[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 59 (Thursday, May 8, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H2434-H2440]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               THE BUDGET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the session has now truly begun. We are now 
contemplating the parameters of the budget. There has been a budget 
agreement reached between the President and the Members of the House 
and the Senate, and now we can go forward in a session that has sort of 
been marking time up to now.
  Nothing is more important than the discussion of the budget. Our 
Nation's values are all locked up into the way it proceeds with its 
budget. What we really care about we can discover by watching the 
figures in the budget and understanding that what is really important 
to this Nation will be reflected in how we score our budget.
  The parameters are there. Discussion will go forward. Maybe we will 
restore the Democratic deliberation process back to the Congress. We 
were beginning to lose it because discussions were taking place out of 
sight, off center. Most of the Members were being excluded. There is a 
budget committee, which we assume would be the primary focus of 
deliberations on the budget, but that did not happen.
  I am told by my colleagues that serve on the Budget Committee that 
very little discussion has taken place on the Budget Committee about 
the budget. It was off limits for most of the Members. We have 
experienced a lot of that this year. It seems that after 1994 and the 
104th Congress, when we had the Contract with America, everything was 
laid out as to where the majority Republicans wanted to take us.
  It was refreshing to see clearly what the goals and objectives were. 
The American people behaved accordingly. Knowing fully well what the 
party and power wanted to do, they reacted, they responded. There had 
to be a lot of adjustments and corrections before the election, and 
things proceeded as they proceeded.
  But at least there was a dynamic interaction, a public discussion. We 
knew that there was a proposal to eradicate the Department of 
Education, and the republic reacted to that. We knew that there was a 
proposal to cut Head Start drastically, to cut title 1 programs. We 
knew those things. The reactions of the public helped to guide what was 
happening, including guiding the party and powers, to the point where 
they reversed themselves and changed their minds on some of those 
critical areas.
  This time it is a stealth process, it is a stealth operation, it is 
an underground operation, it is a guerilla operation. Very little is 
discussed and laid on the table. We find out about it later. Not only 
in the discussions of the budget do you have a situation where you have 
a closed circle, a commanding control group somewhere, at the White 
House probably most of the time, deciding what the parameters of the 
budget would be, but the whole process is repeated throughout the 
entire Congress.
  In both parties it seems that there is a great love affair with 
oligarchists

[[Page H2435]]

and kleptocracists, whatever you want to call them, small groups that 
have the power to make decisions. They think they have the power to 
make the decisions, they make the decisions and then they hand them 
down to the body, both Republicans and Democrats.
  I understand there is more and more of that happening at the 
committee level, instead of the whole committee operating the way it 
did previously at the level of the subcommittee. A subcommittee is a 
small working group. We have committees, and then the committees are 
broken down into subcommittees. The whole idea is that you need to get 
down to a level where it is reasonable for people who are here for the 
process of deliberation to conduct themselves in a process of 
Democratic deliberation and come out of it with practical results.
  But this year you have subcommittees being upstaged by working 
groups, small groups selected by somebody, oligarchists and 
kleptocracists at the lowest level, and then they come back and 
announce to everybody else that we have made this decision, take it or 
leave it. We do not want it disturbed. Here is the manna from heaven; 
eat.
  It runs contrary to the Democratic process. I hope that now we have 
had enough of that in the budget discussions and that we are now going 
to have a chance really to talk about what it is that the White House 
has agreed with the Congress to do and how can we really discard some 
of it and adopt some of it, expand on some of it and go forward to do 
the business that we were elected to do. We are all Members of 
Congress. We all come from a district about the same size. We are all 
elected and we are all basically equal. We ought to have the right, we 
ought to have the opportunity to at least deliberate.
  The majority party has the votes and eventually they will decide what 
happens. But let us have the dialogue. Let us have the chance to have 
the discussion. Let us have the American people hear the discussion. 
Your common sense out there is probably far more valuable than anything 
that can be done or said in these closed circles.
  The average American is superior to the oligarchy that people seem to 
set up. We always criticize these command and control processes. The 
Soviet Union collapsed because it had a command and control secret, 
closed-circle operation. So good sense, common sense could never get 
into that circle. They kept doing things and making decisions that were 
out of touch with reality. The reality of the economy, the reality of 
the Soviet people where they were, all of that was lost because the 
oligarchy, the kleptocracy, the closed central committee circle made 
the decisions and everybody else was shut out.
  So let us go forward in the budget making process and let everybody 
have an opportunity to see how the process goes and where we are in 
this Nation. The President has said that we are the indispensable 
nation. I really agree.
  In this critical 1997, just a few years away from the year 2000, the 
next century, I think we are the indispensable nation. I really think 
we ought to think about that responsibility of being the indispensable 
nation as we shape a budget for this year and for the next year. We are 
the indispensable nation.
  The whole world does not depend on us, but we have a pivotal role. 
Some things will never happen for the good of the world unless we make 
them happen. Some things will never happen for the good of our own 
Nation unless we make them happen, this pivotal generation we are in. 
Some things will not happen for our own constituency that ought to 
happen that are positive unless we make them happen.
  We have a burden on us and we have an opportunity that we never have 
had before. We do not have the burden of the cold war on our backs 
anymore. We do not have to carry the burden of an arms race to the 
extent we had to carry it before. We do not have to carry the burden of 
secrecy and suspicion among the largest nations of the world. Most of 
the industrialized nations of the world are not at war, cold war, hot 
war with each other. So we can jettison that and go forward.

