[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 35 (Tuesday, March 18, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H1090-H1096]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT TO BE CHANGED BY H.R. 1

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] is recognized 
for 60 minutes.
  Mr. OWENS. I want to alert everybody to the fact that we are going to 
be considering H.R. 1, the bill which deals with the denial of cash 
payments for overtime pay work to workers.
  H.R. 1 is called, rightly by the Democrats, the Paycheck Reduction 
Act, or some of us call it the Employer Cash Enhancement Act.
  I will have an amendment on the floor tomorrow in connection with 
H.R. 1. That amendment deals with two-thirds of the American work 
force, two-thirds of the people out there in the work force making $10 
an hour or less, and my amendment deals with trying to protect their 
interests.
  I have been given the grand sum of 10 minutes to debate my amendment. 
That is 5 minutes for the opposition and 5 minutes for myself to debate 
an amendment which impacts on two-thirds of the work force.
  We are going into the session tomorrow with the most important bill 
that we have considered thus far in this session. It is called H.R. 1 
because the majority party, the majority Republicans, consider it to be 
so important as to give it that distinction of being H.R. 1.
  It is first in priority, and it deals with changing the Fair Labor 
Standards Act, which has existed since Franklin Roosevelt and the New 
Deal. The Fair Labor Standards Act will now be changed to remove from 
it the mandate that when workers work more than 40 hours a week, they 
must be paid at a rate of time and a half. If an individual is making 
$10 an hour and they work over 40 hours a week, every hour over 40 
hours must be paid at the rate of $15 an hour. It is that simple.
  This bill did not fall from heaven. The act did not fall from heaven. 
It was the result of exploitation of workers by employers in large 
numbers, exploitation in terms of low payment of wages in general and 
working workers around the clock, late hours each day, weekends, 
Sundays, Saturdays. There was great exploitation at the time this New 
Deal legislation came into being.
  It did two things: It made the workers fortunate to have jobs get 
better treatment and better pay; and it also made employers employ more 
workers. If employers were going to have to pay time and a half rate to 
people who were employed, instead of driving the work force that they 
have incessantly, they are likely to want to hire people, more people, 
and pay them at the regular rate.
  So it had both effects, that more people got jobs, and those who had 
the jobs had better working conditions.
  Now we are about to make a drastic change. It is a revolutionary 
change in labor law. This is no small item. It is a revolutionary 
change in labor law. It is an extreme measure, an extreme step to take. 
It is an extreme step to take and it does not have to be that way. If 
we want flexibility in the law, and no law is written in stone, it does 
not have to be forever. Things change. Each generation has the right to 
look at the laws that it might be bound by and change those laws. There 
is nothing sacred about laws made by mankind.

                              {time}  2030

  So we can change it. But why take a great step which just happens to 
be a step on the backs of the people at the bottom of the economic 
structure? The lowest income people will suffer the most. Why do that 
when you do not have to? You could take some steps toward changing the 
law, making the law more flexible, without hurting so many people.
  The statistics show that two-thirds of the people who are working, 
fortunate enough to have a job, are earning less than $10 an hour. I 
propose that if you have to go forward and change the labor law, the 
Fair Labor Standards Act, and it looks as if the votes are there, the 
majority Republicans have the vote in the House of Representatives. In 
the other body, in the Senate, they are steam rolling forward. They 
have the votes. So the likelihood is that this Republican-controlled 
Congress will come out with a bill that they both agree on, and it will 
have to be negotiated with the White House.
  The White House is saying that they will not sign such a bill, they 
will veto the bill as it is. But when the White House says it will veto 
a bill as it is, that is a clear statement even to a sophomore in high 
school that what they are saying is we will negotiate.
  What will the negotiations be? What I am saying is that it is likely 
that this revolutionary change in labor law which is rolling forward, 
it is likely that it is going to pass, it is likely that we are going 
to have some change in

[[Page H1091]]

