Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding and appreciate being here tonight to talk about this important topic.

It was interesting, I watched a little bit of the hour before with the gentleman from Texas and others, and they were prattling on about the reckless spending of the Democrats. What

they forget is that the last time the budget was balanced, there was a Democrat sitting in the White House. The last time we began to tax the rich fairly, to bring about a balanced budget, there was a Democrat in the White House and the Democrats controlled Congress. Yet they talk about the reckless spending of the Democrats.

The debt when George Bush took office was about $18,000 per American, the tiniest baby, oldest senior citizen, $5.6 trillion. In 5 short years, he has run the debt up to over $8 trillion, almost $27,000 per person on the President's watch. Yet they prattled on about the Democrats' reckless spending.

But what they are really trying to cover up here is their favoritism for a very small percentage of society, and the gentleman from Vermont was just talking about it. This is IRS data. Under the Bush administration, the IRS being steadily politicized by this President, still, the data shows that one-tenth of 1 percent of the people in this country, those who earn over $1.3 million a year, got an average income increase last year of $130,000, a dream to most of my constituents, to earn $130,000, principally due to tax cuts.

Here is what we are doing: collecting from working people, only people who earn salaries and wages who earn less than $94,000 a year paying Social Security taxes. They are paying on every dollar they earn, up to $94,000. Social Security will have a $180 billion surplus this year. The Republicans and the Republican President are borrowing every penny of that $180 billion surplus that is supposed to go to fund future retirement benefits for those Americans. They are borrowing it and they are spending it and they are replacing it with IOUs.

In part, and this is the ironic thing, in part, as the gentleman knows, that is going to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, people who do not pay Social Security taxes, or pay at a tiny fraction of the rate. A person who earns, let us say $940,000 a year, their Social Security tax rate is one-tenth of that of someone who earns $30,000 a year. And many of them, since this administration values wealth over work, many people do not pay any Social Security tax, because they just live off their investments. Yet this administration says they need relief from taxes.

When they talk about the working people, they are not talking about giving tax relief to working families or help to working families. They today, and for the last week, have been talking about cutting student loans by $15 billion, cutting Medicare for senior citizens, Medicaid for senior citizens and the poorest of Americans, cutting food security, cutting foster care from the Federal Government, cutting all those programs under the guise of new-found fiscal responsibility on the part of the Congress, which is spending us into bankruptcy. And what are they going to do with it? They are going to finance more tax cuts for the wealthy, because they think what America needs is more trickle-down economics: give the money to the wealthiest among us and they will spend it in ways that will put other Americans to work.

Well, what if they spend it overseas? What if they invest it overseas, as more and more companies flee overseas? That does not put any Americans to work. The guy who runs Delphi auto parts has an answer for that. People are just going to have to take a little pay cut. He says Americans who work in these industries who are earning now good family wages should work for $10 an hour. I do not know what Mr. CEO of Delphi earnings; I bet it is a little more. The average CEO earns in the first 12 hours of the year what working people under their tutelage and in their industries earn in 365 days of hard labor.

But this administration values wealth over work, trickle-down economics over investments in our future, in education, in our kids, in health care and infrastructure above all. They are hollowing out America, and we should get to trade policy a little later to talk about that, they are hollowing out America, looting the Treasury, and they are getting ready to hand our kids and our grandkids the bill, a bill that they will have to pay on $10 an hour in wages. Now, this is not all going to hold together.

Madam Speaker, the gentleman raises an excellent point. The other technique that Delphi and other major corporations are employing is they are also sticking it to the U.S. taxpayer, because Delphi also is going to walk away from its pension obligations.

Now, we have a pension insurance fund backed by the Federal Government called the PBGC. Under George Bush's watch, it has gone from having an $8 billion surplus to an estimated $200 billion deficit in 5 short years of George Bush's watch. That is the future obligations of pension plans they have assumed. United Airlines pension plan and now Delphi is going to try to dump theirs on them, and other airlines.

So these major U.S. corporations declare bankruptcy and dump the pension plans on the taxpayers. Workers see a

major reduction in pension, because they will not give you your promised pension; depending upon your age and what you were promised, you might get 30, 40 percent of what your pension was going to be. Ultimately the taxpayers are going to pick up the bill for this little maneuver as they take this company through.

Now, there are no future claims. This company goes through bankruptcy, reemerges and is sold for a huge profit, but the Federal taxpayers have no recourse. They cannot reclaim any of that money.

I asked a fellow from the PBGC about this, about the airlines. I said, so, you have taken an equity position in United Airlines as part of this deal of assuming their pensions. Could you not have a claim against future profitability of the airline or against future stock value to make the taxpayers and the PBGC whole? And he got really puzzled for a moment and he looked and said, well, I guess we could do that. Never thought of doing that.

So this has become the new technique: dump the obligations, dump the health care plans, dump the pension plans, the health care plans of people who either fall into the cracks; or, if they are old enough, they can get into Medicare, which this administration is also driving toward bankruptcy. And I do not know if we will have a chance to get to that tonight, but that is another topic of extraordinary concern. And then they become, you know, recovery champions when they turn Delphi around and when the company becomes worth a whole heck of a lot more money, and some turnover specialists capitalize it to come out of bankruptcy and make a fortune on the company. That is the way it works now. That is not a long-term, sustainable plan for this country.

I think now, if we could, we might move a little bit into trade now. Tax policies are a huge portion of this. We already talked about that to some extent. The other thing that is driving down wages and benefits and the working standards, the living standards in this country, is trade. As the gentleman said, it is a race to the bottom. We are saying to the American workers, well, you have to live at the standard of a Chinese worker.

Well, I do not think that that is going to work real well in the system. I mean, we are a consumer-based society. Housing is pretty expensive, cars, fuel, all of these sorts of things. How are you going to live on 3 bucks an hour or a buck an hour, raise a family, have a home, have a place to live and do those sorts of things? It will not work. This model will not work.

