[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3185-3189]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  THE EPIC STRUGGLE OF PUBLIC SERVANTS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, today in the State of Ohio, the State of 
Wisconsin and the State of Indiana there are epic struggles underway 
where those who serve the public, who teach our children, who police 
our streets, who fight the fires and who perform a myriad of services 
at a State, county and municipal level, are under attack. Their wages 
are under attack and their benefits, pensions and working conditions 
are under attack. And these public workers are being made the 
scapegoats in all of the budget challenges which States face. They are 
now blaming the workers.
  Our whole economy has been turned into a somewhat efficient engine 
that takes the wealth of the American people and accelerates the wealth 
to the top. That, after all, is what our tax system is about. That's 
what Wall Street is about. That's what banking is about. That's what 
our energy policy is about, taking the wealth of millions and giving it 
to a few oil companies. If you examine every area of our economy, 
you'll see that we're at a time in the history of America where the 
rich truly are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the 
middle class is getting destroyed.
  Enter public workers, people who have dedicated their lives to public 
service, people who are truly public servants in the truest sense of 
the word, people who were told that if they agreed to public service 
that they would have certain guarantees. And so they dedicated their 
lives.

                              {time}  1550

  Ohio has a new Governor, a person who I served with in this House, 
and from the moment he has come into office, he and his supporters, 
have run an agenda that is aimed at vitiating the rights of public 
workers. This resulted yesterday in the passage by a single vote in the 
Ohio Senate of S.B. 5, a bill that will strip collective bargaining 
rights just about across the board from public workers, that would take 
away public employees' right to strike, that would make the penalty for 
a strike removal with replacement workers that will open the door to 
privatization of services.
  Now, my read of what is going on in Ohio, which is my home State, is 
this: That by attempting to crush public workers, by telling them you 
will not have any ability to negotiate your benefits, you will not have 
any ability to negotiate your working conditions, your health benefits, 
your pension, these provisions are not subject to discussion; the 
number of people working with you at any time, not subject to 
discussion. What has happened is that we have seen accomplished an 
economic attack on workers which will lead to them working for less, 
but opening the door to privatization schemes which, Mr. Speaker, works 
like this: You make public workers the issue. You say that they are 
paid too much when I have here a matter for the record from the 
Economic Policy Institute which says that Ohio public sector workers 
are undercompensated compared to private sector counterparts. But 
facts, unfortunately, mean little in this debate.
  But you tell the public that these public workers are overpaid. And 
this new law, Senate Bill 5, would enable the State of Ohio to do this, 
you then say we are going to privatize this section of the workforce. 
We are going to put the work out for bids. We are going to get a 
private company in here to do it. And oh, we promise it will be done 
more efficiently.
  While the taxpayers then go to sleep, they wake up one day and they 
discover that what has happened is that they have permitted a 
privatization of their services and they end up inevitably paying more 
and getting less. The corporations walk away with the profits; the 
privatized workers get paid less in order to enable the corporations to 
make more money.
  So ultimately what Senate Bill 5 in Ohio will do is end up costing 
the State government even more. There is not going to be any savings 
when you set the stage for a weakening of workers, when you set the 
stage for making it illegal for them to strike and then knocking them 
out with replacement workers and then setting things on a path to 
privatization. That is what this bill is about.
  You look in Wisconsin, and I believe it was Paul Krugman and others 
who pointed out that in Wisconsin, there was a provision in the 
Wisconsin budget from the Governor of Wisconsin's bill, it says sale or 
contractual operation of State-owned heating, cooling, and power 
plants, saying that the department may sell any State-owned heating, 
cooling, and power plant, or may contract with a private entity in the 
operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids.
  So you can have a private contractor just give it away without any 
bids at