                              {time}  1945

  We ought to realize that probably few Congresses in the history of 
the United States have had such an abundance of resources and an 
atmosphere in which to utilize those resources which might do so much 
for the world and maybe for the universe. We are every day discovering 
more and more about the universe, and maybe life is out there and maybe 
we are going to be colonizing moons and planets, and so forth. But here 
is an opportunity, a golden opportunity.
  I had a delegation of the women's group that wanted to get more 
resources to fight breast cancer. Breast cancer, they say, is 
escalating, that there is a great increase, geometrical increase in the 
number of cases of breast cancer. Breast cancer not only is increasing 
in America and in the developed nations, which always thought that they 
had the highest incidence, but now they see an increase in breast 
cancer in places that did not have so much breast cancer before; and 
other kinds of cancer of course also seem to be on the rise.
  I do not see why the meager resources that are available for this 
kind of research, research of other presently incurable diseases, or 
diseases with a high rate of fatalities, I do not see why we should 
hesitate, I do not see why we do not have crash programs, I do not see 
why we do not dedicate ourselves to the proposition that everything 
that can be done to eliminate, eradicate, or reduce the damage done by 
these diseases can be done.
  Mr. Speaker, we are the indispensable Nation, we are the pivotal 
generation within an indispensable nation with the resources available. 
There has never been a nation as rich as the United States of America, 
never the kind of resources available. I do not see why we cannot look 
at the President's education proposals and say that those are part of 
our responsibility as an indispensable nation. Let us look at the fact 
that we are in a position to educate more people than any other nation 
in the world, educate people in the sciences that relate to health 
care, that relate to finding cures for diseases like breast cancer or 
diseases like AIDS, et cetera.
  We do not have to carry the burden on our backs totally for the whole 
world. We should not be so arrogant as to believe we do, but we are 
pivotal. We can do more than anybody else, and to do less is to fail 
the world at a point in history where it needs us very badly.
  If we had an education agenda which said we are going to go forward 
and educate as many young people as possible, give them everything that 
they need in order to fully realize their capabilities and their 
abilities all the way, so that they can become the scientists, the 
technicians, the writers, whatever we need in order to help guide the 
world, they can become that.
  In the area of science, in the area of biology, in the area of 
medicine, we know that if we have more people working, looking for the 
solution, working toward a solution, looking for a solution, if we have 
more people doing research, if we have all of the combinations and 
permutations being examined and reviewed, tested, then we are more 
likely to get a cure, we are more likely to get close to the kind of 
protocols which reduce the damage, et cetera. We know that there is a 
cause and effect, not a cause and effect, but if we take certain steps 
with respect to putting researchers out there with the proper 
equipment, with the proper guidance, we get a result. So we should have 
no less than we can.
  Our schools and our universities should be turning out more students 
at every level, and when we get to the university level and the 
graduate level and the level where people do research, we should not 
have pools of people who are scarce, but the maximum number should be 
involved. That is what the Nation should dedicate itself toward.
  Mr. Speaker, we should have a budget which is not apologizing for the 
amount of money in it for education. True, we do not know always the 
best ways to spend money, but I think there is a clear need in certain 
areas that we ought to address. We ought to address the areas that are 
obvious first, and we ought to address the areas that are experimental, 
the areas that have to be tested, and address those with greater gusto. 
I mean we ought to have more experiments, not less. We ought to have 
more attempts to examine what does work and to take what works and 
expand it, to examine the things that are basic to any workability of 
an education process and expand those.

[[Page H2436]]

  Mr. Speaker, I want to talk maybe about education and some new 
developments in education that we ought to be very happy about. I want 
to talk about the education budget and some disappointments in the 
budget agreement related to education, but I think we need to see it in 
the context of the bigger budget. The bigger budget is that this great 
rich Nation of ours is going to be spending billions of dollars, and is 
it moving to focus the expenditure of those dollars in the wisest 
direction. How much discussion is there, there is almost none, by the 
way, of the defense budget and the waste in that budget. How long are 
we going to continue to waste billions of dollars on defense while we 
force other programs into a discussion of scarcity? We make it appear 
that there is an environment of scarcity, of poverty for domestic 
programs, for programs that really are designed to help people. At the 
same time, we are flagrant in our waste. Nobody wants to even challenge 
the obvious waste that takes place in the defense budget. The CIA 
budget, we are wasting billions of dollars, and in this discussion we 
are not even talking about it, we are talking about wasting Medicaid or 
wasting Medicare, and there is always some waste in any program where 
human beings are involved.
  I will not stand here and say that there is no waste. The problem is, 
the greatest waste is where the greatest amount of money is, and that 
is in the defense budget. And yet, there is no discussion of why we are 
going to continue to waste money on defense.
  We could get the money we need for breast cancer research. We could 
get the money we need for HIV research; there are a lot of different 
causes which are human causes, causes which uplift humanity and will 
carry us to a new dimension as we go into the 21st century, and they 
are going to bleed. They are going to compete with each other while we 
continue to waste money on the expenditure of aircraft that we do not 
really need, on the expenditure of forces that we do not need overseas, 
or if we need them overseas, then certainly the countries where they 
are stationed are the ones who benefit most by their presence, the 
countries that ought to be the ones who pay for the overseas bases.
  We have said this many times, of course, on this floor, but I am 
going to continue to say it because I think it will get through to the 
common sense of the American people. There is something that takes 
place in the atmosphere of Washington that makes people timid about 
expressing the obvious truth. We do not have a command and control 
situation here. It is not as tight as the Soviet Union, but I can 
understand how the go-along-to-get-along theory that Sam Rayburn or 
some of the other Speakers have counseled young people who come in 
here, get along to go along or go along to get along theories infect 
people who come into this body. And there are certain things that 
become off limits, certain things that they will not challenge.