But we are also losing our entire manufacturing base. The first automobiles manufactured in China are going to be reimported next January. So goodbye, auto industry, it is gone. And they were pretty honest about that. There was actually an article, 1 day before we voted on special trade status for China, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal which said, this is the end of the manufacturing in America. It is all going to China. And Boeing, of course, wants to go, too. Then we will not make anything anymore. We will try and borrow money to buy things we used to make, but at some point they will probably stop lending us the money, or they will start demanding something in return that we are not going to want to pay.

Madam Speaker, I guess this is a little bit of a digression, but it is a case in point. I mean, there is this whole bizarre concept of free trade based on an economist who has been dead over 200 years that only the United States Government, under the tutelage of these multinational corporations is following, much to our detriment.

Our trade deficit this year is headed towards $700 billion. That means we are borrowing almost $2 billion a day from overseas, 40 percent of that from the Chinese, to buy things made in China and other countries that used to be made here. That is not a sustainable model. That ultimately undermines our standard of living. We are piling up huge overseas debts.

But even worse than that, and that is just all under these bizarre theories of free trade, the race to the bottom and all things are a result from that; we are not even really practicing what President Clinton and President Bush are so fond of calling rules-based trade. We are going to have rules. Well, there are rules. The rules say that the Chinese cannot pirate things. Guess what? The Chinese pirate millions of dollars a year worth of U.S. dollars.

The gentleman mentioned furniture. I have a little furniture manufacturer, a high-end furniture manufacturer, in my district. He called me up and said, I have a little trade problem. I thought, that is a little weird, but okay, and I went to visit. Well, it turns out the Chinese delegation came over to look at his plant, they liked his stuff, they offered him more money than he could ever imagine he would ever have to buy his company. The only condition was he had to unbolt all the machines and all the production lines, send 3 managers to China for 6 months, and then they would send him a 20 percent cut for the future. Of course, he would not have workers or a company anymore. He agonized, and he said no.

Well, the Chinese said, okay, fine. They went to Seattle and, from a furniture store there, bought a copy of everything he made, and the next year a Chinese Communist Government-subsidized company produced a clone of everything this company in Oregon makes and were selling it for 40 percent less at the furniture show. That has also happened to a high-tech company in my district.

My staff was in an extraordinary phone call with the Bush administration, the Commerce Department, saying, will you not help these companies fight the piracy? And they said, no, we will not do that. We are not interested. These are the people who cloak themselves with small business, except if the Chinese want to steal the small businesses, that is okay with us. We are not going to do anything about it, because it might upset some of the big deals going on between GM to move all of their manufacturing to China, or Boeing to move all of their manufacturing to China, or IBM; you know, the big companies. So small business gets written off.

So not only are we losing the big manufacturing firms; our small firms, our innovators, are being pirated by the Chinese. The administration will do nothing about it. We are borrowing almost $2 billion a day. This is a crazy thing we are doing to the future of our Nation, and they want to tell us how great it is.

Remember, it was the President's own economic advisor who, in the President's economic report a year ago January, said that outsourcing, that is, exporting U.S. jobs overseas like Delphi or GM or others, is yet just the latest and greatest new manifestation of the advantages of free trade.

Remember how they have sold this, how they sold CAFTA, NAFTA? It was, we are opening up markets for U.S. workers and U.S. products. We want to put Americans to work. We want to create wealth in this country. NAFTA, Bill Clinton said, was going to bring 400,000 jobs to America. He was off by a few. It actually exported 1.2 million jobs from America to Mexico, so he was off by a little bit there.

Bill Clinton talked about how all the Mexicans were going to buy our goods. The total buying power of Mexico is less than the purchasing power of the people of New Jersey. If they spent every peso they earned on U.S. goods, which, of course, they have to eat and provide housing, they could not do that. The same thing with CAFTA and the same thing with China. These workers who work in the plants that are producing these products, they cannot afford to buy them.

Yes, Machiadora.

I have got to correct the gentleman. He exaggerated. Their profit was only $9.8 billion for the quarter because they had some markdowns. That is the largest corporate quarterly profit in the history of the world, not just the United States of America. Some would say, well, you know, it has to do with supply and demand and all that. The biggest increase in profits for ExxonMobil, whose profits are up 75 percent on the quarter, BP's profits up 34 percent on the quarter. I think their stockholders should be talking to them. How come they only went up 34 percent on the quarter? ConocoPhillips 89 percent on the quarter--that CEO is going to be getting a nice little bonus--is in their refining areas.

The Republican chairman, from Texas, stood up on the floor of the House and said, ``We have closed 300 refineries in America in the last 10 years.'' If he is talking about ``we,''

that is, if he identifies himself as an oil company executive, that is true. If he is talking about the government of the United States of America, the laws of the United States of America, environmental laws, tax laws, other things, no. The 300 refineries that were closed were closed because of hundreds of oil company acquisitions and mergers and a deliberate policy.

There has been uncovered a memo from Conoco to other major oil companies back in the mid nineties that said: We have a great idea. We're all only getting 27, 22 cents a gallon on refining. If we close down a bunch of refineries, we can drive up those margins. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Oregonians were paying three bucks a gallon on Labor Day weekend. We are not in the east coast supply train so it is a little hard to say it had something to do with Katrina. But we were paying three bucks, $3.05 a gallon for regular, I remember paying. That was because the refiners cut went from 22.7 cents a gallon to $1.11 a gallon, a 500 percent increase in profits for the refiners. In fact, there is a new company, a new kid on the block, the largest refiner in America now called Valero whose CEO when George Bush offered to let him build new refineries on closed military bases with no environmental restrictions, he basically said, why would I want to do that? It's working just great the way it is. They are making unbelievable profits price gouging. It is exactly the same thing that Enron did in California. Enron in California got ahold of a bunch of generating plants and then they would shut them down and they would say, oh my god, we've got to charge you 10 times as much for your electricity today because there's a shortage. They are doing the same thing with refineries. They shut them down and they say, Oh, there's a refinery shortage. Americans are just going to have to pay more. Those darn environmentalists. None of them were closed because of environmental reasons, and they haven't applied to build any new ones.

