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“WE MUST GET PAST THE CLICHES” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H999-H1002 on Jan. 31, 1996.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WE MUST GET PAST THE CLICHES
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 12 1995, the gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield to the distinguished Member from the great State of Montana, Mr. Williams, who announced a little earlier in the month that he would not be returning after this year, and that is a great disappointment, not just to myself as a Member of this body, but to every person in this country.
Few know this man. Let me say to the people of Montana, you sent the best.
Now you can say whatever you want to say.
Mr. WILLIAMS. I thank the gentlewoman very much for yielding.
I first want to say to my colleague and friend, the gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur], how pleased I am with your kind and overly generous introduction and thoughts about me.
But I am here for another year. One of the reasons I am glad enough for that is I continue to get to work with the gentlewoman.
We have just heard on the House floor an argument for apple pie and motherhood and American flags. The previous speakers, it seems to me, are well-intentioned, but nonetheless were just filled with cliches. They condemned debt dependency and despair, they talked about fighting for fundamental principles, they condemned more and bigger government, and accused only one side of the aisle of being for that awful thing, talked about bloated regulations and big Washington solutions. I really did not hear anything they said with which I disagreed. It is just that almost everything they said, in my judgment, was somewhat meaningless and mostly cliches.
One has to, it seems to me, in difficult times like this get past cliches and move to facts if we are really to change this Government and our response to people in the way they want. For example, let me take education. I serve on that committee. There has been for at least a decade, and particularly for the past year, howls coming out of this Chamber about the fat bureaucracy in education. So that is the cliche.
Whether one, however, bothers, takes a few minutes to check the facts, you find out that in the schools of this country, central office personnel constitute less than 2 percent of school employees. We have heard, particularly during this last year on the floor of the House, a lot of talk about regulations in the schools, mandates from Washington, horrible regulations, how bad they are, how overwhelming, overwhelmingly destructive they are, but when you look at the facts of it, you find out some interesting things.
Goals 2000 has no regulations. School-to-work legislation, relatively new, school-to-work law, no regulations. Under President Clinton, who came to office believing there were too many regulations, the Department of Education has eliminated two-thirds of the regulations surrounding elementary and secondary education in this country. Now I know there is a little cloud that follows President Clinton around, that no-credit cloud, he never gets any credit, but he has eliminated two-thirds of the elementary and secondary regulations in this country.
A Member of this House, I will not name him or his State because it would not be fair, he is not here today, said about a week ago, speaking from the well of the House not far from where the gentlewoman from Ohio is standing, he said to the American people over C-SPAN with how many people listening, 100,000, 200,000, 1 million, 2 million, he said, You know, folks, I am not quoting him, I am paraphrasing him, I will quote him in a second, he said, You know, the problem, with Federal expenditures is only 23 cents of the dollars that we appropriate ever leaves Washington, only 23 cents on the dollar ever leaves Washington and gets down to the student; the rest of it, he said, feeds the Federal bureaucracy. So out of a dollar, he is saying only 23 cents gets to the student.
Now, I suppose, what, hundreds of thousands, millions of people heard that. It is totally inaccurate when one checks the facts. The Department of Education in Washington DC, has the best, lowest overhead administrative record of any department. The Defense Department would kill for a record as good as the Department of Education has; less than 2 percent, less than two cents of every dollar is used for the bureaucracy, for the overhead here in Washington, DC. So one needs to get past the cliches. One needs to get past the mistakes, some of them I think quite intentional.
One really needs to get down to the facts, particularly, I want to say as I conclude, particularly in this representative democracy of ours, where the citizens need the facts if they are to make proper choices in November and on election days at the ballot box. If they are to place upon their elected representatives their will, their choices, their options, those must be based on facts--not cliches, not myths, not intolerance, not lack of compromise--facts.
{time} 1430
Again, I am appreciative of the gentlewoman sharing some of her time with me.
Come Shop with Me at Scott Paper Co.
Ms. KAPTUR. I will reclaim my remaining time. I thank the gentleman very much for offering that important clarification. I think one of the difficulties is when you have a large number of new Members that are elected, it takes a long time to learn the ropes, and sometimes perhaps people speak out before they check the facts. I think the gentleman's commentary this afternoon is helpful to the country.