[[Page 3186]]

all. They are power plants that serve facilities in the State of 
Wisconsin. These are the kinds of thing that we can expect in Ohio, 
except in this case we are talking about the privatization of public 
services. Now, the privatization of public services in a way is well 
established already, unfortunately.
  The AFL-CIO Public Employee Department produced a paper which talks 
about when you get into privatization, the public ends up having really 
little accountability on the question of public funds. They point out 
that private business has no business allocating public funds or 
monitoring the use of public funds. It is a question of fiscal 
accountability.
  Look, we know when there are massive amounts of money available that 
goes from the public sector to the private sector, let's take Iraq or 
Afghanistan with respect to contracts, billions of dollars disappear, 
get wasted. It ends up being a racket. Reduce it to a State level, and 
you have the potential for fraud. You have the weakening of the 
community's ability to assert collective interests. And as I said, the 
resulting savings that taxpayers are being told will occur are actually 
directed to the corporations so they get higher profits. Privatization 
is inevitably a racket.
  As a Member of Congress in my home district in Cleveland, the Defense 
Finance Administration wanted to privatize a number of accounting jobs 
in Cleveland. Mr. Speaker, I had a 7-year battle with the Defense 
Finance Administration where we proved that the taxpayers were getting 
taken for a ride in this privatization plan that was being promoted by 
our government to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. We reversed 
the privatization. Privatization is at the core of this battle in Ohio 
because the assets of the State are worth countless billions of 
dollars.
  You can take a workforce that is over 300,000, about 350,000 public 
workers in Ohio, that would be affected by S.B. 5. There is not a 
service that can't be privatized, but then the public doesn't have any 
control over it. They can't call up their elected official and complain 
about a service that is privatized. They have to call up the 
corporation. And they end up paying more in taxes. People need to 
understand that. States have budget difficulties they have to deal 
with. I've got that. I understand that. States need a revenue-sharing 
plan from the Federal Government, but the Federal Government doesn't 
have the money right now. Why doesn't the Federal Government have the 
money? Well, how about the fact that the Federal Government is spending 
trillions of dollars on wars, one of which is based on lies, the other 
one based on a misreading of history.
  Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist, in his book with 
Linda Bilmes, it's called ``The Three Trillion Dollar War,'' has stated 
that the cost of the work in Iraq will run between 3 and $5 trillion, 
just to U.S. taxpayers; the cost of the war in Afghanistan is already 
over half a trillion dollars. The long-term cost of that, since we are 
still in a period of acceleration of that war, will certainly go into 
the trillions of dollars.
  We saw a couple of years ago Wall Street come to this Capitol. 
Suddenly, the waves parted: $700 billion in loans when Wall Street was 
flagging. That could have been anticipated that Wall Street would 
create incredible speculation when Glass-Steagall was effectively 
repealed when they took down the wall that separated commercial from 
investment banking. Those who were the cops on the beat kind of walked 
away while this bubble was building on mortgage-backed securities, 
hedge funds, speculating, inflating the bubble, it burst, and all 
Americans got hurt. But all Americans didn't get made whole. Most 
Americans have experienced a 30 percent drop in the value of their 
mortgages while Wall Street is enjoying record profits once again, 
while Wall Street, once again, is experiencing high salaries and high 
bonuses.
  Not on Main Street, though. On Main Street, they have 15 million 
unemployed, 12 million underemployed, 50 million people without health 
insurance, and 10-12 million people whose homes are or have been in 
jeopardy.
  So then you go back to the State level where States are pressed, but 
States are pressed in part because of the mismanagement of the national 
economy and because we have a monetary policy that has worked for Wall 
Street but it certainly hasn't worked for Main Street. So by the time 
this debate gets down to a State level, those executives who are more 
inclined towards a corporate point of view are saying, look, easy, 
we'll just knock out the public unions.