the next couple of years. Before this session is out, something is 
going to change.
  I hope that nothing changes. I am in the same position as those who 
say just vote no, but I see the change coming. Just vote no is a 
beginning position. I will vote no. But I realize that just voting no 
is not enough. One of the reasons that just voting no is not enough is 
that there is a great deal of sentiment in certain quarters in this 
Nation, and I have said this before, I do not want to be redundant, 
there is sentiment among upper income, middle-income folks to have more 
flexibility in the way their employers treat them. They would like to 
have time off instead of having the employer being bound by the labor 
law to pay them in cash. There is no reason why we cannot accomplish 
that and relieve the anxiety or the bind that certain upper income 
people find themselves in without hurting those at the very bottom.
  The compromise that I have proposed in the spirit of this bipartisan 
Congress is that let us go forward and make the changes and give the 
flexibility to the people at the very top of the wage structure, that 
one-third of the work force that is above the $10 an hour. Let us have 
an experiment, let us do it for 2 years, 5 years.
  I understand that the bill the Republican majority will have on the 
floor tomorrow will modify the bill to say we shall have a sunset 
provision in the bill and in 5 years reconsider it. OK, let us 
reconsider it in 5 years. In the meantime, have a bill which exempts 
the two-thirds of the work force making $10 an hour or less and go 
forward with the experiment for those people at the top who want this 
so badly. It is a win-win situation.
  I did not go to the Democratic-Republican retreat. We had a 
bipartisan retreat, and part of the retreat's purpose was to see to it 
that we work together in a more civil manner, that we work together in 
this session of Congress in a more productive manner, that we avoid 
gridlock, that we avoid ideological locks just for the sake of 
defending positions.
  I am all in favor of reason prevailing. So I offer this reasonable 
proposal and I will offer the amendment on the floor tomorrow to take 
care of those people at the very bottom of the work force, those folks 
who make 2.5 times the minimum wage, and that formula is used in order 
to make certain that as wages rise we are still protecting the people 
at the very bottom.
  I say this as a repetition of what I have said before in the last 10 
days. I will not go any further in that vein. I just want to spin from 
that, the fact that this bill will be on the floor tomorrow, to the 
larger issue. The larger issue is that H.R. 1 is a bill which hurts 
workers as it is now. What this Republican-controlled 105th Congress 
has done is laid on the table its battle plan for the destruction of 
working families. We are going to pursue a course of action very 
similar to the one pursued in the 104th Congress, and in many ways the 
signals have come clear to us that this is going to be a different 
Congress. Certainly in the area of education, we are going to cooperate 
and have some productive, forward movement on the improvement of 
education in America. But the signal that is being sent now for working 
people and the laws and regulations that govern the lives of working 
people, the signal is also clear, nothing is different from last year.
  The Speaker said that politics is war without blood, and with respect 
to organized labor and the things that affect working people, that 
still holds. Politics is war without blood, and war has been declared 
on working people. War has been declared on those laws. What will be on 
the floor tomorrow, H.R. 1, is just the beginning.
  There is also a TEAM Act that is in the works. The TEAM Act is 
similar to the TEAM Act that was on the floor last session. There is 
also a move to curtail the participation of labor unions in politics, 
the ability of labor unions to support candidates that are supporting 
their interests. There are also other efforts going forward to curb the 
Davis-Bacon law. Across the board there are things occurring which make 
it clear that war is still the modus operandi of the Republican Party 
in respect to things that affect working people. If they were happening 
one by one, I would not be as alarmed as I am, but they are not 
happening one by one. There is a clear battle plan. Part of the battle 
plan also extends to the failure of the other body to move forward to 
confirm Alexis Herman as the Secretary of the Department of Labor. The 
Department of Labor is without a head, no direction, no general. The 
troops are there, the functions of the agency cannot go forward. It is 
in limbo in respect to the Secretary of Labor. The denial of the 
Secretary of Labor's immediate confirmation sort of demoralizes the 
people who are in organized labor, the people who are workers. It is 
all psychological warfare, too.
  So the warfare is there, and we should take it very seriously. I am 
here again to talk about this because it needs to be seen in the 
broader perspective. I also talked last week about the fact that 
everybody is not paying their taxes in the way which the Internal 
Revenue Code defines they should be paying their taxes. Corporations 
are not paying their taxes in accordance with the code. The Tax Code 
says that corporations cannot do certain things and on a wholesale 
basis they are doing them.
  As we approach April 15, every taxpayer ought to stop and think about 
the fact, they try to obey the law and our society is based on the rule 
of law and any group that does not obey the law is automatically a 
threat to society. Every time the law is systematically downgraded, 
held in contempt, ignored, then the whole rule of law concept is in 
jeopardy.
  I want to link that up with what is happening with organized labor. 
On the one hand, you have this brutal scrutiny of everything related to 
organized labor, a brutal scrutiny. There was a hearing this morning 
related to the contributions that labor unions give to political 
candidates for political education purposes. The other party, the 
majority party, is very alarmed about the fact that large sums of money 
were spent last year by the AFL-CIO on political education that they 
thought hurt some of their Members, unduly criticized them, and they 
are waging this vendetta against organized labor by developing 
legislation which will curtail their use of their own dues. The dues 
paid by the members are now being subjected to more regulations. Labor 
unions already are the most regulated institution in our society. You 
do not find corporations being regulated in the same way. You do not 
find educational organizations. There are a number of other bodies, the 
Red Cross, all kinds of groups that exist in our society that collect 
money and have money, wield influence, and they are not as regulated as 
labor unions. But they are going to enforce, try to add to that another 
layer of regulation. The majority party in this House is determined to 
get rid of regulations.
  What I am saying is there is a linkage between the fact that we have 
this series of moves being taken against working families and any kinds 
of laws, regulations, rules that affect working families or help them, 
and on the other hand we have certain Tax Code laws being ignored, and 
big corporations and rich people are the ones who are ignoring those 
tax laws. I made the speech about the need to have the Tax Code 
enforced last week. I just want to link these two items up.
  What I said last week is there is a provision in the Internal Revenue 
Code which says that corporations cannot buy back their own stock. They 
cannot buy back their stock except if it in some way relates to their 
capital needs. That is, any business has a right to take parts of its 
profits and put those profits into taking care of certain capital 
needs. They have a right to put the profits into certain options for 
the executives. There are certain things they can do. But once they 
have used their profits for that purpose, they have to justify any 
additional purchase of their own stock and show that they are not doing 
that in order to, first, prevent the payment of taxes by their 
shareholders, and, second, they are not manipulating the stock market. 
The IRS is not concerned about the manipulation of the stock market. 
That is the SEC. But the IRS is concerned about having corporations buy 
back their own stock in large quantities that are not needed for 
legitimate purposes and their shareholders do not pay any taxes then 
because they do not get those shares distributed among themselves and 
the corporations end up hoarding large