Let me say I come down here for a similar reason, and that is to offer a word of caution to Members of the freshman class, especially on the Republican side of the aisle, who this past Friday held a retreat. According to the press accounts, the purpose of the retreat was to reflect on how their best-laid plans for the so-called revolution went awry and to reflect why the American people have turned their backs thus far on their message.
There was an article in my local paper, the Toledo Blade, last Saturday, which I am going to submit for the Record, which talks about the fact that this group of new Members was very concerned after the President's State of the Union that he was able to get his message across to the country, but that their leadership, according to this quote in the newspaper, that their leaders did not understand the importance of what they are calling communication. They were criticizing some of their leaders as too in your face, too extreme, too ideological. In order to help them out of this mess, one of the speakers that was invited to the retreat was the chief executive officer of Scott Paper Company.
When I read down to that point in the article, I knew that I had to come down here today and speak a bit. I would just say to the Members of the new class that rather than seeking political assistance from speakers like this Mr. Dunlap, I think maybe it might be important to have some quiet reflection, more in a spiritual sense, on your own, because when I tell you about this gentleman, I am not so sure you would want to invite him back.
He is one of the most well known chief executive officers in our country, who is referred to as ``Chainsaw Al,'' the meanest boss in America, the country's most notorious employee killer. In his own biography he describes himself as Rambo in pinstripes because of the way that he cut employment and laid off, terminated, thousands of workers at Scott Paper Company, his home company. In fact, the May 1995 issue of Fortune Magazine indicates a reduction in work force at Scott Paper of nearly half. Thousands and thousands and thousands of workers at that particular company were given the pink slip.
Now, if I could give my colleagues some advice, it would be don't listen to Mr. Dunlap. Yet I see that he was invited. Over the last couple of years he has fired over 30,000 people in our country and shipped most of those jobs overseas. Recently he was a party to a merger between Kimberly Clark and Scott Paper, which he ended up coming out of that deal looking pretty good. He made over $100 million on the deal.
I would like to ask Mr. Dunlap, in giving his advice to the new Members, I would like to know what happened to those thousands and thousands of workers that gave their loyal service to Scott Paper? What happened to them?
During the time that all these workers were cut and terminated, Scott Paper enjoyed profits like it had never seen. Well, who would not, when you cut our work force in half? But he benefitted, $100 million.
It is interesting to look at Scott Paper as a company, because it has manufacturing facilities all over the world. I know our listeners and Members of the House here buy their products. Viva paper towels is one you will notice on the shelves, or Scotties facial tissues, or Cottonelle, that you use in the bathroom.
But the company whose products are familiar to us all is cleaning up at the expense of the U.S. taxpayers. Some of the countries that they do business in have the most dirt cheap labor anywhere on the globe. Honduras, gosh, they are a great respect for workers in Honduras. They are shot if they try to earn a decent living down there. Costa Rica, China, Thailand, Malaysis, Taiwan, South Korea. Scott Paper has a huge presence in Mexico. In fact, its Mexican subsidiary, Compania Industrial de San Cristobal, operates five manufacturing facilities in Mexico, and plans for more expansion are under way.
In other words, all these people that got laid off in this country and are terminated coast to coast, they are going to be replaced by workers in Mexico who earn less than $1 an hour. Yet if you go to the store and buy any one of those products from Scott Paper, your prices did not go down. So what happened to the money? Mr. Dunlap took it.
Though the productivity of the workers at Scott even prior to the layoffs was very high and their profits were high, they were not a bankrupt company, workers in Scott Paper's tissue mill in Everett, WA, and I hope there are citizens from Everett, WA who are listening, and other mills across the country, saw their jobs transferred to Mexico already. It is very interesting. In Mexico those workers have no benefits, they have no benefits. The workers in Washington made a living wage. That company really used to stand for something, before
``Chain Saw Al'' got involved.
In January of 1994, Scott employed 33,000 people worldwide. But by December, when he had finished, there were 19,900 people left. Those who did not lose their job last year, imagine what it must be like to come to work every day in that company wondering whether the hatchet is going to fall on your neck in spite of how hard you work, in spite of your loyalty to the company, because every worker in that company knows they can be replaced by a worker in another country where Scott has a plant that earns almost nothing, not even enough to afford to buy Scott's products in the countries where those products are sold and made.
Scott Paper essentially put U.S. employees out of work, and, by building up operations in companies like Honduras and Mexico, the company continues to undercut the wages of this country and the American people.