                              {time}  1600

  But there are serious implications to this type of thinking, because 
what we are actually doing is setting aside an entire struggle that has 
been part of America's history that we should all be proud of. The 
civil rights movement is part of America's history we should be proud 
of: the civil rights movement which resulted in constitutional changes; 
which recognized the rights of all citizens as being equal, truly 
equal; the civil rights movement which accorded women an equal place in 
our society, of course with the exception of pay; but nevertheless, the 
potential for an equal role in our society is something we should be 
proud of.
  With that civil rights movement, the labor movement moved the pace, 
and that labor movement was about lifting everyone up, not just those 
who were members of unions. Unions came about because workers were 
being crushed; they were working in awful working conditions; they were 
subjected to forms of slave labor; they were working long hours and 
were paid very little; they were working under conditions that put 
their lives in jeopardy. America had a tradition of child labor at one 
time. All that changed with the laws that were passed in this Chamber.
  We should be proud of what America has been able to accomplish in 
lifting up the status of working people in our society so that you 
could have an 8-hour day, so that you could have a safe workplace--so 
much so that today we understand that intimately linked to the very 
nature of our democracy is the right to collective bargaining, which is 
the very right that is under attack in Ohio and Wisconsin and Indiana 
and other States across this Union.
  The right to collective bargaining is being able to assert a First 
Amendment right of association. It is being able to assert that workers 
have a sense of agency and to know, in a society where capital can be 
amassed in tremendous sums, that one individual has the right to be 
able to assert his or her rights because they have representation, 
because there is a law that says they have the ability to be able to 
have an influence on how much they are paid and on what their benefits 
and their working conditions will be.
  That's the essence of what it means to be a democracy: that workers 
have a say and that it's not top-down.
  This isn't a dictatorship. Yet S.B. 5 sets the stage for a kind of 
dictatorship, top-down. These are your working conditions. Take it or 
leave it. These are your benefits. Take it or leave it. Don't ask any 
questions. Shut up and go to work.
  When did America buy into that? The minute we buy into that kind of 
mentality, how does that separate us from what's happening in China? I 
want people to focus on this for a minute. We passed a trade agreement 
with China, China Trade, which I voted against, which had no provisions 
for workers' rights, human rights or environmental quality principles.
  A month ago, I had some paper workers in my office from Washington 
State, and they showed me how many jobs in their industry have moved 
out of Washington and how many plants for their industry have opened up 
in China. It's amazing to look at a map and see, well, they were here 
once, and now these same jobs are in China.
  In China, workers don't have any rights. There is no right to 
collective bargaining in China. That's not part of the discussion. The 
government of China is run under a different philosophy. Workers don't 
have a right to strike in China. There's no right to decent wages or 
benefits. Oh, yes. It's called Communist China. Excuse me.

[[Page 3187]]

  As part of a democracy, we assert--and have a right to assert--that 
workers here do have a right to collective bargaining, that they do 
have a right to join a union, that they do have a right to strike, that 
they do have a right to decent wages and benefits, that they do have a 
right to a secure retirement, that they do have a right to a safe 
workplace, that they do have a right to be able to challenge legally an 
employer who maintains an unsafe workplace. They have the right to 
participate in the political process.
  So many of these rights are under attack at the State level today, 
and this has an effect not just on public workers but on all workers, 
because if America begins to take down the hard-earned rights of 
workers, whether it's in the public sector or the private sector, and 
if we try to justify it, here is what we can look forward to:
  We can look forward to lower wages; we can look forward to people 
having zero health benefits; we can look forward to people having zero 
pensions; we can look forward to workplaces becoming less safe; and we 
can look forward to becoming a little bit like our trading partner in 
China, which, by the way, has about a $200 billion trade advantage with 
the United States out of a trade deficit that is in excess of $450 
billion.
  So are we exporting our democracy? Are we importing values that are 
estranged from a democratic society? That's really the question that we 
have to ask ourselves if we think that what happens in Wisconsin 
doesn't relate to us or if we think that what happens in Ohio is none 
of our business.
  Mr. Speaker, I went to Columbus, Ohio, and stood with thousands of 
workers. I stood with firemen and policemen and teachers. I stood with 
people who care for children and seniors. These people are people who 
have dedicated their whole lives to public service. They have a middle 
class standard of living because they have that dedication. They are 
people who are not our enemies. They are our friends. They are our 
neighbors--and they serve us.
  Since when are we now faced with looking at those who serve us as 
being opposed to us? How did our country get that way? Why can't we 
come to an understanding? We have a collective interest here. Why can't 
our Governors tell the truth about what's really happening?--which is 
that States are getting strangled because of policies at a Federal 
level that are making it much more difficult for States to be able to 
get any assistance at all.
  I have not run into any single labor leader who said that they did 
not want to negotiate the issues that are at hand. I've not run into 
any labor leader who didn't understand that State budgets are tight and 
that they want to make sure that States can meet the needs of all the 
people. But this top-down approach, this political approach to 
dictating what the conditions are and what the rights are for State 
workers, sets the stage for an estrangement of people from their own 
government.
  So we have to look at the issue of collective bargaining. In the 
State of Ohio, we have to understand that the fact that they have 
collective bargaining makes strikes less likely. This law was passed in 
1983 in Ohio, and collective bargaining actually provides for the 
public's health, safety and welfare. This bill, Senate Bill 5, is aimed 
at eliminating collective bargaining. It would not only prohibit the 
State from being involved at this point in collective bargaining for 
the purpose of benefits and working conditions, but it would also 
prohibit counties, cities, and other local government employers from 
continuing to negotiate employee benefit plan coverage and also to set 
community-based standards for public employment.

