[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 160 (Thursday, November 6, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H10553-H10558]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE MIDDLE CLASS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Pearce). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) is
recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, tonight I want to focus on some very
important issues which impact the middle class of our country, and I do
that as the only Independent in the U.S. House of Representatives. And
as an Independent, the views that I am going to express are somewhat
different than the views of many of my colleagues.
The first point that I want to make is in a sense an obvious point to
most people in this country, especially perhaps the 50 or 60 percent of
the American people who have given up on the political process and no
longer vote, and that is that in Washington, D.C., in the White House
and in the United States Congress, money, big money plays an enormous
role. There is a reason, and I am going to get into this in greater
length in a moment, why we are hemorrhaging decent-paying manufacturing
jobs and those jobs are going to China where workers there are paid 50
cents an hour and why corporate America is laying off millions of
American workers to take jobs abroad. And one of the reasons that we
have a disastrous trade policy is the huge amounts of money that come
into Congress, that go into the White House, which have opened up
access so that these corporations can go a long way toward destroying
decent-paying jobs in America. Money talks. There is a reason why in
the United States of America our people pay by far the highest prices
in the world for prescription drugs.
I border in Vermont, the State that I represent, Canada, the Canadian
Nation. And in Canada people pay in some cases one-fifth, one-third,
one-half of the prices that people in the United States pay for the
same exact medicine made by the same company. There is a reason for the
fact that in the United States we are the only country in the
industrialized world that does not in one form or another regulate the
drug industry and prevent them from charging Americans any prices they
want, and that reason is big money.
The pharmaceutical industry contributes huge amounts of money to
Members of Congress. They have lobbyists running all over this place.
Several years ago when the President of the United States had a major
fund raiser, there was the pharmaceutical industry up there on the dais
with him. There is a reason why the United States today is the only
Nation in the industrialized world which does not have a national
health care program guaranteeing health care to all people, and that
reason is money coming into Washington, D.C. from the insurance
companies and other people who profit off of a health care system which
is disintegrating before our eyes. There is a reason why pollution all
over America is rampant, and that has to do with the money that
utilities and other large corporations contribute to political parties
and to the White House.
Front page, New York Times today: ``Lawyers at EPA Say it will Drop
Pollution Cases,'' and the article goes on to point out, of course,
that ``Representatives of the utility industry have been among
President Bush's biggest campaign donors, and a change in the
enforcement policies has been a top priority of the industry's
lobbyists.'' In other words, they have now been given permission to
pollute because they are major campaign contributors.
There is a reason why this Congress and this President have passed
legislation which provides enormous tax breaks for the wealthiest
people in our country, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in
tax breaks that will go to millionaires and billionaires, while at the
same time we have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the
industrialized world for our children, where we have working people
living in their cars because they cannot afford the housing that is
available to them. That has everything to do with the money that the
wealthy and large corporations contribute into the political process.
Mr. Speaker, the corporate media, which, of course, is owned by big
money interests, does not talk about what is happening in our country
too much in terms of what is going on in the lives of ordinary people,
but in my view, in many respects the United
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States is rapidly becoming three separate nations. On one hand we have
an increasingly wealthy elite composed of a small number of people with
unbelievable wealth and power. That is one group. Small numbers but
incredible wealth, incredible power. And then we have the vast majority
of the people who are in the middle class, and the middle class in our
country today is, as most Americans know, shrinking. The average
American today is working longer hours for lower wages than he or she
used to. People are going bankrupt at frightening numbers. It is
extremely rare when we can see one breadwinner in the family earning
enough money to pay the bills in almost every instance in the middle
class. Now, two people are needed to work, and sometimes these folks
are working unbelievable hours and are becoming stressed out. That is
the middle class, shrinking, people working longer hours for lower
wages, wondering how they are going to be able to send their kids to
college. And at the bottom, at the bottom of the ladder, we have a
growing number of Americans who are living in abject poverty, people
who are barely able to keep their heads above water, people who are in
many instances working for $5.15 an hour, the minimum wage, and those
people, after 40 hours of work, 50 hours of work, are falling further
behind. They cannot afford to get their cars fixed to get the work.