  The young child who saw the emperor was really naked is a good 
example for us to always keep in mind. Hans Christian Andersen's story 
of the Emperor's New Clothes, somebody told the emperor he had the best 
clothes possible and he was finely dressed and they had a cloth that 
was invisible. And the emperor fell for it, he walked out naked, and 
everybody was afraid to say what was obvious; everybody was afraid of 
the emperor, they were afraid of his guards, they were afraid of the 
whole system, they did not want to be ostracized, they did not want to 
be called troublemakers. And of course it took a little kid to point, 
with obvious amazement, that the emperor is naked, the emperor has no 
clothes on.
  The tax structure of the United States is an abominable structure. I 
have said it many times here and I must repeat it. It is not under 
discussion. Corporate welfare is rampant as it was before and it still 
is now. After years of discussion, nobody has the guts to stand up to 
corporate welfare.
  We heard from the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, the 
majority party's chairman, make some very bold and brave statements 
months ago about cutting corporate welfare. Well, where are the 
proposed cuts to corporate welfare in the proposed budget agreement? We 
do not see any cuts to corporate welfare. Where are the cuts? Where is 
the attempt to begin to equalize the tax burden between corporations 
and individuals? Corporations now pay a little more than 11 percent of 
the income tax burden where individuals are paying 44 percent, 
individuals and families, and we have talked about this many times 
before. It was not always that way. They once had a situation where 
corporations were paying more, and then there was a tremendous shift 
under Ronald Reagan where corporations went down as low as 6 percent of 
the overall tax burden and individuals shot up to 48 percent. They made 
an adjustment, and now it is individuals and families are paying a 
little more than 44 percent and corporations are paying between 11 and 
12 percent.
  That discussion is not allowed, it is off limits. We cannot obviously 
pursue that at all, and there is no discussion whatsoever of doing 
something about the tax burden, adjusting it, in this budget.
  There are some additional goodies for the people who benefit most 
from corporate wealth. The gap in income is continuing to grow, and 
whereas we were once a nation that had one of the smallest gaps between 
the richest people and the poorest people, we now have the largest gap 
between the rich and the poor. And the gap is growing all the time, but 
yet we have focused on capital gains tax cuts in this budget agreement. 
Capital gains tax cut cost us $112.4 billion over a 10-year period, 
according to some calculations that have been done by some Democratic 
colleagues of mine; $112.4 billion over a 10-year period will go to the 
people who are already the richest people in America. Why are we 
preoccupied with those people, while at the same time we are cutting 
the budget for Medicare and Medicaid, while at the same time we say we 
cannot increase the budget for research on incurable diseases.

                              {time}  2000

  In the case of the National Institutes of Health, those kind of 
constructive budgets for life, we cannot increase them but we can 
decrease the revenue in order to give a tax cut and more money to the 
richest people.
  The estate and gift tax credit will cost us about $40 billion over a 
10-year period. The people who will benefit by this particular new 
provision in the code, the Tax Code, if it is passed, are people who 
already are the richest people in America. About 3 percent of the 
people in America would benefit from this gift of $40 billion over a 
10-year period.
  Why are we doing this in this indispensable nation? Why is the 
pivotal generation, the people who have a chance to do so much for the 
world, piling dollars on top of dollars for people who already leave 
the most dollars? The common sense of the American voters is the only 
salvation we have, possible salvation. Now is the time for the common 
sense of the American voters to come to our aid; look at the budget 
very closely, follow these discussions very closely.
  It is confusing, I know, because we have not really made any 
decisions yet. The budget is behind schedule, and we do not even have 
an alternative proposed by the majority party.
  The President produced a budget in February. The alternative budget 
or the budget to counter that budget that the majority party usually 
produces was not produced this time. They decided not to have a budget. 
It is part of the stealth policy.
  Speaker Gingrich says politics is war without blood. In the theater 
of war, they decided to try a new tactic, the stealth policy. The 
gorilla warfare is not to put your cards on the table, so we did not 
have the majority Republicans producing a budget. They went to the 
White House instead and said, we will negotiate something and come out 
with an agreement first.
  That has kept it out of sight, off center stage, and now we have an 
agreement which a lot of people in America think is finalized. It is 
not. The agreement is not final. There are some things that this 
oligarchy of negotiators have decided which will not hold, necessarily. 
The Members of Congress certainly are not puppets. Members of Congress 
are certainly not paralyzed. It is possible to make this oligarchy back 
down, and to have some things done with this budget which have not been 
done. Nothing is impossible, and certainly a lot of things are 
possible.