                              {time}  1610

  What of home rule? I mean, at a State level, cities that are home 
rule should be able to make these decisions. This flies in the face of 
a constitutional right which cities have for home rule.
  Senate bill 5 is really an attack on quality public service. It 
represents a destructive undermining of the compact between government 
and their workers. It changes the whole relationship. And it cannot do 
anything--cannot do a thing to improve the quality of service.
  Look at some of the biggest industrial corporations in America. They 
had their battles with labor, but they also understood that by having a 
workforce they could work with--the steelworkers work with the steel 
industry to produce a quality steel product, the autoworkers work with 
the auto industry to produce a quality car. In aerospace, we have some 
of the best technology in the world, and the industry works with 
unions.
  The whole idea about being able to negotiate for your wages, to be 
able to negotiate for your benefits is so that you can elevate the 
condition of your family and yourself. These aren't selfish people; 
they're people just trying to make a living. They just want to continue 
to do their work, to have an opportunity to negotiate their pay, to be 
able to negotiate their benefits--to have benefits--so that then they 
can go home and put food on the table and maybe be able to send their 
children to a decent college and maybe be able to put a few dollars 
aside, maybe be able to save a little bit for their retirement in 
addition to a pension plan that they have at work. When has that become 
asking for too much?
  I think it was Rachel Maddow the other day had something that was a 
joke on her show where she talked about--I'll paraphrase it: people sit 
down at a table and you've got a CEO sitting at a table and you've got 
workers and a tea party member sitting at a table and there's 12 
cookies on a plate. The CEO grabs 11 of those cookies and then the 
worker goes to get that remaining cookie and the CEO says to everybody 
at the table, Better watch that person, he's trying to take your 
cookie. This is what's going on in State after State.
  And this is actually what's happening in our economy, where it's 
working people who are the target of this attack. And it's not only at 
a State level. Every worker in America understands the downward 
pressure on wages unless you're on Wall Street. Every worker in America 
knows that if they don't have job security they can't plan for 
anything.
  There are so many people in America who are a single paycheck away 
from losing their home, from losing everything they ever worked a 
lifetime for. And in this economy, where corporations have 
extraordinary power, where because of our trade agreements they can 
move out of this country like that, we're going to further weaken the 
ability of workers to have a voice at a State level, or anyplace at 
all? Come on, America, wake up.
  We have to understand the implications of what's happening in Ohio 
and Wisconsin. We have to understand that our very way of life is at 
risk here, that if corporations can use their influence to get State 
leaders to knock down workers' rights, it won't be long before every 
worker in America is reduced to a form of peonage.
  People can laugh and say, well, that can't happen. Well, you know 
what? I want to quote to you from a book by Robert Scheer called ``The 
Great American Stickup.'' And the subtitle of it, so that you know that 
I'm not partisan here, Mr. Speaker, the subtitle of it is, ``How Reagan 
Republicans and Clinton Democrats enriched Wall Street while mugging 
Main Street.'' I won't get into that too much, but I do want to quote 
from Mr. Scheer's book.
  He talks about how two University of California economists, Emmanuel 
Saez and his colleague, Thomas Piketty, they analyzed U.S. tax data and 
other supporting statistics, and they concluded that the boom of the 
Clinton years and afterwards primarily benefited the wealthiest 
Americans.
  During Clinton's tenure, from 1993 to 2000, the income of the top 1 
percent shot up at an astounding rate of 10.1 percent per year while 
the income of the other 99 percent of Americans increased only 2.4 
percent annually. In 2002 to 2006, the next surge of the boom that 
Clinton's policies unleashed, the numbers were even more unbalanced. 
The average annual income for the bottom 99 percent increased by only 1 
percent per annum while the top 1 percent