Yesterday the Republican leaders of Congress held a press conference, which was kind of pathetic, where they said, Pretty please. We don't care about your really high profits, but we've heard there might be some gouging going on and you better stop that. And pretty please use some of your profits to build refineries.

No. It doesn't fit their business model. They are making money hand over fist. Their production end where they pump the stuff out of the ground, their profits are only up a measly 50 percent. On the distribution end they are only up 5 percent. The retailers are up 2 percent. The Republicans the week before last did adopt some price gouging legislation. Who did they target? The refiners, whose profits are up 500 percent? No. The companies who are pulling it out of the ground, whose profits are up 50 percent? No. Even the distributors who are up 5 percent, not a big deal? No, they targeted the retailers whose profits are up 2 percent because it's those mom-and-pops who are responsible for those high prices, let me tell you. But the friends of small business target the retailers and let the price gougers, the refiners, off the hook. Then they say, oh, we need to open up more land, we have to do this, we have to do that. No. Plain and simple this business model is immensely profitable in the industry and until we go after them has no incentive to change that business model.

The gentleman is right. The target is now fixed on your people. They have turned it from price gouging my people on gasoline to price gouging your people on home heating oil. But next spring they will turn their sights back to gasoline. They cannot extort as high, economists call it rent or price for their excess products in gasoline in the wintertime because people don't drive as much. In the summer they can do that.

To be totally fair, the last administration was pathetic on this issue, too. I first uncovered this issue during the Clinton administration. I thought they would be happy to hear it. They could help American consumers. They were big rules-based trade guys. They said, no, no, they didn't believe it. I had further legal analysis done and the legal analysis said, Yes, you can clearly file a claim. They are clearly violating the rules of OPEC. You can't constrain supply of a commodity in international trade if you are in the World Trade Organization to drive up the price, only for conservation purposes. They certainly can't make that case.

But the Clinton administration would not do it. I have heard, well, maybe the Bush people, he understands oil, the Vice President understands oil, they will get tough and take on OPEC. They are tough guys. And so I contacted them. I have gotten a form response from the Trade Representative and the Commerce Department. I have introduced legislation here in the House which the Republican leaders refuse to schedule which would mandate the President file a complaint against

Just to make a link there, remember, during the discussions here on this floor, and during the formulation of the China trade policy here, there were the special Wal-Mart provisions that were added to that legislation, China being the largest producer of products for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has been driving manufacturers out of America.

There was a fan company driven out of Ohio. Finally, they did not want to go. They wanted to keep making them here, but Wal-Mart said we can get them cheaper. You make them cheaper. The guy said, I can't make them any cheaper. This is really efficient. We are making great products here in the United States of America. I am paying these people a decent wage. They said, no, we know you can do it better. No more contract unless you go cheaper. We know where you can go, China.

They are doing that to business after business after business, driving them out of America, driving them to China. Yes, you can say short run, that is good. The products are cheaper. Well, the profit margins are a lot cheaper. The products are maybe a little cheaper, but people do not have jobs any more. People are buying things on credit.

Not only are we borrowing $675 billion this year, projected, to buy products made overseas, Americans are borrowing money to buy the products that we borrowed money to import from overseas that we used to make here, because they have lost their jobs, and they are living off the equity in their homes or other things. We have record levels of debt in this country. So there are a host of cascading problems that are falling out of this unsustainable rush toward the bottom.

Let me tell you, I had a container board company in my district, major corporation. They closed it down. They had one candid executive who told the truth. He said, why would anybody make container board in the United States of America any more? The container board is made to package products. The products are all made in China. The container board industry is moving to China so they can make the container board in China for the products made in China to ship back to the United States of America, even basic industries like that.

I mean, it is extraordinary the breadth and the depth of the undermining that is going on here. When you ask them what is your long- term vision, Alan Greenspan, the chief economist hack of the country, likes to say, oh, this shows how much people have faith in us. They will lend us all this money. But then when you say is it sustainable to borrow $600 or $700 billion a year forever.

Well, no, no, no. This is a temporary situation that will be corrected. How is it going to be corrected? If the dollar went to Arrupe, how would it be corrected? It is not going to be corrected through the typical currencies. We are buying everything overseas. The Chinese have basically pegged their currency to ours. No matter how much the dollar goes down the products cost the same. Oil costs more because we are paying for it, and they are raising the price.

The old models of trade do not work any more. But this administration, because it is working well for a very few, for the corporate CEOs and for a few investors, are perpetuating the model to the point where they push America over the final edge. You talked about the CEO of General Electric. The former CEO of Boeing gave a speech where he said he could not wait until Boeing was not referred to as an American company anymore.

Think about it. If our Republican colleagues do not care about the middle class and small business, which they pretty clearly do not by perpetuating these policies, they at least ought to care about their number one thing they are supposedly tough on, national security. So, in 30 years, when we are in confrontation with China, we have no manufacturing base at all left in this country, we do not make airplanes any more. Like the year before, we predicted we would get into a potential conflict with China, say, over Taiwan. We will call them up and ask them to sell us weapons so we can defend ourselves against them.

How is this going to work? They won't need weapons. They have so many of our assets in their bank as of now. When George Bush took the presidency they had $60 billion in U.S. assets. As of the end of last year they had $242 billion of Treasury bonds. They are headed from being number 2 toward being number 1. They will eclipse Japan in a few years as the largest holder of our debt.

All they have to do is threaten to dump our debt on the market and crash the dollar, and they can control the United States of America.