[[Page H1092]]

amounts of money that it should not be hoarding, it should distribute 
them. It is not fair to the shareholders, first. Some shareholders may 
not want to have their shares distributed to them because they do not 
want to pay the extra taxes that year, but most shareholders probably 
do want any profits that they have received, any dividends that have 
been accrued, to be distributed. The law is very clear. It has existed 
since 1913. It says a corporation may not do this.
  It is not against the law, by the way. It is interesting that the Tax 
Code does not make this illegal. Nobody will go to jail. What the Tax 
Code says at this point, sections 533 to 537 of the Tax Code, Internal 
Revenue Code, it says you will have to pay a 39.6-percent penalty if 
you do this. That is a pretty stiff penalty; 39.6-percent of what you 
did not handle properly, you must pay in penalties. You can see if you 
have $1 billion that you use to buy back stock improperly, a 39.6 
percent penalty on that is a considerable penalty. That is in the code, 
since 1913.
  For a long time corporations and other people tried to misinterpret 
that to mean only closely held corporations, family corporations. But 
in 1984 the Congress, the Ways and Means Committee, made it crystal 
clear that this provision shall apply to all corporations. It is not 
being enforced. The buyback phenomenon has been taking place for the 
last 10 years, large amounts of stock being bought back by 
corporations, and it has accelerated and escalated.
  So what I am saying is that when it comes to the rich, nobody is 
looking. When it comes to corporations and their power, nobody wants 
the law enforced. When it comes to labor unions, on the other hand, 
with much smaller amounts of money, and they are operating within the 
regulations, they are under intense scrutiny.
  Now, one might say, well, the problem is that labor unions made large 
contributions to Democrats during the last election and they spent a 
large amount of money on what you call political education. They asked 
for trouble.
  I have a chart here which shows that labor unions were little 
spenders compared to what other groups spent on the last election, 
labor unions were small fry. The biggest spenders were in the area of 
finances, corporations, financial institutions of various kinds.

                              {time}  2045

  This chart shows that across the board, when you look at the various 
sectors of our economy, if you look at agriculture, construction, 
defense, energy, health, law, transport, miscellaneous business, labor, 
you look at all of them, they all spent large amounts of money. But the 
one thing that stands out about labor, the labor contributions were the 
only ones where the contributions to the Democrats exceeded the 
contributions to the Republicans. All of these other categories in 
great amounts exceeded--the contributions to the Republicans exceeded 
the contributions to the Democrats right across the board.
  So you can see from this chart why it is that the Republicans spent 
seven times more money in the last election than the Democrats, seven 
times more, and yet we are scrutinizing, focusing a microscope only on 
this sector, labor, at present. We are not looking at the kinds of 
activities that took place in respect to corporations, financial 
institutions, et cetera. Are we examining their practices? Are we 
saying to them did you get the permission of your shareholders? Did you 
ask them who to support in the election?
  That is what we are asking labor unions. You did not get the 
permission of the people. They had the right to decide who their money 
was going to support, you should not be using their dues to support 
anybody that they do not agree with, that they do not themselves, each 
one of the members. If a union has a million members, you have got to 
have agreement among--all million have to support somebody. Otherwise 
give the people their money back.
  No other institution in America operates that way, but that is what 
is being proposed in my committee, the Committee on Education and the 
Workforce. The Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations had a 
hearing this morning where the Republican Members in the majority were 
saying in essence, ``You have committed a gross unethical violation by 
not asking your members who you should support,'' and the answer of the 
union members who were testifying, and there were not many of them, 
there were only two of them, and seven of the people there were brought 
in to testify against the unions, but at least they did allow us to 
have two witnesses in defense of union policy. What they said was, 
unions are democratic organizations and as democratic organizations 
what the majority decides the minority must go along with.
  I mean that is the way America operates. The majority elected the 
Members of this House of Representatives. They happen to give the 
majority to the Republicans. So the Republicans are in the majority of 
the House of Representatives. They rule. We have certain rights; 
sometimes they are violated wholesale, but we do have--we pretend to 
have rights in the minority and that is across America. The minority is 
supposed to have certain rights; the majority rules. So why are we 
asking unions to behave differently and allow the minority to determine 
what the union does or does not do?
  There is a set of myths that we went through this morning relating to 
this whole matter, how unions operate. I am not going to go a great 
deal, but it is called ``Separating Myth from Fact Regarding Beck.'' 
There was a Beck decision of the Supreme Court, the Communications 
Workers of America versus Beck, and it dealt with this whole problem of 
how unions can spend the dues of members and what kinds of activities 
it cannot engage in, and that is what is back on the table. The 
Republican majority wants to interpret Beck, the Beck decision, to mean 
that unions should be almost paralyzed.
  I am not going to read all of it because this is not really the 
primary topic of discussion. I would like to submit a statement called 
``Separating Myth from Fact Regarding Beck.'' I ask unanimous consent 
to submit this statement in its entirety. It is just two pages, and I 
think it is illuminating at this point.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. (Mr. Gibbons). Is there objection to the 
request of the gentleman from New York?
  There was no objection.