[[Page 3188]]

saw a gain of 11 percent each year. Further, just as the good times of 
the Bush years saw almost $3 out of every $4 in increased income go to 
the wealthiest 1 percent, the GOP cut taxes for the richest brackets.
  So as I said at the beginning, the whole economy is being converted 
to an engine that takes the wealth of America and puts it in the hands 
of a few. How can you maintain a democracy that way? An economic 
democracy is a precondition of a political democracy.
  The minute we start attacking what people make, the minute we start 
putting pressure on people's wages--and keep in mind, it's okay with 
Wall Street to have 15 million Americans out of work. Why? Because that 
creates a big labor supply, which does what? Keeps wages down. So 
instead of having a full-employment economy--which really ought to be 
what we should expect in a democracy, that everyone who wants to work 
has a place--we have 15 million workers out of work, 12 million 
underemployed, but Wall Street keeps making more and more money.
  We're being told there's a recovery, but it's a jobless recovery. And 
so in this morass we see an attack on public workers. You have to 
recognize exactly what's going on here. This is still another attempt 
to grab more assets from the people and put it into the hands of a few. 
Just think what can happen in Ohio if the State legislature goes ahead 
and passes S.B. 5. If the State house passes it, the Governor signs it 
into law, we will just set the stage for massive privatization which 
will reduce service, increase its cost, and put money into the hands of 
private corporations; more wealth going to the top, less ability for 
workers to defend their interests. And these are people working for us. 
State workers, city, county workers, they're the government. They are 
the ones who provide service.
  I served at a local level, Mr. Speaker. I was a councilman. I served 
as a mayor. I served at that local government where government is 
really close to people. It provides an opportunity where people can get 
on the phone and say, hey, Mr. Councilman, we need somebody who's going 
to fix this street. Take care of it. Well, there's political 
accountability. You get enough calls, it's not taken care of, you won't 
be reelected.
  But that control that comes from people in the neighborhoods to city 
hall, when you break unions and you set the stage for privatization of 
their jobs, you break that, you break the tie.

