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“50TH BIRTHDAY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H4316-H4322 on June 9, 1998.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
50TH BIRTHDAY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gibbons). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 1997, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized for 32 minutes, approximately one-half the time remaining until midnight.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I hoped to have a complete hour, but was going to be divided in two parts anyhow. One part I wanted to utilize to congratulate the State of Israel on its 50th birthday. I wanted to do that some time ago, but it has been very difficult to get time on special orders recently. So I am a little late, but it is still the year of the celebration of the 50th birthday of the State of Israel, so I think that it is appropriate that I make these remarks. And I want to make the remarks in the spirit of comparison of Israel with many other nations and draw some lessons from the conduct of the leadership of Israel.
Second part of my presentation I wanted to deal with leadership in the United States as compared to leadership of Israel and other parts of the world on the vital issue of education, and I hope that I will be able to do that. I know the rules are that I cannot do that if the majority Representatives show up to claim the last 30 minutes. But I do hope to have the time to do that. If not, I will settle for just using the first 30 minutes to discuss the birthday of Israel and the significance of that in this modern world.
Mr. Speaker, I want to wish Israel a happy birthday and state that it is 50 years old, and among nations that is really an infancy, it is an infant nation. You know, the United States is 222 years old, and we are considered quite a young Nation at 222 years. Israel at 50 years is an infant nation.
But Israel is not alone. There are a lot of new nations in the world nowadays. There are many nations that are younger than Israel, and it is very interesting to compare some of the nations about the age of Israel, some of the nations that are younger than Israel, and some of the nations that are much older than Israel and look at the performance.
Israel has done a great deal. The leadership of Israel is to be congratulated on the achievements that they have accomplished in the 50 years of the State of Israel's existence. It is a tribute to leadership, and by leadership I do mean large numbers of people, not just the prime ministers and the Cabinet ministers. Israel has had layers and layers of leadership. As we say in basketball or football, the bench; they have a lot of people on the bench whose names you never know among the civil servants and the deputies and the assistants across a broad range of agencies and activities developing policies to maintain civility, a balanced civic life in the nation. At the same time for the entire existence of Israel, they have been under pressure and fighting for survival.
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So I salute that leadership and want to talk about leadership. Sir Arthur Lewis, who was a Jamaican and shared a Nobel Prize in economics with a colleague of his, sir Arthur Lewis's major theme in his book on developing nations was that the key was leadership. The key was not natural resources. The key was not location, geographic location. The developing nations prospered and advanced in accordance with the leadership that they had, and that was the critical item.
If you look at the recently established nations, nations who received their independence even after Israel, you see a pattern where if natural resources and geographical location was a determining factor, they should be much further along than Israel.
For example, if you look at Nigeria, and I think of Nigeria because Nigeria is in the news today, Nigeria's strongman ruler, the dictator who has been in the position for 5 years, but they have had a lot of other military dictators, he died today. Sani Abacha died, and I do not care to comment on his death or his life. I certainly do not think it is the time to launch a critical analysis of his regime, but I would like to say that he leaves nothing behind that we can be proud of in history. He leaves a record of a sovereign predator who used his enormous powers, and we can see nothing good that came of his great use and abuse of his enormous powers.
Nigeria is a country blessed with natural resources. Nigeria is a country blessed with the particular natural resource which guarantees wealth. Nigeria has not only fantastic oil deposits, but they have a type of oil which is much sought after all over the world. So Nigeria has had oil wells pumping for a long time, and if natural resources alone could determine the faith of a developing nation, Nigeria would be among the leaders of the developing nations.
Nigeria is 37 years old. It was granted its independence by the United Kingdom October 1, 1960, so it is 37 years old. Israel is a little older, May 14, 1948. But Israel has no oil, no uranium, no gold, no great deposits of diamonds. Natural resources certainly do not exist in any significant abundance in Israel, so they did not have that boost.
Nigeria is 37 years old, and its oil wealth has been squandered by its leadership. The oil wealth has not been utilized to really build a prosperous country. It is a large country, more than 100 million people. It is the most densely populated country on the African continent. It has more population and more people. It is not the largest in size, but it has more people, 100 million. South Africa, has many fewer people, less than 30 million people. Nigeria has 100 million. But it has vast land resources and many other natural resources, but oil is the key, because it is the cash crop, the generator of cash in hard currency. The cash that can buy anything you want anywhere in the world, Nigeria had that. But it has all been squandered by the leadership of Nigeria.
