[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 119 (Friday, July 21, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H7452-H7454]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   MY ADVICE TO THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Crapo). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Gonzalez] is 
recognized for 30 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. GONZALEZ. Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, we are told every day 
about a revolution in Congress. Day after day, my colleagues from the 
other party, the Republican Party, advance one or another bill, and 
they call it or label it revolutionary.
  But what is revolutionary about a bill that prohibits the government 
from updating and improving meat inspection? How is it revolutionary to 
prohibit cleaner, safer meat? And what is revolutionary about 
legislation that cuts environmental cleanup funds by one-third, or a 
bill that makes it impossibly expensive and cumbersome to protect 
delicate wetlands in our country?
  Under this kind of legislation the Republicans advocate this year, 
the government would have to pay slave owners to emancipate their 
slaves if it was 130 years ago. In fact, the kind of things that the 
Republicans have talked about this year are purely and simply an effort 
to turn the clock back, to force us back into the darkest ages of 
economic exploitation.
  For instance, their attitude on meat inspection is a rank arrogant 
betrayal of a fundamental premise of what was, at the turn of the 
century, a revolutionary reform, the commitment of the government to 
ensure that the Nation's food supply is not contaminated and is safe to 
consume.
  The back-door repeal of statutes designed to clean up the Earth, 
which we have been everything almost weekly, and prevent its further 
despoilation is simply a return to 19th century ideas that no one has 
any responsibility to either neighbor or to future generations.
  The Republican agenda is not revolutionary. It is, plain and simple, 
an attack, an all-out attack on ordinary standards of decent human 
conduct. Decent human conduct requires that those who have great power 
and wealth to refrain from manufacturing and selling poisonous 
products, but the Republicans would say that 1906 meat inspection 
standards cannot be changed, cannot be made better, despite the fact 
that hundreds of people die every year from foul meat, and Republicans 
would say that land developers should be perfectly free to destroy 
wetlands despite the fact that these lands are the vital source of 
anything resembling a thriving national fishing industry.
  These are not revolutionary ideas. They are merely the candles that 
quiet the tantrums of impatient, powerful, wealthy donors who feed 
endless millions of dollars into the political maw of this machine and 
who want nothing more than to exploit this country as ruthlessly as the 
robber barons did in a bygone era.
  But I do not want to talk about the mindless cruelty of the present 
majority. These cruelties will soon enough be understood by the 
American people. Eventually they will have their distilled judgment as 
the full facts are known, and they will be, and who are smart enough to 
understand that this is merely a spreading of an endless banquet for 
the rich and the powerful and that the feast has been paid for by a 
vast transfer of wealth from ordinary wage-earners to the wealthier of 
those among us.
  What I do want to talk about is the great pain and frustration that 
ordinary Americans feel today, the uncertainty they feel about the 
future.
  The truth is that ordinary, law-abiding work-a-day Americans are 
themselves sliding backward in their feeling that they know they are. 
They are angry. Let there be no mistake, they are frustrated. Let there 
be no mistake in understanding that.
  They went to see their lives get better, not
   worse. These frustrations are not the figments of anyone's 
imagination. They are the product of a real longstanding slide backward 
for most of our fellow citizens.

  I pride myself in being in the most intimate contact one human being 
could have with those is that he has as actually serious responsibility 
that no one man could really fully fulfill to represent, a multitude, 
but in good faith tries to do so by being in immediate and most 
intimate contact.
  It is understood from what I hear and where I meet every weekend when 
we are in session and when we are not, I go nowhere but in the 
district, and the immediate beneficiaries of this frustration and anger 
are those that now have the power, the majority.
  But their policies will make the problems worse, and they will not be 
able to gloat for too long.
  Now, I belong to a party, and have been proud to do so since the 
beginning, that interprets as fundamental premise, as one that is very 
basic in what I tried to adhere to in all of my career, in my position 
first as a local representative, then as a State and now as a national 
since 1961.
  Representation is what I have sought, no other kind of political 
elective office but this, and that is what I have best understood and 
strived to perform.
  We have got to work in such ways and always at all times to redeem 
the great traumas of this Nation, its historic commitment that every 
person have a decent, hopefully rising, standard of living and being.

                              {time}  1830

  The American Revolution is not about the freedom to be exploited. It 
is about the freedom to political and religious expression, the freedom 
to be protected against an intrusive government, and it is about equal 
protection under the law, and it allows us the right to enjoy, above 
all, the fruits of your own labor.
  By that standard the Republican Party on all levels fails. The 
Republicans are simply trying to install a whole new system of what is 
tantamount to exploitation exploitation of irreplaceable resources, 
exploitation of hard-pressed and lowly wage earners, exploitation of 
frustration and fear, which they hope can be used to keep quiet the 
very people that are being exploited.
  The sad fact is the people of the country are playing a losing game. 
They are working harder, they are producing more, and they are being 
rewarded considerably less. I do not think there has been another time 
in modern history which this has happened that I can recall, and I have 
been aboard on this level now more than three decades, much more, 
approximating four, and I can tell you that that is my assessment.
  Now it is a so-called white-collar worker whose own standard of 
living is declining, whose job security is threatened more and more 
every day, and it is a two-income family who now are finding it harder 
and harder to stay even or even to stay employed, and more and more 
professional workers are reduced to part-time employment or contract 
work, the equivalent of piecework in the old clothing-stitching 
factories, garment factories.
  There were a plethora of them in the hard Depression period of my 
youth and that I can recall to this day, my aunts, and my mother and 
other relatives getting up at 4:30 in the morning, and all through the 
day, with the 

