[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 19]
[House]
[Pages 27084-27091]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




          RULING CLASS HAS COMPLETELY PACIFIED SWINDLED CLASS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bishop of Utah). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from New York (Mr. 
Owens) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, it is near the end of the session, and I have 
listened closely to the comments of my colleagues just leaving the 
floor, and I think they were all appropriate at this time for us to 
take a hard look at money matters most. I would like to discuss a 
number of issues which relate to resources and money.
  I have chosen to sort of use a theme of class warfare. There is no 
class warfare in America. When we raise that issue, people get excited. 
I agree with everybody who says there is no class warfare. The problem 
is the ruling class has completely pacified the swindled classes. The 
swindled class includes more than the working class, I assure you. The 
simple-minded notion of the communist, that there is a war of working-
class folks against the rich, et cetera, that is very simple-minded. It 
is much more complicated than that. There are swindled classes in our 
democracy, and they are not fighting

[[Page 27085]]

back so there is no war. One of the duties of the Congress should be to 
make certain that we stir our people up and start a war, an overt war. 
That is what democracy ought to be all about, a war of ideas and a war 
of confrontations with policies and principles that guide the way we 
live.

                              {time}  2145

  The whole system of checks and balances built into our Constitution 
and our government in a very formal way is very important. Those checks 
and balances have kept the Nation going in some critical times. They 
have stopped the hysterical from overriding and overruling the logical 
and the reasonable. They have done a number of things, the formal 
checks and balances. But beyond the formal checks and balances, 
democracy has to have a whole lot of informal checks and balances. The 
labor unions, the town meeting maverick who gets up and challenges the 
school board. There is a whole set of people who are a part of a checks 
and balances system. The newspapers, the magazines, the media. All that 
is part of the checks and balances.
  When some part of that checks and balances system goes silent or 
becomes dormant, then we are in trouble. I think that we have large 
numbers of people in classes who are silent and dormant, pacified at 
this point, and that is the problem.
  This is my prevailing and my overwhelming thought as we near the end 
of the first session of the 108th Congress, that we are a Nation that 
has no class warfare because the ruling class has completely pacified 
the swindled classes. I think it is important to note that today is 
election day. In a democracy we should not ever minimize or trivialize 
any election day. But the Republican majority that runs this House has 
chosen to bring us back to Washington here on election day when every 
public official ought to be close to his constituency. If we think 
voting is important, then any election, whether it is a local election, 
a State election, it is important. It is ridiculous that we are here 
today. It is symptomatic of what is wrong in terms of a handful of 
people making stupid decisions. I think that the leadership of this 
House has done that in bringing us back here to deal with two 
ceremonial bills. We did not have to come back because the Nation 
needed some basic decision to govern, some decision related to the 
budget or some decision related to the war. We came back for two 
ceremonial bills. That is part of the problem, the way this House has 
been run.
  As we approach the end of this session, we should reflect on that. In 
this session, Democrats have been shut out of any kind of meaningful 
participation. It is amazing how the Constitution is one thing, but the 
rules of the House are another. There is no check and balance built 
into the rules. In other words, the rules of the House are established, 
and there is nowhere you can go to appeal the way the rules are 
established or the way they are executed. In our checks and balances, 
we have a problem because the legislative body, the executive body and 
the Supreme Court, the judicial, are three separate bodies. There are 
checks on the executive body. There are definitely checks. Both the 
legislative body and the judicial body can check the executive section 
of our government. But there is no check on the rules of the House. 
There is nowhere to go. So we have had totalitarian rule in this House 
during this session. We have had the least amount of participation and 
the least productivity and the most totalitarian set of rules here in 
this first session of the 108th Congress.
  As we come to the end, part of the process of swindling all the 
classes is certainly carried out by the ruling class of the majority 
Republicans here in this House. It is not a pleasant thing to stand 
here and say this and admit that we are the greatest and most powerful 
legislative body anywhere in the world at this point, but the Members 
of this body are treated in a very trivial manner. We are like ants. 
Certainly if you are a Democratic Member here, you are like an ant 
shoved aside.
  Recent outrage was expressed by the gentleman from New York (Mr. 
Rangel), who stormed into a meeting, a conference meeting. He felt he 
belonged there. The school books and the textbooks still say that 
legislation is made in a certain way. Both Houses of Congress vote 
separately, the House votes, the Senate votes, and they come together 
in a conference committee to iron out the differences. That is what the 
civic book says. That is the way the Founding Fathers meant for it to 
happen. But with Republicans in charge of both the House and the 
Senate, they have chosen to just shut out the Democrats in the 
conference process, as they have chosen in many cases to bring 
legislation to the floor on very short notice, with no participation, 
and on and on it goes.
  I am not going to waste anybody's time with a litany of the things 
that have gone wrong here. But I think the American people, and our 
colleagues, I am addressing the House, my colleagues, wake up. We are 
part of the process of allowing the ruling class to continue to 
overwhelm, pacify, and exploit the swindled classes.
  I think it is important to look at the end of this session in terms 
of unfinished business, and some of that was discussed by my colleagues 
who preceded me. It all fits together. What is happening and not 
happening in one area flows into another, just as all the elections 
that are taking place at the various levels, State and municipal today, 
are interwoven with what we do and what we can accomplish here. Local 
governments are very important. They have an impact on people, probably 
greater than any other level of government.
  I have served in every level of government. I served as a 
commissioner in New York City government. I served as a State senator 
in the State legislature, and I am a Member of Congress. Having served 
at all three levels, nothing is more important than the people who are 
on the front lines, who are the most important in the dialogue and 
delivery of policies and services and programs to ordinary citizens. 
They are on the front lines. It is the hardest job level in terms of 
governing that we have, the local level. Therefore, we should not 
trivialize city council elections, local county legislature elections. 
We should not tear our Congresspeople away from that and bring them to 
Congress and have them do nothing and not have them participate in the 
process of the citizens dealing with that level of government in an 
appropriate way. We are making people suffer a great deal at the local 
level. We are setting our legislators up in counties and cities for 
very difficult jobs in terms of the way in which we are managing the 
resources of the Nation.
  One of the unfinished agenda items is the appropriations process. The 
appropriations process is far from finished, including a very important 
area, Health and Human Services. The Health and Human Services 
appropriation has the appropriation for education. At the local level, 
nothing is more important than education. I want to salute my city's 
mayor. He is a Republican, but I will engage in some nonpartisan or 
crosspartisan praise here.
  The Republican mayor certainly has kept his word in terms of making 
education a priority. I have watched skeptically as things have 
developed in his administration; and the issuance today of a $13.5 
billion proposed capital budget for schools, building, renovation, 
restructuring, equipping with modern equipment, I think, was a step to 
show that for this mayor, education remains a high priority. I am not 
so naive as to believe that the development of the budget and the 
announcement of the capital budget of $13.5 billion means it is going 
to be achieved, that the funds will be there to carry it out; but he 
has made it a priority.
  From some sources, some of that money will be found. It ought to be 
found, some of it, for school construction at the Federal level. Tip 
O'Neill said, ``All politics is local.'' All taxes are local. The only 
retreat to this whole business of the Federal Government has no role in 
education when it is convenient for us, it ought to be well established 
now that the Federal Government has a major role in education