The leadership of Israel is a great contrast. Having no natural resources, the only oil well Israel ever had was the oil wells in the Sinai Peninsula, and they developed the oil there while they were occupying the peninsula, and then they gave it up. The leadership decided at a critical moment that in order to make peace with Egypt, that they would agree to surrender the oil wells in the Sinai Peninsula. So their very short period of wealth by oil was ended.
So the leadership of Israel stands out even more when you take a look at the nature of the land that they occupied. It is land that had been given as desert, where nothing great was going to happen there, certainly nothing in the area of agriculture and self-sustaining food production. Yet they transformed that land into an agricultural giant. They became an agricultural giant, not only for production of food in the Middle East, but they exported large amounts of food to Europe.
At one point, agriculture was their major industry. It is no longer the major industry in Israel. Agriculture is not the major industry. High-tech industries, high technology industries based on brain power and the development of complex industrial operations to take advantage of the knowledge that is produced in the Israeli educational system and other parts of the world, because Israel does benefit from the fact that the leadership is drawn from a diverse group of people who came from all over the world.
The diversity in their leadership probably explains some of the reason it has been so effective. They have a great deal of wisdom they bring as a result of years and years of the Jewish people, centuries of the Jewish people suffering, but they also have a knowledge of all the cultures in the world. People came to Israel from all parts of the world. So Israel is a premier example of what great leadership can do. Nobody else has accomplished this.
No other Nation can say in 50 years they have accomplished as much as Israel. It is basically a self-sufficient society at this point, as much as any society is. Even the great United States of America, we depend on export markets and various other things, where if they were to collapse in other parts of the world, it would have an impact on us here also. So nobody is totally self-sufficient, but in 50 years Israel is about as self-sufficient as a Nation can become. Yes, they receive large amounts of aid from other countries, particularly from the United States, but they have made good use of that aid.
Let us examine the age of some of the other countries that are in existence now. One of the youngest, probably the youngest, is South Africa. I do not know of any country that has come into existence since South Africa reestablished itself May 10, 1994. So South Africa, the new South Africa, the democratic South Africa, the South Africa where all of its people, black and white, are allowed to participate in its government, is only four years old. So it is among the youngest.
The Congo is 37 years old. The new Congo that came into existence after the Belgians were forced to give it up is 37 years old. Most of that time it has been under one leader, the leader was installed after the death of Patrice Lumumba. He, of course, recently died also, and there was a whole new leadership that has taken over.
But since then the Congo, with the vast natural resources, vast wealth, huge land mass, the Congo is an impoverished country right now. It can barely feed its own people. It cannot even feed its own people. All of the potential that exists there in terms of its wealth and its minerals, tin and diamonds, very few things you do not have in terms of natural resources are there that do not exist in the Congo. Yet the Congo is a miserable place. The leadership of Mobuto established by the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, helped to over throw the Lumumba government and install Mobuto, and Mobuto reigned for many, many years with the help of the CIA and aid from this country, and he did nothing but pilfering the country. He was a sovereign predator with all of the power, and he did nothing but make himself and his cronies wealthy.
Some countries that came into existence recently include Guyana here in this hemisphere. Guyana is 32 years old. Jamaica is 35 years old. Trinidad is 35 years old. I remember being quite happy when the independence was granted to Trinidad and Jamaica and Guyana and Grenada, because in my Congressional district, you have large numbers of people from all of these countries. The West Indian population outside of the West Indies, the greatest concentration is in the 11th Congressional District in Brooklyn.
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So I have experienced the joy of independence with all of these different groups. I also experienced the sadness that set in as a result of the various problems that each one of these nations has experienced. They have varying degrees of success in this hemisphere. But, generally, it is not a good picture when you look at the economics of these various nations.
Trinidad and Tobago have a great deal of oil. They had tremendous oil resources. They still have substantial oil resources. They were not utilized properly. The leadership did not utilize that wealth properly in the early days of independence.
If Trinidad and Tobago had made some decisions about utilizing their wealth to build a first class education system, if they had educated their populace and prepared for the complexities of this century and the kinds of economies that we have now, they might have done what they did in Bangalore, India, begun to develop a large pool of people who are educated in the area of computer science.
Bangalore, India is considered the computer programming capital of the world, because they have this tremendous pool of people, young people constantly being produced from their education system who are computer experts. Many American companies send their computer work over there by contract.
When they import professionals, people in the computer industry, into this country, they come from Bangalore, India in large numbers. In fact, there is an issue right now on the table concerning the new American Competitiveness Act which was passed by the Senate.
That act provides for us to solve our problems in terms of the shortage of personnel in the information technology industry by bringing in foreign experts, foreign computer workers, information technology workers. The greatest percentage of those workers would come from India.