They are putting us so much at jeopardy. If they do not care so much about the middle class, if they do not care about small business, they have to care about the national security implications of this, and the economic security implications of this. But they do

not seem to. A few people are doing really well, and they consider themselves sort of stateless people, like the guy who owns a cruise line, who gave up his U.S. citizenship, lives in the U.S. but he took Bahamian citizenship so he would not have to pay taxes any more. He just lives here and all his customers are here. I mean, that is great. What a great model for the American people.

The new CEO of Delphi said that very plainly. He said 10 bucks an hour. That is the future for manufacturing workers in America. As you mentioned, it will not be very long until they try to put the same squeeze on knowledge-based workers. They have done it to other skilled workers.

Just yesterday Northwest Airlines announced, or was it Continental, whichever one of those is currently in bankruptcy, they are both in bankruptcy. Anyway, one of those two airlines announced that they were going to outsource their flight attendant jobs because they can get cheaper jobs overseas. They want to do the same thing with pilots.

We are outsourcing the maintenance of our airplanes. More than half the heavy maintenance on our airplanes is now done overseas with very little supervision from the FAA. We are losing those jobs, too, because they can get a mechanic for $2 an hour in El Salvador, where they would have to pay a skilled mechanic in the United States of America maybe $25, $30 an hour. They do not want to pay those wages. The race to the bottom is going to end very, very poorly for most Americans. We have got to stop it.

We have got to stop the trade policies, tax policies, the fiscal bankruptcy policies that we are doing. I don't mean by the bankruptcy bill, that was bad enough, written by the credit card companies, but the bankrupting, the looting of America that is going on with this administration.

It is just laughable when the Republicans parade down here and talk about the spending of the Democrats when they control everything and they have increased the debt by 62 percent in 5 years. How do you blame the Democrats for that when they are in charge of every branch of government?

Mr. Speaker, that was an interesting speech, but it defies reality. If the government eliminated every general fund program, everything the government does except the Department of Defense, guess what? We would still have a deficit. We would still be borrowing money.

The Republicans are borrowing $1.2 billion a day to run the government, and now they are the party of fiscal responsibility, and, oh, it is those poor working people they are concerned about. Except what they do not talk about is the tax cuts they are talking about, the ones that would cost $70 billion and increase the deficit, flow predominantly to people who earn over $300,000 a year, mostly over $1 million a year, and to estates worth more than $6 million. That is the hard-working families they are worried about, one-tenth of 1 percent of the people in America.

Well, I am worried about the rest of America who are getting screwed by these kinds of priorities.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, we saw an extraordinary event: The Republican leadership of Congress asking, pretty please, if the oil industry would build more refineries.

Now, of course, this flies in the face of the strategy of the oil industry and everything that has been done in the so-called energy bills we have passed so far, which is providing incentives, tax subsidies, and status quo to the oil and gas industry. In fact, in the last 10 years, the oil industry, through mergers, has managed to close half of the refineries in America. And now today, when we see extortion in prices for gas at the pump, and we say, why is that? And they say, we do not have enough refineries. And then they say, those darn environmentalists. But they do not put it in the same sentence, because they know it is not true. Not a single refinery was closed for environmental reasons.

They have not applied to build new refineries. They, in fact, have consciously closed refineries and squeezed down refinery capacity, so like Enron in California, when they shut down their generating plants, they can say, oh, the price has got to go up. We do not have enough of the product out there.

In fact, if you look at where consumers' money is going, if you take gas at $2.50 a gallon, about 95 cents of that is going to the refiners. That is up from the historic average of 27 cents, a 400 percent increase in profits to refiners, which is adding up to a wonderful bottom line for the oil companies. Today Conoco-Phillips announced that their profits are up 89 percent over this quarter last year, $3.8 billion in the third quarter. Not bad. BP, kind of a piker here, probably their stock will go down; their profits only went up 34 percent. What Americans' wages went up 34 percent, except maybe some of the CEOs of these companies, $6.53 billion?

But Exxon Mobil, the big one, will announce tomorrow, and it is widely expected among analysts, that they will report third quarter profits, one quarter, that is 3 months, of nearly $9 billion, which will be the largest quarterly profit for any corporation in the history of the world, and there is no price gouging going on.

Now, one part of that sentence was true, and the other part was a lie. The first part was true: The largest ever quarterly profit in the history of the world will go to Exxon Mobil, who has closed dozens of refineries, and then they say, well, we do not have enough capacity. The Republican leadership says, pretty please, might you build more refineries?

Now, the oil industry is getting a little worried because the American people are kind of onto this game. We saw over three bucks a gallon on the west coast on Labor Day weekend, but guess what? We are not in the east coast supply chain. Now, what justified that, except for price gouging and profit-taking, which did contribute to the largest ever quarterly profit for a corporation in the history of the world? Oregonians and other Westerners contributed to that, or were extorted to contribute to that?

And the industry is starting to get a little worried that maybe some meaningful action might happen, but they do not have to worry, because we have two oilmen in the White House, and we have a Republican leadership in Congress that says, pretty please, would you please do something about this, and you better not price gouge anybody.

In fact, the so-called energy bill we passed just about 10 days ago, energy bill II, all the bad ideas that did not fit into energy bill I, actually would have penalties for price gouging. But they could not be applied to refiners whose profits are up 400 percent, or to producers, crude oil producers, whose profits are up 50 percent, or even to distributors, but to retailers whose profits are up 2 percent.

Now, it is not the Mom and Pop gas station that is gouging the consumers. They are at the end of the chain. They get the gas; they get a tiny little markup. They are not the ones manipulating the system.

It is time to break up these energy cartels, no more mergers, break up some of these megacompanies that have been created, apply a windfall profits tax to take the incentive out of price gouging, adopt meaningful price gouging legislation like 23 States in the Union have; do that nationally to reign this in, go after OPEC and their restriction of supply in violation of WTO.