                Separating Myth From Fact Regarding Beck

       Fact: Unions are voluntary organizations. A union exists 
     only where a majority of the employees democratically decide 
     to form a union.
       Fact: No one can be forced to join a union. The ``closed 
     shop'' is illegal. Where a union exists, it is up to each 
     individual employee to decide whether to join a union.
       Fact: Unions are democratic organizations and union members 
     control their activities, including spending decisions, by 
     voting at union meetings and conventions and by electing 
     their union officers.
       Fact: Under Federal law, union membership dues levels are 
     set by the members themselves; any dues increase must be 
     approved by majority vote.
       Fact: As with other voluntary membership organizations, 
     those who do choose to join a union and enjoy full membership 
     rights are expected to pay the organizations' regular dues.
       Fact: Unlike other kinds of organizations, however, unions 
     must represent all employees in a bargaining unit including 
     those who do not choose to join the union, equally and 
     without discrimination. All employees--members and non-
     members alike--receive the benefits the union negotiates with 
     the employer. And all employees--members and non-members 
     alike--can use the union's grievance procedures.
       Fact: In many states, unions and employers may agree to 
     require non-members who are represented by the union to pay 
     an ``agency fee'' to the union for the representation 
     provided by the union. But under the National Labor Relations 
     Act, as it currently exists, those who object to paying an 
     amount equal to union dues cannot be required to pay more 
     than their pro rata share of the union's cost of ``activities 
     germane to collective bargaining, contract administration, 
     and grievance adjustment.'' That is the precise holding in 
     the Supreme Court case, Communications Workers of America v. 
     Beck, 487 U.S. 735 (1988).
       Fact: The NLRA, as definitively construed by the Supreme 
     Court in Beck, thus already assures that no employee can be 
     required, over objection, to contribute to a union's 
     political communications to union members, a union's voter 
     registration and ``get-out-the-vote'' campaigns, or to any 
     other expenditures by a union for political and ideological 
     purposes unrelated to collective bargaining.
       Fact: To assure that no employee is compelled to support 
     union's political or ideological activities, the National 
     Labor Relations Board has held that a union which

[[Page H1093]]

     seeks to collect agency fees must notify non-members of their 
     right to object to paying for such activities and their right 
     to pay a reduced fee based upon the union's cost of 
     activities germane to the cost of collective bargaining. The 
     NLRB has further held that the union must provide non-members 
     with sufficient information about the union's activities to 
     enable the non-member to decide whether to object. This, too, 
     is already the law.

       Fact: There are approximately 50,000 local unions in United 
     States, thousands of state regional unions, and over 75 
     national and international unions. These unions range in size 
     from a handful of members to over 1,000,000 members, and 
     differ greatly from each other in terms of accounting 
     systems, methods of communication, and the like. Procedures 
     that work in one union will not work in another, and 
     Washington should not impose a straitjacket on what varying 
     unions do to meet their obligations under Beck.
       Fact: Any nonmember who believes that he or she is being 
     required to support union activities unrelated to collective 
     bargaining or who believes that the union's the right either 
     to file a complaint with the NLRB or to go directly to court. 
     In such cases, the NLRB and the Federal courts will decide 
     whether particular procedures the individual union has 
     developed are legally adequate.
  Mr. OWENS. But what I am trying to show is that on the one hand we 
have labor unions under attack. This Beck decision and its 
interpretation is just one of the ways that labor unions and working 
people and laws that benefit working people are under attack, just one 
of the ways they are under attack.
  Another way is the TEAM Act. The TEAM Act allows union employers to 
select groups of employees that they want to form a TEAM committee 
with, and those employees are empowered to work with the management in 
order to do the things that management wants done. Well, you will never 
be able to organize an independent union if the labor law is pushed 
aside and you can have employers and management selecting people that 
they want to bond with among the employees. Unions are supposed to be 
independent; that is the whole thrust of labor law. And yet the TEAM 
Act would eliminate that independence by allowing the management to 
select who they are going to bargain with, who they going to work with 
and negotiate with in the plan. That is another problem.
  The other problem that I mentioned before is Davis-Bacon is being 
attacked. Of course comp time, and you know NLRB is under attack, 
National Labor Relations Board, being attacked. All of these 
institutions that were set up under Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, 
under attack now.
  You know, here we have a situation in America where when Franklin 
Roosevelt became President, there were people saying that you can never 
make America work if you have things like Social Security. You can 
never--America will never work if you have a National Labor Relations 
Board. If workers can organize and they can confront management, our 
whole society is going to collapse.
  It did not happen. We had the great sit-down strikes and the plants 
in Detroit, we had organized labor all over the country getting 
together, and they created a situation where the workers were paid 
decent wages, some of the best wages in the world for a long time, and 
because they were paid the best wages in the world they created the 
biggest consumer market in the world. That consumer market is still the 
biggest in the world. Despite the fact that we have less population 
than many nations, our consumer market is the biggest in the world. We 
are the engine for capitalism all over the world.
  The Chinese have a booming economy only because they have a place to 
sell the products. Unfortunately, I wish they were not selling their 
products here. I wish we had our own workers manufacturing the products 
that they are making in China and not having the Chinese workers making 
products there at very low wages and bring them here and sell them at 
high prices so that the people who own the factories, they make a 
killing. They get things produced at a very low price, they bring them 
here and sell them at a high price, and they are making a killing, and 
they are destroying our labor force and eventually they will destroy 
the consumers. That great body of consumers that makes the world go is 
here in America. The great overwhelming part of our gross national 
product is consumer spending.
  Now these are not conjectures or these are not theories of Major 
Owens. These are facts. Consumer spending drives our economy still, 
despite the fact that you have a lot of other things happening, you 
know, with the age of information, electronics, and you have a lot of 
investment in equipment and capital. All kinds of things are happening. 
Consumer spending still drives the economy.
  If you destroy the great consumer base, the masses of consumers in 
America--there are some people in the rest of the world that think the 
closest they will ever get to heaven is if they come to America, but we 
have it here already. Normal, ordinary people live better, eat better, 
have better accommodation in terms of housing. We have better clothing, 
drive cars. Nothing else like this has ever happened on the face of the 
Earth.
  Why do we want to destroy it? Why do we want to destroy the workers 
and the work force which becomes the consumers, which establishes the 
wealth and drives the economy of capitalism all over the world? Is 
there a danger of destroying it, or is this some farfetched set of 
assumptions that I am making here? Is there any danger if we let 
corporations and people with power not obey the law? We are back to the 
taxes. If they do not obey the law in one respect, and they do not obey 
it in another respect, and they have it galloping on, they buy 
influence either in the Senate or the House, or they buy influence in 
the White House, and they are able to run roughshod over certain laws 
and certain regulations and get things done outside of the channels of 
our democratic processes. Then you will have a situation where you may 
have a threat to this engine that drives capitalism all over the world. 
You may have a lopsided situation created where to facilitate the short 
term gains of making money in the corporations, we destroy the labor 
unions, we destroy the capacity of our working class to demand good 
wages, and we destroy our consumer market. You know, we can have that 
if we have a lopsided situation, if we wipe out the Government's 
involvement and the Government's protection of workers.
  One of the people who testified this morning was a professor from 
somewhere in Texas, and his proposal was that we follow the example of 
New Zealand, that New Zealand has almost wiped out all of their laws 
with respect to labor. It is up to the management and the unions to 
negotiate, and they do not have any guidelines and any parameters that 
are set by government, and he wants America to become that way.
  That would be a risky experiment indeed. That would be an extreme 
experiment. It would be a revolutionary experiment.
  We should not become so complacent that we think our great American 
society is not susceptible to great collapses. We have not looked at it 
closely enough, but we ought to take a look at the savings and loan 
swindle. The savings and loan swindle was a partial collapse of our 
economy that never has been really recognized because the forces that 
control that situation were so great until most Americans do not 
realize what happened to them.
  You know, about $500 billion in taxpayers' money will go down the 
drain as a result of the savings and loan swindle. Five hundred 
billion. Most people cannot comprehend that. You know it is very hard, 
you know. An aircraft carrier costs $3 billion. You can comprehend that 
maybe if you stretch your mind; an aircraft carrier costs $3 billion. 
But when you get up to 500 billion, it is just hard to comprehend, but 
when you add all the money that went down the drain in the savings and 
loan association that the taxpayers have to put back in because 
fortunately for the economy, fortunately for our system, we had a 
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Government regulation was in 
place so that people whose money was jeopardized by the savings and 
loan swindle, which was a massive swindle that spread across the whole 
Nation--never before has anything in the history of the world happened 
on the scale that the swindle of the savings and loan association 
demonstrated to us.
  We really do not understand yet what happened. Part of the reason we 
do not understand is because this country is so rich. There is so much 
wealth here until you can have a massive swindle

