Burgess Owens

Social Security should be a nonnegotiable part of a democratic society in America. I must appeal and beg the White House and the Republican majority in the House and the Senate to end the torture of millions of Americans. Right now they…

this 60th anniversary observance of the liberation of Auschwitz presents the people of all civilized nations with an opportunity to focus a searing light of exposure on one of the deadliest landmark events of human history. More than 1…

Mr. Speaker, as other members on the Democratic side of the aisle have stressed, the Republican majority has allowed us only a handful of hours to examine the content of this mammoth bill, which numbers in the thousands of pages, before…

it is insulting and disgusting for the Republican Majority to make a joke of serious war and peace policy by bringing draft legislation to the floor as a frivolous matter, as a joke. Every member of the House who is against the draft…

I wish to express grave concern over a clause in this bill that would seriously erode worker protections against tuberculosis, TB, and bioterrorism. This provision prohibits the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, from…

Democrats like tax cuts, too, but the Democratic Party's tax policies are targeted to do the most good for the majority of Americans. Working families will be the beneficiaries of the Democratic tax policy. Republicans want tax cuts which…

The right to overtime pay is a fundamental right guaranteed for the past 66 years by the Fair Labor Standards Act. For 6 million or more American workers, however, that right will expire in exactly 1 month's time. On August 23, a Bush…

I rise to close for the opposition on H.R. 2729. As I stated at the outset, neither H.R. 2729 nor any other of these four bills before us addresses the important health and safety concerns of American working men and women. In essence…

I am here to protest, first of all, the package, the packaging process, the rules process. Lumping five bills together, four of them dealing with OSHA matters, there is an effort to trivialize, to minimize and to make invisible this…

working families continue to suffer under the oppressive policies of the Republican-controlled White House and Congress. With a new low in cynicism, Republicans have made a mockery of the suffering of the jobless. The Republican unit of…

the House should hold hearings on the abuses in the Iraqi prisons. The most powerful military machine that the world has ever seen quickly won the hot war in Iraq. It is the occupation of Iraq that is unwinnable. The gentleman from…

A lot of us have chosen in say that we are into a second Vietnam. And there are some people who are quite upset that we compared the war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam. It is true that the war in Vietnam cost us 58,000 lives, and so far we…

once again the CBC budget makes education the highest priority. We are requesting an increase of $18.5 billion for education funding. The CBC understands that at the heart of our efforts to improve homeland security, at the heart of our…

I rise against this budget because while this administration is proposing to spend billions of dollars to build schools in Iraq, there is zero in this budget for school construction for the public schools in America.

the bloody spectacle of this week is not the release of Mel Gibson's gory movie exploiting the suffering of Jesus Christ. In this hemisphere, 600 miles from our shores, blood is flowing in the streets of Haiti with the complicity of the…

The gentleman mentioned India. Members ought to know that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is not now considered the greatest institute of technology in the world, there is one in India that has surpassed the Massachusetts…

It has been 3 years since we have had an increase in minimum wage. It is frozen at $5.15 an hour. On that, you cannot get out of the poverty even if you work 40 hours a week every week of the year.

the word ``outsourcing'' ought to be branded into the minds of every young American. The folks with great hopes that if they stay in school and get an education, become a programmer or technician, that they were guaranteed a job, but…

the gentleman from New Jersey, I am sure, has had the experience that I have had, that they were glad to get the income tax check from the government because their unemployment was running out. That immediate cash was great, but the…

Is it perhaps barbaric that the ratio of the salary of the CEO to the worker can be 300 to 400 times as much as the average worker, plus bonuses, investments, et cetera? And to increase that, you indulge in outsourcing and move jobs…

I am going to talk about common-sense legislative priorities, and practically every priority I discuss will be related to budget and appropriations matters. And I want to thank those the three Members. I watched the presentations. And…

I have chosen to sort of use a theme of class warfare. There is no class warfare in America. When we raise that issue, people get excited. I agree with everybody who says there is no class warfare. The problem is the ruling class has…

I hope we are not exporting to Iraq the kind of democracy which would allow a minute and a half only for a Representative of more than 650,000 people to speak. We need more time to excuse how we are going to spend $87 billion. We have…

we are all glad that Saddam Hussein has been dethroned. It is better for the world. It is better for Iraq. But the cost is too great and has been too great in dollars, and we now are considering another $87 billion. We have already…

in his first month, the President called together all Members of the Congress to support a bipartisan education bill. He said that he was willing to do two things: promise additional funding for education of no less than $6 billion, and he…