They cannot afford child care for their children, and that is what is
happening to our low-income people, and poverty in America, as we all
know, is increasing.
What we very rarely hear discussed in the House of Representatives,
in the corporate media, is the growing gap between the rich and the
poor and the fact that in our country we have the most unequal
distribution of wealth and income. The fact that there have been rich
and poor is not new. That has always gone on. But the disparities in
wealth and income that currently exist in our country today have not
been seen since the 1920's. In other words, instead of becoming a more
egalitarian country, a country in which the middle class is growing,
where fewer people are living in poverty, what we are seeing is more
and more inequality in terms of the distribution of wealth and income.
Today, Mr. Speaker, the wealthiest 1 percent of the population owns
more wealth than the bottom 95 percent. That is right. The richest 1
percent owns more wealth than the bottom 95 percent. Some people may
think that is okay. Let me be frank. I do not think that that is right,
that that is moral, that that is what this country should be about. The
CEOs of our largest corporations today earn more than 500 times what
their employees are making, 500 times. 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 in many
instances make out like bandits. And I am not just talking here about
the crooks, the dishonest people, the illegal people who ran companies
like Enron and WorldCom and Arthur Andersen and those companies. I am
not talking about them. I am talking about the highly-respected CEOs
like the retired head of General Electric, Jack Welch, who, when he
retired in 2000, received $123 million in compensation and $10 million
a year in pension benefits for the rest of his life, and he did that
after throwing tens and tens of thousands of American workers out on
the streets as he moved his plants abroad to China, Mexico, and other
countries. Good job, Jack. He is sure worth $123 million now that he
has laid off tens of thousands of American workers. I am talking about
people like Lou Gerstner of IBM, who, from 1997 to 2002, received $366
million in compensation while slashing the pensions of his employees
and the health care benefits of IBM retirees. Right on, Lou. $366
million for him; cuts in pensions and health care benefits for his
retirees. A great American. I am talking about C.A. Heimbold Jr.,
Bristol-Myers Squibb, who received almost $75 million in 2001 while
helping to make it impossible for many seniors in this country to
purchase prescription drugs because they are priced so high.
Today the Nation's 13,000 wealthiest families who constitute 1/100 of
1 percent of the population receive almost as much income as the bottom
20 million families in the United States. 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, while the poorest 110
million had less, 14.4 percent.
Mr. Speaker, it is increasingly common to see in my State of Vermont,
and all over this Nation, working people working not at one job, not at
two jobs in order to pay the bills, but in more instance than we can
imagine, working three jobs, working incredible hours, not 40 hours but
50 hours, 60 hours. Is this what the new global economy is all about,
seeing men and women all over America working one, two, three jobs with
minimal benefits?
When I was growing up, the expectation of being in the middle class,
and I know this is a very radical concept that some young people might
find difficult to understand, but the concept then before computers,
before the explosion of technology, concept of being in the middle
class in those days was that one person in a family could work 40 hours
a week and earn enough money to pay the bills and take care of his or
her family. Imagine what a radical idea that was, one person. The
reality now is that we find very few families in the middle class where
one person works 40 hours and earns enough money to pay the bills.
{time} 2230
In terms of what is happening to the middle-class, we have lost over
3 million jobs in the last 3 years, and, with 9 million workers
unemployed, unemployment is over 6 percent. That is a serious problem.
But in truth, the unemployment situation is far worse than that,
because official unemployment statistics do not include those workers
who are no longer actively searching for work. So if you are in a high
unemployment area, if there are no jobs and you are not actively
working, you are not included. Those figures do not include workers who
are working part-time because they cannot find full-time work. Those
figures do not include Ph.D.s who are driving cabs and skilled workers
who are doing unskilled labor because there are no jobs around that fit
their skills. But, nonetheless, we have 9 million people who are
unemployed.