[[Page H1094]]

like that take place, and resources and money were moved in mainly from 
the American taxpayers to cover it so that you did not have any massive 
dislocation.
  What if we had been in the position of Albania? Now little Albania is 
tiny, but I am going to use Albania as an example because it is a 
recent development. Most people I am certain will listen to me are not 
concerned with Albania. People are concerned about what is happening in 
Africa where the disruptions and the collapse of societies in certain 
places means that people get massacred. The Hutus and the Tutsis, the 
fight there, people massacred in large numbers, bodies floating down 
the rivers; it is very dramatic, and rightly so we should be concerned.
  People are concerned about, you know, other kinds of upheavals that 
have happened. In Cambodia you had the killing fields where millions 
were murdered in Cambodia by political forces, the Pol Pot Red Army. 
You know we should be excited about those kinds of collapses, and of 
course, the collapse that took place in Nazi Germany, the collapse of 
society where some people said German society did not collapse, the 
subways are running on time. You know, they were very efficient. You 
know, some of the most educated people in the world were in Germany. 
The German army was the most efficient army ever created in the field. 
All kinds of things, civilization. The German army troops sometimes 
sang Beethoven and Bach as they marched. So there was no collapse of 
society. But when you have a situation where millions of people within 
that Nation were massacred, and then millions of people in the 
surrounding Nation were massacred, and you had a barbarous war 
perpetrated on a scale never before seen, there was a collapse in the 
German society. It was a collapse. It was a failed society, and that 
failed society dragged a whole lot of other innocent human beings and 
the surrounding societies down with them.
  So societies can collapse that are very sophisticated. Societies can 
collapse that are very educated. Societies can collapse. Society of 
Tojo in Japan, they went like savages through China massacring people; 
you know, very educated, sophisticated people, very high degree of 
science, very high degree of education. But it collapsed.
  Albania is not a jungle. Albania has been suffering for years, almost 
50 years, as a result of the overwhelming domination of the Soviet 
Union; isolated, forced to operate under the Communist hammer, but they 
have educated people, they have scientists, they have a structure. But 
Albania in the transition into capitalism has suffered a gross 
collapse. You know what has happened there is outrageous.

