[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 10 (Tuesday, February 8, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H241-H247]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 CREATION OF A BICENTENNIAL COMMISSION TO CELEBRATE ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S 
                                 BIRTH

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 1999, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, today's agenda for the Congress was quite a 
small one. I think it is one item that we ought to pay close attention 
to, that is the creation of a bicentennial commission for Abraham 
Lincoln to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birth.
  Madam Speaker, I think it is very important that we pass the bill 
today. We are going to have a chance to take a look at the age of 
Lincoln, the man Lincoln and all the things surrounding Abraham 
Lincoln.
  Our country owes a great debt to the wisdom and the courage of 
Abraham Lincoln. There are people who try ranking the greatest 
Presidents, always starting with Lincoln, then they debate who the 
second, third and fourth might be. But Lincoln and Washington are 
clearly ranked first. I think that the Lincoln discussion would lead us 
into some very profound considerations of issues that need to be 
discussed that normally are not discussed.
  The President had a commission on race that was created for just one 
year, a very limited budget; and they unearthed a few important items 
and just got started and then they had to stop. I think a discussion of 
Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, the considerations of what went into 
holding the Union together and why it is considered such a moral high 
point for America needs to be thoroughly discussed.
  There was a time when people stood for great principles, and I often 
talk to young people of African American descent who are always looking 
for the negative side of things who want to declare that Abraham 
Lincoln did not really care about black people, Abraham Lincoln was not 
our friend, and you would have a chance to show them how ridiculous 
that was. The same people say that white folks never are concerned with 
the welfare of black folks or white people in power are never concerned 
with other people at all, that principles of Judeo-Christian heritage 
and all that is a big laugh.
  We will have a chance to examine that. We will see how white people 
on one side had great principles and cared a great deal about fighting 
slavery, while others, of course, took advantage of it and enjoyed it; 
but there were some who had great principles and who were not 
themselves affected.
  White people, who were not slaves, were the people who determined 
that America should not have slavery. It is important to understand 
that in the battle of Gettysburg, the crucial battle in the Civil War, 
almost no blacks participated.
  They were not allowed in the army of either the Union or the 
Confederacy at that time so it was not their fault; but it was a battle 
that really decided the war and it was white people fighting white 
people on the basis of principle, principle on the basis of 
understanding, some understanding, that the Nation would never be able 
to be a great Nation if half are slave and half are free.
  At one point there were States that declared themselves slave States 
and other States that were free States and there were bloody clashes 
among the border States, the free States versus the slave States and 
all that history has gotten lost and nobody needs to hear and 
understand that history more than young African Americans. All 
Americans need to hear it and understand it, but young African 
Americans need to understand there are principles that have been fought 
for and large numbers of people died for them who did not have a vested 
interest. They could have all made a deal and if they did not stand for 
principle, if the Judeo-Christian ethic was not in place in the hearts 
of so many, the status quo would have prevailed.
  So I think we cast a very important vote today and I would just like 
to note that in passing.
  The real big issue of the day, however, is the budget. The budget was 
released by the President yesterday and there was a big hearing in the 
Committee on the Budget today; and I think that that is an item that 
not only is the biggest item for this Congress but also it may be the 
biggest item for the next 10 years, for this decade. The way we handle 
this budget this year may set the tone for the whole century.
  Consider the year 2000. We are about to discuss a budget of the last 
and only superpower in the world; and unquestionably, the United States 
of America is a superpower, an economic superpower, to begin with. We 
cannot debate it. We are an economic superpower as a result of an 
appreciation of science and technology and genius and the art of 
government. We have governed in a way to maximize the advantages of 
science and technology. Our systems have allowed us to emerge at this 
particular time as the richest nation ever in the history of the world, 
by any relative standards, any way we want to try to create a scenario.
  Rome, at the height of its greatness, was just a village compared to 
the wealth and might of the United States of America at this point in 
history. So our budget is a budget for a people, a nation, that is at 
the very center of the globe in terms of power and decision-making. Our 
budget is a budget for people who probably are at the center of the 
universe.
  I also happened to read today that some of the leading scientists 
have reached agreement and have concluded that there is no other life 
anywhere in the universe. There cannot be any life similar to the life 
on Earth. They may continue to debate that and theories of physics and 
theories of the universe

[[Page H242]]

have changed over time but right now all the evidence points to the 
fact that in this whole universe, which is so much larger than we ever 
imagined, with all kinds of galaxies and black holes and billions of 
stars, overwhelming in this great thing that exists there are no other 
living creatures, certainly nothing approaching mankind.
  So we are not just at the heart of the globe but this Nation, the 
United States of America, at this point in history, is at the heart of 
a whole universe. The way we make decisions, and what we do can greatly 
determine the course of where mankind in the universe goes. That is an 
awesome, awesome thought, and I think that we trivialize where we are. 
We play it down.
  In the State of the Union address, the President certainly was broad 
and encompassing in terms of the agenda for America; and also it 
addressed some issues in terms of the entire globe but it was really 
not looking at the fact that we are at the center of the universe and 
this is the beginning of the 21st Century and that not only is this 
Nation the last superpower, well governed with a tremendous economy but 
also all of that put together has created an enormous amount of wealth.
  The amount of wealth that the government is able to make decisions 
about is just a tiny part of the total wealth of America.

