NOTE: WITH CARTOON TO BE PLACED WITH HEADING #2.

By House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt

Working families are doing better than they were a few years ago. Thanks to the 1993 budget, enacted by Congressional Democrats and President Clinton, without the vote of a single Republican, the budget is balanced, unemployment and interest rates are down, and the economy is looking up for the first time in a generation.

But we still aren't where we need to be. A rising tide used to lift all boats. Now, it's just lifting some boats. Today, the benefits of the economy aren't spread around as fairly for all Americans. The economy is stacked in favor of the wealthy and big corporations -- and too often, working people don't get a fair shake.

The Republicans who control Congress are happy to see things continue the way the are. They don't want to make the changes that are necessary to give working people a better chance to care for their families and make ends meet.

We can't stand for that. We have too much work left to be done to accept this Republican Congress which is stuck in the muck of the special interests and hostility towards working families. We need a worker-friendly Congress that will fight to enact policies that will reward hard work and help expand the middle class in this country.

We have to reform our labor laws so that working people can be represented by the leaders they choose. I strongly believe that your right to organize must be enforced by the federal government. We must restore the balance of power in the workplace to give workers a real voice, and a real stake, in their future.

We have to fight for the rights of all workers -- American and those all over the world -- to be treated with respect and dignity. We need to continue to insist that our trading partners enforce their labor laws -- and respect the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain to raise their standard of living.

We have to protect the quality of health care for all Americans. And we have to expand the Medicare program to reach older workers who lose their health insurance due to layoffs.

We have to improve the quality of public education all over the country. Democrats have a plan to invest in our schools with 100,000 new, well-trained teachers to reduce class size. And we want to help local governments modernize schools so kids can compete in the global marketplace.

We have to invest n the productive capacity of our workers. We must make sure that our people have the most updated skills so they can obtain the jobs that exist in this economy. We can't afford to let one job go overseas because of our failure to make these investments in our people. We must help working families make ends meet.

We have to enforce the equal pay laws that we have in this country. It's just not fair that a woman only makes seventy-two cents on the dollar compared to a man for doing the same job. And we must raise the minimum wage this year. If we want to call ourselves a moral society, we must ensure that the minimum wage is a decent wage and a living wage.

Believe me, it will be a heck of a fight -- don't forget that many Republicans in Congress don't even believe that there should be a minimum wage in the first place. Republicans have no positive agenda -- they only know how to say "no."

They just want to roll back the accomplishments we have fought so hard to achieve.

They want to say "no" to health and safety protections for workers. It amazes me that in 1998 -- almost 80 years after many of these protections were enacted, the Republicans are still trying to dismantle all of our accomplishments that protect you in the workplace.

The Republicans didn't like the fast track debate last year. You know why? We won an important victory -- we stood up and said that trade agreements need to represent the interests of working men and women in this country, and that trade must raise the standards of workers all over the world.

They didn't like the fact that big business was out-lobbied in Congress by working people. So now the Republicans are trying to stack the rules of the game against working people with the Paycheck Protection Act. I have one question about this Act. Whose paycheck are they really trying to protect, yours or theirs?

The debate over fast track stood for more than the rules about trade. Our efforts started a real debate about whether Washington is going to stand for or against the working people of this country and around the world. I've traveled to Mexico and seen the maquiladoras on the border. As long as Mexican workers are denied their fundamental rights to organize, trade is going to be a race to the bottom. We need trade that raises living standards, not that drags them down. If developing nations don't develop a strong middle class among their workers, they will never buy the American goods that we want to export to their countries.

Trade will remain a one -way street unless worker rights and human rights are enforced. That's what we were fighting over in the fast track debate. And this issue is also part of what the China Most Favored Nation trade debate is about -- whether we should be rewarding a country that fails to honor and respect the rights of its workers.

We need to stand for more than the value of the mighty dollar. We need to stand for the values that our nation was founded upon. We put our values above commerce in South Africa. As a result, Nelson Mandela is now president of a democratic and free nation. If we are really serious about bringing change to China, we need to take the same approach.

You know where I stand. I support the rights of working people to be treated with the decency and respect that you deserve. And for policies in Washington that put your interests first, not the special interests. We have to work together to tear down the wall which the Republican Congress has put in our way.

We face a lot of challenges in our mission. But let's take inspiration from that former shipyard electrician Lech Walesa. In a speech before Congress, he told us how he started the Solidarity union movement which led the opposition to the Polish communist government.

When the famous strike in the Gdansk shipyard began in August 1980, the strike which led to the emergence of the first independent trade union in a communist country, Walesa was an unemployed electrician.

He had been fired from his job for earlier attempts to organize workers in their fight for their rights. But he jumped over the shipyard wall and rejoined his colleagues who promptly appointed him the leader of the strike. That's how the beginning of the end of Communism started. When Walesa recalled the road he traveled, he often thinks of that jump over the wall. Now others jump fences and tear down the walls of oppression. They do it, Walesa says, because it is right.