                              {time}  2100

  The Albanians happily embrace capitalism. The government did not 
protect the citizens who invested their money in certain investment 
schemes. There was deregulation on a scale of the kind that is 
requested here often on this floor: Just get out of it; the government 
should get out of it. So the people of Albania had no government 
protection.
  They had hopes. They believed in capitalism coming to their rescue 
after so many years of communism. They put their savings into various 
investment schemes, and most of them have lost them completely. The 
investment schemes have blown up. Those that had some basis have just 
collapsed because they were unreal; others were complete swindles, and 
the people who took the money have disappeared.
  So what is Albania? Albania is now a collapsed, failed society, a 
collapsed society, a society that has subways, buses, government 
structure, parliament, that a few months ago looked like a civilized 
place but now there is complete anarchy.
  Let me just read to my colleagues from one of the items related to 
Albania. This is March 18, that is today's Washington Post:

       In Albania, the army and the police have ceased to exist 
     and the navy and air force have relocated themselves to Italy 
     or Greece. One leaking ship or decrepit airplane has gone at 
     a time. The prisons have been emptied. That fellow on the 
     corner with the newly liberated AK-47 may be your 
     neighborhood grocer or he may be a murderer who recently 
     liberated himself. U.S. ships are plucking desperate refugees 
     from choppy, open seas.
       The anarchy that has descended on the impoverished Balkan 
     nation just north of Greece and across the Adriatic from 
     Italy should make us appreciate the relatively smooth 
     transitions that most of the other nations of the formerly 
     communist world have managed to accomplish. Albania was one 
     of the most isolated of all of those nations, sealed off for 
     decades by a lunatic regime that expected attack from 
     anywhere and everywhere. It remains the most impoverished of 
     European nations.
       People have risen up now with an anger that is more primal 
     than political, a rebellion against not only 45 years of 
     Communist rule, but also the past 6 years of disappointment 
     and disillusion. It was only 6 years ago, after all, that 
     300,000 jubilant Albanians jammed their capital's central 
     square to see visiting Secretary of State James Baker and the 
     arrival of democracy, free markets and the West. What they 
     have gotten instead is corruption and Mafia politics. Because 
     the government refused to regulate the financial sector, 
     massive numbers of people have been defrauded and total 
     anarchy has broken out in Albania.

  A civilized society in the civilized sense that we usually mean, a 
society with educated people, a society with structure, et cetera, has 
completely collapsed. Let it be a warning that we are not above the 
same thing happening.
  What would have happened if the savings and loan swindle had taken 
place? Billions of dollars, people losing their money and when they 
went to the bank, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation of America 
was not standing behind every deposit up to $100,000. People would have 
gone crazy, mad in the street. They would have good reason to. But the 
government was regulated. The government was not only regulated, it was 
standing behind these banks, ensuring that people who had deposits of 
$100,000 or less would not lose their money.
  The government had resources. Massive amounts of dollars were poured 
into the savings and loan swindle, so we did not have any collapse of 
that sector of our society. In fact, there were very liberal policies 
put forward to save the banks because certain people felt it would lead 
to a collapse of the economy or a great deal of strain and dislocation 
in the economy, and that was the reason they gave for being so generous 
of the people who had stolen so much money.
  Mr. Speaker, if my colleagues want to know about the continuation of 
the savings and loan scandal, recently one of the most celebrated 
crooks, the most celebrated, most heinous criminals in the savings and 
loan swindle was released from jail. Charles Keating was told that due 
to technicalities he does not have to stay in jail any more, although 
his savings and loan association was guilty of swindling the American 
people out of more than $2 billion. Two billion dollars. Now, that is 
almost an aircraft carrier; that is a submarine; $2 billion, $2 billion 
by one savings and loan association.
  Mr. Charles Keating was responsible for that, and he went to jail 
originally in California because after he had gotten through swindling 
people via that route, he went a little further and went out, had his 
workers go out in the lobby and sell securities that did not have the 
FDIC standing behind them, had no government insurance behind them, and 
lots of elderly people lost their savings and they did not have any 
insurance by the FDIC to back up the bank failure. And on and on it 
goes.
  There have been Members of Congress involved with savings and loan 
associations that have gotten away. The Vice President, he was Vice 
President at the time, Vice President Bush's son was involved with 
Silverado Bank in Colorado. Silverado in Colorado also was above the $1 
billion mark, close to $2 billion.
  Silverado was guilty of doing something that was celebrated. They 
actually loaned a borrower $26 million, and the borrower had come to 
them asking for $13 million. They told the borrower, ``We will give you 
twice as much as you are asking for, if you will put the extra back in 
the bank because the auditors are coming and we need to show we have 
some more money in the bank.'' So they actually loaned the guy $26 
million, he only needed $13 million, and he redeposited the extra $13 
million back.
  This was revealed as one of many crimes committed by the Silverado 
Bank, of which a relative of Vice President Bush at that time, and 
President Bush later, was sitting on the board. It reached to high 
circles.

[[Page H1095]]

