[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 148 (Tuesday, October 21, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H9795-H9800]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE INCREASING ECONOMIC DIVIDE AMONG AMERICANS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, the corporate media does not talk about it
too much, and we do not discuss it terribly much here in the Congress,
but the United States of America is rapidly on its way to becoming
three separate nations: An increasingly wealthy elite, a small number
of people who have incredible wealth and incredible power; a middle
class, the vast majority of our people, which is shrinking, where the
average person is working longer hours for lower wages; and, at the
bottom we
[[Page H9796]]
have a growing number of Americans who are living in abject poverty,
barely keeping their heads above water.
Mr. Speaker, there has always been a wealthy elite in this country,
that is not new, and there has always been a gap between the rich and
the poor. But the disparities in wealth and income that currently exist
in this country have not been seen since the 1920s.
In other words, instead of becoming a more egalitarian country, with
a stronger middle-class, we are becoming a Nation in which the rich
have more wealth and power, the middle-class is shrinking, and poverty
is growing.
Mr. Speaker, today the wealthiest 1 percent own more wealth than the
bottom 95 percent. One percent own more wealth than the bottom 95
percent. The CEOs of large corporations today earn more than 500 times
what their employees are making. While workers are being squeezed,
being forced to pay more for health insurance, while their pensions are
being cut back, the CEOs of large corporations make out like bandits.
Mr. Speaker, the Nation's 13,000 wealthiest families, which
constitute one one-hundredth of one percent of the population, receive
almost as much income as the bottom 20 million families in the United
States. One one-hundredth of one percent, more income than the bottom
20 million families. That, to my mind, is not what America is supposed
to be.
New data from the Congressional Budget Office shows that the gap
between the rich and the poor in terms of income more than doubled from
1979 to 2000. In other words, we are moving in exactly the wrong
direction. The gap is such that the wealthiest 1 percent had more money
to spend after taxes than the bottom 40 percent. The richest 2.8
million Americans had $950 billion after taxes, or 15.5 percent of the
economic pie, while the poorest 110 million had less, 14.4 percent of
all after-tax income. Once again, that is not what America is supposed
to be. While the rich get richer and receive huge tax breaks from the
White House, the middle-class is struggling desperately, in my State of
Vermont and all over this country.
It is increasingly common to see people work at not one job, but two
jobs, and occasionally three jobs. When I was growing up, the
expectation for the middle-class was that one worker in a family could
work 40 hours a week and earn enough income to pay the bills. Well, in
the State of Vermont, and all over this country, it is becoming
increasingly uncommon when that happens. Much more often than not,
wives are forced to work alongside husbands in order to bring in the
necessary income, and kids, in many instances, do not get the care that
they need.
Unemployment in our country is now at a 9-year high. We are over 6
percent, and there are now over 9 million people who are unemployed.
But in truth the real number is higher than that, because there are a
lot of people who are working part-time because they cannot find full-
time jobs, and there are a lot of people who are not part of the
statistics because they have given up and are not actively seeking
employment.
Mr. Speaker, of the 3.3 million private sector jobs that have been
lost over the last 3 years, 2.7 million were in the manufacturing
sector. This is an issue I want to spend a moment on, because what is
happening in manufacturing today is a disaster for this country and
bodes very poorly for the future of our Nation.
Mr. Speaker, the bottom line is, and this Congress must finally
recognize it, our trade policies are failing. Permanent, normal trade
relations with China has been a disaster. NAFTA has been a disaster.
Our membership in the World Trade Organization has not worked for the
middle-class and working families, for this country, and the time is
long overdue for the United States Congress to stand up to corporate
America, to stand up to the President of the United States, to stand up
to all of the editorial pages all over America who have told us year
after year after year how great unfettered free trade would be.
They were wrong. Their policies have led to enormous economic
problems for the middle-class in this country. The decline of
manufacturing is one of the reasons why our middle-class is shrinking
and why wages for middle-class workers are in decline.
Many people understand the pain involved when we have lost 3 million
jobs in the last few years. But we also have got to point out that our
trade policies and our overall economic policies have been a disaster
for the wages that American workers receive.