Importantly, of the 3 million jobs that we have lost over the last 3
years, 2.7 million were in the manufacturing sector. This is an issue
that I want to spend a moment on, because what is happening in our
manufacturing sector today is a disaster for this country and bodes
very, very poorly for the future of our Nation.
The bottom line is, and Congress must finally recognize this, our
trade policies are failing. NAFTA has failed. Our membership in the WTO
has failed. Perhaps, above all, permanent normal trade relations with
China, PNTR, has failed.
The time is now, and, in fact, it 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 editorial writers all
over America, all of whom have told us, year after year, how great
unfettered free trade would be. Well, the evidence is in. They were
wrong. They were horrendously wrong.
They told us that unfettered free trade would create new jobs.
Instead, we have lost jobs.
They told us that unfettered free trade would improve the standard of
living of the middle-class. Instead, real wages have gone down.
Let us be very clear: The decline of manufacturing is one of the
reasons why our middle-class is shrinking and why wages for middle-
class workers have declined. When we talk about the loss of 3 million
jobs in the last 3 years, we should appreciate that 90 percent of those
jobs were lost in manufacturing, and, with the loss of manufacturing
jobs, we have seen a decline in real inflation-accounted-for wages over
the last 30 years.
Today, American workers in the private sector are earning 8 percent
less than they were in 1973; 8 percent less. Now, just think about that
for a moment. In the last 30 years there has
[[Page H10555]]
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, what
cell phones and satellite communications have done. We know what
robotics in factories have done. In other words, we are a much more
productive Nation than we were 30 years ago. Almost every worker is
producing more.
Given that reality, that we have new tools that make us more
productive, why is it that the average worker in the private sector
today is earning 8 percent less than he or she was earning in 1973?
This is a major issue that we have got to put up there on the radar
screen, and an issue that needs to be discussed all over our country.
Let us be honest about it: Manufacturing in this country today is in
a state of collapse. In the last 3 years, we have lost 2.7 million
manufacturing jobs, which comprise 16 percent of the total; 16 percent
of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the last 3 years.
In my own small State of Vermont, the third smallest State in the
country, we have lost some 8,700 manufacturing jobs between January
2001 and August 2003. And here is the tragedy: When we talk about the
loss of manufacturing jobs, we are talking about the loss of decent-
paying jobs, often with decent benefits.
In Vermont, for example, on average, someone working in manufacturing
makes over $42,000 a year. That is a decent income. When that employee
loses his or her job, when that job goes to China, in almost every
instance the new job that is acquired by that worker pays less and
provides lower 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 go up and up and up in future years.
In recent years we have seen the trade deficit rise from $11.5
billion in 1990 to $49 billion in 1997 to $120 billion this year. And
here is what is scary; the National Association of Manufacturers
estimates that if present trends continue, our trade deficit with China
will go up to $330 billion in 5 years.
Now, our disastrous trade policy is not only costing us millions of
decent-paying jobs, it is squeezing wages. It is lowering the wages for
the average person. Many employers are making it very clear that if
workers do not take cuts in their health care coverage or do not take
cuts in wages, that they will move operations to China, to Mexico, or
elsewhere.
One of the areas where people are most severely hurt is among the
young entry level workers, people without a college education.
Mr. Speaker, for entry level workers without a college level
education, the real wages, that is, inflation-accounted-for wages, that
they receive have dropped by over 28 percent from 1979 to 1997, which
are the latest figures that I have seen. The drop for women during that
period was only 18 percent.
How did that happen? Why did that happen? Well, the answer is fairly
obvious. Twenty-five years ago, 30 years ago, if you graduated high
school you had, as often as not, the opportunity to go to work in
manufacturing. You did not get rich, but you were able to make a
living, you were able to have decent health care and other benefits.