The President is a great free trader until it comes to OPEC, because he could file a free trade complaint about them, but he will not. I have written to him. I have asked him. I have introduced legislation. They will not hear it; they will not let us vote on it. Nobody wants to take on OPEC, because they are working hand in glove with Exxon Mobil and the big oil companies. They are all getting really rich together, and the American consumers are getting taken to the cleaners.

Short term we could save tens of billions of dollars for American industry, business, consumers, and others, and then long term we need an energy policy in America, something that has not happened in 5 years, even with Dick Cheney's secret meetings at the beginning of his term as Vice President. What we have is more subsidies for the oil, coal, and gas industry instead of a visionary energy policy that will get us new fuels, new technologies for the future, and make us energy- independent and efficient.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take the time of the gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff).

Mr. Speaker, we heard some earlier interesting statements from the Republican side of the aisle, and one gentleman talked about a once-proud party. I guess he was referring to the Republicans and the fact that they used to have a commitment to protecting Federal taxpayers and for fiscal responsibility, but no longer.

Now, they keep talking about the Democrats taxing and spending. Excuse me? Who runs the White House, the United States House of Representatives with an iron hand, and the United States Senate? The Republicans. They are in charge of everything. It is the President who is submitting budgets that are being approved by Republicans that are running up huge and growing deficits.

They are trying to say, oh, this year was great; it was only $312 billion, only the third largest deficit in history. Except they forget to tell people they borrowed the whole $180 billion surplus out of Social Security and spent that, too; and, in fact, some of it went to tax cuts for rich people that was paid for by working people with their Social Security money that is supposed to pay for the future of that program.

They say, well, it is the darn Democrats. No, it is not the darn Democrats. It is the Republicans who control everything who have brought up $8 trillion of debt, a 60 percent increase in the 5 years George Bush has been in the White House; and, no, it was not all spent on the war in Iraq and homeland security. A lot of it came from huge tax cuts to the wealthiest among us, immensely expensive tax cuts that go predominantly to people who earn over $311,000 a year; and they want to give permanent exemption of estate tax to estates over $6 million. They consider $100 million, $200 million, that is a small family farm or small business in Republicanland over here.

Unfortunately, those tax cuts are immensely expensive, and they are borrowing the money to finance them and the government.

The entire general fund of government of the United States, everything that government does outside of the military is paid for with borrowed money, $1.2 billion a day, some of it from Social Security. Yeah, we are borrowing some of it from ourselves. We are borrowing a heck of a lot of it from China, Japan, and other foreign interests; and we are adding this mountain of debt and we are pushing it forward to our kids and our grandkids. In their vision, the wealthy would not share in the burden. They will not help pay that debt because they will be the beneficiary of massive tax cuts.

What they were going to bring to the floor today was so embarrassing they could not quite do it. They were actually going to increase the deficit. Under the guise of paying for Katrina, they were going to cut programs like student loans, $9 billion; Medicare for seniors; Medicaid for needy people and seniors and other essential programs. But they were actually going to cut those programs to pay for more, guess what, tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.

Are the wealthy really hurting that much? Well, actually no. IRS data that came out last week say that 99 percent of the people in America saw their real incomes decline last year; but 1 percent, those who earned over $311,000, saw a real increase. But that is not even the real thing.

The real thing was one-tenth of 1 percent, those who earned over $1.3 million a year, saw a phenomenal increase in their incomes, mostly due to tax cuts that are being paid for by borrowing on the backs of working people and Social Security. They have the gall to come to the floor and say it is the Democrats who want to tax working people.

The only working people they are concerned about are people who earn over $311,000 a year, the investor class; but the investor class also happens to be the contributor class, the people who can write out those $2,100 checks

twice a year to their campaign accounts or the even bigger checks to their party accounts or to the Presidential campaigns. That is who they are taking care of.

They are borrowing money from working people. They are bankrupting the country. They are undermining the future of Social Security; and now they want to pull the rug out from under kids who want to get a higher education and from seniors who need a little bit of help with medical care in their old age. They are going to pretend that they are fiscally responsible.

April Fools has come early to Congress if anybody believes that malarkey. It is just extraordinary to me, and the boys keep turning the volume up and keep listening to a little too much Rush Limbaugh over there. We are going to counter them with the facts.

The facts are they have run $8 trillion of debt, $27,000 for every American. They are borrowing $1.2 billion a day to run the government; and now they want to cut essential programs, student loans, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs, to finance more tax cuts for the wealthy, more trickle down.

Our people have been trickled down on long enough, and more than enough. It is time to change the priorities around here, and that is what we are fighting to do.

Madam Speaker, April Fool's Day has come early to the United States House of Representatives. The Republicans are in charge. They control everything, and in the last 5 years our debt has increased 60 percent to $8 trillion. That is $27,000 for every American. Well, not for every American, only for working Americans because the rich are exempt from taxes.

What they are talking about here, the hard-working Americans, the only people who got a pay raise last year, the people who earn over $1.3 million a year.

Madam Speaker, 99 percent of the people in this country had their real incomes go down last year, but not that group. That is who the Republicans want to protect here. It is trickle-down economics. They say we need it now more than ever. How else are we going to recover from Hurricane Katrina? They want to give the wealthiest among us, the top one-tenth of 1 percent, the millionaires, tax breaks, and they will trickle-down on America.

Well, the people of the Southeast have been trickled down upon. And, in fact, some of them drowned because of the incompetence of these people.

Mr. Speaker, well, congratulations are yet again in order to the Bush administration. They hit another milestone just last week. They ran up the 8 trillionth, trillionth dollar of debt in the name of the American people.

The U.S. debt is up 60 percent under the Bush-Cheney watch with the Republicans in charge of Congress, a 60 percent increase in the Federal debt in 5 years. That took some doing. That means every American, from the tiniest baby to the oldest senior citizen, today owes about $27,000. That is a heck of a burden to carry.