[[Page H7453]]
exception of the middle of the week where I would accompany my aunt to 
go there because she could not speak English to this garment factory to 
deliver the hand-stitched products that day and night my mother and my 
aunts, my sister and all, would be doing during the week. What was the 
reward? A man at the window would pick that garment, and look at it, 
and examine it, and then, if he okayed it, it was 5 cents.
  Of course I have got to translate here. With a nickel in that day and 
time you could buy a loaf of bread, you could buy a whole quart of 
milk, so there is no way to extrapolate those standards. The world has 
long gone by in which no power I would be able to summon could describe 
to my colleagues of these newer generations.
  Now obviously the numbers indicate that job growth is taking place. 
But that job growth is in service and in retail jobs which are the low 
end of the economic pecking order. As a result, incomes have been going 
down collectively. For a while a family could stay even and perhaps 
even get ahead by having a second wage earner in the family, but 
presently even the number of two-earner families is shrinking, and we 
have more and more families that are less and less able to meet the 
daily necessities of life, a house or apartment, some kind of access to 
transportation, some way to buy clothing and food, and some way to pay 
for medical care.
  Perhaps it is not too visible to a lot of us that have the comforts, 
good clothing, perhaps free of debt, good place to go home and sleep in 
comfort with all the creature comforts anybody could summon in today's 
living standards, have a full meal three times a day. It is hard to 
conceive, very hard to conveive, of anybody not comfortable if we are 
comfortable.
  We see the evidence of this desperation everywhere in the burgeoning 
numbers of beggars and homeless. I walk down the street here to go to 
the local drugstore or grocery store, and where it used to be that 
there would be none, in half a block I will encounter four mendicants 
pleading for a handout. That was not so since I came to the Congress 
until fairly recently of just a few years ago.
  So the evidences are in the burgeoning numbers of beggars and 
homeless, and declining support for schools, and more and more people 
depending on government for health and medical care, and most all of it 
in the growing frustration and anger which sometimes expresses itself 
at the ballot box, and some seek to explain it by one wild conspiracy 
theory or another in which most express by a kind of cynical anger 
which has been most artfully exploited by radio talk shows.
  We are not losing jobs because American workers are unproductive. In 
fact, productivity is up by 37 percent just during the last decade or 
the 10 years. That kind of productivity increase is normally 
accompanied by an increase in real income, but that is not happening 
now. If you look at real earnings, that
 is earnings expressed in constant 1982 dollars, American workers today 
are earning 40 cents an hour less than they did 10 years ago. What is 
more, real wages in this country hit their peak in 1972, and I said so 
at the time and said at that time real income has dropped from $8.55 an 
hour in constant dollars to $7.30 an hour, a drop of $1.25 an hour. To 
put it another way, American workers are about 12 percent poorer today 
than they were in 1972.