[[Page H2437]]

  There are going to be a lot of changes. We would like to have those 
changes be made in favor of the people who have the greatest needs. We 
do not need anymore tax cuts for the richest people in America. We do 
need to address Medicare and Medicaid in a new way, and stop the 
assumption that that is the place where most of the money is, and 
therefore we can keep cutting Medicare and Medicaid.
  Members might have heard and read in the newspapers that this budget 
is good because it restored disability benefits to legal immigrants. 
Let us applaud that. Let us celebrate that. Members might have heard 
that Medicare recipients will pay a higher premium, also, $4 more each 
month; it does not sound like much, does it; or $4.50 per month. It 
does not sound like much, but why, in the richest Nation in the world, 
the richest Nation that ever existed, why are we cutting money on the 
one hand, cutting taxes for the richest people, and on the other hand, 
we are going to make Medicare recipients pay $4.50 more per month?
  The savings that Medicare will yield will come from cutting payments 
to providers, mainly hospitals and health care plans, as well as the 
savings that will be gained by the increase in monthly premiums. Why? 
Why are we being forced to move in a way which will penalize the 
elderly and the poorest people?
  Members might have read also that budget negotiators have agreed to 
expand health care for about 5 million poor children. That is, again, 
good news. But there are people who do not agree with that. That is 
what the negotiators have agreed to do, and it is still in jeopardy 
because there is a great deal of disagreement about how that should be 
done.
  Five million poor children is one-half the estimated number of 
children who need coverage. They say there are about 10 million 
children who need coverage. We think the estimate is much higher, but 
let us be grateful for a small step forward. Half of the children, 5 
million of the 10 million who need coverage, half will be covered with 
this $17 billion over 5 years.
  Will it be coverage by Medicaid, or will they give the money to the 
States, which is always a very dangerous proposition, and let the 
States decide? Because States are notorious for ignoring the people 
with the least amount of power in their States, within their borders. 
They are notorious for ignoring the poor, and the New Deal and all the 
programs that were generated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930's 
were designed to make up for what the States had refused to do to 
compensate.
  So when you are giving money to the States, always be aware of the 
fact that they are part of the problem, not part of the solution. If 
the money to cover children is handed to them totally, without any 
oversight, which is quite strict, I fear many children who need the 
coverage will not get coverage.
  Administration officials said this budget deal also will cover 
disabled legal immigrants who were in the country on August 22, when 
the bill was passed. That is another bright spot. We have proposals to 
deal with a problem that has overwhelmed some of the congressional 
offices. I have more people seeking help with immigration problems and 
problems relating to the immigration reform than any other problem in 
my office. There are just hundreds of people who fear that they are in 
dire straits, and are. The threat to their well-being is tremendous.
  There are nursing homes that will not admit elderly people who are 
not citizens, even before the September cutoff point goes into effect. 
They do not want to have people in the nursing home who are not 
eligible for Medicaid and then they have to kick them out, so they are 
just preempting the situation by refusing to admit them. Anybody who is 
a legal immigrant who needs nursing home care cannot get it, because of 
the fear that they will not be able to get reimbursed for their 
services, and already they have begun the tragic course of triage; 
throwing the elderly overboard.
  I just want to break in with a note of optimism, some good news. In 
the budget the agreement still calls for an increase in the funds for 
telecommunications and for revamping our schools, so the schools can 
make full use of the new educational technology efforts. Technology 
literacy will be promoted as never before, and schools will be all 
wired early in the next century. All that is very optimistic language, 
and I prefer to believe we can make that happen.
  In connection with that, there was a development which should help 
schools and students all over the country that took place yesterday. I 
want to pause from my review of some of the negative elements of this 
budget agreement to point out the fact that something amazing happened 
yesterday, and we should all take note of it. It helped the children in 
Brooklyn in the 11th Congressional District and everywhere else across 
America. That was an agreement reached by the FCC.