But with the decline of manufacturing, what job opportunities are now
open to young workers who do not have a college degree? Well, everybody
knows what is open. They can go to work at McDonald's for the minimum
wage, or a little bit more than that, or they can go to work at Wal-
Mart. But the sad truth is that those jobs do not pay anything close to
a living wage.
What I think can best show what is happening in our economy today is
that not so many years ago the largest employer in the United States
was General Motors, and workers who work at General Motors today and
worked at General Motors 20 years ago earned a living wage with decent
benefits.
Today, Mr. Speaker, our largest employer is Wal-Mart. And that is
what has happened to the American economy. We have gone from a General
Motors economy to a Wal-Mart economy, where people earn low wages and
miserable benefits. Today, Wal-Mart employees earn $8.23 per hour, or
$13,800 annually, wages which are below the poverty level.
In other words, the largest employer in America, Wal-Mart, now pays
workers wages that are below the poverty level. Many of these workers
qualify for Federal food stamp programs, which means that Wal-Mart is
being directly subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. They pay inadequate wages,
workers cannot make it, the Federal Government subsidizes Wal-Mart and
allows those workers to get food stamps.
Wal-Mart, as you know, has been sued by 27 States for not paying the
overtime pay their workers are entitled to, and, recently, on the front
pages of our newspapers, Federal agents raided their headquarters and
60 of their stores across the country, arresting 300 illegal workers in
21 States. That is the largest employer in the United States of
America.
That is what the transformation of the American economy is all about.
We have gone from an economy where workers used to work producing real
products, making middle-class wages with good benefits, to a Wal-Mart
economy, where our largest employer now pays workers poverty wages with
minimal benefits and has a huge turnover.
Frankly, Mr. Speaker, in hindsight, it did not take a genius to
predict that unfettered free trade with China would be a disaster. Many
of us have been saying that right here on this floor for years. With
educated, hard-working Chinese workers available at 30, 40, 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? Why would they not
shut down their plants in this country and move to China? It does not
take a genius to figure out that that is what they would do, and that
is what they are doing.
Should anyone be surprised that Motorola eliminated 42,000 American
jobs in 2001 while investing $3.4 billion in China, or that it plans to
invest $10 billion there by 2006?
Who is shocked that General Electric has thrown hundreds of thousands
of American workers out on the street in the last 30 years, while
investing $1.5 billion in China? From 1978 to 1995, GE eliminated
269,000 jobs in the United States. Meanwhile, of course, its former
CEO, Jack Welch, managed to put together an estimated fortune of some
$900 million for himself.
Boeing has laid off 135,000 American workers. In the last 30 years,
General Motors has shrunk their U.S. workforce by 250,000. IBM, another
major corporation, has signed deals to train 100,000 software
specialists in China over a 3-year period. Honeywell has built 13
factories in China. Ethan Allen Furniture, which does business in my
State, has cut jobs at three sawmills and 17 U.S. manufacturing plants.
Nobody, nobody, should be surprised at those developments.
China, for American multinational corporations, is a great place to
do business, if by ``doing business'' we mean making products for
export back into the United States that companies previously made here.
Not only are wages extremely low in China, 30, 40, 50 cents an hour,
but if workers attempt to stand up for their rights and they try to
form a union, they get arrested. They go to jail.
That is a great place to do business. In the United States we have
environmental standards. Factories, plants cannot throw their garbage
into the air and into our waterways. Not in China, which is rapidly
becoming one of the most polluted countries in the world.
It is a great place to do business: Low wages, people go to jail when
they form unions. If people stand up and protest against their former
government, they go to jail. Massive pollution. What a wonderful place
to go and support the authoritarian government in China.
