[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 18381]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         AS IT WAS FOR THE ANASAZI, SO COULD IT BE FOR AMERICA

  (Mr. KUCINICH asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. KUCINICH. The Anasazi were Native Americans whose culture dated 
back 2,000 years. They were the cliff dwellers who built into the sheer 
walls of canyons extraordinary places to live. Yet, in 1300 A.D., these 
cliff dwellers, these great architects of culture and civilization, 
mysteriously disappeared.
  The people of this great Nation, the United States of America, are 
dwelling on real cliffs of fiscal insecurity: the cliffs of joblessness 
and low wages; the cliffs of mortgage foreclosure, homelessness; the 
cliffs of retirement insecurity; the cliffs of small business failure 
and investor uncertainty; the cliffs of violence at home and war 
abroad.
  At a time when the government should be demonstrating its capacity to 
meet the practical aspirations of the American people for jobs, 
education, health care, and retirement security, the government instead 
would have America dwell at the edge of a fiscal cliff in a 
manufactured crisis to manufacture consent for a deal that would 
otherwise be unacceptable.
  Leaders of both parties would do well to remember that the original 
cliff dwellers, as great as they were, disappeared.

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