                              {time}  1620

  Then it's the government at the top that has to do with the 
corporations to make sure their workers are doing right by the people.
  The essence of democracy is accountability. The essence of democracy 
is that people have the ability to be able to contact their government 
and be able to change conditions if they don't like it. And also the 
essence is service. People pay taxes, they should get something in 
return.
  And yet the public workers who are being attacked in Ohio and 
Wisconsin and other places are the focal point of a great debate over 
whether or not we will continue to have something that we call 
government of the people.
  All across this country, Mr. Speaker, there are Governors who are 
facing budget shortfalls, and they're watching events very carefully in 
Ohio and Wisconsin to be able to determine how far they're going to go. 
We're looking at cutbacks in pension benefits, cutbacks in health 
benefits--some of which the representatives of the workers are actually 
agreeing on in order to keep the jobs.
  But we're also looking at this parallel attempt to knock out 
bargaining rights. What does one have to do with the other? If people 
don't have the right to collective bargaining, they don't have a right 
to a sense of agency in dealing with governments, they're just reduced 
to nothing.
  Why do we do that to people who serve us? Why should we do that? And 
why shouldn't we be calling into accounting those public officials who, 
by and large, will be representing corporate interests or corporate 
thinking?
  There are those who think that the interests of corporations and the 
government are one in the same. Oh no they're not. Government exists to 
provide service. Corporations exist to make a profit. Fine. But let's 
make sure we understand there's a difference.
  Government does not exist to make a profit, but it does provide a 
service. And when government's resources are starting to be eroded, we 
have to ask why. I'll give you an idea, Mr. Speaker.
  We're being told that there's just not enough money anymore. Let's 
look for a moment at our monetary system itself.
  When you go to a bank and you take out a loan, the bank will book 
that as an asset. Banks for years and years have been using a device 
known as a fractional reserve where they're able to create for every 
dollar they book as cash that they claim to have. They're able to 
create another $9 or even $10, maybe more. And that device, known as a 
fractional reserve, has given our banking system essentially the money 
to create--the ability to create money out of nothing.
  Now, there's some people who are okay with that. They say, well, 
banks have to have this ability; but when banks have that ability, we 
also know that banks have been prone to being able to make transactions 
when they got involved, as a bank in Cleveland did on mortgage-backed 
securities and they began investing heavily, actually investing money 
they didn't have. When the market collapsed, the bank collapsed.
  So this device of fractional reserve actually in this economy has 
ended up helping to fuel speculation.
  And what about the Fed? The Fed, which this Congress has tried many 
times--and I've worked with Mr. Paul on this--the Fed has virtually no 
controls whatsoever, limited accountability. When the Federal Reserve 
Act was passed in 1913, it really took out of the hands of this 
Congress the ability to have control over the monetary system.
  Now, this Constitution of the United States, which I carry with me, 
article I, section 8, Congress has the ability to coin money. Now, to 
coin money doesn't mean just to make coins. It actually means to create 
money, to publish money.
  That was a foundational principle of the ability of Congress to have 
a role in the money system. We basically sent that over to the Fed with 
the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. So the Fed, through another device known 
as quantitative easing--I want everyone to remember this--quantitative 
easing. What does it mean? It means the Fed has the ability to create 
money out of nothing to the tune of trillions of dollars--$4 trillion 
in this most recent economic crisis.
  Now, we're told that unless the Fed can do this, our economy would 
collapse. I think it's time we started to look at these institutions 
which we've created and ask if this isn't the time for us to take 
control on behalf of the American people to critically analyze the 
fractional-reserve system and see if it has any more viability, if it 
doesn't really expose us to more problems than it ends up creating.
  I personally think that it's time to challenge the fractional-reserve 
system to the point of where you let banks loan the money that they 
actually have on deposit instead of creating money out of nothing, and 
then if the bank goes down, we have to bail them out.
  I think it's time for us to take the Fed, which has been out of our 
reach, and put it under the control of Treasury again. And then if the 
government needs to invest money, and we do, then we invest the money, 
then we spend it into circulation. We're told right now we don't have 
any money. We don't have any money to fix our roads. There's over $2 
trillion of infrastructure needs. States don't have any money. That's 
what we're told. That's why we're told they're having these conflicts 
with the workers; they're out of money. We don't have any money to fix 
up our roads.
  Well, FDR figured out what to do in the New Deal. You just create a 
WPA. You put millions of people back to

[[Page 3189]]

work; you rebuild America. We're apparently not going to go in that 
direction. But why not? We're told we don't have the money. What, we 
have to borrow it from banks? Who's holding our securities?
  If we can borrow money from Japan and from China and from the UK, and 
from the Cayman Islands to manage our economy, well, if we can borrow 
money to keep wars going, hello, why can't we spend the money into 
circulation, take back the power--which inherently is in the 
Constitution--and invest in the creation of jobs again and put those 15 
million Americans back to work? Create a revenue sharing program for 
the States so States aren't faltering any more. Have a national health 
care system so you don't have to worry about health care being on the 
bargaining table. Absolutely make Social Security solid so there's 
never a question about a partial privatization--which is another agenda 
some people would like to run here.
  It's not like we don't have within our grasp an ability to change the 
conditions in which we're operating.
  But, instead, we have this poverty mentality which rivets us to 
control by corporate interests who are making money hand over fist, who 
we're being told all of America's poor except Wall Street. Huh? How did 
that happen? With our money nonetheless? How did that happen?
  Why isn't unemployment a problem on Wall Street? Think about this. 
Why is Wall Street doing better than ever? Why do we hear these dark 
tales about speculations happening again? Are we getting ready for 
another pump-and-dump scheme where we'll be back here in a few years 
having to bail out Wall Street again?
  Meanwhile, Main Street's infrastructure crumbles; Main Street's 
workers are hungry for work; Main Street's wages are getting depressed; 
Main Street's struggling for health care; Main Street's worried about 
its pension; Main Street's worried about whether they're going to have 
a home or not.
  What's happening in Ohio and Wisconsin is relevant because every 
single economic issue that is facing this Nation today is part of that 
debate.