[[Page 27086]]

and has played a role throughout our history from the time Thomas 
Jefferson established the University of Virginia. If we had not had a 
major role in later on taking that University of Virginia model and 
expanding it into the land grant colleges, the education level of the 
American people at the time of World War I and World War II would have 
been inadequate for the challenges that it faced.
  Not enough credit is ever given to the fact that there was a very 
educated population that made the productive capacity of America 
overwhelm Hitler. There was a very educated population even that hit 
the beaches of Normandy, engineers and a whole set of people who 
probably would not have been there with the same competence if there 
had been no land grant colleges spread throughout a whole Nation where 
we were teaching more than Latin and classics and English composition, 
but also teaching engineering and agriculture, et cetera. Education has 
always played a role.
  We finally, under Lyndon Johnson, began to give aid to elementary and 
secondary education. This President as he came in made a statement and 
took action which showed that he considered education a great priority. 
No Child Left Behind is a law which was the outgrowth of the President 
mobilizing, marshaling all of the Members of Congress behind a bill 
that passed overwhelmingly. It certainly makes a great commitment to 
continue the role of the Federal Government in elementary and secondary 
education.
  The problem is that before the ink was dry on the President's 
signature for the bill, he moved away from his commitment to provide 
funding at a level that would make the bill work, make the law work. 
The $6 billion that was promised is not there. That is part of our 
problem. The appropriations process for Health and Human Services is 
stalled, partially because there are some people who are trying very 
hard to regain that committed $6 billion or some portion of it. The 
appropriations process is stalled for Health and Human Services, I 
think, primarily because the majority party knows that it cannot go to 
America, it cannot go back home and admit that we have neglected 
certain basic needs in education.
  We have maybe complicated the problem by adding mandates, 
requirements through No Child Left Behind that we are not willing to 
fund and made life miserable and more difficult for teachers and 
students, and school reform is suffering instead of being benefited. So 
the appropriations process with respect to Health and Human Services 
should go forward. I hope it will go forward with a break in the logjam 
that creates the funding stream that is necessary to make No Child Left 
Behind live up to its promise.
  Another unfinished business here, I hesitate to even bring it up 
because it has not been discussed at all anywhere in any meaningful 
way, that is, the increase in the minimum wage. It is still stuck where 
we were more than 3 years ago at a $5.15 minimum wage. There is nothing 
on the floor, nothing at the committee level that deals with the 
increase in the minimum wage. It is just tossed aside as being 
inconsequential.
  What does this have to do with swindling people? The working class, 
the working people at the very bottom are the ones who make the minimum 
wage. There are many more than you would imagine, more than 10 million 
in this country still at that level. $5.15 an hour. Those people are 
being swindled. Those people should be protected more by the 
government, if that is the only way we can get the wages up, deal with 
the realities of the 21st century and make certain that employers pay a 
minimum wage. It is not a living wage. Some States have passed what 
they call a living wage. They have calculated how much the cost of 
living is, and they have come up with a living wage. New York has one 
which they passed, but they are not implementing. It is 2 years away 
before they fully implement it. But they recognize that families cannot 
make it on $5.15 an hour, even when two members are working in a family 
of four. $5.15 an hour will not produce enough to take care of a 
family. So minimum wage is very important, if you care about working 
families, if you care about people at the very bottom.
  Ninety-five percent of the troops in Iraq come from working families. 
Ninety-five percent of the troops in our military come from working 
families. They happen to be on the front lines now, but they are a 
class. They are mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and they 
are children trapped in a situation where they cannot realize a decent 
wage. I will talk more about that later.
  In health care, the same thing is true. They cannot depend on the 
government to help guarantee that their families back here have decent 
health care. Health care bankrupts the average middle class family. We 
are not talking about the poor. The very poor, thanks to Lyndon Johnson 
and the Great Society programs, Medicaid, for which not a single member 
of the Republican Party voted, Medicaid, Medicare, a fundamental safety 
net for health care for the poor.