{time} 2245
Mr. Speaker, I want to read a quote, and I think some of our Members
and Americans will really be quite surprised by this quote, but I think
it needs to be brought out, and it needs to be discussed, because this
is what is going on in America today. This is a quote from Jeffrey
Immelt, who is the chairman and CEO of General Electric, obviously one
of the largest corporations not only in America, but in the world, and
this is what he said at an investor meeting on December 6, 2002, a
[[Page H10556]]
little less than a year ago. This is the chairman of General Electric:
``When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China,
China. You need to be there. You need to change the way people talk
about it and how they get there. I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from
China is going to grow to $5 billion. We are building a tech center in
China. Every discussion today has to center on China. The cost basis is
extremely attractive. You can take an 18 cubic foot refrigerator, make
it in China, land it in the United States, and land it for less than we
can make an 18 cubic foot refrigerator today, ourselves.'' Jeffrey
Immelt, Chairman, CEO of General Electric.
There it is. This is not an American company; this is a company
prepared to sell out every American worker and run to China where they
can exploit people there and bring that product back into this country
tariff-free. And it is not just General Electric. I quoted GE. I could
have quoted a dozen other corporations.
Mr. Speaker, the trade problem with China is now so severe that it is
not only a question of companies located in the United States moving to
China, but it is companies located in Mexico moving to China. Everyone
knows that Mexican wages are a fraction of the wages in the United
States, but for many American corporations and international
corporations, wages in Mexico are too high, which is why hundreds of
factories have shut down there and have gone to China, causing major
problems for Mexico. Mexico cannot compete with China, and we signed a
trade agreement with them which says that American workers are supposed
to compete against the desperate people of that country.
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 high-tech economy was in the making. It would be a
new economy in which millions of workers, young people, would be able
to be sitting in clean offices, working behind their computers, earning
$50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year. We do not have to worry about those
old factory jobs, let them go to China and Mexico, because we have all
of these high-tech jobs that are going to pay people really good wages.
That is what they told us. Do not worry about blue collar jobs, we have
the white collar jobs.
Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, the advocates of 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 50,000 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. When
Americans argue with the phone company about whether their phone bill
is right or wrong, they are not going to be talking to somebody in
Boston, New York City or Los Angeles; more often than not, they are
going to be talking to somebody in India. That is who we are going to
be talking to, more and more. And that whole phenomenon of outsourcing
information technology jobs is happening more and more.
According to Forester Research, a major consultant on this issue,
they say, ``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 Forester 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. That is your job going abroad.
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.
Recently, 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 much of our textile industry, our footwear industry, our steel
industry, our tool and die industry, our electronics industry, 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
information technology jobs as well.
Mr. Speaker, I want to place into the Record a recent press release
from the University of California at Berkeley. Its headline is, ``UC
Berkeley Study Assesses Potential Impacts of Second Wave of Outsourcing
Jobs From the U.S.,'' and this is the way it begins: ``A ferocious new
wave of outsourcing of white collar jobs is sweeping the United States.
According to a new study published by the University of California
Berkeley, researchers say the trend could leave as many as 14 million
service jobs in the United States vulnerable. Study authors, who are
both researchers at the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban
Economics housed at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, say that not
all of the jobs are likely to be lost, but they note that jobs
remaining in the United States could be subject to pressure to lower
wages, and that the jobs that leave may slow the Nation's job growth or
generate losses in related activities.
What are those jobs? Well, if you are a telephone operator, watch
out. If you deal with health records, if you are a payroll clerk, if
you are a legal assistant or a paralegal, if you are an accountant, if
you are a financial research analyst, if you work behind a computer,
there are folks in India, there are folks in China who can do that job
for a fraction of the pay that you are being paid, and your boss is
interested in taking that job there.
Now, let me be very clear, Mr. Speaker. The United States needs to
have a strong and positive relationship with China. I very much respect
the Chinese people, and I am not here attacking China. I am here saying
that the President of the United States, corporate America, and the
United States Congress have sold out the American worker. China is
doing fine. We do not have to criticize them. They are doing very, very
well. They just sent a man into space. Their economy is exploding. The
problem is not China. The problem is that corporate America, and all of
their money, have influenced the United States Congress and the
President of the United States. And not just this President, but Mr.
Clinton, but Bush the first, but Ronald Reagan before him, into a trade
policy which is a disaster.