Today, American workers in the private sector are earning 8 percent
less than they were in 1973. Now, just think for a moment. Think for a
moment. In the last 30 years, there has been a revolution in
technology. We all know that. We all know what computers have done,
what e-mail has done, what faxes have done. We know what robotics in
factories have done. In other words, we are a much more productive
Nation than we used to be. Every worker is producing more.
Given that reality, why is it that the average worker in the private
sector today is earning 8 percent less? That is an issue we have to put
right up there on the radar screen, and we need to debate.
Mr. Speaker, manufacturing in this country is currently in a state of
collapse. Let us be honest about it. In the last 3 years, we have lost
2.7 million manufacturing jobs, which comprise 16 percent of the total.
That is right. You heard that right. In the last 3 years, we have lost
16 percent of our manufacturing jobs. At 14.7 million, we are at the
lowest number of factory jobs since 1958.
In my own State of Vermont, my small State of Vermont, we have lost
some 8,700 manufacturing jobs between January 2001 and August 2003, and
the pity of that is that in Vermont, manufacturing jobs pay workers
middle-class wages. In Vermont, on average, a worker working in
manufacturing makes over $42,000 a year. That is a decent wage. We are
losing those jobs, and the new jobs that we are creating are paying
only a fraction of what manufacturing jobs are paying, and almost
always provide much, much weaker benefits.
Mr. Speaker, in 2002 the United States had a $435 billion trade
deficit, a $435 billion trade deficit. This year, the trade deficit
with China alone, one country, China, is expected to be $120 billion,
and that number is projected to increase in future years. It has gone
up and up and up. The National Association of Manufacturers estimates
that if present trends continue, our trade deficit with China will grow
to $330 billion in 5 years.
{time} 1700
But our disastrous trade policy is not only costing us millions of
decent paying jobs; it is squeezing wages. It is squeezing wages.
Because many employers are saying if you do not take the cuts in health
care, if you do not take the cuts in wages, we are going to move to
China, we are going to move to Mexico.
One of the areas where people are being most severely hurt is among
young workers without a college education. For entry-level workers
without a college level education, the real wages that they have
received, that they are now receiving, have dropped by over 20 percent
in the last 25 years. And the answer and the reason for that is quite
obvious. 25 years ago, 30 years ago if somebody did not go to college,
as most people did not, what they would be able to do is go out and get
a job in manufacturing. And millions and millions of workers did that.
And with those wages and those benefits they were able to lead a
middle-class existence and raise their kids with a decent standard of
living. But the reality now is that the new jobs that are being
created, the jobs at McDonald's and the jobs in Wal-Mart are not paying
people a living wage.
What is happening to our economy today is best illustrated by the
fact that some 20 years ago our largest employer was General Motors.
And workers in General Motors earned, and still earn today, a living
wage. Today, Mr. Speaker, our largest private employer is Wal-Mart. And
that is what has happened to the American economy. We have gone from a
General Motors economy where workers earned decent wages and decent
benefits to a Wal-Mart economy where people earn low wages and poor
benefits. Today Wal-Mart employees earn $8.23 per hour or $13,861
annually. And that, Mr. Speaker, is an income which is below the
poverty level.
And that is what the transformation of the American economy is about,
an
[[Page H9797]]
economy where workers used to work, produced real products, made
middle-class wages, had good benefits, to a Wal-Mart economy where our
largest employer now pays workers poverty wages, minimal benefits, huge
turn-over.
Frankly, Mr. Speaker, in hindsight it did not take a genius to
predict that unfettered free trade with China would be a disaster,
which is why I and many other Members in the House have opposed it from
the beginning. With educated, hardworking Chinese workers available at
40 or 50 cents an hour, and with corporations having the capability of
bringing their Chinese-made products back into this country tariff-
free, why would American multinational corporations not shut down their
plants in this country and move to China? It did not take a genius,
frankly, to think that that would happen.
Should anyone be surprised that Motorola eliminated 42,900 American
jobs in 2001 and invested $3.4 billion in China or that IBM has signed
deals to train 100,000 software specialists in China over 3 years? Who
is shocked that General Electric has thrown tens of thousands of
American workers out on the streets while investing $1.5 billion in
China. Honeywell is a sophisticated corporation. Should anybody be
really surprised that they have built 13 factories in China or that
Ethan Allen furniture has cut jobs at three sawmills and 17 U.S.
manufacturing plants, including some in my State of Vermont, as they
import more medium-priced furniture from China into the United States?