  The savings and loan swindle; most writers found it defied 
description. They gave up. Most reporters were told by their editors to 
just cool it, it is too complicated. But, I think that it is an example 
of how the media, instead of going to bat to analyze events and to 
inform the public, obeys some forces that are unseen that control their 
paychecks.
  So the savings and loan swindle is not clearly understood. It would 
have been like Albania if it had not been for tight government 
regulation, government insurance. You would have a little bit of 
Albania, but we are too big to have a total collapse.
  But societies do collapse totally when you have a corruption among 
the leadership where nobody confronts the evils. If we are going to 
stand still and let the forces of this Government beat upon organized 
labor, beat upon the working people, and we are going to let a lopsided 
situation develop where workers have no leverage against employers, we 
are going to destroy capitalism as we know it. We are going to tilt the 
scales so much until corporations will be determining what our 
Government does.
  Everybody knows, we learn early in high school or college that we 
have a doctrine of laissez-faire. Laissez-faire means the Government 
should leave the private sector alone; that is the usual 
interpretation. What we need is a two-way laissez-faire. Laissez-faire, 
leave it alone. The Government should leave the private sector alone as 
much as possible, and the private sector should leave the Government 
alone as much as possible.
  These furors about contributions to campaigns that are raging now, 
the furors relate to the fact that people are waking up and for a brief 
moment we have a snapshot of how much money has gone into politics. 
This last political race shook everybody up. The Lincoln bedroom was up 
for sale, coffee in the White House. Nobody is talking about what the 
Republicans were doing out of sight, without a White House, but they 
raised 7 times and spent 7 times as much as the Democrats, so sooner or 
later the spotlight will fall there and we will find some very unusual 
things happening with the way both parties raise money.
  But money is in the driver's seat; money, money, money is in command. 
Money commands a lot that happens in the world outside of the United 
States as well as inside the United States. Never before has there been 
a Nation as rich as this. We are the wealthiest Nation that has ever 
existed in the history of the world. Rome was just a little colony 
compared to the imperial power of the United States of America, 
compared to our wealth that has been accumulated, that exists.
  God must be proud of what the American democracy has done. The 
combination of American democracy and American capitalism has produced 
something we have never seen before, and the question is, what shall we 
do next? What good is it all? How does it redound to the good of man, 
that here we have a vast population of more than 250 million people who 
have, for the most part, enough to eat, enough clothes to wear, and 
they enjoy life a great deal.
  When the human creatures created by God reach that point, how do they 
behave? Will they have compassion, and will they use their leisure time 
and their comfort to look out at the rest of the world, first in their 
own world, to make sure that there is compassion and sharing? Or do 
they look out at the rest of the world and say that we cannot sit next 
to Haiti and see the misery in Haiti without taking some ways to see 
how we can help?
  We cannot sit here because Haiti and the problems of Haiti are 
partially problems created by the people who live in this part of the 
hemisphere. We installed a regime in Haiti that endured for many 
decades. Our Army went in and trained the Haitian army that kept in 
power a mulatto class that oppressed the great majority of the 
Haitians, and all movement in that economy was governed by what that 
grand mulatto group that we protected with our Army and our diplomatic 
maneuvers and our threats.
  So what happens in Haiti now cannot be separated from what happened 
in the past and what we have made to happen. We recently redeemed 
ourselves by going in to liberate Haiti from a criminal regime, and 
that is to our credit.
  There is a collapse of government in the Congo, what used to be 
called the Congo, its called Zaire now. Zaire has a rebel army that is 
marching through, taking control from the government because the 
government is so corrupt the people hate the government. What is the 
government that the people hate so much? It is a government installed 
by the United States of America, the government of Mobutu. Mobutu was 
installed by the CIA because at that time they feared that the Congo, 
as it was called at that time, would fall into the hands of the 
Communists, under their influence.
  There was a poet from the post office who had made a political party 
and a political movement. His name was Patrice Lumumba. His son was 
recently in my office. He met with the congressional Black Caucus 
delegation, his son. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with the 
assistance of the CIA, and the CIA took control of that country. 
Billions of dollars from taxpayers in the United States flowed into the 
Congo, which later became Zaire, to support Mobutu. I am sure Mobutu 
got a lot of the money from the American taxpayers that the CIA put in. 
I am sure that many CIA agents put a lot of money in their pockets. But 
the criminals were cutting it up.
  Under the false notion that Zaire was a strategic country and we must 
keep it out of the hands of the Communists, we poured billions and 
billions of dollars in. We made Mobutu the strong man that he is. He 
has billions of dollars in European banks now.
  But Mobutu is mortal, Mobutu is sick, Mobutu is about to die, and all 
of the people that he oppressed with our help for so many years are 
rising up to get revenge. And we say the Congo is falling apart and 
Zaire is falling apart. That is one more example of how African nations 
cannot govern themselves. Look at what happened in Rwanda, look at what 
is happening in Zaire. It is proof that Africans cannot govern 
themselves.
  I want to close on a brief review of a book called ``Out of America: 
A Black Man Confronts Africa,'' by Keith B. Richburg, and it is all 
about these failed societies, these failed nations in Africa where Mr. 
Richburg, who was a reporter, a correspondent for the Washington Post, 
and Mr. Richburg has gotten a lot of attention later because Mr. 
Richburg is black. ``Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,'' by 
Keith B. Richburg.
  Mr. Richburg is appalled. It is somewhat of a traumatic experience 
for him to have been a reporter in Africa for several years, because as 
a reporter he is dispatched and assigned to cover all of the 
developments that are violent and most gruesome, so if he lived in a 
state of trauma, we cannot be surprised or shocked. If he had to watch 
bodies flowing down the river in large numbers as a result of the 
massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda, I can understand the 
trauma of that and how that would impact on him; if he had to be in 
Liberia and watch the Liberian society fall apart after we had held, we 
had, America, had kept the regime in power in Liberia, the Tubman 
regime. Tubman was kept in power by the American Government, so much so 
that the people began to hate them and an army sergeant named Sergeant 
Dole took over Liberia.