Right now, there is a dispute because some people are wondering how can we have an American Competitiveness Act which is designed to make us more competitive by relying on outside workers to come in? Why do we not train our own workers? Why do we not build up our capacity here and make certain that large cities, the big cities, inner cities with large numbers with unemployed people, train the people who are able to take these jobs, and we would have the resource here in the Nation.
One fallacy of relying on outsiders is we are building the capacity of countries like India to create their own nuclear bombs and their own nuclear weapons. Many of the Indians that helped to create the nuclear bomb which was exploded recently and for which they have endured sanctions from our government and indignation from the rest of the world, many of those experts were trained right here in this country. They were trained here.
As you train more and more, you bring them in to work here, and you pay them, you are increasing the pool of people who come from India to be able to do that kind of thing.
I am not going to single out Indians and say we should not import more computer workers and information technology workers from India and discriminate against them, import them from other countries instead, I am saying we should not be importing them from anywhere because we have the potential pool right here.
The failure of leadership, to get back to my concern tonight, the failure of leadership in places like Trinidad, Jamaica, Guyana, Grenada, the failure to invest more in their own education systems places them outside the possibility of the realm of being able to have workers come from their countries with the same expertise as the workers who are trained in India or some other central European countries that will be soon exporting workers to this country, instead of us developing our own.
The answer to the problems is to develop our own. But if you are not doing that, this is an opportunity that the countries of this hemisphere had, but I do not think it is going to be there much longer.
So we have some countries that are younger than the Nation of Israel, and some have done very poorly in terms of their years of existence and foundations they have laid. I think Israel is to be congratulated for having done far better than the Soviet Union, which came into existence in December 1922.
Russia, Ukraine, a number of countries that made up the Soviet, existed long before the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was 75 years old when it died. The Soviet Union is no more. It is dead. That is very interesting. Modern nations can die. Modern nations. A superpower we have watched die.
So Israel is not invulnerable. It will not go on forever. It is always going to need what they have now, and that is excellent leadership.
At 50 years, Israel is much further along than the United States was at 50 years. At 50 years, we had endured some pressure from the outside. We had to fight for survival. There were a number of different challenges to the new Nation. Of course we came into existence only after fighting a war with Great Britain. This new Nation was struggling along.
Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, we have doubled our size on to his presidency. When he died, the Nation was 50 years old. When John Adams died, the Nation was 50 years old. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, James Monroe, they all left a legacy which guaranteed that the Nation was strong enough to resist the greatest challenge that it faced in the 1800s when civil war erupted and the Nation had to fight for its life.
If we had had two nations resulting from the Civil War, history would be very different, I assure you. So we have had, after our first 50 years, we were much further along when the greatest challenge that the nations ever faced came along; that is, the Civil War.
Israel is not immune to some new catastrophe. They have suffered one catastrophe after another, one challenge after another, one war after another where everybody who is not familiar with the Israelis themselves counted them out and said they will never survive.
They were attacked from all sides at one time before they made peace with Egypt. Then they were attacked even after that later on, and they are under constant pressure.
If you take a look at the physical nature of Israel, you can understand why they are always at risk. Israel looms very large in the minds of most of us because of the fact that they play a major role in terms of war and peace and the world. They have a large population in this country that, of course, keeps us very much aware of the problems of Israel and the achievements of Israel. So it looms large in our minds.
But when you go to Israel, the first shock that I had when I landed at the airport was that it is a very tiny country. You really begin to feel how tiny it is when you land at the airport in Israel.
I began immediately to feel it, even before we started traveling around the country and found that the country's dimensions physically are astounding. It is so tiny in that it is hard to conceive of the fact that its total area is 20,770 square kilometers. But you cannot really envision that.
Stop and think about the State of New Jersey. The State of New Jersey, which too many New Yorkers think of as sort of a suburb of New York, the State of New Jersey is a State in itself, but Israel is smaller than the State of New Jersey.
As of July 1997, you were talking about a population of 5,534,000. That is a great increase. When I first went to Israel in 1983, the population was about 3 million. So they have a great increase in population by bringing in groups from all over. But it is still only 5,534,000.
They occupy a very tiny strip of land. The width of Israel is a very narrow waist. Of course the length also is very short. The preoccupation of the Israeli leadership with land is very easy to understand. They have taken the little land that they have, and they have transformed it. The greening of the desert is discussed often.
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They have used their knowhow, their ingenuity, to make good use of all the land available. But when it comes to their defense in military terms, the fact that it is so easy to penetrate with even short-range rockets or short-range artillery gives the Israelis a well-understood concern always about their survival in terms of land.