Nobody should be surprised at these developments.
China, for American multinational corporations, is a great place to
do business, if by ``doing business'' we mean making products for
export to the United States that companies previously made here. Not
only are wages extremely low in China, but if workers attempt to stand
up for their rights in China and form unions, those workers go to jail.
Now, what a great place to do business where when workers try to
organize, they go to jail. What more could a company ask for?
In China today environmental regulations are almost nonexistent. And
while China becomes one of the most polluted countries on Earth,
companies that invest in China, they do not have to ``waste money on
environmental safeguards.'' In our country we said many years ago to
companies you just cannot willy-nilly throw your garbage into our lakes
and into our streams. You cannot pollute the air any way you want. You
have got to have some environmental safeguards. Those safeguards are
expensive. But in China, no problem, you can do whatever you want.
Great place to do business.
Mr. Speaker, over the years advocates of unfettered free trade have
tried to gloss over the bad news about the decline in factory
employment by promising that a new economy was in the making. A new
economy was in the making, one in which Americans would be working at
good wages in the high-tech field. We have all heard it. Hey, you do
not have to worry about them factory jobs anymore. We are the United
States of America. We all have new clean, high-tech computer jobs. All
of our young people will go out there, make $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a
year. That is the future for the United States. That is what they told
us.
Unfortunately, the advocates of unfettered free trade are wrong
again. We now know that blue collar manufacturing jobs are not the only
casualty of unfettered free trade. Estimates are that some 50 to 60,000
high-tech white collar jobs have been lost in this country in the last
2 years, and that many of them have ended up in India. If any of the
listeners sometimes want to argue with the phone company that your
phone bill was wrong, you get on the phone and you are calling up and
arguing, well you may end up going not to Chicago or New York or Los
Angeles, you may be talking to somebody in India. And that is happening
more and more.
According to Forest Research, a major consultant on this issue, they
say, and I quote, ``Over the next 15 years 3.3 million U.S. service
industry jobs and $136 billion in wages will move offshore. The
information technology industry will lead the initial overseas
exodus.'' That is from Forest Research. According to Booz Allen
Hamilton, companies can lower their costs by as much as 80 percent by
shifting tasks such as computer programming, accounting, and
procurement to China.
Among many other companies moving high-tech jobs abroad is Microsoft,
which is spending $750 million over the next 3 years on research and
development and outsourcing in China. Just the other day, just last
week, Intel Corporation chairman Andy Grove warned that the U.S. could
lose the bulk of its information technology jobs to overseas
competitors in the next decade, largely to India and China.
In other words, Mr. Speaker, not only has unfettered free trade cost
us our textile industry, cost us our shoe industry, our steel industry,
our tool and die industry, our electronic industry, much of our
furniture industry, as well as many, many other industries, it is now
going to cost us, unless we change it, millions of high-tech jobs as
well.
Now, let me be very clear. The United States needs to have a strong
and positive relationship with China. I am not anti-Chinese. I am an
internationalist. China is the largest country on Earth, and this
country must have a good and positive relationship with China; and
there are a number of ways that we can do that. But doing that, having
a positive relationship with China, does not mean allowing corporate
America and their supporters in the White House, in Congress, to
destroy the American middle class by making jobs America's number 1
export.
We want our exports to be products manufactured by American workers,
not the jobs that American workers have. If we continue to force
American workers to, quote unquote, compete against desperate people
from China and other developing countries, both in manufacturing and
high tech, the United States will be the loser.
By definition a sensible and fair trade agreement works well for both
parties, not just for one. Trade is a good thing. Trade is a good thing
when both sides benefit. The New York Yankees do not engage in free
trade by exchanging their top ball player for a third string minor
leaguer.
The United States is the most lucrative market in the world. We need
to leverage the value of that market to achieve trade agreements that
result in fairness for the American worker. And we can do that. Trade
is a good thing. But our current trade policies are not working for
American workers.