                              {time}  1915

  But that tiny portion of the wealth that becomes revenue and comes 
under the decision-making powers of the Congress and the White House, 
that amount itself is still an enormous amount of money. We are talking 
about a budget past a trillion dollars; and more important than the 
budget that has passed a trillion dollars, we are talking about a 
budget surplus over the next 10 years which will be, by very 
conservative estimates, $1.9 trillion.
  Over the next 10 years, the surplus, after we factor out Social 
Security surplus, the Social Security surplus will be in a locked box. 
Put that aside. In addition to the Social Security surplus, we have a 
$1.9 trillion anticipated surplus of revenue above expenditure.
  That is an awesome position to be in, to be able to look, as a 
Nation, at a situation where money is not the problem. The problem is 
our capacity to make decisions about investments, our capacity to act 
in the most humane and compassionate way, at the same time we act in a 
most practical way.
  The Romans, at one point in history, they did not earn it through 
science and technology and good government; they earned it through 
their savage conquests. Their savage conquests produced a lot of 
wealth. They had so much booty and treasure they brought in from the 
rest of the world until the Romans decided at one point that we are all 
so rich until every man in Rome shall not pay taxes, we shall give 
every man in Rome a certain amount of money every year. The government 
will give them a big amount of money because the treasury is so full.
  That turned out to be an unwise way to invest their wealth because 
all of the surrounding countryside moved into Rome; all of the people 
in the surrounding countryside heard about the goodies in Rome. They 
began to move in, and of course the Romans were overwhelmed by having 
to pay out more and more money, and they had to bring that to a stop.
  The great Roman empire would do it for a long, long time. They 
thought it would go on forever. Maybe there is a God, and he does look 
down on Earth. There are periods where certain people, he smiles upon 
and chooses them to try to lead us and create the kind of Earth, the 
kind of world below heaven that he would like to have. The Romans might 
have been selected for that purpose. They failed.
  Before the Romans, there were the Greeks. Maybe God was smiling on 
them and hoping that they would do it. Maybe this God does not like to 
get involved. The joy of God is to watch us and see what mankind 
individually does or mankind collectively does. Maybe he smiled on 
Greece, the great age of Greece being celebrated now on public 
television.
  The Greeks were great people in every way: in science, in literature, 
in architecture, militarily. They defeated opponents who had many more 
soldiers and far greater resources militarily. The great Greeks, the 
people we know so very well: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, all three came 
right together. Aeschelus, Sophocles, Euripides, the great dramatist, 
and on and on it goes in medicine, architecture. There is a Greek 
related to the beginnings of western civilization, the great Greeks, 
and do it for a long time.
  Then they got fascinated with military conquests under Alexander who 
had studied under Aristotle and understood some very important things 
that Aristotle taught him. Alexander started his conquests. The great 
secret of Alexander's ability to keep conquering was that the people 
that he conquered he looked upon as human beings, he absorbed them into 
the Greek culture. He tried to. He did not have to occupy the places 
that he conquered because the people became allies and friends.
  But as his ego mounted, as his conquests increased and his ego rose, 
he forgot the secret of his success and became a cruel and inhuman 
tyrant, and eventually he spread out the Greek resources and Greek 
empire in such a way that, upon his death, things began to fall apart. 
So Greece failed.
  Rome failed to live up to the possibilities of mankind, to spread 
their great civilization throughout the world. Greece failed.
  Before that was Egypt. Egypt, we are still now digging up new tombs. 
Egypt, Nubia, as you move toward black Africa, they are discovering 
more and more pyramids, more and more tombs. They are discovering that 
Egypt's Egyptians were as black as they were brown.
  As they dig up these tombs, they find new and more splendiferous 
treasures, gold and jewels and all kinds of things that evidently Egypt 
was, at that time, a place of unparalleled wealth. They had an 
organized society. Something was wrong, though, because the society 
chose to focus on death more than life. One can imagine how many 
millions died creating those pyramids and tombs and creating the 
treasures that went into those tombs.
  They had an obsession with death. They had an  elitist culture. They 
had people who, despite their great wealth, had no vision. Egypt failed 
too.