                              {time}  2200

  But there are many who fall outside that net, and some of the people 
who fall outside that net are not working families in the usual sense. 
They are middle-income families who, for various reasons, do not have 
insurance, and when they have to start paying for medical care, some 
have gone bankrupt as a result of trying to pay for health care costs, 
a burden that no family should be asked to bear in certain cases. So we 
have the unfinished business of health care. Prescription drug benefits 
is on the table somewhere. That is just for senior citizens. We just 
started. The need for universal health care, the need for a single-
payer plan, that is like minimum wage. Nobody will discuss that around 
here. All the industrialized nations of the world have something close 
to universal health care, but in our great American democracy, the 
richest Nation that ever existed on the face of earth, we will not even 
discuss a universal health care plan. This 108th Congress is no 
different. A discussion of the prescription drug benefit is frightening 
because there is an attempt to try to make that a means-tested program 
with overtones of welfare that would drive a wedge and set up 
divisiveness among our senior citizens and the families who have to 
support senior citizens.
  Transportation, I understand, is stagnated. We will not have any 
major action on that. Home security and terrorism, two things that are 
high on the agenda of this administration, have made no great 
breakthroughs where they are needed most. I still have police stations 
in my district which have telephone systems that can only take three 
calls at a time. The police precinct serves something like 200,000 or 
300,000 people in a New York police precinct, but the phone systems are 
so old that they can only take three or four calls at a time. We do not 
need a 9/11-type emergency to show us that we have got a problem. 
Everyday citizens are complaining about the fact that that system does 
not work. We do have 911, a number of ways to deal with that, but why 
such antiquated systems?
  The firemen who lost lives in great amounts, more than 300 firemen 
died in the September 11 World Trade terrorism attack. They still do 
not have equipment that is up to par in terms of communication. Many of 
them died because the communication equipment was inadequate, and they 
could not be warned properly about what was happening outside as they 
went up the steps to rescue people. A simple matter of radios that were 
not tuned in to the frequency of police radios and things that we have 
known for some time were a problem. Those problems are not being 
corrected. In the House and the Senate, many Members have talked about 
security in our ports and how vulnerable our ports are, and I heard on 
some television station today about a new program that is being 
launched by the Secretary for Homeland Security, and that is welcomed, 
but it is just beginning to creep off the ground, slowly, because we 
have our priorities diverted into other areas. Each one of these items 
would be getting far more

[[Page 27087]]