When we talk about trade with China, Mr. Speaker, we should also
understand that today 60 percent, 60 percent of Dell Computer parts are
made in China. Boeing recently said that it expected to purchase $1
billion worth of aviation equipment annually in China by 2009 and $1.3
billion by 2010, up from $500 million this year.
North Carolina's Pillowcase Corporation filed for bankruptcy on July
20, 2003, laying off 6,450 of its 7,650 workers and made plans to sell
its textile-producing machinery to several nations, including China.
Over the past year, Intel has added 1,000 software engineers in China
and India. And on and on it goes. The bottom line is that American
workers cannot and must not be forced to compete against workers in
China who are paid extremely low wages.
Two-thirds of China's 1.3 billion citizens live on less than a dollar
a day. The average factory wage in China is 40 cents an hour, \1/40\th
of what U.S. factory workers are paid. The average annual salary for an
information technology programmer in the U.S. is $75,000; in China it
is $8,952.
Mr. Speaker, for all of these reasons and more, I have introduced
H.R. 3228, which would repeal permanent normal trade relations with
China. My legislation, once again, would repeal permanent normal trade
relations with China. It will acknowledge that our current trade
policies with that country are a failure. And we have got to begin
negotiating trade policies not only with China but with other countries
that work well for the American worker and the American middle class.
I am happy to say that in just over 3 weeks, this tripartisan
legislation has garnered 52 cosponsors, including 14 Republicans. So we
are moving forward in that area, Mr. Speaker, in a tripartisan way.
Mr. Speaker, when we talk about the decline of the middle class, we
are talking about high unemployment; we are talking about the
conversion of the United States from a manufacturing
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economy to a service economy whereby wages and benefits are much lower.
{time} 1715
We are also talking about the fact that in the United States, workers
today are now working the longest hours of the workers in any major
country on earth. There should be little wonder why the average
American family is so stressed out. And one of the reasons that they
are so stressed out is that people are working incredibly long hours in
order to make enough money to pay the bills. Today, the average
American employee works by far the longest hours of any worker in the
industrialized world, and the situation is getting worse.
According to statistics from the International Labor Organization,
the average American last year worked 1,978 hours, up from 1,942 hours
in 1990. That is an increase of almost one week of work. Since 1990,
the average American is now working an additional week a year of work.
We are now, as Americans, putting more hours into our work than at any
time since the 1920s. Just think about that. Huge increases in
productivity and an explosion of technology, logically, would lead one
to believe that people would be working fewer hours for higher wages,
but the converse is true. People are working longer hours for lower
wages.
Americans are now putting in more hours at our work than at any time
since the 1920s, 65 years after the formal establishment of the 40-hour
workweek under the Fair Labor Standards Act, almost 40 percent of
Americans now work more than 50 hours a week; and we should do a lot of
thinking about that. An explosion of productivity and technology,
people working longer and longer hours; and in almost every instance in
the middle class, two bread winners are needed to pay the bills. Real
wages for workers in the private sector have declined since 1973. The
rich get richer. The middle class shrinks and poverty increases.
Mr. Speaker, I have talked a moment about what is going on with the
middle class. I have talked a little bit about the conversion from a
manufacturing society, a General Motors society, to a service industry
economy, a Wal-Mart economy, but let us look for a moment at the people
who are not even in the middle class. People who have not made it into
the middle class. People who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic
ladder in our country, the 34.8 million people in America who live in
poverty. Sadly, Mr. Speaker, while the rich get richer, 1.3 million
more Americans became poor and entered poverty, the group of poor
people in America.
In the midst of those people, Mr. Speaker, we have got to ask about
the 11 million Americans who are trying to survive on the pathetic
minimum wage of $5.15 an hour which exists here, and I think it is
morally repugnant that this Congress voted to provide huge tax breaks
for millionaires and billionaires, but somehow the President of the
United States and the Republican leadership, not for one moment have
thought about raising the minimum wage, which today is at a pathetic
$5.15 cents an hour.
How do people earning those wages survive? And I will tell you how
some of them do it. After working 40 hours a week, they live in their
automobiles because they cannot afford housing units in order to
survive. They just cannot afford the housing because their wages cannot
pay the rent. And what, Mr. Speaker, about the 43.6 million Americans
who lack any health insurance? That is 15.2 percent of our population.