The bottom line is that American workers should not and cannot be
asked to compete against desperate people who make 30 cents or 40 cents
an hour. That is wrong.
Now, trade in itself is a good thing. I am not anti-trade. But we
need a trade policy, and I know how heretical it is to say this, but we
actually need a trade policy that works for America and not just large
multinational corporations. We need a trade policy that is fair for the
American workers. We want to export our products that are manufactured
by American workers, not export the jobs that American workers have.
When the New York Yankees are engaged in trade, they do not engage in
free trade by which they trade their best ball player for a third-
string, minor leaguer, they do not do that. The United States has the
most lucrative market in the world, and we are giving it away. Let us
engage in trade that works for us, that works for the other side; not
engage in trade which is decimating American manufacturing and
increasingly, high-tech jobs.
Now is not the time to engage in an accelerated race to the bottom.
We should be talking about how wages go up, not down; how poverty is
eliminated, not increased. And that is why we need to change our trade
policies, and that is why, Mr. Speaker, I have introduced H.R. 3228,
which would repeal permanent Normal Trade Relations with China. Let us
get it out in the open. Let us not be talking about currency. It is
important, but it is not the major issue. The major issue is that our
trade agreement with China, permanent normalized trade relations is a
disaster. We have to repeal it, and then we can engage in a fair trade
agreement with China and with other countries.
I am very happy, Mr. Speaker, to tell my colleagues that since we
have introduced that legislation just a few weeks ago, we have garnered
54 cosponsors and it is strongly bipartisan, 14 Republicans are on
board that legislation right now, and I appreciate that. We have a
tripartisan piece of legislation, and it is something that I know
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the American people support. If any person in the House of
Representatives or elsewhere wants to learn more about that
legislation, we have written it up on our Web site which is
www.bernie.house.gov. We have a lot of information there about trade
and many other important information about what is going on in
Congress.
Mr. Speaker, when we talk about the decline of the middle class, when
we talk about unemployment going up, wages going down, the loss of
decent-paying jobs, we should also talk about what is happening to the
quality of life of so many people in our country. We should recognize
that the average American today is working incredibly long hours in
order to pay the bills. Today, in fact, the average American employee
works, by far, the longest hours of any worker in the industrialized
world, and that 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 1 week of work. Since 1990, the
average American is now working an additional week a year.
Now, I see those workers in the State of Vermont and I see them all
over the country. They are stressed out. They do not have enough
vacation time. They are working day and night just to pay the bills.
Again, we want to ask ourselves this simple question: What is going on
in our country when we have increased productivity, more technology
and, yet, more and more workers earning lower real, inflation-accounted
for wages, and they are working incredibly long hours? What is going on
in our economy?
The bottom line there is that we have got to begin to create an
economy that works for the middle class and not just for the very, very
rich. We have to create an economy where people are earning more income
so they can work fewer hours, so they have more time to spend in
leisure and with their kids and with their families.
I have talked, Mr. Speaker, 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 Wall Street economy. But let us look for a moment at those
people who are not even in the middle class. They have not made it into
the middle class, those people who are living in poverty. Sadly, Mr.
Speaker, while the rich become richer, 1.3 million more Americans
became poor and entered poverty just in the last year.
{time} 2300
We now have 34.8 million people who now live in poverty. In the midst
of those people, Mr. Speaker, and what is happening, people 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.
And I wonder how it is that in this great institution we can lower
taxes for billionaires, but I have not heard one word from the
President of the United States about the need to raise the minimum wage
above the pathetic level of $5.15 an hour.
Now, how does somebody survive who makes $5.15 an hour or $6 an hour.
Does anybody care? Well, I will tell you how some of them do it. After
working 40 hours a week, some of these workers, full-time employees, go
to sleep, not in their houses, not in their apartments, but in their
automobiles because they cannot afford the housing units that are
available in their region.