But the leadership, despite all these problems, has maintained itself, and everybody knows the military machine that the Israelis were able to build was a remarkable one, indeed. They have earned high praise for that.
But most people do not understand how at the same time the Israelis were under such military pressure, they have built a Nation with a strong education system, they have built a Nation with institutions of culture, they have built a Nation that has a great deal of compassion and humanity.
In the midst of all their troubles, the Israelis rescued 40,000 black Jews, Ethiopian Jews, from Ethiopia and brought them into Israel. In the midst of all their troubles they made special provision for black Jews from Ethiopia. The Israeli leadership decided to undertake this very difficult job of assimilating people who have a different skin color.
They were not stupid. They knew very well that in the modern world color is very important, and that it is a new kind of problem. When I visited Israel the last time, I visited a school called Yemin Ord, where half of the 500 students there were Ethiopian. They deliberately reached out to bring in the Ethiopian youngsters in this village school setting.
They have tremendous achievements there. The Ethiopians have come from a pastoral society, and have been able over a short period of time to rise to the level and the challenge of Israeli education. The graduates from that school who were Ethiopian performed at an equal level to the other graduates from that school.
Since then, they have had some difficulties. We have had some headlines about Ethiopians rioting in the streets of Tel Aviv, and being very upset about the fact that some bigoted people in the Israeli blood supply system separated their blood out and threw it away without telling them because they thought there was something wrong with their blood, and some other incidents have taken place.
So they have had, as a result of reaching out to the black Jews of Ethiopia and recognizing that they were Jews, first of all, and color had to be secondary, they have had some special problems. The Israeli leadership is to be congratulated for taking on those problems with all the other problems that they have.
If I had to call names, of course, and I do want to call some names, David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel; Golda Meir, the American schoolteacher who went to Israel and became Prime Minister; Menachem Begin.
Menachem Begin was labeled by the British as a terrorist, and he was in that sense a terrorist. He led the violent uprisings which helped to force a critical situation which led to the creation of the State of Israel.
Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Perez. It is interesting that Begin and Yitzhak Rabin were both military people, they were coordinators of violence. They were successful generals and successful commanders of violent activities, of wartime activities, military activities. But Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin were the greatest peacemakers of Israel. Men who have faced war and understood war were the ones who understood the necessity for peace.
Menachem Begin invited Anwar Sadat to come from Cairo to Israel and open the doorway to the peace agreement which Jimmy Carter presided over, and led to an agreement with Egypt and Israel which in many ways has done more for the security of Israel than any other action taken by the leadership of Israel since its existence.
They eliminated one front. They eliminated their largest and most effective enemy, Egypt, by negotiating peace at the proper time. They gave up some oil wells, some real estate that was very popular with the Israeli population. They gave up a lot, but they got peace and security as a result. Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin.
Shimon Perez was very interesting individual, in the background for a large part of his life. If one person can be credited with building the Israeli military machine in terms of the equipment and the organization of it, and even the creation of the Israeli Air Force, and the creation of the series of activities which probably led to Israel developing a nuclear weapon of their own, and I cannot document this and nobody admits it, but certainly the Air Force and the military machine of Israel was built mostly through the ingenuity and leadership of Shimon Perez, who operated behind the scenes and never fully got the credit. It is important that there are unnamed Israelis that we will never know who helped to make Israel what it is.
Leadership means more than the people on top. The leadership in Nigeria, the leadership in Trinidad and Jamaica, et cetera, the problem often is that the leadership is too scarce. There is only one layer of leadership, and that layer of leadership, if they have errors and faults, there is nobody to balance them off. There are no people to criticize them.
Leadership in a nation means that you have to have newspaper editors, judges. The whole set of modern functionaries have to be present, and they have to sort of play off each other and keep each other in line, and you create something which, by trial and error, becomes a stable Nation.
The absence of this kind of leadership in most of the nations that have been newly formed is a serious shortcoming. If there is any remedy for underdeveloped nations or developing nations that we ought to look at, it ought to be some way to give them more and more aid to create more and more leaders. That means that education in other developing nations ought to take priority.
There are some nations which are pitiful. Somalia destroyed itself completely. Somalia is 37 years old, but they have completely destroyed themselves. There is no Nation of Somalia anymore. There is something on the map. They have no government at all, it is completely gone.
This is a Nation where most of the people are of African descent. This is a Nation where most of the people speak the same language, most are the same religion. We cannot understand quite what happened to Somalia, but because of faction fighting, they destroyed themselves completely. Israel exists because they have been able to deal with each other. They have had this pool of leadership drawn from all over the world. They have been able to compromise and negotiate when necessary.