But, wait. It gets worse. We know prices have not gone down. In fact, prices in the tissue area have been going up for years, at the same time as people like Mr. Dunlap are reaping huge profits while they take advantage of dirt cheap labor elsewhere and put our people out of work in this country. The company does not even have the decency to pass along its cost savings as a result of manufacturing and other companies in the form of price reductions at the shelves when our people go to the supermarkets to shop.
In the last year alone, however, as a result of this kind of shredding of a corporate charter with the American people, where so many of our folks are thrown out of work, its stock price skyrocketed. Wall Street could not be happier, its price value going up over 100 percent.
Now, what happened recently was Kimberly Clark just bought Scott Paper in July of this past year for $6.9 billion. Mr. Dunlap, that is where he managed to get $100 million on the deal, and effectively built a rising stock price on the swelling ranks of jobless people. How would you like to have him live next door to you?
Kimberly Clark is the largest paper product company in Mexico, having invested over $100 million there, and millions more in other countries. It is interesting to see, a gentleman who came into address the new freshmen, who disdains Government, who disdains the laws of this country, benefits so much from Government programs.
In 1994, Kimberly Clark, get ready for this, obtained $9.27 million from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, for insurance. That is an instrumentality of the Government of the United States, paid for by our taxpayers to invest their money in other countries.
In the same year, our Department of Labor certified 636 U.S. employees of Kimberly Clark as approved to receive help, unemployment help, because they were being put out of work because imports were coming in from Scott and Kimberly, the same products from these other countries, putting our workers out of work, and the American people have to pay for the families that have been put out of work by this very same company. Scott Paper, with its presence in Mexico, also had 300 workers. So that is nearly 800 workers just in the past year that we are paying for, unemployed people, that these very same companies put out of work in the United States.
You could say that is a form of corporate welfare, because, on the one hand these companies are using our money to go abroad, insurance through the taxpayers of the United States, and then putting the U.S. work force out of work and having to get the money to pay for those unemployed workers through our Department of Labor. We know Americans are paying for the training of nearly 1,000 workers just over the last year because of the actions of these two companies.
Now, it is amazing, because Mr. Dunlap began working for Scott Paper at the beginning of 1994. The terms of his contract, though hidden from the public, specify a base salary of no less than $1 million per year. While 13,100 workers got pink slips, Scott Paper bought Mr. Dunlap a multimillion-dollar home in Boca Raton, FL, and gave him a $333,000 hiring bonus. I sure hope that the new freshmen did not have to pay him to speak before their group, because he certainly could afford to come on his own.
So I guess what I wanted to point out today, there were articles that were included in Roll Call on Monday talking about some of his comments to that group, where he said, and I can't repeat some of these words, by the way, but I will just leave a blank, where he advised the freshmen, ``Never give up. Never give up. Never let the `blank' get you down. This nonsense about the working people, don't ever apologize for being successful.''
This is the kind of person that is being listened to here in Washington. It says here, and I quote directly,
[[Page H1001]]
The sleepy-eyed freshmen were greeted with a take no prisoners exhortation from Al Dunlap, the chief executive of the Scott Paper Company, who has been described variously as the meanest boss in America, the country's most notorious employee killer.
What an attitude at the end of the 20th century for someone with this kind of rapacious greed to be invited to address Members of the Congress of the United States, which means that they are acquiescing in the actions that he has taken.
Mr. KILDEE. Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?
Ms. KAPTUR. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.
Mr. KILDEE. I have been listening to the gentlewoman's remarks. I was wondering, Mr. Dunlap is being asked by the Republican Conference to address them and to give them advice? Is that what the article states?
Ms. KAPTUR. The article states that they were asking for his advice.
Mr. KILDEE. His advice on Medicare, how to cut Medicare, the school lunch program, the WIC program for pregnant women? They have already cut those programs. He could advise them further on how to cut those programs. He is good at cutting programs. Is he coming in because he is an expert on cutting and they are going to go further in taking his advice on how to cut these programs for the people?
Ms. KAPTUR. I think it is very interesting they would invite him in as an expert and listen to a gentleman like this, and try to shape their agenda for 1996. That is why I bring it to the attention of the body.
Mr. KILDEE. I suggest after Mr. Dunlap, they should at least balance things out and maybe have someone like Mother Theresa come in and give them some spiritual guidance.