attention and could be dealt with in a more realistic way if we did not 
have the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq is a blunder, a quagmire that 
sucks down dollars. It sucks up the energy and the attention of the 
highest policymakers in our government. It destroys lives 
unnecessarily. So the great evil that hangs over this 108th Congress at 
this time is the great blunder of the war in Iraq.
  Accountability for the war in Iraq is unfinished business. We do not, 
as a Congress, have the accountability that we should be able to 
expect. As part of a system of checks and balances, certainly we should 
get more information, we should have more dialogue, we should be told 
more about what the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) had called an 
exit strategy. She talked about a plan to train people, the Iraqi 
police force, the army. When are we going to declare that we have 
sufficiently done that and say we can go home. There are a number of 
questions that she asked earlier tonight that go to the heart of the 
accountability question. Beyond the Permanent Select Committee on 
Intelligence, and they complain that they do not have respect and they 
are not given the kind of accountability that they deserve, but there 
ought to be more general accountability to the Congress and the 
American people about just how we spent the money. Seventy-nine billion 
dollars was appropriated earlier. Now, another $87 billion, and yet the 
question with respect to the helicopter explosion, and it is pretty 
much conceded now that it was a Stinger-missile-type, shoulder missile 
which we call our Stingers. We perfected that in the war against the 
Soviets in Afghanistan. We taught the Taliban how to do that. We gave 
them those modern weapons which helped drive the Soviets out, but we 
learned they are very skilled. The terrorists who came out of the 
Taliban in Afghanistan are very skilled in the use of shoulder 
missiles; plus I understand that they are so well-designed that they 
are fairly easy to use. The helicopter was probably hit by that kind of 
surface-to-air missile fired by one or two people. One question being 
raised is did the helicopter have a device that has been designed to 
protect aircraft from heat-seeking missiles? Was it equipped with it or 
was it not? And the very fact that the question is being raised and 
there is no immediate answer tells me that it was not. If it was 
equipped and it failed, we would have known. We would have been told 
that by now: It was equipped properly, but it failed.
  There are some other questions about how the troops inside the 
helicopter were protected. And these kinds of micromanagement questions 
are being raised all the time. The bulletproof vests, there are two 
types, they say. One just protects them from flak and shrapnel. Another 
protects them from flak, shrapnel, and bullets. And many of our troops 
only have the old one. And on and on it goes. My colleagues who have 
visited Iraq, Republicans as well as Democrats, this is not a partisan 
matter, are very upset by the shabby way in which some things have been 
done. We should have a chance to talk more openly about what is going 
to be done to correct all of this or what exactly is happening. If 
Rumsfeld is the kind of person who just does not want to talk to 
Members of Congress, it is one more reason to call for Rumsfeld's 
resignation. Several people have called for his resignation. I would 
like to add my voice to that. I think in a situation like this, he 
should have been asked to resign long time ago. The President is 
elected. The buck stops with the President. But we ought to say to the 
President that if he wants to show that he is trying to deal with this 
problem, then he has got to get rid of the chief planner, the chief 
policymaker, the person who made the mess. It does not make sense to 
keep Rumsfeld on as the Secretary of Defense if he wants to convince us 
that he is trying to solve this problem. We would like to have a 
dialogue with the President about why he insists on keeping Rumsfeld 
there when such a mess has been made on so many different levels. The 
failure to plan for postwar, what happened after the war, is totally 
unacceptable. It is an outrage because we have been in these situations 
before. There was so much experience and so much knowledge available, 
so much history, that we cannot comprehend how basically intelligent 
men and women could have done such a bad job of anticipating what 
happened. These are not basically intelligent people; these are 
brilliant people. Intellect was not a problem. The problem is mindsets 
and old men indulging in juvenile fantasies about war. All that is part 
of what has happened, and I make these charges and statements, and I 
would love to have a dialogue with somebody to tell me they are not 
true.
  The punishment of corporate crime is part of an economic swindle, 
probably the biggest swindle that the swindled classes suffer from, and 
I repeat, what I am talking about tonight is there is no class warfare 
in America. There is a ruling class which has completely pacified the 
swindled classes, and the present administration here, along with its 
Republican rule in both Houses, have demonstrated how the ruling class 
can be very efficient and very effective in executing its policies, 
even when the policies are wrong. Tax cuts to make the ruling class 
stronger and more powerful at a time when the economy is in trouble.
  Yes, the economy suddenly surged forward, more than 7 percent growth 
in the last quarter, but that is more disturbing than if the economy 
was just dragging along. When we look at the surge forward that took 
place, and we look at the number of jobs that still were lost in the 
last quarter, 47,000 jobs to make up the total of 3.2 million jobs that 
have been lost since the Bush Administration came into power, we are 
having a terrible economic situation develop where the economy can 
improve, profits can go up, wealth can increase, but there are no jobs 
for the working families. There are no jobs for college graduates soon 
because our jobs are being exported. The ruling class has decided they 
can get computer specialists, they can get Ph.D.s, they can get all 
kinds of people by traveling around the world, and they can get them 
for less than one-quarter of the price that they pay here. Computer 
specialists, now the best school for training for computers is not MIT, 
computer and related matters, not MIT and some of the first-rate 
American universities. At the very top is the University of India, and 
everybody is clamoring for their graduates from our corporations. 
Beyond that, at lower levels, people who can do computer work are the 
beneficiaries from India, Pakistan, a few other places. They just 
merely have to learn English. They can be beneficiaries of lower-level 
jobs related to computer services.
  And, also, simple matters like telemarketing, telemarketing now is 
being outsourced at a very rapid rate. Listen carefully, if my 
colleagues have the occasion when somebody calls them about an item, 
especially something related to a big corporation, a utility, listen 
carefully and sometimes we do not have to listen carefully. They have 
been trained to disguise their voices, and those who call Brooklyn from 
India, some of them have got a Brooklyn accent, but I picked up phone 
the other day and there was a person talking from AT&T who had a bit of 
an accent. So I said, ``Where are you calling from?'' And she said, 
``Why are you asking that?'' I said, ``Are you calling from India or 
Pakistan? Where are you calling from?'' So she got a bit ruffled and 
she fell into her real accent. So I knew very well she was not an 
American, and she was calling from some foreign place, having learned 
to speak English very well.
  Telemarketing is not a great job. That is one of the jobs where we 
might call it an entry-level job. A lot of college graduates have got 
out of college and drifted around, cannot find anything else. 
Telemarketing is one of the places they go to get a start. A lot of 
people who have not been to college can find a lot of jobs in 
telemarketing. Telemarketing jobs are going rapidly, and it will go 
right up the ladder. Anybody who thinks they are exempt because they 
have a Ph.D. or a master's degree are going to find that the master's 
degrees of India and Pakistan, even Russia, China, those master's 
degrees and Ph.D.s will be competing at

[[Page 27088]]

much lower wage levels if we do not do something about policy.