There are some very serious problems internally within the Nation now. At 50 years old, its existence is not guaranteed, I assure the Members, but certainly when we think of the pressure on the Jewish populations of Europe, which is part of what helped to create Israel, the man who created those pressures, Adolph Hitler, said that the Third Reich would reign for a thousand years. The third Reich is gone, it is no more, but Israel is very much alive with a lot of promise for growth in the future.
I salute the State of Israel on the occasion of its 50th birthday. The Jewish people have defied numerous catastrophies and they have survived for thousands of years. Now Israel has become a harvesting place for all of these centuries of suffering and the wisdom accumulated from that suffering. Happy birthday to the State of Israel.
Mr. Speaker, if the majority is not here, I would like to claim the other 30 minutes that is left for the second portion of my presentation.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gibbons). The time of the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) has expired. In the absence of a member of the majority party, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized for the remainder of his hour.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about leadership again. The theme of leadership now shifts to the United States. It shifts to the Congress of the United States.
Last week on Friday we voted the majority budget into existence. That majority budget completely ignored a major need of this Nation. This Nation needs to reform its education system. At the heart of that reform process is a need for the construction of new schools.
In the Republican budget there are no funds allocated for the construction of new schools. In fact, the Republican budget represents an attack on education. They are going to wipe out Title I programs as we know them, and they will proceed to turn the dollars for Title I into vouchers.
They are going to completely ignore the major problems. The problems have been clearly delineated by the President, who started with his State of the Union Address delineating the problem of the schools when he said, we need $22 billion for the construction of new schools. That is his program. I wish we had a more direct way to deal with the problem of the schools, and not through a loan program.
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He offers a $22 billion loan program where States and localities may borrow the money and the Federal Government would pay the interest. So they are interest-free loans. That is better than nothing, of course. It is significantly better than nothing. But I wish we would dedicate some portion of the funds that we have at the Federal level to the building of schools, grants outright to schools, especially in the inner-city communities and the rural communities where schools are in atrocious condition.
All over America, in the inner cities in the suburbs, and in the rural areas, we are beginning to find these schools that are 75, 85 and 100 years old. They need repairs at least. Many of them need extensive renovations. Then we find many situations where we need totally new schools and they are just not there. The Federal Government should take leadership and this Congress should take leadership.
We are facing a situation at this point where there is going to be a budget surplus of no less than $50 billion. No matter how they play with the numbers, there will be no less than $50 billion more in revenue collected than there will be expenditures. So with a surplus of
$50 billion, now is the time. We have a window of opportunity to act and deal with the most pressing needs of our school systems.
Education reform needs a lot of different things, but what it needs most is the basics such as classrooms and safe schools; safe schools and classrooms in those schools which will allow us to then move to the President's second point.
His second point is that we need to use Federal resources to fund more teachers and decrease the student-teacher ratio so that teachers do not have so many students to teach, especially in the early years.
That makes a lot of sense and the education pedagogy, the surveys and studies, everything supports the fact that we would get a more effective and more efficient school system if in the early grades we had classrooms that are smaller; probably even in later grades too, but start with the early grades.
The President's proposal to provide Federal aid to reduce the number of children per class is the next step and it is very sensible, but it cannot take place in areas like New York City. Even if we had the money for more teachers, there is no place to put the classes. We have to have more classrooms if we are going to make use of the money for smaller classes.
The State of New York, the legislature, recently passed legislation which guarantees that in 5 years, every child will have a right to a pre-kindergarten education. Pre-kindergarten education will be universal in 5 years in New York, theoretically. Theoretically, it is going to be done. The money will be available for the State to fund a large part of it. But if we do not have the classrooms, and in the places where we do not have the classrooms like New York City, where are we going to put the pre-kindergarten kids when we have situations where we cannot take care of children who are already there?
We have situations like PS-161. And I had a group of students from PS-161 visit me last week. It is a great school, and I had been there to visit their school about a month ago. I was very much impressed with their school. Their school has been cited nationally. Even Diane Ravitch, who has very little positive to say about inner-city schools, cited this school as being an excellent school. Diane Ravitch is a former assistant secretary for OERI, the Office of Education Research and Improvement.
PS-161 is located about seven blocks from my district office on Crown Street in Brooklyn. 161 has a school building that was built for 500 students. They now have almost a thousand. They have twice as many students than they were built to hold. PS-161 has a coal-burning furnace. The school still has a furnace that burns coal, not only polluting the air around the school, but polluting the internal school building.