  So here we are, the United States of America, unprecedented in terms 
of wealth and power. The great advantage we have perhaps over Egypt and 
Rome and Greece is that we have a modern democracy. Greece had a 
democracy. They did not have television. They did not have the 
Internet. One could not click on and give one's opinions. There is a 
whole lot that we have now that they did not have.
  They did not have an ability to make wealth multiply as rapidly as 
Bill Gates is able to multiply his wealth or Ted Turner is able to 
multiply his wealth. They did not have this great contradiction where 
there were people in one part of the world who still do not have 
running water and who live on a dollar a day, and there are other 
people in the Fortune 500 who have millions and millions of dollars, 
more money than they will ever be able to spend.
  The United Nations has put out a report and calculated that one could 
provide enough decent water, one could provide vaccinations and medical 
care for children, one could provide an elementary education, one could 
provide a way for youngsters to get a start in life with educational 
opportunity, one could provide a package for the poor and downtrodden 
of the world for $40 billion a year. All of the developing countries, 
all of the dirt-poor countries like Haiti, like the countries in Africa 
whose life is bleeding away from disease. All of those things could be 
brought under control with $40 billion of expenditure per year.
  We have just proposed a budget of more than a trillion dollars just 
for the United States of America. We anticipate a surplus of $1.9 
trillion over a 10-year period.
  Bill Gates, according to estimates, is worth at least $40 billion. 
That is several months ago. They talked about $40 billion, one man 
whose net worth is $40 billion, and because it increases geometrically, 
it is far beyond that probably now. That estimate was made a few months 
ago.
  So with all of that, we approach the budget for the year 2001 that is 
going to be debated and discussed here in the Congress and here in 
Washington. We are the dawn of a digital age. America

[[Page H243]]

is leading the world very rapidly at an ever-escalating speed into what 
I call a cyber-civilization.
  What drives the wealth of Bill Gates and new millionaires, the new 
billionaires is a cyber-civilization. It is the age of the ``e,'' the 
age of the dot.
  If one watched the Super Bowl, one knows what I mean. Most of us 
watched the Super Bowl. It is not something which is elitist, esoteric. 
The ``dot'' is here. The ``dot'' is here because the great United 
States of America invested in the kind of science that produced the 
Internet.
  It was the people of the United States through their military that 
created the Internet, just as the people of the United States through 
the military created radio, mass broadcasting, and television. If one 
looks at the history of all these great developments, they belong to 
the people. They would not exist if it had not been for a government 
that chose to make investments. Yes, they chose for military reasons. 
The Navy wanted to develop radio. For military reasons, we developed 
the Internet. The defense system needed to meet certain needs.
  Whatever the reason, American taxpayers' dollars invested well, 
created the possibilities for the great cyber-civilization which we are 
contemplating now.
  Now, what does all this have to do with the figures and the numbers, 
the priorities and the proposals released by President Clinton today as 
we start the budgeting process? The President released his budget. The 
President is a Democrat, so the Republicans in Congress in the majority 
received it with a statement that it is dead on arrival. That is the 
way the budget was treated last year, the year before. When we had the 
Republican Presidents, the Democrats in the Congress used to say the 
same thing.

  We need to get away from that cliche, ``dead on arrival.'' 
Nevertheless, that is the way we start, dead on arrival. That means we 
are going to have a great debate.
  I am trying to take a few minutes to appeal to my colleagues to get 
beyond the trivial, to get beyond the immediate and the myopic 
approach. We all are held very closely to reality.
  We all know as Congresspersons that, when we go back to our 
districts, people expect us to have our feet on the ground. They do not 
want to know about the possibilities of a cyber-civilization. They do 
not want to know about the fact that we are at a point where the Romans 
first once stood and the Greeks once stood and the Egyptians. We are 
now the pivotal Nation, what President Clinton called in his 
inauguration address a few years ago, we are the indispensable Nation.
  Once Rome was the indispensable nation. Once Greece was the 
indispensable nation. Once Egypt was the indispensable nation. Now the 
United States is the indispensable nation to determine the future of 
the world. Is that too ambitious a vision to project? I do not think 
so.
  There was a time just a few years ago when people were predicting 
that the little island of Japan, because it was moving so rapidly in 
technology and overtaking the other industrial nations, that we would 
all be trailing in the wake of Japanese economic power.
  There was a time when we looked at Europe and the wonderful and very 
much appreciated unifying factor there, the uniting of Europe, where, 
instead of wasting their resources and their genius on war, now they 
are uniting in economics and politics that they would surely be leading 
the world, and we would be following in their shadow.
  But history has not developed that way. The fact that we are at the 
point that we are now is more than just luck. Some great decisions have 
been made, some immediate decisions in 1993 made by the Democrats on 
the floor of this House and in the Senate, and some long-term decisions 
made in terms of the investment in items which not only include the 
Internet, radio, television, but also the science that produced wonder 
drugs. We keep people alive longer, they are able to produce more 
scientific miracles. Wisdom, the longer one lives the greater the 
wisdom in general, and one is able to take advantage of that.
  Just an item like that on the side, wonder drugs and the things that 
have helped people function throughout their lives for longer periods, 
all of it comes together, all of it is American, all of is part of what 
we have created by maximizing freedom and allowing all flowers to 
bloom, allowing the innovations and the ideas to come up from the 
bottom. All of this has led us to the point where we now have the 
prospects of a $1.9 trillion surplus over a 10-year period.