And what, Mr. Speaker, about the 43.6 million Americans who lack any
health insurance at all? What happens to those people? That is over 15
percent of our population. And what about the 3\1/2\ million people who
will experience homelessness this year, 1.3 million of them children?
And what about our elderly citizens who cannot afford their
prescription drugs, who shrug their shoulders and nod their heads when
doctors write out a prescription because they do not have the money to
fill those prescriptions? How many of them die? How many of them see a
deterioration in their health?
And what about the veterans, the veterans who have put their lives on
the line defending this country and then try to get into a VA hospital
that they are entitled to get into but they find out that they have to
be placed on a waiting list? They were not placed on a waiting list
when they were going off to fight, but now to get the health benefits
they are entitled to, they are placed on a waiting list.
And just last year the President of the United States, after giving
huge tax breaks to the richest 1 percent, threw over 150,000 veterans
off of VA health care. Tax breaks for billionaires, inadequate funding
for our veterans.
In the last several years we have seen huge increases in health
insurance costs. And with the increase of unemployment, we have seen
more and more working people lose their health insurance. And what
happens to those people? What happens if you have no health insurance
and you have an automobile accident and you end up in the hospital?
Well, I tell you what happens. You go bankrupt. And the largest single
cause of bankruptcy, personal bankruptcy in this country are for people
who cannot pay the medical costs that have been generated because of an
accident or an illness.
Mr. Speaker, our health care system today is a disgrace and is in a
state of disintegration. More and more people are uninsured and more
and more people are underinsured, that is, they have to pay higher and
higher copayments, higher and higher deductibles, higher and higher
premiums. There are millions of Americans today who have insurance, but
who hesitate to go to the doctor when they should be going because they
cannot afford the deductible and the copayment. And doctors will tell
you that the patients they are seeing today are far sicker than the
patients they used to see because people simply cannot afford payments
out of their own pocket.
In my mind, the only solution to our health care crisis, the only
right thing to do to really address the disintegration of our health
care system is 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 as a
right of citizenship.
The reality of our health care nonsystem is not only that 43 million
Americans are uninsured, not only that more and more are underinsured,
not only that we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription
drugs; but the reality is that this system is the most wasteful and
bureaucratic system in the world. Many people do not know this, but in
the United States we spends twice as much as the Canadians, three times
as much per person as the United Kingdom spends. And those countries
provide health care to all of their people.
And study after study shows that if we moved toward a single-pay
national health care system, we can guarantee health care to all of our
people, quality health care, freedom of choice for the doctor that you
want to go to and not spend one penny more than we are currently
spending on our disintegrating nonsystem. And, Mr. Speaker, that is
what we have got to do. We can no longer tolerate the disgrace of tens
of millions of people being uninsured, people going bankrupt because
they get ill, people delaying going to the doctor.
In areas of this country dental care is a disaster. Children have
rotting teeth in their mouths because there are no dentists who will
treat them or dentists available in the area. We need to finally move
toward a national health care system and make health care a right of
all people.
Now, Mr. Speaker, those are some of the problems facing our country.
Poverty is increasing. Middle class is shrinking. Rich are growing
richer. Large corporations and their CEOs, while they hide behind the
American flag and they tell us how much they love America, they are
prepared to throw millions of American workers out on the street and
move to an authoritarian China because they can make more money there.
Now, I wish I could say, Mr. Speaker, that the Bush administration is
in any rational way responding to these problems. But I think it really
would be impossible to say that. Instead of addressing the very serious
problems facing our veterans, facing our children, facing public
education, facing the fact that middle-class families are finding it
harder and harder to send their kids to college, instead of addressing
the crisis of the high cost of prescription
[[Page H10558]]
drugs, the proudest achievement of the Bush administration is huge tax
breaks, 40 percent of which went to the wealthiest 1 percent.
And in the midst of all of this, in the midst of workers working
longer hours for lower wages, the decline of manufacturing, the Bush
administration, if one can believe it, is now attacking overtime pay
for American workers. Can you imagine that? Attacking overtime pay for
American workers and trying to undo laws that have been on the books
for decades which say that if you work over 40 hours a week you will
get time and a half.