                              {time}  2215

  What we do in our government has to deal with the fact that we have 
got a standard of living that is being steadily eroded by this kind of 
exporting of jobs. But corporations are doing that, and there is no 
countervailing force. We waste our time here on ceremonial bills and do 
not even tackle the problem.
  Finally, the failure to punish corporate crime is one of the greatest 
swindles of all that has taken place in the last few years, one of the 
derelictions of duty that has taken place, the worse dereliction of 
duty that has taken place in the last few years.
  The failure to deal with corporate crime, to have the appropriate 
investigations, to have the appropriate follow-up and to punish people 
who have been stealing from the investing class, the middle class, the 
investing class, people who are well off enough to have invested some 
portion of their income, they are the worst victims; not the working 
class, but the middle class, upper-middle class in particular, who had 
extra income to invest.
  I do not know what the figure is, but my colleague who just left the 
floor from North Carolina said it is $4.6 trillion; $4.6 trillion has 
been lost in investment income. It is an astounding figure.
  People have lost that kind of money, many of them. Of course, 
pensioners, people whose pensions got caught up in this. But $4.6 
trillion has been swindled away. These people have been swindled, and 
they are not really fighting back, and nobody is fighting for them. The 
ruling class has prevailed, and they do not even call hearings in 
Congress to really deal with it in a forceful way.
  Enron, the criminals at Enron are still at large. There are a few 
that they put in handcuffs and paraded before the cameras, but it was a 
massive, massive swindle. WorldCom was even larger. Then every day 
there is some new revelation about the way in which the banks are in 
collusion with these swindles. Even the stock market has finally been 
exposed to be riddled with conflicts of interest and all kinds of 
questionable dealings that resulted in income being lost by this class 
of people that had enough money to invest.
  Investors have lost a tremendous amount of money. The ruling class 
has completely prevailed over these investors, and the investors, the 
middle class, upper middle class, educated people, they are now part of 
the swindled class. They join the ranks at the very bottom who cannot 
even get an increase in the minimum wage.
  If there is anything that stands out, it is the way we have failed as 
a Congress to protect our people from the ruling class swindles that 
have taken place. The greatest economic swindle on jobs is the worst. 
Corporate swindles against small investors is probably the most far-
reaching and the most devastating in terms of the volume of stealing 
that is taking place.
  We have got a surge with our jobs lost which shows we are going to 
have more of a swindling taking place at another level of what used to 
be the middle class. We have lost manufacturing jobs. We have given up 
on that.
  We joined in the great argument in many cases. The great argument was 
that we are America, we are ahead of everybody in the area of high-tech 
production. We will be the high-tech gurus of the world. We will 
provide high-tech services. And we still do lead everybody else in 
terms of nations. But the assumption that this is automatic, that, as 
we surrender manufacturing jobs, that automatically we will benefit 
from the new world order, where global trade will mean trading services 
as well as trading goods, and we will trade our services, we will 
provide the innovations, we will provide the science, all of those 
assumptions might have made sense 10 years ago; but you would have to 
be blind not to see that China is not waiting to develop its high-tech 
class, its high-tech workers. Russia certainly always has had high-tech 
workers; they have just been out of the world markets, and many other 
nations have, as a matter of national policy, set out to take over 
certain sectors of the high-tech economy.
  It is not by accident that China sent a man up in space. They have 
been sending up satellites for some time. The man in space in China is 
just one more piece of evidence that shows you how hard they are 
working at this high-tech development of high-tech personnel brain 
power.
  The brain power is the question, not military power. Military power 
is backed by brain power. That is why we won the war in Iraq so 
rapidly. It was by a tremendous amount of brain power that went into 
developing the weapons system. But that is not the way of the future. 
We have done it probably for the last time, made the mistake of 
believing we can really gain a greater foothold for democracy or for 
our economy or anything by military action against a nation as large as 
Iraq. It is a pitfall, a bottomless pit that we have fallen into, and 
we must get out of it and get out of it with honor. But we cannot do 
that unless we make some radical changes in the way we do things, the 
swindle I will come to later, because lives are being swindled away 
from American citizens.
  The refusal to consider the minimum wage, I want to come back to 
that. The refusal to consider the minimum wage increase is the most 
hard-hearted, cold-blooded piece of mindset that we are faced with. It 
originates from Democrats and Republicans, unfortunately.
  We have an economic guru, a person who has been guiding our economic 
policy in this country for some time now, Alan Greenspan. Alan 
Greenspan does not believe in the minimum wage. Alan Greenspan thinks 
we should not have a minimum wage. He is a disciple of Ayn Rand, the 
individualist, great fascist, rugged individualist, in my opinion.
  Ayn Rand said the government should never be involved in the lives of 
people, it should never interfere with business; we do not need 
government until we have a war. Ayn Rand said we need government only 
for wars. So the government should use its power to send soldiers off 
to die to protect the rugged individuals, the capitalists, the 
Greenspans, the Rands. People should go off to die to protect them, but 
it should ignore their health care, ignore laws which establish minimum 
wages and allows them to earn a decent living. All that should be 
ignored. It is all unnecessary.
  I marvel at how long they have gotten away with this and how revered 
Mr. Greenspan is in this Capitol still by Democrats and Republicans. He 
has been reappointed twice by a Democratic President, and nobody wants 
to touch Mr. Greenspan.
  I think we should dwell for a moment on the fact that all the surveys 
show that the soldiers fighting in Iraq, like the soldiers who died in 
Vietnam, like the soldiers who died in Korea, mostly come from working 
families, people who would benefit from government actions such as an 
increase in the minimum wage.
  We have a situation where basic questions need to be asked, about 
whether or not an individual should have the right to refuse to go to 
war. We had a draft in the case of Korea; we had a draft in the case of 
Vietnam. If this administration is reelected, and I say this standing 
here on this 4th of November, 2003, if this administration is 
reelected, there will be a draft, because there is only one way to 
solve their problems, and that is more manpower.
  I would like to see them put more manpower in Iraq right away, 
because I think part of the solution to the problem in Iraq is you have 
to secure the place and you need bodies to secure the place. You need 
soldiers to secure the place. For political reasons they want to keep 
the number of soldiers involved in Iraq down low, but by that political 
decision we are going to lose more lives. Every life lost in any war is 
unfortunate, but a life lost in the war in Iraq, a war which never 
should have been, a blunder, a disgrace, that life is much worse, the 
tragedy is much worse, because it is needless. We are going to lose 
more people because of the politics of not putting enough troops in 
place to secure Iraq.
  While I am on the subject, I would like to mention there is a 
conference