                              {time}  1630

  Why should we accept an economy where people are told they have 
limited expectations? This is America. We have shown the world the 
ability to create untold wealth. But if we keep shipping it offshore . 
. .
  Why shouldn't people who have an education, who have strived to 
achieve a middle class standard of living, why shouldn't they expect 
that their government will stand next to them? It's time for people to 
understand that we need to take a strong stand in favor of the rights 
of workers.
  Now, how do we do that? Let's look at our trade agreements, Mr. 
Speaker. Every trade agreement needs to be renegotiated. We need to 
renegotiate NAFTA, and the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, and 
China trade, and we need to say that every single trade agreement has 
the right to collective bargaining. We're going in the wrong direction 
in the States. Every agreement we have should have the right to 
collective bargaining, the right to join a union, the right to strike, 
the right to decent wages and benefits, the right to a safe workplace, 
the right to be able to sue an employer if they maintain an unsafe 
workplace, the right to a secure retirement, the right to participate 
in the political process.
  If we had those in our trade agreements, if in our trade agreements 
we had prohibitions on child labor, slave labor, prison labor, if in 
our trade agreements we had the protection of the air and the water, 
then these corporations wouldn't be running to China or anywhere in the 
world in order to have the people of that country subsidize their 
profits through dirty air, dirty water, low wages, slave labor, child 
labor. Think about it. That's why we need to go back to the trade 
agreements.
  We need to elevate the condition of workers in our society. We need 
to think in terms of raising people's standard of living. We need to 
think in terms of helping people save their homes. We need to think in 
terms of more competition in our economy. We need to think in terms of 
how do you create wealth in our society, not just how do you create 
debt. Because right now, Mr. Speaker, our whole economic system is 
money equals debt. And as long as we're locked into that mentality of 
money equals debt, then all we're going to have is debt no matter where 
we look. And our ballooning debt keeps getting larger and larger, and 
we're told, well, we have to pay off that debt before we can deal with 
our problems. Baloney. We don't have to do that.
  What we have to do is to start looking at what can be done to prime 
the pump of our economy, to get America back to work. We have the 
resources. And if we have to change the way that we handle our money 
system, we should do that. The Fed has not been responsive. The private 
sector isn't creating jobs. They're getting rid of jobs. If the private 
sector created jobs, then right after we gave hundreds of billions of 
dollars to Wall Street we should have seen millions of people go back 
to work. That did not happen. We are in at least a double-dip 
recession. We have Americans struggling to survive, and they could read 
the daily reports about how great Wall Street is doing.
  Let's go back to Ohio and support those workers. Let's support those 
who teach our children, who police our streets, who put out the fires, 
who serve our elderly, who take care of our children, the people who 
perform the services at the myriad of State offices and at county and 
city offices. Let's respect and honor those who are in public service, 
as we ourselves would want to be honored for taking the path that we 
chose in our careers. The people who chose the civil service, the 
people who chose to do that day-to-day work of being involved in a 
community, they are no less important than we are as individuals. We're 
part of the same tissue that makes up a democracy.
  And so I want to appeal to my colleagues to look at this moment in 
history, to understand the deep threat which the breaking of collective 
bargaining represents to our democracy, to understand how urgent it is 
that we support workers everywhere, that we express our appreciation to 
them, that we understand that in this House there are many different 
points of view.
  We have different points of view about the amount of power we would 
like concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. But we should have no 
difference of opinion, there should be total solidarity on protecting 
those who serve the public and on protecting workers whose basic rights 
are cardinal principles of a democratic society.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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