We cannot have coal-burning furnaces and not have coal dust escape. The first house I ever owned had a coal-burning furnace. I got a bargain because of that. No matter what filters we put in there or what steps we took, some of the coal dust escaped in the house. And after a while one can see the coal dust settling around.
Mr. Speaker, if a child sits in a school with a coal-burning furnace, and an old one at that because these premises are 50 years old or older, and the walls of the cellar and the walls in the area around the furnace, all of those are problem areas, the chimneys are problem areas, I assure my colleagues that if a child sits there for 6 years, day after day, year after year, his lungs will receive enough coal dust to affect his health in some way. They may never know.
But as I told the PS-161 students who came to visit me, they achieve despite it all. They are high achievers in reading and high achievers in math scores, among the highest in the city. They achieve no matter, despite all of this. But I hate to see one of those young people so gifted, and they are not necessarily gifted, but so well educated. They are normal children. They do not pick and choose them. They are not picked for gifted and talented attributes. They are just normal children. Most of them are poor. Ninety-five percent of the PS-161 students are eligible for school lunches. They are eligible for the school lunch program, which means they are poor. They are coming from low-income families. Nevertheless, they achieve at a very high rate despite it all.
I would hate to see one of those high-achieving students have their life cut short or their career made difficult because they develop aggravated asthma later in their teen or early college years. I would hate to see one of their lives cut short because they have lung cancer because they have sat in a building provided by the city fathers and the Board of Education that was unsafe.
We cannot control the environment that poor children come from. We do not have enough humanity yet to make certain that every child gets three meals a day and has a decent place to stay, and food, clothing, and shelter. We do not have that kind of society yet. But certainly when a child goes to school they ought to expect to have a safe place, a place free of harm to study, not a place which is a danger to their health.
So the coal-burning school, PS-161, is an abomination. The fact that we have 285 such schools in New York, out of 1,100 schools in New York, 285 have coal-burning furnaces. That is an abomination. That is cruel and inhuman treatment to children.
On top of that we add the fact that these same children are in a school that is overcrowded, so that some of them have to eat lunch at 10 o'clock in the morning. At PS-161 where despite it all they perform brilliantly, they have an excellent principal and they have teachers who care, somehow the reading scores, the math scores, any barometer we utilize shows that they are given an excellent education. But they are subjected to force feeding at 10 in the morning. To make a child eat lunch at 10 in the morning is a cruel and inhuman treatment. Some have to eat later on at 1 and 2 o'clock, and they are hungry. That is cruel also.
That has to happen, they tell me, because the lunchroom is not big enough to accommodate all the students. After all, the school was built for 500 students and it is accommodating almost twice that number.
If PS-161 was by itself, I would not be here today discussing this. But this is the rule, the pattern almost, in certain areas of the city. All of the schools have a problem that forces them to have very early lunches and very late lunches. Most of the schools have some problem there. Some are as bad as PS-161, and they have children eating lunch at 9:45 or 10 o'clock in the morning.
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In PS-161, they have a very tiny library room, but it was filled with eager youngsters. They even have put in two sections where they have a ring of computers where the youngsters can practice on computers. The principal himself went out and begged and borrowed and got the money together, it did not come in the budget. Whatever has to happen he makes happen there.
He has a skilled staff that he keeps there because they like working there. Some of his teachers come in from the suburbs where they pay more money, and they could get jobs in the suburbs as teachers. They come there because they like what they are doing. They are in an environment with great leadership, to keep the theme of leadership going, because the principal is a great leader. They get things accomplished.
But in that library, they pack one on top of the other. The kids sit one next to the other. They can barely turn the page. But as a mark of what is happening in that school, you do not hear a single sound in terms of children complaining about not being able to turn the page because they are so close to one student, right next to another. They work; they read. They achieve despite it all.
I am here to salute PS-161 and all the people involved, the principal, the teachers, parents. They have an after-school program where the parents run it. The parents finance it. It is amazing what they do at PS-161.
But why should the leadership of the school system in New York, the leadership at city hall, we have a $2 billion surplus. This year we have a $2 billion surplus projected in the city budget. None of that has been proposed as a way to get rid of some of the coal-burning furnaces. At the State level we have more than a $2 billion surplus projected.
The Governor vetoed a bill recently which would have given $500 million to help alleviate the worst conditions in school buildings. So I cannot complain only about the Republican majority here in this body. We have a situation in our State and our city which shows that there is no compassion. The leadership wants to subject the children to cruel and inhumane treatment.