What about the 3.5 million people who will experience homelessness in
this year, 1.3 million of them children? What about our elderly
citizens who cannot afford the outrageously high cost of prescription
drugs? And the many of them who cut their pills in half or do not even
bother trying to fill the prescriptions that their doctors write for
them? What about those people? What about the veterans who have put
their lives on the line defending this country and then try to get into
a VA hospital but find out that they are on a waiting list?
Mr. Speaker, one of the clear crises being faced by the American
middle class is the crisis in health care and the cost of prescription
drugs. In the last several years, we have seen huge increases in health
insurance and with the increase of unemployment, we have seen more and
more working people lose their health insurance. In terms of losing
health insurance, people then are open to bankruptcy, because if they
end up with an accident or a serious illness, they go to the hospital,
but they are unable to pay those bills. And the highest amount of
people who are bankrupt are the people who cannot pay their health
expenses that have been generated as a result of an accident or
illness.
Mr. Speaker, our health care system today is in a state of collapse.
More and more people are uninsured and more and more people are
underinsured. That is, people have higher and higher copayments, higher
and higher deductibles, higher and higher premiums. To my mind, the
only solution, the only serious solution to our health care crisis is
for this country to do what every other major industrialized nation on
Earth has done and that is to move toward a national health care
system which guarantees health care to every man, woman and child.
A hundred years ago, the United States of America said that every
young person, regardless of income, could get a quality public
education. Well, the rest of the world has said that every person in
their country, regardless of income, is entitled to health care. But we
lag behind what countries throughout Europe, Scandinavia and Canada are
doing. To my mind, health care is a right, not a privilege. It is wrong
that more and more Americans delay and hesitate going to the doctors
because they do not have health insurance or because they cannot pay
the deductible or the copayments.
When people in America get sick, they have a right to go to the
doctor, to go to the hospital and get the health care that they need.
The irony with regard to our collapsing health care system is that it
is an extremely costly and wasteful system. The fact of the matter is
that we spend more than twice as much per capita on health care as any
other nation, and yet we end up with 43 million people with no
insurance and many more who are underinsured. For the sake of our
children, for the sake of our parents, for the sake of the middle class
of this country, we have got to adopt a national health care system
which finally says with no ifs, ands, or buts about it that in America,
all of our people will receive the care that they need as a right of
citizenship.
Now, Mr. Speaker, given the very, very serious problems facing the
American people and especially our middle class, it is appropriate, I
believe, to ask what President Bush and his administration have done to
begin addressing some of these problems. What are their priorities?
What are they doing to reach out to the middle class and say we are
going to expand the middle class; we are going to lower poverty; we are
going to improve health care? What are they doing in that direction?
Well, let me tell you a little bit about what they have done. They
have given hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the very
richest people in our country while cutting back on the basic needs of
working families. Now, at a time when the middle class is shrinking,
when poverty is increasing, when the number of people without health
insurance is going up, when unemployment is far too high, who are the
people that the Bush administration are reaching out to? Well, needless
to say, it is their campaign contributors and the very wealthiest
people in this country who have received hundreds and hundreds of
billions of dollars in tax breaks.
Through legislative and administration efforts, the Bush
administration is making it more and more difficult for workers to form
unions and to protect their jobs and incomes. When a worker is a member
of a union, by and large that worker will earn 30 percent more than a
worker doing a similar job who is nonunion. That is why many workers
want to join unions, and yet it is getting harder and harder for
workers to do that because the law very clearly sides with the employer
and the large corporation and not with the worker.
The Bush administration, if you can believe it, is now attacking
overtime for American workers and trying to undo laws that have been on
the books for decades which say that if you
[[Page H9799]]
worked over 40 hours a week, you will get time and a half. And I am
proud that a number of Republicans join many of us on this floor of the
House to say that when the middle class is shrinking, when real wages
are declining, we are not going to cut back on the overtime pay that
workers need.
Now, when we talk about the achievements of the Bush administration,
and we understand that our deficit is now at an all-time high, that our
national debt is going higher, that in the midst of all of this, our
conservative friends who year after year told us how terrible deficits
were and what kind of terrible obligations we were leaving to our kids
and our grandchildren, well, these are the folks that are driving up
the deficit, and they are driving up the national debt. Now, why are
they doing that? Why are conservatives doing that?