                              {time}  2115

  And he did not know what he was doing. So following Sergeant Doe was 
a set of rebellions that destroyed the country completely. The country 
went down in chaos as a result of a Sergeant Doe taking over from a 
corrupt regime that had been kept in power by America.
  Mr. Keith Richburg has watched all this over a 3-year period in which 
of the most violent events developed. And he has concluded that the 
Africans, I will read from one of the reviews where they quote Mr. 
Richburg and in what is a shocking statement. And I understand his 
shock, but what he is saying is that Africa is the way it is because 
the people have not fully evolved as human beings. Africa is the way it 
is because they have not finished the process of evolution.
  I find that statement shocking, that a black man would hate himself 
so much and hate his people so much that he would subscribe to the 
theory that

[[Page H1096]]

we are inferior beings who have not yet fully evolved. That is a very 
shocking statement.
  Mr. Richburg is a journalist, and journalists are supposed to report 
what they see and to some degree interpret it. But in his book he 
becomes a philosopher, and journalists are not automatic philosophers. 
Most philosophers were not journalists. Plato was not a journalist, 
Socrates was not a journalist, Jesus was not a journalist. I mean 
journalists should stay in their place and understand that they are not 
philosophers and do not try to get too far in your conclusions.
  Mr. Richburg concludes that it is fortunate that Africa was raided by 
the slave traders. The slave traders brought millions of Africans to 
America. The millions of African Americans who suffered for 232 years 
under the bonds of slavery, another 100 years in the oppression of 
discrimination, second class citizenship, they are fortunate. We are 
fortunate that we were snatched from Africa where people are still 
evolving and brought into civilization. That is part of his conclusion.
  He saw terrible things but he came to the conclusion as a journalist 
and he did not have the equipment to deal with it. Because if he was a 
philosopher and a real thinker, he would not conclude that savagery and 
the failure of a society mean anything about the evolution of a people. 
If savagery and the killing of large numbers of people, if the bodies 
floating down the river as a result of the massacres in Rwanda are the 
result of people not having fully evolved, then what was the Holocaust 
all about? What was the systematic extermination of 6 million people by 
the Germans, the Nazis, the gestapo, what was that all about? Were they 
not fully evolved? When do you stop evolving? They had the world's best 
science. They invented rockets. We copied our rockets from German 
advanced science in rocketry and German scientists. The German 
composers and the German artists are the bedrock of certain parts of 
our civilization. Did the murder of 6 million Jews in gas chambers, did 
the burning of bodies in crematoria signify that they had not fully 
evolved?
  What happened in Cambodia in a short period of time, the Pol Pot 
regime in one of Asia's oldest societies, they had been around much 
longer than most Western societies. And yet a million people in a short 
period of time were murdered in the Pol Pot killing fields. Does that 
mean they have not fully evolved?
  What happened in Bosnia, in Croatia? All across the world there are 
examples of millions of people being slaughtered by various collapsed 
societies, failed nations. They have failed and been taken over by 
dictatorial oligopolists or dictatorial individuals, and their aims are 
not civilized aims and, therefore, terrible things happen.
  America, the taxpayers' dollars in this country have been used to 
support some of that. Certainly in the case of the Congress, we must 
bear responsibility for the collapse of society, the brutality, 
corruption that has existed for so many years in Zaire under Mobutu, 
our CIA had a direct link there. In Haiti, we had a direct link there.
  We have a direct responsibility for not taking steps in other places 
to ameliorate or to end savagery, and we have future responsibilities. 
Why? Because God has blessed us, we are among all nations the most 
blessed. We are blessed with high technology, blessed with peace. We 
did not endure World War I on our soil. We did not have to put up with 
World War II on our soil. Our cities were not destroyed. Our 
universities were not destroyed. Yes, we gave a lot in those wars. Some 
of the greatest examples of bravery that ever have been exhibited by 
mankind were exhibited by American troops going into World War II. The 
beaches of Normandy, fantastic in terms of the sacrifices that were 
made there and the bravery that was exhibited.
  America has risen to the occasion to protect the world from a total 
takeover by savage, well educated, scientific beasts. But we have to do 
more. And we have to be careful.
  The warning here is that we have to be careful that we do not 
collapse from within. America from within can collapse if we lose our 
sense of proportion, if we destroy certain segments of society which 
help balance us off and keep us going. If we destroy our workers and 
their working class and the workers energy and the workers contribution 
to the economy, we begin the downhill slope where only one class of 
people is in charge. We, too, might face some kind of shallow analysis 
in the future where conclusions are made that we have just not evolved 
fully as human beings. That is rubbish.
  We are what our society is willing to do in terms of taking what is 
learned from the past, taking the leisure time that we have, the 
information on the Web sites, the information on the Internet, all 
kinds of knowledge and information that are flowing to us. Let us use 
it in ways which expand the compassionate parameters of mankind, in 
ways that say, we want in our own society, in our own Nation to share 
as much of the wealth as possible and see to it that nobody goes 
hungry, that no segment of the population is oppressed unduly by 
another segment, that no segment of the population is pushed to the 
point where it is not a part of the economy, that no segment of the 
population has to bow down politically and not exercise its full rights 
in this democracy. That is step one.
  Step two is to go beyond our own society and say that our richness, 
our fortunate wealth, the fact that we are fortunately located in this 
hemisphere, with the right kinds of climates and a number of things 
that have happened, we had the land to expand on, we had the European 
background to help in many cases. We relied on, we had the Native 
Americans to help us through some critical periods and we never thanked 
them for that or did not treat them very well. Nevertheless, all these 
fortunate occurrences came together to create a great America.
  The great America should go forward never to take the position where 
they never will allow a Zaire to happen where our forces were used to 
oppose people. We will never allow another Haiti to happen. And we 
will see to it that our institutions are constantly working to improve 
the world without condemning the world. And never should we come to the 
conclusion Mr. Richburg has come to, that certain people are in certain 
kinds of positions and they are having trouble because they have not 
fully evolved.

  All human beings are guilty of unspeakable atrocities, and we must 
work to make certain that that does not prevail. Our civilization, our 
structures, our patterns of government, our mores, everything must 
operate to make sure that the best comes out in mankind and not the 
worst.

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