We have an American Competitiveness Act that is going to be on the floor soon, where the Senate has said the only way we can get the people we need for information technology, the only way we can meet the problem of Y-2000, you heard of that, where our computers are going to go wild, lots of things are going to happen if we do not get those computers changed which cannot deal with the year 2000. There is a mad race on behind the scenes to deal with the year 2000. We cannot get the people to do it. We do not have the personnel.
One of the reasons we are going outside the country to get personnel is because we are confronting that problem. But there is an ongoing need for information technology workers; 300,000 vacancies exist right now in the information technology industry. The Department of Labor projects that over the next 5 or 10 years we will have 1.5 million vacancies in the information technology industry, because they do not see the colleges and universities and the other places which produce these information technology workers, they do not have the capacity, they do not have the students in there now. Unless something radical happens, we are not going to be able to take care of those positions.
We have the American Competitiveness Act. If ever there was a misnamed piece of legislation, it is the American Competitiveness Act, which the House will be acting on soon, which calls for the importation of an extra 30,000 people in the category of professionals. We are going to lessen the quota in some other areas for immigrants and increase the quota for professionals in order to deal with this problem; 30,000 more in the first year and over a period of 2 or 3 years, 20,000 each year more.
Many of them are going to come from Bangalore, India. There is a special company over there which sends us large numbers, the same company that sends large numbers of Indian workers here for our information technology industry, that same company also has a large number of contracts to work on the Indian nuclear weapons. As I said before, you have a circle there where we are training people who can make the bombs, which we deplore, the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
So we have a problem of leadership in America. We have a problem with leadership in this House. There is no compassion for poor children out there who need the help of the Federal Government.
The Federal Government cannot do it all, but if we make the first step, we take the first step, we can push the States and the cities to use some of their surplus or more of their surplus or, if not the surplus, to find a way to meet us somewhere. Somebody has to have the compassion to see that you are putting children at risk in unsafe and dilapidated buildings.
I have not covered all of the hazards. Some of the schools still have lead pipes that are unhealthy. Some schools have lead paint. Some of the schools have top floors where there is deterioration as a result of too many leaks, and there are so many problems with the leaking that they cannot find it anymore. The walls are just caving in.
I am sure that this is not unique to New York. Other big cities and rural areas have similar problems with respect to defectiveness of school buildings. I want to salute the United Federation of Teachers, the affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers in New York. They took the case to court with respect to safety in school buildings, and they recently won a victory. A judge has ordered that all school buildings in New York have to be inspected for violations.
We inspect other buildings. Landlords are held to standards with respect to health and safety. But we have never had a situation where schools have been held to the same standards. They have been exempt from inspections from the health or the buildings departments. The judge has now ordered that.
We remember what happened in Washington when they began to look at certain kinds of shortcomings in the schools. For 3 weeks they had to delay the opening of schools here in Washington, D.C., because roofs had to be repaired. We hope that we are going to confront this problem and really get down to admitting that we have a crisis and are subjecting children to a crisis.
We are endangering and injuring the national security of the United States. Our national security is now tied up with the degree to which we educate our population.
I am not going to belittle the need for a strong Air Force or a strong Navy, the need for the most effective modern weapons, but in addition to that and in order to keep that going, you need an educated population on a scale we have not yet recognized to keep everything going.
We have these surveys that have been done about the shortages of information technology workers in business. They only look at businesses. They surveyed businesses. They have not surveyed the nonprofit sector and their needs for information technology workers. They have not surveyed schools, which are trying to get going with more and more information technology, and they need personnel. When you look at all of the ways in which we are going to be utilizing information technology workers, the problem mushrooms. Our Nation's national security, our leadership economically, all is being jeopardized by the blind manner in which we insist on proceeding by not recognizing the importance of education.
The budget that has been submitted by the majority Republicans in this House does not recognize the educational crisis at all. It plays games with education. It is dangerous, the budget that has been submitted by this House.
We are ignoring a window of opportunity. We have a $50 billion surplus we can contemplate. And anybody who says that none of that surplus is going to be spent on anything but Social Security, that is a lie. That is a big lie, because we have left certain things undone. We have not fully funded the transportation bill, not fully funded the agriculture research bill. A number of places have not been fully funded.
You watch, as we go into the latter part of this session, we get to the last days of October, you watch them pull the rabbits out of a hat. You watch and understand that part of that $50 billion surplus is going to go toward meeting some of these needs, as it ought to. I am all in favor of some of the money being dedicated to Social Security.