[[Page 27089]]

being scheduled by my colleague, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. 
Davis), sometime next week, I think it is the 14th of November, a 
conference on the black male and the problems faced by black males in 
America. Of course that conference will have to deal with the first and 
greatest problem, the tremendous unemployment problem faced by black 
males, by young people in general; and our society as a whole better 
take note that things that happen to blacks always get multiplied and 
transferred into the larger society.
  There was a time when drug addictions and problems related to drugs 
started out in the African American community. The hustlers and the 
criminals and organized crime took advantage of the weaknesses in the 
African American community. They got a base there. They capitalized and 
expanded and got such a tremendous base until there is nowhere in 
America right now, small towns, large towns, nowhere, where the menace 
of drugs, particularly for young people, is not there.
  So the menace of unemployment on a mass scale, unemployment of a 
group of people, will not stay just with the black males. But right now 
it is very high, 25 percent. Before you get into the figures of how 
many unemployed there are, look at the figures that relate to the lack 
of jobs and the lack of any stabilizing factors in their lives, like 
the figures, the numbers in prison, on probation and on parole. 
Staggering numbers of young black males are in prison, on parole or on 
probation.
  Even Secretary Rumsfeld brought up the subject of education in one of 
his interviews, where he talked about the dilemma that we face as we 
fight terrorism in the world. The dilemma is that the terrorists are 
always training more people. They have sort of an unlimited supply of 
potential terrorists; and they are even training them formally, openly, 
in the madrassas, madrassas, particularly he mentioned madrassas of 
Pakistan.
  Well, that is an appropriate observation, because the Taliban came 
out of the madrassas of Pakistan. The Taliban did not organize 
themselves by themselves, but the cannon fodder, the personnel of the 
Taliban, are graduates from the madrassas of Pakistan. These are 
schools that were set up by the fundamentalists, Islamic 
fundamentalists. They taught them reading, writing, science, and 
hatred. They still are going.
  I visited Pakistan. Because I have a large Pakistan community in the 
lower part of my district in Brooklyn, they kept inviting me to come 
visit. Three years ago I visited Pakistan. Because I was most 
interested in education, I was taken around to various places, three 
cities, and talked to people, visited schools, et cetera. It became 
apparent to me after one day that they had no respect for their 
education system.
  Public education was a very low priority in Pakistan. So the public 
education was receiving pennies, while they were spending money 
heavily, of course, on the military and in a number of other places. 
But public education was still being treated as though it was trivial, 
inconsequential. So the madrassas, the religious private schools, step 
in and fill the vacuum by providing reading, writing, science, math, 
food. You get a meal. A mother who sends a child, they are mostly 
males, sends her son to a madrassas, knows he is going to get a decent 
meal, be taken care of all day, and get basic education.
  If you have no public school system, then who can blame a mother or 
father for sending their child to what does exist? The madrassas of 
Pakistan and a number of other places, these madrassas, by the way, are 
able to do what they do because they get funding from Saudi Arabia and 
some other rich oil countries, but mostly Saudi Arabia, because they 
are based on the Wahhabi sect. I am not well versed enough to know 
whether it is a sect or not, but there is a group that pushes what they 
call Islamic fundamentalism. It is based in Saudi Arabia, and they have 
financed these madrassas in Pakistan and other places. So they will 
keep going. Our ally, Saudi Arabia, has not indicated they will stop 
funding it.
  But for a parent, it is an alternative that makes sense, if you do 
not have a public education system. The public education system in this 
country in areas where the black males are concentrated has been 
treated as a low priority, trivialized.