  The FCC voted to implement a mandate of Congress. When Congress 
passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act they mandated that the FCC 
should make provisions for the provision of discounted or free services 
to libraries and schools. The FCC acted on a subcommittee 
recommendation yesterday, and we are off and moving. It is a historic 
occasion.
  The Federal Communications Commission has adopted the joint board's 
recommendations for providing eligible schools and libraries discounts 
on the purchase of all commercially available telecommunications 
services, Internet access, and internal connections. Eligible schools 
and libraries will enjoy discount rates ranging from 20 to 90 percent, 
with the higher discounts being provided to the most disadvantaged 
schools and libraries and those in high-cost areas.
  Total expenditures for universal service support for schools and 
libraries is capped at $2.25 billion per year, with a rollover into the 
following years of funding authority, if necessary, for funds not 
dispersed in any one year. That means that $2.25 billion is available 
for schools and libraries, and those that are in the richest 
neighborhoods or the more affluent neighborhoods can get a discount of 
at least 20 percent off the telecommunications service. That includes 
telephone, by the way.
  Most schools in my district have only a few telephones, because 
telephones at present charge the business rate to schools. They cannot 
afford to have even enough telephones. There is already technology 
related to telephones which will allow a school to program their phones 
so every child who is absent and does not show up, the home of that 
child can be called off the program that is set up over the phone. But 
we do not have, in many cases, the adequate phones to do that. We do 
not have phones adequate enough for the teacher to make the trip to the 
phone and make the call, because there are not enough available. The 
teacher would have to stand in line, they would have to go downstairs, 
in many cases, and deal with lining up at the office, et cetera. Just 
more telephones would greatly improve the ability of our schools to 
function.
  But more than telephones are involved here. The internal connections, 
wiring of the schools inside, that can be part of the discounted cost. 
You can engage a contractor and the contractor can get paid from the 
funds from the telecommunications industry. In a poor school in an 
inner city the community, the neighborhood of Brownsville, parts of 
East Flatbush and parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant, they would be paying 
only 10 cents for every dollar's worth of services. A 90-percent 
discount would mean, and I hope I am not oversimplifying it, on your 
phone bill related to this process you would be paying only 10 cents 
for every dollar's worth of service. That is a great step forward.
  The high cost of wiring internally, the high cost of hooking up to 
the Internet and maintaining on-line services, all that will be 
discounted for the poorest schools down to the level of a 90-percent 
discount. This is not just for this year or next year, it is for 
eternity. Theoretically it goes on forever.
  That is a revolution. That is a monumental achievement, to have that 
kind of opportunity provided for the schools of America, and the 
libraries. Schools and libraries are all eligible; not just public 
school, private schools. Everything that falls in the category of 
providing an education to elementary and secondary education students 
is eligible.
  This is a great revolution. It is a revolutionary action, in my 
opinion. We

[[Page H2438]]

did not hear any fireworks yesterday, there was no great celebration, 
only a few people announced it on the television news. McNeil/Lehrer 
did have a special discussion of it. But it is revolutionary.
  It is like the Morrill Act which established the land grant colleges 
in every State. The Morrill Act is unknown to most Americans. The 
Morrill Act is unknown. Morrill himself was a congressman who was 
unknown, but the Morrill Act established land grant colleges in every 
State in the United States. Every State has a land grant college now, 
and some of the great universities of America are those land grant 
colleges. It had an explosion of higher education over a short period 
of time, relatively.
  Morrill proposed it during the Civil War, when America was at its 
lowest ebb in terms of its attention being focused on education. It was 
proposed during the Civil War, and later on enacted after the Civil War 
and fully given appropriations, and it took off.
  Practical education was the emphasis. They copied the model of Thomas 
Jefferson at the University of Virginia, where practical education was 
the emphasis. Agricultural and mechanical colleges they were called at 
first, but they understood that they had to teach literature, English, 
et cetera.
  So everything the higher education institutions were responsible for, 
the land grant colleges became responsible for them, too. They just had 
an emphasis which was different. They emphasized practical education. 
The great experiments in agriculture that we have had in this country 
which put our agricultural industry way ahead of all other economies 
with respect to the ability to grow food and produce food at a cheaper 
cost resulted as a result of the Morrill Act.
  The Morrill Act created the colleges which set up the experimental 
stations. They created the colleges which established the county agents 
who went out to the farmers and got the farmers to make use of the 
theoretical knowledge that the universities had produced, a great 
revolution that most of us do not know about, but it was a government 
action. It was a government action with ramifications and results that 
continue to flow to the benefit of the American people.
  What was done yesterday by the FCC in my opinion will have the same 
kind of impact and effect. There was another government action when 
they decided the transcontinental railroad. Most people do not know, it 
was not private industry that built the railroads across America.
  Private industry has always run the railroads and private industry 
has always been up front, but the government made the contracts and the 
government offered the prizes to those companies that could build the 
railroads and link the east coast with the west coast.