Well, I think there are two reasons. Number one, obviously, the tax
breaks for the rich are not hard to understand. Here in Washington,
D.C. there are fund-raising dinners in which individuals have
contributed $25,000 a plate, large corporations and their executives
make huge contributions and that is payback time. Nothing new. The rich
make contributions. They get paid back in tax breaks. They get paid
back in corporate welfare. They get paid back with their trade policy
which makes it easier for them to throw American workers out on the
street and move out to China. That we can understand. That is obscene,
but easily understood.
But, Mr. Speaker, let me suggest to you that there is another even
more cynical reason for driving up this deficit and driving up the
national debt. And I believe that that reason is that as the debt and
the deficit become higher and higher, this President, or any other
President, may be forced to come before the American people and say our
deficit and our debt is so very high that we have no choice but to
privatize Social Security, privatize Medicare, privatize Medicaid,
privatize public education.
{time} 1730
We have got to do it. We have a huge deficit. Oh, yeah, we did give
hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the rich; but
nonetheless, the deficit is so high that we are going to have to do
away with all of the benefits, all of the guarantees that the American
people have fought for over the last 100 years; and it is my belief
that this administration really does want to take us back to the 19th
century, where working people and the middle class had no protections
whatsoever, where workers and poor people were dependent upon the
largess of the wealthy for charity, but there were no guarantees.
Social Security has its problems; and in my view, Social Security
must be strengthened. Seniors must be receiving larger COLAs, but the
solution to the problems that we may have are not to privatize Social
Security and bring us back to the 1920s when elderly people were the
poorest segment of our society; but that is the direction that these
folks are moving us towards, and they are moving us toward the
privatization of Medicare.
Think about how many private insurance companies are really going to
provide insurance for elderly, low-income sick people. The function of
an insurance company is to make money, not to provide health care; and
if a person is old and sick and poor, who is going to insure them? They
are on their own.
In terms of prescription drugs, an issue that I have worked very hard
on for a number of years, the Bush administration is working hand-in-
glove with the pharmaceutical industry, the most powerful lobby here on
Capitol Hill. While Americans pay by far the highest prices in the
world for their prescription drugs, the pharmaceutical industry year
after year after year is the most profitable industry in this country.
In order to maintain their status as the most profitable industry,
they have hired over 600, 600 paid lobbyists right here in Washington,
D.C., to descend on the Congress, on the House and the Senate, to make
sure that we do not pass any legislation which will lower the cost of
prescription drugs. Nonetheless, despite all of the hundreds of
millions of dollars that they have spent on all of their lobbying
efforts, all of their campaign contributions, I am happy to tell my
colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that 6 weeks ago, longer than that, the House
of Representatives, in a bipartisan way, had the courage to stand up to
the pharmaceutical industry and pass legislation that would allow our
pharmacists, prescription drug distributors, and individuals to buy
FDA-approved medicine in 26 countries including Canada; and if we can
get that bill through the Senate, we will be able to lower prescription
drug costs in this country by between 30 to 50 percent. Unfortunately,
on this issue, we are fighting not only the pharmaceutical industry but
the Bush administration and the Bush campaign, which has received
substantial support from the drug companies.
Mr. Speaker, on another area that is of enormous importance to the
American people and more and more Americans are getting involved in it,
the Bush administration is moving in precisely the wrong direction in
terms of media consolidation. In my view, one of the crises that we
face in our country today is fewer and fewer large media conglomerates
own and control what we see, what we hear, and what we read. I know the
average person says, well, man, I have got 100 channels on my cable.
Check out who owns those 100 channels. Check out who owns NBC, which is
General Electric; who owns CBS, which is Viacomm; who owns ABC, which
is Disney; who owns Fox Television, which is Rupert Murdoch, an extreme
right-wing billionaire. What we are seeing in terms of media is fewer
and fewer large corporations controlling the flow of information in
America. Clear Channel Radio now owns 1,200 radio stations all over
this country.