                              {time}  2230

  Obvious problems have not been dealt with. You can look at the 
physical facilities and the lack of equipment and supplies and books 
and before you get to the quality of construction and see that there is 
a great difference, it is almost as if you had de jour, de jour 
segregation in our big cities. When you look at the contrast between 
the way our big cities look in one section versus in another, or the 
way our big city schools look in the cities, the inner city versus the 
suburbs, you can see the great difference, as if somebody had 
consummated a decision to give inferior education to the African 
American students and to not deal with their needs.
  The greatest need, of course, is outside of school, and that is 
income. Families need income in order to support children in school. 
School children's families are struggling to survive and are inevitably 
going to suffer. They are going to suffer. I do not see that it is 
inevitable that they will not succeed, because I came from a very poor 
family. My father never earned more than the minimum wage, and he had 
eight children. So you cannot get much poorer than we were and, yet, 
just about every member of my family has to some degree achieved some 
degree of success.
  We have those stories of very strong families and people who 
overcome. The African American community would have withered away a 
long time ago if we did not have these people who overcome: the super 
people. But that is not human nature. Most human beings faced with 
tremendous adversity do not overcome, they succumb. They succumb to 
drugs, they succumb to the easy money on the streets selling drugs or 
other kinds of crime, and our dilemma with the black male conference is 
that we do not know how we are going to get out of this without the 
help of government. It is such a monumental problem, such a huge 
problem, we do not know how to get out of it.
  Of course, the prejudices in our policymaking do not help at all. The 
fact that our prisons are already full of people who really should not 
be there and that many of the black males who go back on the street 
after serving time in prison, never should have been put in prison 
because they had drug problems, drug addiction problems. And all 
intelligent people agree that the first avenue of attack for a drug 
addiction problem ought to be treatment. But these people have never 
been in treatment in large numbers, and it is generally considered a 
luxury to provide treatment for a drug addict.
  Of course, if a drug addict happens to be Rush Limbaugh, not only 
does he get the best treatment in the world because he can afford it, 
but he also does not admit that he is an addict. I do not know whether 
what he did was criminal or not, but I do take exception, and I resent 
the way in which the information about Rush Limbaugh's situation is 
being handled. I know of many young people who have been put in prison 
and served terms for the kinds of things that are implied in Rush 
Limbaugh's behavior. Definitely, he was an addict seeking drugs that 
were not prescribed, or seeking amounts of drugs that were not 
prescribed.
  I have been told that it is intemperate, it is bad manners, it maybe 
is uncivilized to criticize Rush when he is down, but if there is 
anybody who ought to be criticized when he is down, it is Rush 
Limbaugh. Heartless, merciless, he specialized in ridiculing people. He 
is the kind of person who calls for drug addicts to be put in jail. So 
why not comment on the fact that there is one standard for the black 
males and females who happen to get caught up in drug use, drug users, 
and another standard for another set of people. The swindled set of 
people. There are large numbers of blacks, but the number of whites is 
increasing all the time. The number of other groups is increasing. The 
number of females is steadily increasing who are caught up in using

[[Page 27090]]

