James Moran: “Mr. Chairman, our neighbor needs our help desperately. What is our excuse for not helping our neighbor? We have a $10…”

“Mr. Chairman, our neighbor needs our help desperately. What is our excuse for not helping our neighbor? We have a $10 trillion economy, we have more surplus than we have ever had, we just gave ourselves a $2 trillion tax cut, and our neighbor needs our help desperately. They had an earthquake that they could not have done anything about. Imagine, 1.6 million, one out of four people in El Salvador has been affected. In fact, about 10,000 were killed or seriously injured. Our neighbor needs our help. Three hundred thirty-five thousand homes were destroyed, and El Salvador tells us that they do not possibly have the money to build even 30,000. So 90 percent of the people lost their homes and are not going to be able to rebuild a home. They are families. They all have kids. They are living in tents. Our neighbor needs our help. We have never had as much capacity as we do today to help. We have no excuse not to help. When we think of the health care, the sanitation needs, the housing, they need it all. We provided $6 billion during the 1980s in military aid. Where are our priorities? Tens of thousands of Salvadorans are in this country because of the terror of the 'death squads' that we contributed to. Where are our priorities? We have $100 million in this bill to help our neighbor.”