And then this year, they are touting the fact that they only have the third largest deficit in history at $312 billion. They are saying, big progress. Of course, they forget to tell you that that does not include borrowing every penny of this year's Social Security surplus of $180 billion, which is only paid for by working people, not the rich who are favored by the tax cuts. Only people who earn less than $94,000 pay Social Security taxes. They are paying $180 billion more than is necessary for the program, with the idea it is being saved.

It is not being saved. This administration is taking that money and spending it, part of it to finance tax cuts for rich people who do not pay Social Security taxes. A great noose on the taxpayers' money.

But now they are born again, right here on the floor in front of us this week, as fiscal conservatives. They say they want to pay for the Katrina disaster, but there is only one way to do it. Cut the tax cuts for the rich people? Oh, no, no, no. Wasteful spending? No. How about, let us go to the programs that are important to average Americans. Health care for seniors: they want to cut Medicare and Medicaid for seniors. Education: kids are already struggling to go to school, but cut education. They would hit at food stamps so they will be more hungry, and maybe cut back on energy assistance in a time of huge price gouging by their friends in the oil, coal, and gas industries.

Now, this is born again fiscal prudence on that side of the aisle. But what they are not telling people is not a penny of those cuts would go to pay for the Katrina disaster. No. In fact, they would, by implementing those cuts, still increase the deficit next year by a quarter of a billion dollars. Now, how can that be? I thought that money was going to pay for Katrina. No. They are going to borrow all the money to pay for Katrina. They are using those cuts to finance, guess what, more tax cuts for the richest among us. They want to make permanent the cuts in capital gains, dividends taxes, and a permanent exemption of all estates from all estate tax. That costs a lot of money.

Now, why should we do this? Well, because they believe in trickle- down economics. The way to stimulate our economy, the way to rebuild our economy is more trickle-down economics. They even, one conservative over there had the gall to say poor people do not put people to work. No, that is right. Poor people and working people do the work. But they are saying we need to shower more money on the richest among us.

During the last 2 years, 99 percent, this is from the Internal Revenue Service controlled by George Bush, their statistics, 99 percent of Americans saw real income reductions after inflation. One percent, those over $311,000, saw an increase; and one-tenth of 1 percent, those over $1.3 million, saw a huge increase in their income, mostly due to tax cuts paid for by working people and borrowing against our future. And now they have the gall to come to the floor of the House and say, if only the Republicans were in charge, this fiscal irresponsibility would stop. Excuse me. You control the White House, the House, the Senate, and the judiciary. You control everything. It is within your power. You want to pay for Katrina? Let us cut wasteful spending.

The President wants to borrow $1 trillion to go to Mars. They are already beginning to borrow $100 billion to go back to the Moon. Hey, JFK took us to the Moon for a fraction of the cost. Why do we need to borrow $100 billion to go back? That would pay for half of the Katrina disaster. Then we can talk about, guess what? Tax cuts for the wealthy.

If we just did not make those tax cuts permanent, we could pay for Katrina a number of times over. But oh, that would mean that rich people would pay income taxes at the same rate as working people, and that does not fit into their trickle-down theories.

There is a few other things that we could cut, agriculture subsidies. Let us say any farmer who earns over $100,000 a year will not get a taxpayer-financed subsidy where the money was borrowed, sometimes from Social Security, to subsidize that farm. That is pretty simple.

But no, they cannot go there. Or maybe we can get rid of the silly star wars fiasco. The general in charge of Star Wars has spent $100 billion on it so far, borrowed, taxpayer money, says it has a better than zero percent chance of working.

Now is that not heartening? Let us have real fiscal responsibility, not more phony bologna.

Mr. Speaker, well, the majority party is shocked, shocked that price gouging took place in the wake of Katrina. Of course, they turned a blind eye to the gouging of consumers for months and years before that by big oil working in collusion with OPEC.

In the last 4 years, the top five oil companies have made $254 billion of profits. Exxon-Mobil, in the quarter before Katrina, $14 billion in one-quarter. And this bill does nothing to provide price relief to consumers or prevent gouging. Big oil gets a pass yet again. They are not getting as big of a gift this time, just a pass.

They point the finger at the retailers. Well, with rare exceptions, the gouging is not at the retail level. Producers of gas, they are getting 46 percent more, 47 cents a gallon; refiners, they are up to 250 percent in one year, 70 cents a gallon. Every American is paying 70 cents a gallon more to the refiners and 2 cents more on average to the retail people. It is not the retailers who are price gouging.

The chairman says ``we have closed 175 refineries.'' He can only say ``we'' if he is the oil industry. The oil industry has consciously colluded to close refineries to squeeze supply to drive up the price. It is the same thing Enron did in California to stick it to everybody on the West Coast of America. Tried and true. The industry has been doing that for years.

It is not environmental laws or regulation which have closed these refineries. They have been closed by mergers and a conscious decision of the chief operating officers and CEOs of big oil to drive up their profits, and boy, have they done that. Unfortunately, it is about to destroy small businesses and consumers across America.

But they still cannot take them on. They cannot take on their benefactors here on the floor. The President offered last year to let Valero or anybody else build a new refinery on a closed military base, waiving all environmental laws, and the chief operating officer of Valero, stock up 263 percent in one year, you thought Google was doing good, he said, why would we do that? It is working really well the way it is. It is phenomenally profitable for them and the few others who still operate refineries.

We need real help for Americans, short-term relief against price gouging, take on OPEC in the World Trade Organization. And then we need longer-term new technology, new fuels, more efficiency, true energy independence for the United States of America from big oil and the Saudi and the OPEC cartels. That would be something for the American people. You are not doing that.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

I stand in strong support of this legislation. It is certainly suitable that a Federal facility in Jamaica, where Colin Powell's parents were born, should be named after him. I would hope that this will be followed by, perhaps, something within the United States itself that commemorates his service to our Nation, which spanned decades, extraordinary service in the military and great service to this administration as Secretary of State during the first term of the Bush Presidency.