                              {time}  1930

  And we have a President who has proposed a budget of more than $1 
trillion.
  The Congressional Black Caucus has asked me to serve on the committee 
to develop an alternative budget, and I welcome the opportunity. In 
previous years I have helped to develop an alternative budget and found 
it to be an exhilarating experience, to take the President's figures, 
to take the parameters that are set by the White House and set by the 
majority party and to try to operate within those parameters.
  Last year the Republicans were so parliamentary cruel that they 
banned other budgets from being offered on the floor. I hope that they 
will become more civilized and that we will go back to the tradition of 
the House of having alternative budgets offered by various groups. Let 
the Blue Dogs offer their budget, let the conservative Republicans 
offer their budget, let the moderate Republicans offer their budget, 
let the Congressional Black Caucus offer its budget, and the Hispanic 
caucus, and let us see what the alternatives are.
  We would like to combine with people who are not just African 
American but people who care about others; what I call the caring 
majority. There is in America a caring majority. The caring majority is 
made up partially of people who are suffering from oppressive policies, 
who are suffering from the blindness of leadership, who are suffering 
from the blunders of leadership, from people who are not necessarily 
cruel but who do not understand what it means to force a welfare mother 
to go to work instead of taking care of a young child.
  We have a whole bureaucracy related out there to putting that welfare 
mother to work and complicating the life of both the mother and the 
child because they like the idea of people going to work. In the 
process of creating the order to go to work, they have to create a 
decent day care center. And a day care center will not exist unless we 
have funding for that. But we do not provide decent funding for the day 
care centers, so we have inadequate salaries and people in day care 
centers who are going to be a negative influence on the children 
because they do not know what they are doing and they are bitter about 
their low wages.
  We create bureaucracies and take away a child from the one most 
beneficial thing that they have: a parent. That is the kind of blunder 
that a lot of decent people fall into. That is the kind of reasoning 
that seems to be straight and logical but which is very, very crooked 
and harmful.
  So we have the opportunity to seriously debate these parts of the 
budget and reach some conclusions that we should spend money in a way 
which allows what Thomas Jefferson stated in the Declaration of 
Independence to become a reality; that people really have not just the 
right to pursue happiness but the opportunity to pursue happiness. The 
right to the pursuit of happiness is important. Do not interfere with 
that, but let us also in the great America of the year 2000 create 
opportunities to pursue happiness.
  We have had great debates over the past few years about race-based 
legislation; race-based programs. Some people have sweated, turned all 
kinds of colors at the thought of doing anything that is race based. I 
have said that if we are talking about race-based programs in the 
abstract, yes. But if we are talking about programs to compensate for 
the fact that for 232 years one group of people were held in a cruel 
bondage, where no wealth could be created, where laws were made which 
made it illegal to teach them to read, where all kinds of cruel things 
were done and now the descendants of those folks are behind the 
mainstream, it is not really race based, it is justice based to talk 
about scholarships just for African Americans, to talk about policies 
which force the end of gerrymandering which creates districts that keep 
African Americans out of power so they cannot help themselves, and on 
and on it goes. So the so-

[[Page H244]]

called race-based phenomenon is offered as a first step towards some 
kind of justice.
  Reparations is something we do not want to talk about in connection 
with American slavery. The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission will 
probably rule out any discussion of reparations for the descendants of 
African American slaves, rule it out of order. Oh, yes, we can discuss 
reparations for the Japanese who were interned during World War II in 
America, and we did discuss that and we did pass some legislation. I 
certainly, along with other members of the black caucus, welcomed that 
legislation and supported that legislation. We supported recognition 
that a government has responsibility, a present government has a 
responsibility for what past governments have done.
  The Japanese day in and day out are fighting that notion. They refuse 
to apologize for what they did to the Chinese. They refuse to apologize 
for what they did to the Koreans. But let us applaud the fact that the 
Swiss have finally owned up to the fact that they swindled desperate 
people out of billions of dollars. The Swiss have finally said that, 
yes, we did take the money from the Jews fleeing the Germans, we did 
put their money away and refuse to allow anybody to claim it later, 
refused to come forward, so we will pay. The Germans are now creating a 
$5 billion fund, reparations for all those people they forced into 
slave labor in the industries. And maybe they have some kind of 
compensation for all those who died that they can pinpoint.