Mr. HEFNER. I think he probably has a special interest, Mr. Dunlap. If you make the drastic cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and these other programs, it will make more room for a tax cut, which he will benefit very greatly from. So I admire the man for being honest about it. He at least is sticking to his principles. The more working folks you can get rid of and you can cut the Medicare and Medicaid and programs for children, then you give him a bigger tax cut. I do not have any idea what $100 million would be in a tax cut, but I think it would probably be substantial under the proposed budget that the Republicans are offering. So at least he is going to his constituency, those that sympathize with him and feel the same way that he does. It would have been kind of nice if we had heard what his views are on Medicare and Medicaid and family leave and this sort of thing.
{time} 1445
Maybe the next retreat that they have--no, it is not a retreat. Maybe the next whatever you call it that they have, what is it? The next one they have, they will discuss some of these programs and let the American people know how they truly feel about some of the programs that affect the most vulnerable people in our country rather than the most privileged few, rather than those that made their fortunes on the backs of the working people of this country. And do not apologize for getting wealthy. How much in tax breaks did the company get under the overseas advertising program that we did?
Ms. KAPTUR. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation, they received nearly $10 million in insurance in 1994, for investment in other countries. So it shows how he is thinking.
Mr. HEFNER. Mr. Speaker, if the gentlewoman will yield, that would be investing in other countries where the labor force would be cheaper, and labor would be more kind to a company of this size, and that the benefits would tend to not be as great as they are if they had all of their production in this country? Would that be a fair assumption?
Ms. KAPTUR. That is a fair assumption. What is interesting to look at is that, even before this is done, they were making profits in the United States. They had a good work force. They were making profits as a company. It is not that they had a work force that was not producing for them, but they wanted not to just make reasonable profits, they wanted excessive profits. They disinfested this country and used our tax dollars to do it to us.
Mr. HEFNER. I think we have to admire the gentleman's intestinal fortitude to come to people that think along the same lines and have the same philosophy. At least we have to give him that. He goes to where he has the potential to get even more goodies from this Congress if the budget passes along the lines that our Republican friends want to pass it.
Ms. KAPTUR. I thank the gentleman for bringing up a good point about his personal tax benefits that would flow from the tax package that they are proposing. He earns, who knows, millions and millions of dollars a year. The benefit to him would be absolutely incredible, probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, figuring his stock options, and so forth. So, he certainly would not be the example I would have chosen.
We have so many good companies in this country that are making profits that are well-managed and that treat their workers with respect, that have respect for people. But I thought that this was just a terrible indictment on the freshman class. I hope that the caution we have given them today might encourage them to bring business leaders to this Congress that are worthy of the kind of recognition that they give to this type of gentleman.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Levin].
Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I have been talking about one aspect of the House freshmen and women.
I would like to, if I might, talk about another one of their, I think, extreme causes. That is essentially the debt ceiling be damned. All torpedoes ahead, no matter what we are going to hit or whom we are going to hit.
I wanted to say just a few words about a letter that one of my colleagues from Michigan sent to Secretary Rubin, and I quote. The gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Smith] said, ``It is my understanding that you are considering withholding Social Security and other trust fund payments due on March 1, 1996, despite the positive cash-flows of such trust funds.''
There is a grave misunderstanding here. The Treasury is not going to withhold Social Security and other trust fund payments. Here is the problem: If the debt ceiling is not extended, the Treasury is going to be put in this position, as I understand it. They are not going to be able to redeem the nonmarketable funds that they have. And if they cannot do that, they have to do it by issuing marketable securities. Then they may not have the money to honor the Social Security checks that would have been mailed to millions and millions of people.
So, it is not the Treasury Department that is, as the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Smith] put it in his letter, withholding Social Security and other fund payments, despite the positive cash-flows of such trust funds. It would be that the Republican majority here, I think a reckless act it would be, and I find it hard to believe that they will ultimately do this, would put the Government in the position of not being able to honor these checks.
Now, even if they could find the funds if cash came in, et cetera, the day that these checks were presented, if there were not enough money, if there were not enough monies to honor all the checks that came in from Social Security on that day, and every other source, none of these checks under Federal Reserve policies would be honored, none of them.
There is because the Treasury Department does not at this point have the ability to segregate the kinds of checks that are paid. Social Security checks for mothers, they all come in. The software is such that either they are all handled together or they are not, under Federal Reserve rules, handled at all.