I would urge my colleagues to vote in favor of this legislation.

S. 1413 is a bill to designate a staff housing facility located in Kingston, Jamaica currently used by the State Department for state department employees as the Colin L. Powell Residential Plaza.

Colin Luther Powell was born in Harlem in 1937. His parents were Jamaican immigrants who stressed the importance of education and personal achievement. He grew up in the Bronx, and attended City College of New York to study geology. While at City College he joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). When he graduated in 1958 he was at the top of his ROTC class, with the rank of cadet colonel, the highest rank in the corps.

In 1962 he was sent to Vietnam for the first of his two tours of duty. In 1963 he was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. During his second tour in Vietnam he was injured in a helicopter crash but managed to rescue his comrades for which he was awarded the Soldier's Medal. In all he has received 11 decorations including the Legion of Merit.

In 1986 Powell left Washington to serve as military commander in Frankfurt Germany. He was recalled to Washington by Frank Carlucci

to serve as his deputy national security adviser. In 1991 as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Powell became a national figure during the successful Desert Shield and Desert Storm operations.

In 2001 President Bush appointed Powell as Secretary of State, the first African American to hold this office.

Since his retirement in 2004 Colin Powell has written a best selling autobiography, My American Journey. He has pursued a career as a public speaker and has remained involved in his work with the Alliance for Youth.

By any measure Colin Powell is an extraordinary public servant. He is America's premier Soldier-Statesman. This designation is but a small gesture to honor his devotion to public service and his lifetime of dedication to the American public.

I support this bill and urge its passage.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

H. Con. Res. 161 authorizes the use of the Capitol grounds for the Millions More March scheduled for October 15, 2005. It will be on the 10th anniversary of the original Million Man March held here in Washington on the Mall in October of 1995. This event was one of the largest ever to be held on the Mall.

Similar to the original march, the themes and programs of this event will focus on unity, spiritual values, education and economic development. It is going to be extraordinarily timely this year in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and some of the conditions we saw in New Orleans.

It will be very relevant to this march, and hopefully the administration and others will be paying attention to the issues and themes raised at this event. The organizers will work with the office of the Architect of the Capitol, the Capitol Police; and the event will be free and open to the public.

I support the resolution and urge its passage.

Madam Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis).

Madam Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The chairman has made an excellent case for this legislation. It is not to set any precedent for the future use of AIP funds, since those funds we know are not going to be adequate in the future to meet the total needs of the system. But this is a recognition of an extraordinary circumstance of the disasters of Katrina and Rita and what it has done to the aviation infrastructure in addition to other elements of the infrastructure in those regions. And it is only, I think, appropriate that the Federal Government use discretion and flexibility in helping those airports to recover and to become fully operational. They obviously suffered not only physical damage but tremendous economic losses due to the storms and, in some cases, face perhaps an uncertain economic future because of the damage in the City of New Orleans and questions about how soon or when full aviation schedules will be reinstated to serve that airport.

So I think this legislation is timely. It is appropriate, and I appreciate the chairman of the committee for bringing it forward in such an expedited way.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would like to support the remarks of my colleague from Ohio. He mentioned what a laborer would earn under Davis-Bacon. I have become aware of the fact that a skilled pipe fitter under Davis-Bacon wages in the Southeast would earn $10.22 an hour. That hardly seems to me to be an excessive wage.

And with the extraordinary poverty that was brought to the Nation's attention in New Orleans, one would think that we would want to have people working in jobs that pay a living wage, a decent wage, so that they can support themselves and their families. And it is just extraordinary to me.

We had a meeting with the IG and the GAO regarding the FEMA contracts under Homeland Security, and we asked if they could document, particularly with Hurricane Andrew last year and some other times when Davis-Bacon has been suspended, that, in fact, the taxpayers came out ahead. And they said, well, they really could not. So I said, they mean we might just be lowering wages and increasing the profit margin? And they said, they had a lot of concerns about a lot of these contracts and the no-bid nature of the contracts and whether or not taxpayers were getting full value for their money. And it is particularly distressing when we do not know that we are getting full value for our money and we might, in fact, be only increasing profits while depriving people of a living wage.

So I support the gentleman's remarks, and I do hope that we are allowed to bring legislation to the floor in the near future to overturn the President's misguided efforts in this area.

Madam Speaker, I urge Members to support the legislation.

Madam Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. Speaker, how quickly we forget. We are essentially flying blind with this bill. We were supposed to have a comprehensive report from the Department of Homeland Security which was long overdue, and then, when finally produced, which was supposed to be comprehensive on all the transportation sectors, was a regurgitation of open-source material and news articles. They had an early, more specific version, but it was pulled by the administration because it was measurable. It had goals, objectives and technology. It would have shown how short the funding is in this bill and how little progress we have made: $150 million for all of the ports in the United States of America over the next year. Whew.

Mr. Speaker, we could be buying radiation detection equipment for those ports, but that money is not available. It is not in the budget.

Aviation security, arbitrary cap on screeners. Okay, you can cut back on labor if you give them adequate technology. But guess what? There is not enough money in this bill to buy the new technology, the new explosives detection equipment that should be at every passenger checkpoint, that should be under every airport, that should be used for cargo security, but they do not want to put up measurable goals, because they are not getting there, and the American people would be pretty darn mad about it if they knew.

Then, first responder money, come on. Interoperable communications. First lesson: 9/11. We could not communicate with the fire and police and other first responders in the buildings, and many of them died, because they were out of touch as the buildings were collapsing, and they had no notice.

Katrina, first lesson: no interoperable communications. Well, the President provided for zero dollars, and this is up to $76 million nationwide. Wow, that is enough to do three counties in my State out of 36, and that is the money for the entire Nation of the United States of America for interoperable communications, the most basic tool that our first responders need to protect American lives and to rescue people and to better and more effectively deal with emergencies, whether they are terrorist-generated or natural disaster-generated, and we can come up with $76 million nationwide, not even a real tax break for some of the rich people around here.