  I do not want to get into details. I do not know the details. I just 
know that the concept of reparations, that a present government has a 
responsibility for what past governments did; that the people of a 
present Nation have a responsibility and should bear some 
responsibility for what the people did in the past. That has been 
established everywhere.
  What does this have to do with the budget the President sent to 
Congress today? Throughout this budget there are opportunities to do 
things which would greatly facilitate the correction of some of the 
injustices that were done to the forefathers of African Americans. 
There are great opportunities in this budget to go forward and create 
programs which not only help the descendants of slaves but also help 
all poor people.
  Yes, we have had this great debate. We have lost it. Those of us who 
wanted reparations, those of us who said we needed to have affirmative 
action, we basically lost ground. We have lost ground in the Supreme 
Court. The Voting Rights Act is being diluted. We have lost ground in 
the universities. They have ruled out giving scholarships on the basis 
of race. We have lost ground. Let us switch the concepts. If we have 
lost ground on the basis of reparations and the need to correct past 
injustices, let us talk about opportunity. Let us go for an opportunity 
budget.
  In the President's budget we should create maximum opportunities not 
only for the descendants of slaves but for all people who are 
disadvantaged; for immigrants who came here from dirt poor countries 
who have problems assimilating, for other people who in some way have 
been disadvantaged, for the Native Americans who were driven off their 
land and treated cruelly. They fell for the trap of segregation and 
separated themselves out and have not been able to get a foothold in 
the power structure and, therefore, are suffering more than any other 
group probably of disadvantaged people in America.
  Let us have an opportunity program which looks upon every child that 
is born. Let us not focus so much on what happens in the womb, let us 
focus on what happens after the child gets here. Let us say we will 
guaranty an opportunity that every child born in America will have an 
opportunity to get an education which maximizes their God-given 
talents; that no child shall be hungry from the time he is born until 
the time he gets to be 18 years of age or 21 years of age, finishing 
college; that every child should have an opportunity to go to a school 
which is a school that physically is better than his home. It does not 
threaten his health because at the school there is a coal burning 
furnace spewing fumes into the air which may ruin his lungs and create 
a situation where asthmatic conditions develop in that child.
  Let us not send a kid to school which is so crowded that it forces 
him to eat lunch at 10 o'clock in the morning, which ruins his 
digestive system and his whole attitude toward eating because he just 
had breakfast. Because of the bureaucracy of the school and the fact 
they have so many kids to feed, in a cafeteria that was built for one-
third of the number that they have to feed, they have to have three 
lunch periods and they have to start early. The children who eat lunch 
early at 10 o'clock are forced to eat lunch before their breakfast is 
digested. The children who eat lunch late are hungry, unusually hungry, 
and their systems are damaged. Let us not have an America that allows 
that.

  Let us have an America that with a $1.9 trillion projection over a 
10-year period decides to invest heavily in opportunity in various 
ways. Opportunity may involve health care or opportunity may involve 
housing. There are very few housing programs any more that are being 
driven by Federal initiative. We are barely hanging on to the programs 
that were created by the New Deal and by the Great Society. So we need 
to create decent housing for every child born; an opportunity not to 
have to live in a cold house that makes it difficult to sleep at night 
for a child or creates the possibility of many more illnesses so they 
will miss many more days of school and also develop many kinds of 
childhood illnesses which create difficulties later as an adult. On and 
on it goes. An opportunity to be free of that.
  Why not look at the budget in the year 2000 as being an opportunity 
to get rid of all those impediments to children; an opportunity budget 
as we go into the great cyber civilization.
  The cyber civilization needs brainpower. Brainpower drives America 
right now. Those nerds, those kids that everybody made jokes about in 
high school and in college, they now are in command. They are in 
command. They are the ones who drive the computers and the Internet and 
the e-commerce. It is not a passing phenomenon. We are going to need 
more and more of them. The projection is that right now we have 300,000 
vacancies that are going unfilled in information technology? These are 
cyber technicians, people who can create the Internet; programmers, 
people who can merge a sense of the culture with what is possible in 
the digital world and come out with a product that is very useful and 
also very profitable. All of these developments require brainpower. We 
know that.
  If brainpower drives the future, then let us invest in activities 
which create more brainpower. So the opportunity approach is not only 
the ethical approach, not only the moral approach, the opportunity 
approach is the most practical approach. If we want to keep America 
great, if we want to keep this economy going, if we want our military 
to remain the greatest military, the most effective military in the 
world, we have to have recruits that go into that military who are 
exposed to the digital revolution, who have come in understanding a 
great deal and can be trained to use our high-tech weapons.
  There is no sector in American public life that is not affected by 
the digital revolution.
  Madam Speaker, I began by saying that two great things happened 
today. One was that we voted to create a bicentennial commission in 
honor of Abraham Lincoln, and that commission and all the activity 
surrounding that is very beneficial to the American Nation as we 
examine where we are at the beginning of the 21st century.

