local budget-balancing problems.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the chairman also for sponsoring this Special Hour on Black History Month, and I want to discuss a few milestones and events in African American history that are related to education and that should not be forgotten.

We should not forget that one time to teach reading to a slave was a crime. If you want to know why we are in a position where we need affirmative action, if you want to know why at present the median net worth of white families in America is $120,000 while the median net worth of black families is America is only $17,000 then take a look at where we had to come from.

For 232 years it was a crime to teach a slave to read, and then we went through a period where we had to endure separate but equal; but separate but equal was never equal. I came from the Southern schools, the Southern schools. All my life I was in Southern schools, and there was a point where the books and desks and everything that we had had been used for 5 or 6 years by white schools before they were shipped to the black schools. So in every way there was no equality.

We should remember this. We went through separate but equal, and now we are in a situation where it is official neglect. The money, the resources necessary for education is not there. We have a lot of rhetoric supporting public education where most of our black youngsters are educated, but we do not have any resources.

My time is short so I will have to cut this sort. I just want to say that education is a civil rights issue of our time. It is a civil rights issue we must focus on. The slaves who were set free understood very well the most important thing for them to do was to read. People who learned to read had a great deal of status in the new free-slave communities, and we have to get back to that in our African American communities.

Education must be our first priority. It is the only way out of poverty. It is the only way to achieve political equality.

Mr. Speaker, the White House has abruptly ended the brief era of bi-partisan cooperation on the vital issue of education. In his recent budget message the President halts the six year pattern of increases for education. Private school vouchers are returned to the federal policy agenda through the proposal of a 75 million dollar funding initiative. HeadStart is threatened with obliteration through the combination of a freeze on funding and the transfer of this successful child development program to the limited confines of the Department of Education. And finally, the administration has not continued the 1.2 billion dollars in funding for school repairs which was introduced in the last year of the Clinton administration. Only for charter schools is there a recognized need for school construction and modernization--100 million dollars is provided. Meanwhile, the overcrowding and unhealthy conditions persist in schools serving the poorest children throughout the nation. Without adequate facilities and other vital education resources, No Child Left Behind becomes a fraudulent and deceptive piece of legislation. The following rap poem sums up the spirit of this rapidly deteriorating situation.

Crowd the Children In

No Child Left Behind,

Crowd them in,

Construction dollars

Never win.

No Child Left Behind

The budget is unkind

An increase of billions

They promised--

A bold elephant fable,

A decrease by millions

Placed on the table.

Under funding catastrophe

Lurking in the wind,

Carefully covered sin,

Regally wrapped spin,

Cutbacks cover the table.

On the made in White House label

Read progress,

Camouflage the big mess,

Public relations success.

No Child Left Behind,

Crowd them in,

Construction dollars

Never Win.

Mr. Speaker, it appears that the Congressional investigating and hearing process is over for the racketeering corporations of the nation. With all three branches of the government now controlled by Republicans, the world's most costly coverup can be finalized. Enron, Worldcom, and all of the rest have proved that crime can pay huge profits. As a member of the 108th Congress I beg that we at least be allowed to discuss these serious thefts on the floor of the House. But, alas, the Republican majority through a tyranny of rules changes has cut off the opportunity for free speech on the floor. We are forced to keep the dialogue alive through ``guerrilla'' communications among ourselves. The following two poems comment on corporate morality.

Corporate Credo 1

Greed is great,

Less harmful than hate,

Not the business of the state,

Each sucker deserves fat bait.

For the economy's sake

Protect our freedom to take

From any investor on the make.

Pension funds we can feed

To the belly of great greed,

Old guys never really need

Too much green evil weed;

It's a handout risk free;

Social Security we guarantee--

401K's must take a chance,

The market is the ultimate romance.

Greed is great,

Not the business of the state,

Each sucker deserves fat bait.

Mr. Speaker, I make an appeal to the President that he lead us in the most profound and comprehensive way and give us hope in his State of the Union address.

At the beginning of this 108th Congress, it is important that we take note of a very important report recently released by the Federal Reserve. The study focuses on consumer finances, and is issued once every 3 years. Among the definitive items in this comprehensive statement is a report that the median net worth for our white population rose by 20 percent to $120,900 while the median net worth for minorities fell over the last 3-year period by 4.5 percent to $17,000. Consider the contrast of $120,900 versus $17,000. It is a portrait of two economies. It is a portrait of two societies. In the midst of a period of great prosperity, at least 2 of those years we were in a period of great prosperity, just before the economic slow down, minorities were existing with a standard of living close to that of the third world.

In the year 2003 this is the state of the Union for a population that can be no less than one-half of the total. I have not been able to review the report closely and find out what their definition of minority is, but I will do that. But I am certain if minority means all of the groupings that I know as minority, we are talking about more than half the population. I intend to review the report in more detail and see what this category of minority means.

While we casually speak of the expenditure of as much as $200 billion for a possible war against Iraq, a large portion of our population is sinking deeper into poverty. A war against poverty should be our first priority because this economy, which is sinking into a recession, will cause more hardships if we do not address the war against poverty.

In the State of the Union we hope to hear that there is support for an increase in the minimum wage. We have been hearing about that for several years, and it is still locked into $5.15. Even if we go to work every day 40 hours a week, Americans will not get out of poverty on that kind of minimum wage.

I hope the State of the Union will talk about job training and employment for mothers being pushed off welfare. It is premature to claim that we have solved the welfare problem by giving people jobs with dignity instead of a handout. There are no jobs with dignity that also pay decent wages out there, otherwise we would not have a 4.5 percent decline among poor people in terms of net worth.

For workers who have never been on welfare, we want to provide jobs and job training, and we need revenue sharing for cities and States because large numbers of municipal and State workers who have decent jobs now are in danger of being laid off and losing their jobs, and that is a further decline into poverty. We need funding for necessary capital projects like school construction which provide real jobs, good jobs, and keep our population working.

We hope and we pray that the vital standard of living issues that we are talking about here will be addressed in the State of the Union address. It is not the war against Iraq that should have priority; it is the war against poverty and the war to maintain a decent standard of living for all of our population that ought to be given a priority in the State of the Union address.