So to say somehow that this is adequate is absurd. If you set goals and the goals are, every first responder in America has interoperable communications, we are falling way short. If you say we are going to begin to protect ourselves against radiological attack, against bombs coming in in shipping containers, we are doing virtually nothing. If you are going to improve aviation security, nothing.

Then, finally, they want to push us back to the good old days of private aviation security, but it is not happening, because people know what we have now is better. But in order to facilitate that push, they cap the liability of the private companies who are so good and, now, they have to extend complete liability exemption to the airports to try and induce them to bring in private security, because everybody knows it failed us on 9/11, and it will fail us again, but it will make money for a few special interests.

Mr. Speaker, about 2 years ago, I traveled to Fort Hood, Texas, to see my Guard unit before their deployment to Iraq. I was surprised to see that they were using radios that their families had bought for them at a place called GI Joe's, a good store in Oregon in the Northwest. But the point is they did not have the equipment they needed, they could not train on the equipment they were going to use in Iraq, and now it turns out that that equipment is not available in the United States of America to the National Guard.

Yesterday, Lieutenant General Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said he has about 34 percent of what is needed for the National Guard for equipment for homeland security, for emergencies, disasters or terrorist attacks. Thirty-four percent. He has radios, he said, that cannot communicate with the Army radios because they are Korean War vintage radios. This is an embarrassment for this country. This administration must give the Guard the tools it needs. We don't have to talk about a bigger role for the active duty military. We need to give the National Guard, who does not have problems with posse comitatus and other things, who performed admirably in this disaster, the tools they need for future disasters.

More money for Guard equipment now.

Mr. Speaker, there are some seeds for potential bipartisan agreement. We do need to reauthorize, update, and improve Endangered Species Act. I think there is some fair consensus on that. But we also do not want to go to a time where we have the next passenger pigeon, for instance, where we extirpate a species forever. That is a long time. I wore my eagle tie today in the hope that we will continue to protect the bald eagle, the symbol of our country.

There are some serious problems with the bill that was unveiled last week, hastily pushed through the Committee on Resources, and further changed last evening by a manager's amendment which few have seen. Among them, and one that has to give pause to this body as we wrestle with how we are going to pay for Hurricane Katrina and other essential things here, and how much money is being borrowed in the name of future generations, is a section regarding compensation.

Now, I had hoped to offer an amendment to say that we would compensate people for foregoing the usual historic and accustomed use. If you grow timber and you cannot cut the trees, you get compensated for the trees. If you ranch and you cannot graze the cattle, you get paid the value of the area on which you cannot graze your cattle. If you grew a crop and there is some sort of restriction and you cannot grow that crop, then you would be compensated.

But the bill goes so far beyond that, it is extraordinary. It goes to speculative, proposed, possible, potential use. This is going to create a wonderful new market for speculators. If people across America thought that this was going to become law as written, which it will not, it will be changed dramatically after the Senate acts, if they do act, they would be out right now purchasing, on a speculative basis, or getting options on property that in any way was restricted by the Endangered Species Act. Because they could say, well, it is true that was a tree farm, but actually I was going to build a destination resort on that tree farm. And my destination resort would have provided me with a profit of $1 million a year for the next 30 years. Please pay me $30 million. And the government has 180 days to come up with that money.

Now, there is a low-ball estimate for this new entitlement, and who knows how they came up with it, but they are saying, oh, no, it will only be $5 million to $10 million a year. Come on, only $5 million to $10 million a year? This is going to be hundreds of millions, if not billions a year of a new entitlement. And, remember, the compensation is in an amount no less than the fair market value.

So taxpayers are going to be obligated to borrow money for speculative, possible potential future profits, and maybe even a little on top of that because the Secretary cannot compensate less than the fair market value. It does not say that the Secretary is restricted to the fair market value; if the Secretary feels generous, borrow more money and pay more than the fair market value. It is binding only on the Secretary as I understand in the new manager's amendment.

So the taxpayers are on the hook; but if the property owner says my speculative value was $2 million profit a year for the next 30 years, then that person could go to court. But the government could not go to court to say wait a minute, this is crazy, you really were not going to make $2 million a year on a destination resort on that tree farm. We will compensate you for the loss of harvest of the trees, but we are not going to pay for that speculative value.

I cannot believe that any Member of this House is going to open the doors to the Treasury so wide for potential speculation. That is not compensating landowners for usual, historic, and customary use. If that amendment had been allowed, I think many more Members could support this bill; but that amendment was not allowed here in the House of Representatives today.

There will be only one substitute and a manager's amendment, no other amendments are allowed. This is a perfect bill. After all, it was just introduced last week. It had no hearings. It was marked up one day in committee, and now it has been changed further by a manager's amendment last night which no one has seen. It is a perfect bill, and no amendment should be allowed here on the floor, but we are going to put the taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars.

Mr. Chairman, the substitute would be a great improvement for the current Endangered Species Act. It would treat landowners much as we do under the Conservation Reserve Program; but the underlying bill would be a disaster for taxpayers, a new entitlement.

The Secretary shall pay no less than fair market value. I guess the Secretary, if they are feeling good that day, could pay more than fair market value with taxpayers' money, borrowed money; and it does not require the historic, usual, or custom use.

Take a piece of remote farm land, propose a huge development on it; it does not have to be proven to be economically viable. You proposed it; you were going to build 5,000 houses; you were going to make $1,000, $2,000, $5,000 on each house. You would have to be compensated for that. You do not have to prove that this is economically viable, and sequential owners would get that right. You then sell it to your next door neighbor; they can make the same claim. They sell it to the guy down the street, they can make the same claim, on and on and on.

What an incredible new, speculative market, helping the housing bubble, I guess; but this is going to kill the taxpayers and the Federal Treasury. You should vote for the substitute. It will improve the Endangered Species Act.