                              {time}  1945

  I also said today we launched the most important budget in the 
history of the United States of America. I also said I think it is most 
unfortunate that we are casually launching this budget and trivializing 
the significance of this particular moment in history, that we are 
downplaying the fact that we have a $1.9 trillion budget surplus 
progression over a 10-year period.
  We are trivializing the fact that this budget will definitely not 
have a deficit if we are going to have a budget that is certainly 
balanced, and we can do that without having to cut large numbers of 
programs.
  The challenge before us is, when we have this kind of opportunity, 
when this kind of wealth exists unparalleled

[[Page H245]]

in the history of the world, when we stand at the pinnacle of the 
rudder system that guides the world, and maybe we are the gyroscope 
that guides the entire universe at this point, that great 
responsibility will be taken seriously enough to utilize this budget 
for the sake of the entire world, starting with our own people who need 
health care, who need a greater investment in education and 
opportunity.
  Why be too cautious? Why be cavalier? Why be uncaring? If we are 
cautious, cavalier, and uncaring at this moment in history, we may lose 
our opportunity, the way the Romans lost theirs and the way the Greeks 
lost theirs and the Egyptians and maybe the way the British Empire lost 
its opportunity to provide leadership that would create a heaven on 
Earth, a place where all human beings have an opportunity and a right 
to pursue happiness. It is possible.
  The United Nations has said, as I repeat, that, with $40 billion 
expenditure per year, you could end most of the greatest hardships of 
the world, you could vaccinate children all over the world, you could 
provide a primary school of education, you could provide decent water 
for everybody in the world. It may be that they are off by a few 
billion dollars, but the fact that they have come up with a 
quantification of what the world needs is a great beginning.
  I salute Ted Turner, the great American billionaire, when he decided 
that he would devote a billion dollars to helping people throughout the 
world. That is the kind of action that individual Americans with wealth 
can take, and we are probably going to see more of that. Let us applaud 
that.
  I salute Bill Gates and his magnificent set of foundation projects, 
one of which is a billion dollar grant to the United Negro College 
Fund. The United Negro College Fund has been given a billion dollars to 
provide scholarships for students over a 10-year period. For college 
students, they are going to pay the entire college expense for 4 years. 
These students who are fortunate enough to be chosen will have their 
college expenses paid for 4 years. That is Bill Gates, the billionaire. 
There are other billionaires and other millionaires who have various 
kinds of projects of their own.
  That is American. This is very American. Never in the history of the 
world have we had this kind of foundation approach to the utilization 
of wealth by individuals. I do not think the Greeks had any foundations 
or the Egyptians or the Romans. There is no evidence that they had 
centers of philanthropic operation run by ordinary citizens.
  The governments did have certain programs, but probably the Greeks 
failed because they did not educate enough Greeks. It was an elitist 
process. The academy that was run by Aristotle probably only took the 
elite. Probably the Egyptians failed because the priest and the whole 
religious society of an elitist ran the culture and eventually ran the 
whole nation.
  On and on it goes. Let us not make that mistake. We have a great 
democracy now. Let us invest in education so that the maximum number of 
people will be able to be fully developed and make their contribution.
  The greatest natural resource in the universe is the human mind. That 
is not just a flowery phrase. It is reality. With the human mind, you 
open up vast caverns of possibilities and scientific miracles that have 
produced the technology and the medicine and the kinds of things that 
are happening in today's world. It all came out of human minds.
  If you put to work twice as many human minds in 10 years as you have 
working now in the area of science and math and agriculture, producing 
music, drama, the kinds of things that create a culture, we take 
advantage of the opportunities that are created by technology and 
science. Because the human being is molded a certain way.
  One of the problems with the Romans is that even while they were 
building vast architectural empires, they invented concrete, they were 
the geniuses in military strategies, at the same time the Romans had 
the coliseums. If you have ever been to Rome and been to the Coliseum, 
a fascinating thing to behold is that underneath the main arena are all 
these pits where the animals were kept, big animals, like lions and 
tigers. They were kept there because they are what they threw the 
Christians to. And Christians were not the only ones sent to the lions.
  The Romans sat in these huge coliseums while watching animals eat 
people and watching gladiators kill each other. They were a culture out 
of sync with compassion and humanity. Even though they had the greatest 
military inventions and strategies and created Roman law and logic, the 
breadth of the Roman empire was so impressive they liked to watch 
people get eaten by animals.
  That lack of development, that cruelty streak, whatever you want to 
call it, probably played a great role in the fall of the Roman Empire, 
the lack of compassion, the inability to make use of all their great 
wealth for everybody.
  So we would like not to be an American people who watch the Super 
Bowl in millions. We would like not to be an American people who find 
that phoney wrestling on television is the most popular cable 
television programs, phony wrestling, watching people do crazy things 
to each other, knowing very well it is all staged.
  Our culture, our minds are being shaped by that.  Where might we be 
in 10 or 20 years if more of that keeps going on? Our science, our 
genius, our government all may not be able to save us if our culture is 
watching phony people throw each other around in the ring. That is our 
entertainment. Our minds may get affected and shrink as a result. I am 
laughing, but I really do not think it is funny.