I am very proud that a number of Republicans joined many of us
Democrats, Independents, on the floor of this House to say that that is
wrong and that in fact we were not going to cut back on the overtime
pay that workers earn and deserve.
Now, when we talk about the Bush administration, we should also point
out a very strange irony. The President considers himself a
conservative. That is fine. But, generally speaking, conservatives have
told us over and over again, year after year after year, what a
terrible thing it is to grow the deficit and grow the national debt
because when you do that they have told us, and they were right, you
are simply passing on today's problems to our children and our
grandchildren. Over and over again I have heard from these podiums
right here how terrible it is to grow the deficit. Well, guess what? We
now have the largest deficit this year in modern American history and
the largest national debt that we have ever had.
{time} 2310
In the midst of that and accelerating that deficit and accelerating
that national debt are the huge tax breaks that the President and the
Republican leadership have given to the wealthy.
Now some people, many conservatives, they say why would a
conservative President grow the deficit and grow the national debt.
That is not conservative. Let me suggest my view as to why they are
doing that. We can all understand that if the wealthy contribute large
amounts of money, you are going to give them a tax break. I think that
is obscene, but that is nothing new; that is politics. But there is
something more cynical going on here. That is, I believe, by driving up
the national debt and the deficit, what the President is saying is that
we will be so deeply in debt that we have got to tear apart many of the
important social programs that have protected tens and tens and
millions of Americans.
It is my opinion that in many respects this President wants to undue
many of the major gains that were won by working people over the last
100 years and bring us back to the 19th century where workers had no
guarantees, and when trouble struck them and their families, they were
dependent on charity and the largess of the wealthy.
I think that is one of the reasons why this national debt is going
up, so the President and future Presidents will be able to say we can
no longer afford to maintain Social Security; let us privatize it. We
can no longer afford to protect Medicare; let us privatize it. Let us
do away with Medicaid. Let us do away with the Veterans Administration.
Let us do away with Pell grants. We cannot afford it. I think what this
administration is doing, and this is the most right-wing administration
in modern history, is essentially trying to remove all of the
protections that the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the young have
and were won over the last 100 years. That is what I think is going on,
and I think that is a very, very dangerous trend.
Mr. Speaker, let me conclude my remarks by mentioning that this
weekend I am going to be going to Madison, Wisconsin, to participate in
a major media conference where we expect some 1,500 people from all
over the country. I want to congratulate some of the organizers of that
conference, Bob McChesney, John Nichols and many others for putting it
together. The issue that they are going to be talking about and I will
be talking about is the danger that faces our country when a handful of
huge media conglomerates increasingly own and control what we see,
hear, and read.
On June 2, the FCC by a 3-2 vote voted to make a bad situation worse
and to allow even fewer large media conglomerates to control more and
more media. That certainly will be one of the many issues that that
conference will be dealing with.
I believe it is a very frightening day for democracy when so few
large corporations control so much of the flow of information in this
country. And if we are not able to overturn that FCC decision, and I
and many of us are working hard on that, the day could come in the not-
too-distant future where in a community like Burlington, Vermont, you
can have one company owning the major television station, the major
newspaper, and a number of radio stations. That is one of the rules
that was undone; the prevention of that was one of the rules that the
FCC just eliminated.
Now the good news is that the United States Senate, the other body,
voted for a resolution of disapproval against that by a 55-40 vote.
Liberals and conservatives came together, Republicans and Democrats
came together and said that is not what media should become in America.
Mr. Speaker, I have a letter which has 205 signatures on it for the
Speaker of the House, and it says to the Speaker, let the U.S. House of
Representatives have a vote on doing what the other body did. Let us
also have the opportunity to vote for a resolution of disapproval
regarding the FCC decision. Three million Americans have contacted the
FCC, and I think we should listen to those Americans, and I think the
Speaker should give us a vote.
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