                              {time}  2015

  They came through mountains and swamps, and they did all kinds of 
things, but they were paid by the Congress. And Congress had a bonus. 
If you were going through difficult territory, mountainous terrain, 
Congress gave more money to the companies than they gave to those who 
were going across the plains.
  The great transcontinental railroad was a government project, and it 
unified the country in a way which, if we had not had the 
transcontinental railroad, the country would never have been unified. 
It made America America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
  That was a government action. The Morrill Act, the transcontinental 
railroad and then the GI bill following World War 2.
  The GI bill was another one of those governmental actions with 
revolutionary implications and impact on the American economy in terms 
of large numbers of men returning to the peacetime economy who got a 
chance to get an education and who boosted America's industrial might, 
technological know-how, carried us forward in ways that we never would 
have gone forward if those men had not had the opportunity to be 
educated in all walks of life.
  I meet lots of millionaires who got their start with the GI Bill of 
Rights. So governmental action.
  Yesterday the FCC took another governmental action which really has 
to be carried out mostly by private enterprise, but it started with the 
Congress. It was the Congress that mandated that you have to do this. 
The mandate to the FCC came from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, 
and the FCC has followed through on that.
  I am very optimistic about the impact of that, because the President 
of the United States knows the value of telecommunications on 
education. They have taken steps already. We have funds flowing already 
to the State education departments and down to the local education 
agencies to get ready for this technological revolution and take 
advantage of it.
  Any teacher will tell you that their presentation in the classroom 
can be greatly enhanced if they can use some of the material that comes 
via the Internet or if they can use videotape of a key moment or if 
they can use a CD ROM at a key moment. It can be greatly enhanced.
  We talk a lot about doing things in the area of education assistance, 
which gets down to the classroom. Here is one that really can get down 
to the classroom.
  One of the unfortunate things in New York City is that we did a 
survey several years ago and found that two-thirds of the teachers of 
math and science in the junior high schools had never majored in math 
and science. Things have not gotten any better since then, because New 
York City has had a great program of encouraging the most experienced 
teachers to retire. In order to save money, the teachers at the upper 
end of the pay scale had been encouraged to get out of the system. They 
have been given buyouts and all kinds of inducements.
  We have drained some of our best teachers away in the last 3 or 4 
years. So the teaching of math and science certainly has not improved 
as a result of these buyouts and the people leaving the system.
  It is as bad as it was 3 or 4 years ago. One way to compensate for 
that is to have teachers who are not as experienced in teaching math 
and science, even some who did not major in math and science, have the 
benefit of the back up of some of the courses that they can get on the 
Internet or the courses that they can get via educational television or 
via videos. There are ways to supplement what happens in the classroom, 
as we try to get over this period of the scarcity of teachers in the 
classroom, particularly in inner city communities where there are other 
hardships and problems. Teachers continue to be in great shortage.
  The number of teachers who are substitute teachers in my district is 
far greater than the number of substitute teachers in most other school 
districts across the country, because they cannot find the teachers who 
are really qualified and meet all the requirements and can pass the 
State tests, et cetera. So what you end up with is people in the 
classrooms, but they are really not the best quality teachers.
  We keep imposing new curriculum requirements on the students. We 
insist that they must take tests, but we have not solved the problem of 
getting decent teachers.
  Finally the biggest problem we have not solved is the problem of 
physical space and equipment and supplies. It is the most basic 
problem. One would think that in the richest Nation that ever existed 
on the face of the earth every student, every citizen could be 
guaranteed that you can go to school in a safe environment, free of 
health hazards. That is a basic. That is a basic that we thought the 
President would help us with in terms of the construction initiatives, 
school construction initiative that was in the budget before the 
negotiators finished.
  Somehow mysteriously it got kicked out. The President's education 
initiatives are 80 percent intact after the budget negotiations. We 
have a lot of things to be happy and optimistic about, but the school 
construction initiative probably is the one that would have helped the 
poorest children in America the most.
  School construction initiative would have helped to guarantee that 
the revolution that took place yesterday, revolutionary decision with 
respect to telecommunications, becomes a reality in the inner city 
schools. There are inner city schools, there are schools in my district 
that will not be able to use the 90 percent discount for 
telecommunications, because the wiring in the

[[Page H2439]]

school is such that they cannot be wired for modern telecommunications.
  There are some others where they can be wired. However, they have an 
asbestos problem. If you bore holes, you will find asbestos and the law 
says that you have to have a certified asbestos removal contractor 
there. And that is very costly, because we do not have any place in the 
city to store asbestos. They have to store it in expensive places. It 
becomes a big problem.
  We had NetDay in New York State in September 1996. And in New York 
City, which is half the population of New York State, very little 
happened with NetDay. NetDay is a day where you have volunteers come 
out, and they wire the schools for $500. They get a package which 
includes all the equipment they need, all the wiring. And they have 
enough equipment and wiring to wire the library of the school plus five 
classrooms. So a school is considered wired for NetDay if it wires its 
library plus five classrooms.
  In New York City we could not get even 5 of the 1,000 schools in New 
York wired in the way in which NetDay really dictates. They claim they 
wired some schools because they put a special telephone line in. We 
later found that they were calling that wiring of schools, and it was 
far removed from the kind of thing that NetDay should produce in terms 
of the wiring for telecommunications. An enhanced set of telephone 
lines was not enough. We had far too few schools in a city with 1,000 
schools that were wiring for NetDay.
  As a result of being disappointed with the results of NetDay, during 
National Education Funding Day, which was October 23 of last year, the 
Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission, which is my advisory 
committee for education, pledged to wire 10 schools in 10 weeks to 
overcome the problems experienced on NetDay. We picked our 10 schools 
and said we would wire them in 10 weeks.