  If we enjoy that kind of cruelty, we may institutionalize cruelty. 
And we have to some degree institutionalized cruelty. We have vast 
expenditures by the Federal Government and by State and local 
governments in a prison system which now is the largest in the world. 
No industrialized nation has more people in prison than the United 
States of America.
  Is that where we want our wealth to go, to build more prisons? We 
build a prison and keep a person in prison for no less than about 
$20,000 a year. The price to keep a man in prison costs a minimum of 
$20,000 per year.
  In the New York City school system, people complain about the fact 
that we spend $8,000 a year per child for an education. But yet, we are 
willing to send that same child to prison and spend $20,000 a year. 
That is the kind of thinking that probably led to the downfall of the 
Roman Empire.
  I am talking about the President's budget today. You might wonder why 
I am not reciting figures. You are going to hear a lot of figures. You 
are going to hear a lot of numbers.
  Let us take time out to salute President Clinton for the fact that he 
has placed a great deal of emphasis in his budget on education, not 
enough, in my opinion. But where else in Washington, where else in the 
world will you find more emphasis being placed on education? Where else 
in the context of the American government systems, the States, the 
cities.
  There are cities like New York City that have surpluses and had a 
surplus a year ago of $2 billion. The amount of revenue collected was 
$2 billion greater than expenditures. And yet New York City would not 
spend a single penny to remove the coal burning furnaces in its 
schools.
  There are more than 200 schools in New York City that have coal 
burning furnaces. New York City spent several million dollars on an 
asthma project to educate school kids and their parents about asthma to 
try to do something about an asthma epidemic. Asthma is growing as a 
problem in New York City. And in the course of that asthma project, 
which got high visibility for city hall and the mayor, they did not 
mention a single time that the city, the Board of Education, was 
responsible for 200 coal burning furnaces spewing pollutants into the 
air very close to where young children were being educated.
  If a child is sent to school from a house that burns oil or gas and 
the school is burning coal, that means that at school he is placed in 
jeopardy in a way that he is not placed in jeopardy at home. Going to 
school becomes harmful to children who at an early age are put into a 
school that is burning coal.
  When I bought my first house, it was a coal burning furnace. We got a 
bargain. I could not afford it otherwise. And we tried very hard with 
filters and we worked very hard to keep it clean.

[[Page H246]]

 But no matter how hard you work, those tiny particles of coal dust get 
into the air and eventually in the lungs of young children.
  We were glad when we could convert to gas, I assure you. Coal is used 
for many purposes but it should not be in a situation where children 
are being exposed day in and day out to the fumes and the dust that 
comes from coal.
  But in New York City, we had $2 billion and not a single penny was 
spent to get rid of a single coal burning furnace. In New York City, $2 
billion and not a single penny was spent to build a new school.
  The mayor squirreled all that away. That is the kind of cruel and 
blind decision-making that we do not want to be guilty of in this 
budget.
  The President has proposed, and I want to salute him for this 
breakthrough, the President has proposed in the area of school 
construction we go beyond what has been proposed in past years. He has 
proposed for the past few years that the only Federal involvement in 
school construction would be limited to a $25 billion program where the 
Federal Government would participate in the program where localities 
and States could borrow up to $25 billion across the country, the total 
would come to that much, and the Federal Government would pay the 
interest on the bonds.
  And if that whole program went into motion and the whole program was 
utilized, the Federal Government would be paying $3.7 billion in 
interest and, therefore, its contribution to school construction in the 
entire country would be $3.7 billion.
  Now, the General Accounting Office has said that in 1995 we needed 
$110 billion to repair and build schools in order to keep up with the 
population at that time.  Without projecting additional children who 
would be going to school and therefore needing more classrooms, $110 
billion was needed in 1995.

  Bob Chase, who is the President of the National Education 
Association, made a speech at the Democratic Caucus retreat this 
weekend where he said that now we need $300 billion in order to stay 
even, that in order to have a decent school and classroom for every 
child that is going to school, you need to bring it up to $300 billion.
  But the President is proposing, and he is way out ahead of everybody 
else, the Republicans propose zero, the President is proposing $3.7 
billion to pay the interest. We need at least the amount that the 
General Accounting Office projected in 1995, more like $110 billion 
dollars.
  I have a bill which, based on the General Accounting Office 
progression in 1995, proposes that we spend $110 billion for school 
construction, repair and modernization over the next 10 years. The 
President has at least gone beyond his $25 billion borrowing scheme and 
made a breakthrough in thinking in this administration and he has 
announced a new school construction initiative where $1.3 billion will 
be directly appropriated, directly appropriated, not borrowed, no 
interest, no principal, the Government of the United States will 
directly appropriate $1.3 billion for emergency school repairs.