In America, what our freedom is about is debating different points of
view. No one has all the right answers, but we cannot flourish as a
democracy unless we hear different points of view; and that is becoming
harder and harder to achieve, as fewer and fewer companies own what we
see, hear, and read.
Instead of acknowledging that problem and moving us to a more
diversified media, where we will have local media reporting on local
issues, where it will be different points of view being heard, where
there will be more diversity in our media, the Bush administration is
moving in exactly the wrong direction.
Michael Powell, who is chairman of the FCC, with the strong backing
of the Bush administration, passed with a three to two vote on June 2
more media deregulation, which will allow for even fewer companies to
own what we see, hear, and read; and one of the manifestations of that
decision, if it is allowed to stand, is there will be cities in America
where one company will own the local newspaper, will own the largest
television station, will own many of the radio stations, and will own
the local cable TV system.
Mr. Speaker, that is not what America is supposed to be; and I am
happy to tell my colleagues that all over this country, in a grassroots
fashion, millions of Americans have written and communicated to the
FCC, some of them conservatives, the National Rifle Association, some
right-wing organizations, some of them progressives, some left-wing
organizations, some in the middle, different points of view
philosophically on almost every issue, but they have come together to
say that in America we need to have a diverse ownership of media and
different points of view to be heard.
The Senate, listening to the demands of the American people, had the
courage in a bipartisan way, Senator Byron Dorgan, Senator Trent Lott
helping to lead the effort, had the courage to pass a resolution of
disapproval with regard to what the FCC did. In other words, they said
we want to junk it. That bill is now here in the House of
Representatives; and working with some of my colleagues again in a
tripartisan way, we have now garnered 190 signatures on a letter to the
Speaker of the House, because the bill is now on the Speaker's desk,
and we have said, Mr. Speaker, let the American people have the debate
and a vote about whether or not we want more media consolidation. I
sincerely hope that the Speaker will allow that debate because if that
debate takes place, I believe that the American people will win and
that Republicans, Democrats, and Independent on the floor of this House
will vote to junk what the FCC has done.
[[Page H9800]]
Mr. Speaker, when we talk about America, we often pride ourselves
upon being a free country, a free country; and it is easier to stand in
front of the American flag and give great speeches about freedom than
it is to really fight for freedom, because one of the elements of
freedom is to understand, among other things, that not everything, not
everything that somebody says or does is something that we agree with,
but what freedom is about is tolerating and respecting other points of
view, of understanding that people have the right to read whatever they
want to read, have the right to an attorney when they need an attorney.
I was one of the relatively few people in the House who voted 6 weeks
after the horror of 9/11 against the USA PATRIOT Act, and I voted
against the USA PATRIOT Act not because I am not concerned about
terrorism. I happen to believe that terrorism is a very serious issue
and that the United States Government must do everything that it can to
protect the American people and fight terrorism, but I voted against
the USA PATRIOT Act because I believe we can fight terrorism without
undermining basic constitutional rights, which is what the USA PATRIOT
Act is doing.
Again, on this issue, we have seen some very interesting
nonideological coming-together. We have seen some really very
conservative people who are honest conservatives who say because they
do not believe in Big Government they do not want the United States
Government monitoring the reading habits of the American people in
their libraries or their bookstores. Unfortunately, again, on this
issue, the Bush administration and Attorney General John Ashcroft are
on the wrong side. They are, in many respects, working to undermine the
basic constitutional rights that are given, that have made this country
a free country.
So, Mr. Speaker, let me conclude by stating that it is high time that
the Congress of the United States begin to focus on the needs of the
middle class, the vast majority of our people, the middle class of
which is shrinking, the middle class in which the average person is
working longer hours and for lower wages. America will grow when the
middle class grows; and to do that, we need some fundamental changes in
our policies.
We need a national health care system which guarantees health care to
all Americans. We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. We
need to fundamentally change our trade policies so that we do not
continue to see the collapse of manufacturing. We need to make sure
that every American, regardless of income, has a right to go to
college. We need to rescind the tax breaks that have been given to the
wealthiest people and the largest corporations and create a tax
structure which works for the middle class and not just for the wealthy
and the powerful.
There is a lot of work that must be done, and I look forward to
participating in that effort.
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