  We had the assistance of a group called the Hussain Institute of 
Technology, a volunteer group that has set up a computer practicing 
center with about 20 computers, free instruction. And they have done 
wonders with helping people learn how to use computers on the Internet 
and those people who already knew how to use them have improved their 
skills so they could get promotions on their jobs and are going to 
better jobs somewhere else.
  The combination of the Hussain Institute of Technology, Martin Luther 
King Commission seeking to wire 10 schools in 10 weeks has run into all 
kinds of obstacles, mostly related to asbestos. And we have not wired a 
single school since October 23. It is now May 8. We have not completed 
a single school because the wiring cannot go forward until we solve the 
asbestos problem.
  We do not have the money to pay an asbestos contractor to come in. We 
wrote letters to the board of education, have been on television 
appealing for help. All kinds of things have happened. All we have 
gotten is a response from one asbestos contractor who wanted the 
publicity and said he would provide free service, but when we went to 
get the free service, he changed his mind.
  That kind of cynical playing with children resulted from publicizing 
our plight. One thousand schools are in New York City and we cannot 
wire 10. In my district there are 70 schools. Those schools, I only 
wanted to wire 10, and I cannot get even one wired as of today. We hope 
we will have a breakthrough soon. The breakthrough will come in the 
form of giving up on going into the walls, a technique where you wire 
by stringing the wire outside. It is ugly. It alters the way the 
building looks. It is another way you communicate to children that your 
school is not like the others, but it would get the job done.
  The proposal is to wire some schools by stringing the wire outside 
the walls in full view and, of course, the danger is they will be 
tampering with the wires, but we will go forward and try to get it 
done. But across the country in all of the inner city communities, you 
have the same kind of problems: old schools, asbestos problems.
  In New York City you have many schools that still have coal burning 
boilers, boilers that are burning coal. We recently had an announcement 
by the mayor, this is an election year in New York City, and the mayor, 
following the precedent set by the White House, is sort of doing what 
you call the continuing campaign, the continuing campaign as focused on 
education and schools. Because when the polls were taken, the one area 
that the mayor of New York City was clearly graded with an F was in the 
area of education.
  The mayor of the city had cut the school budget dramatically by 
almost a billion and a half dollars. The mayor had waged war on the 
previous school chancellor. We do not have a superintendent. We are so 
large we have a chancellor. The previous chancellor had a plan for 
renovating, building and repairing schools over a 7-year period. He 
produced a plan that would cost $7 billion, I think. And the mayor 
literally ran him out of town. He kept after him until finally the 
previous chancellor resigned, went out of town. Gave up.
  The building plan for construction, for renovation, for repairs that 
the previous superintendent, Mr. Ray Cortines, had prepared, is sitting 
there on the shelf and still needed because when schools opened last 
September, September 1996, there were 91,000 children in New York who 
did not have a place to sit, 91,000 who could not be safely seated.
  They say they have solved most of the problems now and when you go to 
investigate what is happening with the 91,000 that could not be seated, 
most schools will say, we have taken care of it.
  What they have done is they have put children in closets, hallways. 
They are even a few cases where bathrooms have been converted to 
classrooms. They say they have solved the problem and school is not 
overcrowded. But when you go and you ask the question, how many lunch 
periods do you have, the lunch period is an indicator that it is 
overcrowded, they cannot feed children within a reasonable period of 
time. You know they have too many. Some schools, most schools have 
three lunch periods, three lunch periods. Children start eating at 
10:30.
  One school I found had five lunch periods. Children started eating 
lunch at 9:45. They say they are not overcrowded, but if they are 
forced to start children eating lunch at 9:45 in order to accommodate 
them, they are overcrowded. We have gotten so used to abominable 
conditions, conditions which are atrocities against children, until we 
take them for granted. It is quite all right to feed children lunch at 
9:45.
  We are moving to try to get some kind of regulation installed or 
health department edict, something to stop feeding children at 9:45 or 
even at 10:30. It is bad enough, the period between 11:30 and 1:30, to 
have children, that is more reasonable, but to go to 9:45 for children 
who are in junior high school and say you have to eat lunch is child 
abuse. And it seems to me that something about the physiology of the 
child is greatly impaired if they are being forced to cram in lunch, 
and they just had breakfast. But the atrocities are great.

                              {time}  2030

  Overcrowding and the lack of attention to facilities, the lack of 
money for construction over the years. They have been scrimping and 
refusing to put the money forward for construction. We have had to 
close down some buildings because they literally were really falling 
apart.
  Recently the mayor launched an offensive to prove that he really 
cares about schools, although he ran the chancellor out of town. He did 
not come forward with another plan. He is now saying he has a long-term 
plan for the renovation and repair of schools.
  Looking at an article that appeared in one of my favorite community 
papers, the Flatbush Courier Life, it has a very lengthy article 
describing what happened to the schools, what may happen to the schools 
in Brooklyn as a result of the mayor's election year initiative.
  They had $275 million. The mayor's long-term plan opens up with $275 
million allocated to schools for the entire city. When we talk to 
people across the country about New York City schools, they always get 
bewildered because the figures are so great. We are talking about a 
thousand schools. We are talking about a million students. We are 
talking about 60,000 teachers. So I know one can get dizzy, and that 
$275

[[Page H2440]]