  No wonder people have tried to supplement their incomes with a second 
job. No wonder so many are unable to even think about a new car for 
instance. Car prices have risen far faster than incomes, and so have 
the prices of housing, medical care, and the other essentials.
  More and more Americans are being forced to take temporary jobs 
because companies do not want to hire full-time workers, and so the 
temporary-job business has increased by 50 percent in the past 5 years 
alone, and some 2\1/4\, 2.25 million Americans, are so-called temps or 
temporaries. In other words, for every 10 Americans in a solid 
manufacturing job, there is 1 American who is hanging on by doing 
temporary work, work that pays few, if any, benefits, usually does not 
include health care, and pays less per hour for the same work as a 
regular employee would earn.
  Even when jobs are not just disappearing, millions of Americans have 
seen employers transform these job into low-pay situations. A major 
airline, for instance, spun off its reservation business to a 
subsidiary owned by that same company. The subsidiary then told the 
employees they were welcome to the jobs, but the jobs would pay less 
than half the present rate. With that kind of story common, used every 
day, is it any wonder that housing starts today are 20 percent below 
the rate of a decade ago?
  None of this is happening because corporate profits are too low. In 
fact, corporate profits are at record levels. This slide in wages is 
not happening because of high unemployment. Unemployment is less than 6 
percent, the lowest in 6 years. The slide is not happening because of a 
stock market crash. The market has never been higher. What is happening 
is that fewer and fewer Americans are taking more and more of the 
economic pie, and so we are seeing a creeping pauperization of this 
country.
  What saddens me is that the current majority in control wants to 
enact policies that would accelerate this pauperization. They would 
enact a tax system that would transfer more money from the poor to the 
rich. They will enact cuts in all kinds of programs, from education to 
Medicare, that we will pay for that transfer the wealth from the bottom 
to the top, and they would blame the social ills that flow from all of 
this on the very poor victims themselves.
  Sixty years ago the country was on the verge of a great class 
struggle. I was there and was of an age that had it indelibly imprinted 
in my mind, heart, and soul to this day. This was the age of the 
immense struggle over unionization. It was the age of the picketing 
line, the lockout, the violence that I witnessed in my hometown and the 
whole panoply of antilabor laws sought by industrialists who were 
determined to share no power with the workers of the Nation.
  Today we hear our counterpart party Members, Republican Members, 
accusing Democrats of fomenting class warfare. That is not unlike the 
segregationist accusing civil rights protesters of being agitators. But 
the truth is, unless there is an injustice, unless there is a 
grievance, nobody gets excited by an orator who denounces something as 
evil or wrong.
  The Republicans know that there is injustice, and, if they do not 
know, then they are far more dense than I ever will believe they are. 
They know that they are wrong. They should know that people are angry. 
But they want to blame all this on educators who are guilty of nothing 
more than telling the truth. If we are about to enter into some kind of 
class warfare, there can only be one reason for it. Too many people 
have been pushed too far. We need to understand the fact about what is 
happening in this country, and what is happening is that too many hard-
working Americans are finding that they are losing ground no matter how 
hard they work, how hard they strive, how frugal they may be. Too many 
Americans are losing wages and benefits for no good reason at all 
because they know they are producing more and better goods and doing 
all the things they are supposed to do to make this a great and growing 
economy.
  No wonder they are beginning to ask, ``Well, what about me? What is 
my share?'' No wonder they are asking why they cannot plan on being 
able to retire, or why they cannot afford to get ill, or why they 
cannot have a decent place to live.
  Now there is no question about it because a party identifies itself 
with these policies. The Republican Party and its policies do not 
address any of this, and frankly I am not certain that my own party 
that I have adhered to, the Democrat Party, is doing much more either, 
which is a terribly sad confession to make to the people of this 
country who are in urgent need to have some reaction from those sources 
of power that have been built in their country as forces or 
institutions that are supposed to meet that. This is the premise for 
the existence of these two great parties, but twiddle-dee-dee, twiddle-
dee-dum, when it comes to these basics, it hurts me. I have always 
identified as a Democrat, but then the choice was impossible to do 
otherwise in the manner I came up. But I must 

[[Page H7454]]
say truthfully today, and I have spoken out, I have antagonized some of 
my so-called fellow Democrats both here and at home. So what? As we 
used to say, if the shoe fits, put it on.
  So we will see a great, and growing and greater anger in this 
country. It does not take a genius to predict that. I have seen it. I 
have had it told, and I have visibly registered. I pride myself in 
coming from a level that I have never lost contact with the society 
back home, and I know of the frustration. I know that when people lose 
hope, then we have trouble. We will see a general revolt as people 
demand a fair share of the wealth they have helped to create.

                             {time}   1845

  As they demand a secure future for themselves and their families, as 
they demand a decent environment to live and work in.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope and pray not to see that. I have seen it in my 
youth, and I recall to this day the bitterness and the anger and how 
the scars remained for at least some generations there. True, the Lord 
has been kind and has preserved me to witness the emergence from those 
dreary days, but I am fearful, I must confess.
  I am never one to have been governed by fear. Fear, I think, is the 
big enemy all along. I have always tried to act not in reaction to 
fear, but with as detached and as cool as possible a judgment would 
enable me to see.
  Those who think they saw agitation in the civil rights struggle, 
those who think they saw unrest during the Vietnam period, did not live 
through the squalid and violent times through the 1930's as I have, 
when the Army drove squatters from the Washington areas here with 
violence, when States tried to keep America from crossing their borders 
to find work, and when people did not hesitate to fight and die for the
 right to unionize, or even to protest.

  I would not want to see the kind of deprivation that causes that, not 
again, when there is no need. God has blessed us. We must deserve that 
blessing too, and make sure that we have wisely and charitably and with 
consideration made use of this gift of plenty.
  Mr. Speaker, if we are to avoid repeating history, I say to my 
colleagues, we must all listen better. We must all show compassion, and 
we must all show more concern for ordinary people than I have seen thus 
far this year, or indeed in recent years. Most of all, we must have a 
passion for justice that I see as almost entirely missing from this 
body today. A passion, a passion for justice, not just a desire or a 
hope, but a passion for justice. An unquieted, uninterrupted passion 
for justice. I have not seen it, unfortunately, not lately.
  To those I say that the American people have never lost their thirst 
and passion for justice. It is there. They are crying out for it, maybe 
in a temporary wilderness, maybe not, and sooner or later, one way or 
the other, they will be heard.

                          ____________________