                              {time}  2000

  Mr. President, we thank you for that great breakthrough in logic. We 
thank you for joining the commonsense Americans.
  We have made a first step. In fact, I sent out a ``Dear Colleague'' 
to all the Members saying we are winning. We are winning. This is a 
great step over where we were 2 years ago. We are winning because the 
commonsense logic of the American people is beginning to prevail.
  The American people in survey after survey have indicated education 
should be the highest priority. When you ask them in great detail to 
tell you what items within the education budget need the most help, 
they say fixing schools. School repair, construction, renovation, 
security, all of those items relate to infrastructure, and rank highest 
in the minds of the American people according to several key polls.
  Why do I single out school construction? Why do I walk around with 
this hat as a symbol, a trademark, to keep it in people's minds when we 
are talking about it? Why do you care about education and care about 
schools?
  I have been on the Committee on Education and the Workforce now for 
my 18th year. I care about education. I asked to be placed on the 
Committee on Education and the Workforce when I came here, Education 
and Labor it was called then, because I saw education and jobs, 
education and employment, as being inextricably interwoven. You cannot 
separate them. If I was going to do anything about the high 
unemployment in my district, about the opportunity for the poor people, 
I needed to be on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. So 
education has been the one thing that I have considered most important 
in my life for a long time.
  Why do I single out school construction among all the other items 
that relate to improving education? Because school construction, the 
physical infrastructure, they are so dilapidated, so rundown, such 
obvious symbols of a lack of commitment in certain areas. Not just the 
big cities, but even when you get outside of the big cities, you have 
schools in the suburbs with trailers all over the place, indicating 
that the commitment to build schools is not there, that the trailers 
were put there instead.
  They are supposed to be temporary. Some places have had trailers for 
20 years now. The trailers do not have indoor toilets. When the weather 
is bad you, you have to go out to the real building for that. Trailers 
are not symbols of education commitment to children.
  So why do I see the physical infrastructure as being so important? If 
I am an intellectual, why do I not care about the books, the 
curriculum, the standards? Why do I not care about testing? Why do I 
not care about whole school reform?
  I care about it all. It is all very important. I think it is 
dangerous to try to separate out any one part and say we do not need it 
all. We need it all. But there is such a thing as a core need, a 
kingpin need, a critical need, which, if it is not addressed, all of 
the attention to other needs is folly.
  For example, let us consider school reform and investment in 
education as we would approach a patient that is very ill in a 
hospital. The patient is delivered to the doctors in the hospital and 
they are told that this man has heart congestion. Because of the heart 
condition, if something is not done about the heart very rapidly, very 
quickly, he is going to die. But he also has infected feet. He also has 
strange sores growing all over his skin. He also has some damage to one 
of his internal organs. Which shall the doctors address first if they 
care about keeping the man alive?
  The school systems are no different. In order to keep the patient 
alive, you have to address the heart congestion first. If the heart 
stops beating, none of the other illnesses matter. If the heart stops 
beating, trying to cure the infected foot is a waste of time. If the 
heart stops beating, trying to cure the damaged organ internally is a 
waste of time.
  If you do not address the school buildings, the infrastructure, which 
provides the place for the library and the laboratory, the physical 
symbol of commitment, if you do not address that, then the children 
will pass judgment immediately. Walking into a dilapidated school with 
a sagging roof, water dripping through the roof on the top floors, 
window panes out, coal burning furnaces. I went to one school, I had a 
town meeting, 7 o'clock in the evening, and under the chairs in the 
auditorium where we were holding the town meeting, mice were playing. 
No extermination was taking place, no effective cleaning services were 
taking place in that school.
  What does that tell the children? What does that tell the teachers? 
It tells the children and teachers that there is a lack of commitment 
by the people that make decisions about the budgets to provide a decent 
education to those children.
  We have gone from blaming the children, change the curriculum 
standards, test the children, blame the children, now we have come down 
to blaming the teachers. This is the year of blaming the teachers. We 
have dealt with curriculum standards out there. We tried to institute 
national testing. Some of us fought that. We said ``do not test the 
kids until you have more resources so they have a chance to learn 
before you test them.''

[[Page H247]]

  Now we have gone to focus on the teachers. If only the teachers were 
better prepared, if only more teachers were certified, if only more 
teachers understood what they are doing, then we could reform the 
school system.
  Not for one moment will I disagree that we need quality teachers. We 
need systems that provide certified teachers, qualified teachers, right 
across the board.
  In my district, one-third of the schools in my district, where the 
poorest children live, half the teachers are not certified. Each school 
has at least 50 percent not certified teachers, 50 percent unqualified 
teachers, because they have been given a chance, in some cases, 9 or 10 
years, to get certified, and some have not wanted to care.
  Recently the United Federation of Teachers, the teachers union, said 
to the uncertified teachers, if you want to go back to school, we will 
pay your tuition. We will make it possible for you to get certified.
  They were shocked to find that the majority of the people they were 
addressing turned it down. When they turned it down, they said to the 
union people, ``This school system needs our bodies. We cannot be 
replaced. We are not worried about losing our jobs. You need our 
bodies.''
  Mr. Speaker, I want to end by saying that at the heart of education 
reform, education investment, which should be the heart of this year's 
budget, should be $110 billion over a 10-year period for construction, 
because that is the way we show our commitment for education as we go 
into the 21st century as the leaders of the world and as the leaders on 
this whole globe. We ought to take this budget seriously. We ought to 
make the decisions that will carry our Nation forward, and not make the 
error that the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians made when they were at the 
pinnacle of power and had the world in their hands.

                          ____________________