million seems like a lot of money to help renovate and repair schools.
  Brooklyn received 44 percent of the allocation, according to the 
Flatbush Courier Life; $121 million, again, looks like big money but it 
will only pay for 78 projects in 48 schools. Forty-eight elementary, 
intermediate and high schools in Brooklyn will get some of the money to 
pay for 78 projects within their schools.
  Now, remember, I have 70 elementary, intermediate and high schools in 
my district. I have 70. The Borough of Brooklyn has 2.5 million people. 
So we can see we would have many, many more. Only 48 of our schools 
will be able to get the assistance for 78 projects.
  In Brooklyn we still have more than 100 schools that have coal 
burning boilers. That should be a first priority, because coal burning 
boilers produce pollutants. We all know about that. We have the highest 
asthma rate of any large city in the country in New York City, and we 
wonder why we have a large asthma rate among children if they are 
sitting in schools which are burning coal.
  New York City is broken down into 32 different school districts. 
There is a chancellor and then 32 superintendents and one of the 
superintendents, John Comer, community superintendent of District 22, 
said, ``We were delighted to receive the preliminary plan which will 
only enhance our buildings for the children and professional staff. It 
was long overdue. Hopefully, we can get money every year to restore the 
buildings in this great city to what they once were. Money like this 
hasn't come in a long, long time.''
  It is just a tiny amount for Brooklyn, $12.1 million. Everyone is 
singing the praises, but with this piecemeal approach we will fall 
further and further behind because these are buildings that are 100 
years old. In many cases they need new roofs, new boilers, and on and 
on it goes.
  Mitch Wesson, another superintendent for district 21, a school in my 
Congressional District, ``stressed the importance of boiler 
replacement. He said about a third of the district's schools were still 
heated by coal.'' In his part of the district there is a concentration 
of these coal burning furnaces or boilers. ``We are looking forward to 
having our coal-fired buildings converted,'' he said. ``Obviously, 
we're pleased the work is being done. Our superintendent and school 
board pushed the issue. We hope these repairs are accelerated not just 
for three of our buildings, but for all of our buildings.''
  Desperately everybody is hanging on to hope that the mayor's small 
beginning will become a reality. It will not be a reality unless we get 
some help from the Federal Government. It will not be a reality if the 
President continues to go along with the negotiation that has been 
reached.
  The school construction initiative is no longer on the table, and we 
are told it cannot be restored. The Congressional Black Caucus pledged 
that this will be our No. 1 priority. We will fight to get it back into 
the budget. The school construction initiative must go forward. And if 
people in certain parts of the country feel it is not needed, let us 
have an emergency school construction initiative in the inner city 
schools where these atrocities against children are being committed.
  Phyllis Gonon, superintendent of District 18, District 18 has a large 
number of schools in my Congressional District, he said ``Most of our 
schools need capital improvements. Most of our schools are falling 
apart. This building as well.'' The one she is in. ``The roof has 
leaked for 18 years.'' I repeat, the roof has leaked for 18 years.
  District 18 offices are located in the P.S. 279 Annex building, 
prospective repairs to which she is referring, that is the building 
where the roof has been leaking for 18 years. She added, ``We haven't 
been satisfied with the work that has been done on District 18's 
buildings in the past. Even where they're doing expansions, she 
continued, at P.S. 233, for instance, which isn't listed, the work has 
to be done over and over again.''
  The buildings are so old. It would be better in some cases to tear 
them down and start all over again because the repairs do not hold.
  Eric Ward, community superintendent of District 17, District 17 has 
about 26,000 students, it is the largest one of the local districts in 
my Congressional District, it is wholly within my Congressional 
District, District 17's superintendent says, ``We are grateful for any 
capital improvement that occurs in the District. But for every one that 
has been approved, I have about five others that need to be done. New 
York City, Mr. Ward adds, has many historic buildings that are 
beautiful. The city needs to have in place a system for updating, 
renovating and repairing them. Until the city devises a systematic 
plan, they will be behind the eight ball.''
  Now, Chancellor Cortinez had a systematic plan prepared. Mayor 
Giuliani has only discovered education is important in this election 
year. We are going to elect a new mayor in the fall of 1997 and 
suddenly education is on the agenda of the mayor. But even with city 
hall making it a priority, the amount of money we can see in comparison 
with the magnitude of the problem is far too small.
  David Gulob, who is a spokesman for the board of education, when he 
was questioned as to how did they select 48 schools out of a thousand--
48 are in Brooklyn, I am sorry, but for the whole city the number will 
not be more than a 100. A hundred schools in the city at this rate 
would receive some kind of emergency help.
  How did they select them? It appears that there were two pieces to 
this selection process. Schools that had needs and had submitted those 
needs were considered because they were on record. And then the board 
of education sent the list over to city hall and to the city council 
and they made political decisions about which of the victims would be 
salvaged first.

  We are into a situation where it is so horrendous. The school 
construction problem, the problem of providing a safe and decent place 
for children to go to school is such that it has become a political 
football.
  The scarcity of the resources are such that they have to run it past 
the political process. There is no system where they have an objective 
list which says that the emergencies are greater here and they have 
some kind of prioritization of the emergency so that we get the worst 
situations first. No, it is run by the city council and the mayor, so 
that political decisions can be made in this great economy of scarcity.
  I want to close on a note of optimism. We welcome the revolutionary 
decision of the FCC to provide telecommunication services to all the 
schools and libraries in the country at a great discount rate, the 
discount rate being weighted so that the poorest areas will get the 
biggest discount. That can do a great deal for the children with the 
greatest needs.
  If they do not have, however, the complementary program of the school 
construction initiatives proposed by the President, many of the schools 
who have the greatest needs will not have the buildings in position to 
take advantage of this great revolutionary achievement of the 
government and the private sector.
  We hope that all Members will hear the common sense of the people out 
there and understand children need safe places to sit. The school 
construction initiative of the President must be supported by both 
parties as we go forward in a bipartisan quest to improve education in 
America.

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