When the President made his State of the Union address, we anticipated $8 billion. Certainly if you only had an $8 billion surplus, it should go to the Social Security contingency fund, rainy day fund. But if you have $50 billion, why not divide it the way that I propose. One-fourth of it can go to Social Security, $50 billion or more, one-fourth Social Security contingency fund. One-fourth should go to the reduction of taxes on people, families that earn $50,000 or less. And one-fourth should go to a direct grant system for school construction and repair and renovation and improvement. Another fourth should go to other education matters such as reduction of class sizes, the purchase of equipment, education technology.
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We can spend $50 billion in ways that would be an investment for national security. If you put it into education, it is an investment for national security, unlike any other expenditures. We are going to spend it on something, we might as well put on the table a discussion right now of how we are going to spend the $50 billion, how we are going to invest the $50 billion and not play games.
I put a statement in the Record on the budget where I said the following last week at the time of the discussion of the budget:
It is highly likely that there will be a budget surplus of no less than $50 billion for the coming budget year. For the first time in many decades, there will be a window of opportunity to make meaningful Federal investments in education. Unfortunately, the Federal share of the overall expenditures for education is merely 7 percent at present. This budget surplus offers an opportunity to bolster our national security by increasing the pool of brainpower to operate our increasingly complex society. I propose that the new budget surplus be divided in accordance with the priorities that I have just stated. This represents a worthy budget deal. Let us make a deal. Let the deal be on the table in respect to how we should spend the dollars, one-fourth for direct emergency for school funding, one-fourth for Social Security, one-fourth to reduce taxes for people at the bottom, and one-fourth for other education priorities. This represents a worthy budget deal which should immediately be placed on the table for discussion and debate. We need an open debate on the best use for the surplus. What American voters should fear most is a closed-door, smoke-filled room, a deal made in October with only representatives of the Republican-controlled appropriations committees and representatives from the White House present. There will be a compromise which will leave out very important, basic national security concerns, especially as they relate to education. School construction will be tossed aside in that kind of compromise. Let us talk about it. Let the American people hear the possibilities. Let the focus groups and the polling show us where they are and let the parties respond to that. The common sense of the American voters cannot go into play if they do not know what the issues are, if they do not know what the possibilities are. We have an option. We have a $50 billion plus option, a window of opportunity, and the public ought to know about it. A multibillion dollar deal is going to be made. Let this deal be done in the sunshine. Let us do a deal for the children of America.
Start acting real.
Right now do a democratic deal.
Do this magic surplus deal.
Upfront right away.
Chase infected cynics
Off the political highway.
Make humane rules.
Build safe schools.
Start acting real.
Right now do the deal.
Sunshine is now okay.
Act fast in the light of day.
Invest it the people's way.
Stop pushing the no touch lie.
In four pieces cut the pie.
Start acting real.
Right now do the deal.
Vote for children's justice fast.
Make up for the stupid past.
The budget is on keen keel.
Upfront right away.
Do this magic surplus deal.
Do the deal now. Let us not have a situation similar to the one we had in 1990 when they all went to the White House under George Bush and the leadership of the Congress and they made a deal that was not in the best interests of the American people. At that time I wrote a piece called the Budget Summit where I said:
In the great white D.C. mansion
There's a meeting of the mob.
And the question on the table is
Which beggars will they rob?
There's a meeting of the mob.
Now, I'll never get a job.
All the gents will make a deal.
And the poor have no appeal.
There's a meeting of the mob.
It is still relevant. I do not want the mob to meet at the White House or any appropriations room and decide behind the scenes how to use the surplus without the input of Members of Congress. We all get elected, the same number of constituents in the districts. We should all have input. The American people should have an input. The columnists and the analysts, everybody should have an input. They should not suddenly wake up and find the deal is done and is done badly, we have used the money in ways that are really not consistent with what voters think are the priorities. Education is an ongoing priority.
Within the education priority, there is no priority more important than construction. Safe schools, safe schools where students can study safely and in peace and with the necessary equipment and supplies. They should come first. In our national security, nothing is more important than education. We have a window of opportunity. We need the leadership in this House, we need the leadership in this city, in Washington, leadership that understands this. Nations rise and fall on the basis of their leadership.
As I said before, superpowers can fall, too. The Soviet Union died at age 75 because its leadership was just not responsive. Its leadership closed its circle. They would not listen to anybody from the outside. They would not even let the outsiders know what they were deciding.
Nothing is worse than going into the backroom and making a deal without the input of the American people. Nothing is more anti-
democratic. Nothing is more destructive. We need leadership. We are a great Nation. We are called, as President Clinton said, the indispensable Nation. We have a pivotal set of decisionmakers in this pivotal Nation. This year is a pivotal time of decision-making. Let us make decisions that are in the interest of the children of America.
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