That is my understanding of it. So, the Republican majority, again they have got blinders on. They are seeing only what they want to see. Here they are being terribly myopic. They are so myopic they cannot even see what is in front of them, let alone, what is far away.
So, I would strongly urge that we do this: I heard a lot of the back and forth earlier on the floor, and to my colleague from Ohio, that is why I am here. I am deeply troubled. The gentlewoman referred to an example of the extremism of some of the House Republicans, especially some of the freshman, not all. I think that the ultimate example of this is playing around with the debt ceiling. There are other examples pointed out.
This is the ultimate. The faith and credit of the United States, their ability, when checks are presented, including by Social Security recipients, the question of whether they will be honored. What do other people think about this? I know that my colleagues on the other side, they do not like us to call them extremists, but they ought to understand that the public is calling them extremists, because playing around with the debt ceiling is an example of it.
I was reading the article on the House freshman in Business Week, the January 29 edition. it refers to a Business Week Harris Poll where 45 percent of the Americans thought of the first-termers on the Republican side as extremists. That is a huge number. They are doing so because it is based on the reality they see, extreme actions are well as rhetoric.
So, my reaction to the back and forth today, and all the oratory that went on, I know that my colleagues have trouble just giving ground in terms of some of these extreme ideas. I know they want to use every leverage they can, because they hold there views so deeply. But the problem with extreme ideas is that sometimes it causes people to adopt extreme means. In this case, the extremity, the extremeness of the end leads people to justify extreme means.
Mr. Speaker, playing around with the debt ceiling is an extreme means that is going to lead, I fear, if it were ever undertaken, the default, to extreme results.
So, the mainstream of America, which we are part of here, those of us who are pleading that we end the leveraging with the debt ceiling, even talking about it, the mainstream of America is saying resist the temptation. They talk about people who touch a hot stove, they learn having touched it once. In this case, our colleagues on the Republican side touched the stove twice at least in terms of shutting down the Government, and they got burned, but so did America. You would think people would learn. I hope so.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, and I would be happy to yield again, talking about measures that go too far, I think part of the problem is who they might be listening to. Again this Mr. Dunlap, and this is a direct quote from Roll Call on Monday, January 29, suggested, just think about this for a second, that they should abolish the Senate, the other body. And if they did that, then they could get somewhere.
Now, a lot of us have problems with the way things are set up. We are not always pleased with the way we make our laws in this country, but I do not think that that remark was made in jest. And I think there are a lot of people that would want to dismantle the very tenets of our Constitution. To me that borders on anarchy. That is not just reform. That someone would come before them and offer that as a proposal, I find not just to be off the edge, I find that to be about as extreme a recommendation as they could make.
It goes to the very fundamental rights of representation that the small States and the large States have in our country. It goes back to the founding of the Republic. What gives this person the right to speak before this group in this way?
Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, if the gentlewoman will continue to yield, I think she put her finger on it. There is an obligation on the part of some of our colleagues on the Republican side who really do not like this extremism, who have said to a number of us on many occasions privately that it is reckless, and sometimes they used the word
``crazy,'' that they now speak out publicly.
We should not leave here tomorrow or the next day wit the debt ceiling issue up in the air. It could have all kinds of results. And, look, it might help us politically, Democrats, if the Republicans playing with fire unleashed an inferno, but I do not want that and my colleague does not want that.
What the Republicans here should do is to say, look, we are reluctant to give up this leverage, if they think it is. It is not, and we are going to cut it cleanly. Cut it cleanly, extend the debt ceiling and let us argue out these important issues. We are in favor of a balanced budget. We are arguing out how we do it. Let that be the argument, not the debt ceiling.
I deeply appreciate the distinguished gentlewoman from Ohio yielding to me. I just wanted to come to the floor and to straighten out this issue about Social Security, the debt ceiling that would cause the checks perhaps to be dishonored, not because the Treasury was taking steps. The onus is on our colleagues over there, and I just pray that they will act responsibly and do it this week.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for raising a very important matter that frankly we could have taken care of weeks ago, months ago. We do not have to be constantly operating at the edge.
I think, as the gentleman says, and he is a very moderate individual in his own views, that perhaps people feel so strongly that they think this is their only alternative. But for the sake of the Nation I think it is best to put on the shelf some of the deeper urges we might have and for the sake of the Nation do what is right for all of the people, not just for a small subset or how we might personally feel about something.
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