We need to jump over the walls in our country to make sure that working people get a fair shake at the bargaining tables and in the halls of Congress. We have to fight along side each other this year to ensure that we get a Congress that stands for your principles and your priorities. I look forward to working with you on these issues to make sure that we protect the paychecks of the people that matter -- the working men and women of America.

Reprinted from AIL Labor Agenda September 1998.

Finish The Flogging

By Jim Wright, former Speaker of the House

Whatever President Clinton's sins and indiscretions, a growing majority of Americans appear to feel that he and they, have been punished enough.

Among other things, the four-hour televised grilling of Clinton by a hostile battery of grand jury prosecutors seems to have backfired. The broadcast would have been unprecedentedly demeaning for any chief executive. Immediately after witnessing Clinton's response, the already substantial majority against impeachment went up six points in at least one poll. A solid two-thirds now back the president.

Regardless of what they may think of Clinton personally, most say they're tired of the prolonged investigation and don't want to hear any more about the tawdry sex affair.

Most believe that the president did wrong but don't believe he should be impeached. They feel there are more important subjects for Congress to consider and want their lawmakers to get on with the nation's business. That's what people are telling pollsters.

The overpowering tragedy of the shabby scandal that has dominated Washington this entire year transcends the personal grief and its persistent focus has visited upon the principals and their families. Far worse is the injury that our preoccupation with the sordid subject inflicts on the nation. It has affronted the public taste, cheapened the national dialogue, drowned out other important information, and polarized Congress into hostile, bitter, partisan camps.

Real harm has resulted from the year-long absence of any serious congressional attention to a host of genuine national problems. The noisome babble that fills almost every news broadcast obscures a mounting backlog of unattended public business.

Obsessed with their incessant game of political "gotcha!," congressional leaders have managed to shirk doing anything about important national needs that affect people's lives. Here are a few of those real problems ignored by newscasters, commentators and lawmakers while they've chattered, trance-like about Monicagate:

• Alarming stock market plunges and sharp currency devaluations in Japan, Russia and much of the developing world. These are impoverishing millions and drying America's foreign markets. If long unattended, they could bring on a worldwide economic depression from which America could not immunize itself.

Remember the 1930s, when economic panics gave impetus to the rise of military dictatorships, including those of Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Josef Stalin?

• The looming crisis in the Social Security trust fund, about which we've been duly warned. This crisis is preventable if we act soon enough. The best possible time would be in this moment of budget surplus. But all year long this subject has been ignored by Congress.
• The negotiated tobacco settlement, now moribund. It offered a fleeting chance, and some needed revenues, to begin protecting the nation's youth from tobacco's addictive menace. Congressional leaders, mindful of tobacco company contributions and apparently mesmerized by the tobacco industry's ad campaign, have quietly closed the window of opportunity by premeditated inaction while a distracted public was looking the other way.
• The proposed Patients' Bill of Rights. Intended to protect everyone's right to choose a doctor -- and the physician's right, free from insurance company pressure, to prescribe needed medical treatment -- this proposal, too, has fallen by the wayside. The bill, important to many millions of Americans, was so watered down by the House majority that it bears little resemblance to its original purpose.
• The slow strangulation of America's electoral process, the very lifeline of democracy, by ever-bigger contributions from private interests intent on controlling elections for their own purposes. Congress has been powerless to pass reforms. Twice this year, a bipartisan House majority has voted to close the gaping "soft money" loophole through which big corporations and others with axes to grind are funneling millions into political campaigns. Each time, however, the majority will was thwarted by leadership maneuvers. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott have put the reforms in deep freeze for one more extravagant binge of campaign excesses.
• Substantial majorities of the American people want prompt attention to each of these priorities. But GOP congressional leaders have gambled that they are safe in ignoring these needs because press and public are fixated on the sensational pornography of impeachment hearings. The nation's top newscasters, competitively thirsting for ratings, have kept public attention distracted from our country's serious business by the constant repetitious stream of chatter about Monicagate.

And the public is saying, "Enough!"

No other American president -- neither Richard Nixon nor Andrew Johnson -- was ever hounded as long, harassed as persistently or attacked as viciously as Clinton has been. From the moment he became president, determined critics have been out to discredit and remove him from office by any means available. Clinton's enemies accused him of financial improprieties over the Whitewater investment; of unnamed sins for replacing White House travel agents; of selling out U.S. interests to China for campaign contributions; and even of personal culpability in the suicide of his lifelong friend, Vince Foster.

Unable to prove any of that, Kenneth Starr now claims that Clinton obstructed justice by helping Monica Lewinsky get a job. Yet Starr mysteriously left Lewinsky's sworn testimony on this out of his report. "No one ever asked me to lie, and I was never promised a job for my silence," she testified to the grand jury.

Maybe the people are right. Clinton has been punished, and we should get the focus back on this nation's unfinished business.

Reprinted from the Fort Worth Star Telegram, September 27, 1998.