drugs, and they get into the criminal system that refuses to provide 
adequate treatment, but will spend $15,000 or $20,000 a year to keep 
them in prison, and $15,000 is a low figure. Some prisons in New York 
and a few other places, it is $30,000 a year to keep a person in 
prison. Half the people in prison are there for nonviolent crimes 
relating to drugs. But Rush Limbaugh can go to a private place and 
people are afraid to say he has committed a crime.
  I would like to read a bit from an article that appeared in the Miami 
Herald on October 12 related to Rush Limbaugh's situation. The article 
was written by two reporters, and I will not submit the entire piece 
for the Record, but I want to read some sections. Lisa Anderson and 
Raoul Mowatt wrote this article and I quote from certain sections of 
it. One quote: ``Limbaugh did not specify if the medicines he abused 
had been prescribed. And he did not address allegations by his former 
maid, Wilma Cline, that she had procured OxyContin, Lorcet and other 
painkillers for him.''
  ``At the present time, the authorities are conducting an 
investigation,'' Mowatt said, ``and I have been asked to limit my 
public comments until this investigation is complete.''
  Quoting again, from the article, ``I do wonder if it is going to 
cause any softening in the way he perceives personal failings and 
weaknesses in others,'' said Rendall, who coauthored the book ``The Way 
Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error.'' A critic of him said, 
``I wonder if this is going to cause any softening in the way he 
perceives personal failings and weaknesses in others.''
  Maybe we should all pray for Rush Limbaugh. Why not pray for him as 
we pray for other addicts. But I think somewhere there ought to be an 
acknowledgment of the fact that he is an addict and some request for 
forgiveness.
  To continue from the article, ``He has been incredibly uncharitable. 
He has relentlessly exploited the personal weaknesses and failings of 
others. He has not extended the same understanding one suspects he 
would like to be getting right now,'' said Rendall. ``Some of his 
listeners are bound to be shaken by the fact that Rush has feet of 
clay.''
  ``While humility has never been the style of the bombastic Limbaugh, 
a dose of it might not hurt his image,'' said Harrison, another person 
who was asked to comment. ``Well, I guess he has to now join the rest 
of humanity and fess up to the fact that some of us are not as strong 
as others. If he is a hypocrite, well then so be it. He is not the only 
one.''
  ``Indeed, Limbaugh hardly is the first prominent conservative figure 
to tumble from the realm of sanctimony to shame. Once wildly popular 
television evangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert famously fell from 
their pulpits in the late 1980s, undone by missions of adultery and 
addiction to pornography, respectively. And just 5 months ago, former 
Reagan administration education Secretary William Bennett, best-selling 
author of such moralistic tomes as ``The Book of Virtues'' was revealed 
to have a major gambling habit. In Limbaugh's case, many thought his 
conservative listeners would be compassionate. This is a beloved man to 
his listeners. It would only draw them closer like a family gets closer 
in a time of crisis. The worst thing Limbaugh could do is to return to 
the air in too chastened a form,'' said one commentator. ``The only 
thing that can destroy Rush Limbaugh's career is Rush Limbaugh suddenly 
becoming a boring person, and it doesn't seem that he is about to 
become that,'' implying that to be compassionate is to be boring. To be 
tolerant is to be boring.
  The excitement of Rush Limbaugh is that he has no mercy on people in 
trouble. It is another way in which the ruling class dominates the 
swindled classes. Rush Limbaugh is a jester. He is a joker. The kings 
had jesters, you know, and jokers. Sometimes they were very well paid. 
He stands for the ruling class and provides laughs for them by 
denigrating the poorest people who are being swindled at the bottom.
  The great education reform swindle takes place because we do not 
recognize the problem that I just cited in Pakistan. If we do not 
educate people, we run the risk of them falling into the hands of a 
Taliban. I am not going to make any extreme projections, but Islam is 
the fastest growing religion in America today, and the people who are 
converting to Islam are black males. If you want to know what is 
relevant, how to relate one thing to another, black males are the 
people converting to Islam faster than anybody else. I am not saying 
that they are ready to rush out and become terrorists and join the 
Taliban, but it is an interesting development. They see something there 
that I do not quite understand, but it ought to be watched and 
understood.
  People who are treated like dirt, if they are drug addicts, of 
course, they are even below that level, they are going to respond, the 
whole class is going to respond in ways which are not healthy for 
America. The great health care swindle goes on, the people who are 
going bankrupt, and a lot of them are middle class and upper middle 
class. I mentioned them before.
  But the biggest swindle, of course, is the war on Iraq swindle. The 
war on Iraq swindle is the most outrageous of all. Dollars and lives 
are going down the drain, and the people who are running the operation 
refuse to be accountable to the Congress of the United States, and the 
leadership of the Congress of the United States refuses to make them 
accountable. They do not demand. The leadership is the Republican 
majority. They do not demand that the people come here and tell us what 
they are doing, how they intend to proceed with the spending of $87 
billion, and when we can expect an exit.
  The gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), who was on the floor 
earlier, cited the fact that if you took the $87 billion and divided it 
among the Members of Congress, it will be above $200 million for each 
congressional district in America; that $87 billion would be more than 
$200 million. And he talked about all of the things we could do with 
that in terms of building schools, supporting better health care, et 
cetera. But those dollars are swindled away from the American people 
who are going to have to pay the bill with interest later on.
  We have the swindle that refuses to spend dollars on targeted 
revenue-sharing back to our localities that are in trouble who are 
cutting the budgets of schools and services, so those localities can 
get through this recession, which they say is almost over; that kind of 
cooperation is needed. As I said before, disdain for the municipal 
elections, the local elections that are taking place today, that 
disdain is reflected in the way we appropriate money. We have not come 
to their aid. The Federal Government is the one place that does not 
have to balance the budget. New York City, New York State, 42 of the 
States were in such budget trouble that they had to cut the school 
budgets and, in some cases, the school year was cut. But the Federal 
Government has not come to their aid.
  So as we end this session, as we are nearing the end of the session, 
I would like for my colleagues to reflect on the fact that there is no 
class warfare in America. The ruling class has completely pacified the 
swindled classes.
  I want to end it with a little piece that summarizes that. It is a 
rap poem I put in the Congressional Record on Wednesday, July 16 called 
``Let the Rich Go First.'' This is as a result of my anger when on July 
10, there was a vote to stop the expenditure of funds which were being 
allocated for the study of the Wage an Hour Act to cut overtime and 
that vote was defeated by the Republican majority. At a time when we 
were voting to stop paying overtime to working families, shortly after 
that, it was announced that the soldiers in Iraq would have to be kept 
there longer than expected. Instead of 6 months, they may be kept there 
for a year. Reservists would be in for a year instead of 6 months. So 
overtime for the people dying and fighting in Iraq, we are fighting 
overtime for payment of working families.
  ``Let The Rich Go First.''

[[Page 27091]]

  ``Working families keep your soldiers at home, for overtime in Iraq 
no cash, no comp time, not even gratitude, Republicans intrude to 
exempt all heroes, no combat rotation, life on indefinite probation, 
scrooges running the Nation. To the front lines let the rich go first, 
for blood they got a thirst, let the superstars drink it in the 
glorious trenches; leave the disadvantaged on the benches. Welfare moms 
have a message for the masters: Tell Uncle Sam his welfare pennies he 
can keep for food stamps we refuse to leap through your hoops like 
beasts; just promise to leave our sons alone and we will find our own 
feasts. To Uncle Sam we offer a bargain: don't throw us dirty crumbs, 
don't treat us like bums and then demand the full measure of devotion; 
our minds are now in motion, class warfare is not such a bad notion.

                              {time}  2245

  Your swindle will not last. Recruiters we will not let pass. Finally 
we opened our eyes, each family is a private enterprise. Each child a 
precious prize. We got American property rights, before our children 
die in war. This time we will choose the fights. Let the rich go first: 
They worry about the overtime we abuse; the battlefields they always 
choose. Their estates have the most to lose. Let the rich go first.

                          ____________________