From bigxc@prairienet.orgMon Feb 20 17:59:05 1995
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 95 11:41:06 CST
From: Brian Redman <bigxc@prairienet.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <conspire@prairienet.org>
Subject: Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 4 Num. 06


              Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 4  Num. 06
             ======================================
                    ("Quid coniuratio est?")
 
 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 
THE MEXICAN RESCUE PACKAGE
 
[From The Congressional Record -- House, H1271-H1278, Feb. 6, 1995]
 
[...continued...]
 
MR. SANDERS [continues]:
You are standing up from Oregon, you are standing up from 
Mississippi, you are standing up from Ohio, many of us are 
standing up and the people are saying, "What difference does it 
make? Thanks for standing up for us, but you don't have any 
power. We send you here to represent us but you can't do anything 
about it. Why do you want me to come out and vote for you or vote 
for anybody else?"
 
I think one of the other aspects about this agreement which 
disturbs me is not only the agreement itself, which we disagree 
with, but the process which denies the elected officials of this 
country to stand up and do what is best for their districts.
 
 
MS. KAPTUR:
Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman raises some excellent, 
excellent points. I know that there are working people across 
this country who feel that they have lost voice at the highest 
levels of our Government.
 
What is equally disturbing to think about, Mr. Speaker, is that 
for the people of Mexico who have no voice, the working people of 
Mexico who have no voice, if our Government, and I think they 
were in cahoots with the top leaders of Mexico, has now caused 
the standard of living in Mexico to be cut by half, and it wasn't 
very high anyway, there are people who are hungry and there are 
people who are streaming across our borders now because our 
Government was too greedy for some of the interests that 
supported it and some of the top leaders in the Government of the 
United States, then shame on us as the most powerful economic 
force on this continent.
 
I yield to the gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Taylor], who 
wanted to make a comment.
 
 
MR. TAYLOR of Mississippi:
The only point I wanted to make, Mr. Speaker, and I wanted to get 
back as to the very eloquent delivery by the former mayor of 
Burlington, could he not just vote against the appropriation for 
this when it comes up?
 
 
MR. SANDERS:
If the gentleman knows, Mr. Speaker, if I had the opportunity to, 
I could and I would, but I do not have the opportunity. 
Unfortunately, as we have been discussing, we do not have that 
opportunity.
 
 
MR. TAYLOR of Mississippi:
Mr. Speaker, isn't it interesting that every group -- there are 
groups like the National Taxpayers Union, Common Cause, groups 
that represent the defense industry, groups that represent the 
homeless, everyone has a score card on how you voted. You hear 
the Nation has incurred at least a $20 billion liability and 
there was not even a vote on it, and there will not be a vote on 
it next year or the following year or the following year, unless 
something happens.
 
Mr. Speaker, I think the point all of us are trying to make, and 
maybe not saying as well as we can, is that the reason we need 
the information, the reason for the vote tomorrow morning, is 
that, No. 1, we find out just how far our liability goes with 
this; just what kind of assets, if any, the Mexicans have 
pledged. I have heard they pledged oil revenues that have already 
been pledged to pay other bills, so, therefore, they are really 
not available to get our money back. What kind of track record do 
the Mexicans have in paying things back? Where did this money 
come from?
 
Isn't it interesting, Mr. Speaker, that while everything comes 
before this body, from the amount of money we will have to mail 
letters home to our constituents, the amount of money we will 
spend on B-2 bombers, the amount of money we will spend on 
housing and urban development, the amount of money we will spend 
on veterans, all these things, sometimes much, much smaller 
amounts dealing in just tens of thousands of dollars, we will get 
an up-or-down vote on, but for $20 billion, neither the President 
of the United States nor the Speaker of the House nor the 
minority leader even thought we ought to have a vote. The only 
chance we get to rectify that starts tomorrow.
 
 
MR. SANDERS:
If the gentlewoman will yield further, Mr. Speaker, the gentleman 
makes a very important point. There almost seems to be an inverse 
relationship between the amount of money that is being spent and 
the level of discussion that takes place here.
 
We are seeing a whole lot of discussion on the National Council 
on the Humanities and Public Broadcasting, right? Every day, 
people are down here, some on one position, some on the other. It 
is a matter of a few hundred million dollars.
 
What we are talking about is more than $20 billion, and as of 
this moment, we do not have a vote on that, and that is clearly 
an outrage.
 
 
MR. DeFAZIO:
If the gentleman will continue to yield, Mr. Speaker, in an 
answer to the gentleman's earlier inquiry, there has not been a 
vote on an appropriation for the Economic Stabilization Fund 
since 1934, 60 years since an appropriation has been voted for, 
yet the fund has continued to garner money through Treasury 
withdrawals, through having money printed, and they exchange some 
sort of bizarre notes which they obtain from the International 
Monetary Fund. They give them to our Treasury in exchange for 
dollars which the Treasury orders printed at the Mint.
 
If you want to talk about creating something out of nothing but 
obligating the American people, and if Alan Greenspan is 
concerned about inflation, how about the inflation that is caused 
when you just run the presses overnight, running out whatever the 
largest denomination of bills is, I don't know, a thousand 
$10,000 bills, so we can shovel that money over to the Economic 
Stabilization Fund, so we can send it to Mexico, or so that we 
can secure the loans of Mexico?
 
Also, Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman put together an excellent list 
in response to your query here. I have heard a little bit about 
this "We will guarantee these funds with the oil revenues." There 
is a list here put together by the gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. 
Kaptur].
 
The gentleman is right, those funds are already 100 percent 
committed. In fact, they are so committed that the Mexican oil 
company has not been able to invest any money in exploration or 
maintenance, because their funds are so over committed already.
 
You go through the list: Pemex bonds, 7.75 percent; French 
francs, $750 million; Euro notes, Pemex, 8.375; $400 million, 
Austrian bond, dated July 23, 1993, due 1998. The list goes on 
and on and on. They are already well in hock for any oil they can 
pump until their supplies are exhausted, and we are going to take 
security out of this? You can't get blood out of a turnip.
 
 
MS. KAPTUR:
If the gentleman will yield on that, Mr. Speaker, Oil and Gas 
magazine also reported about that by the end of this decade, by 
1997, 1998, 1999, Mexico will be a net importer of oil because 
the number of barrels she has been able to produce has been cut 
in half, and because capital investment has not been able to be 
made in capital plant, and because of instability among the 
workers in the oilfields in Mexico, where conditions are just 
terrible.
 
Mr. Speaker, I think any wise investor would question that, oil 
being used as collateral.
 
If I might respond to the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders], 
who raised a good point, when it is a small item involving the 
budget, we get tied up in knots here, right?
 
When we are talking about $20 or $40 billion or however much the 
American people will be on the line, it is like the Stealth 
bomber. It goes through here, nobody saw it, we didn't vote on 
it. It happened, it is a happening in America, but we didn't have 
anything to do with it.
 
Mr. Speaker, I remember when the President came up here with his 
State of the Union speech. He didn't like the fact that the 
Department of Agriculture had spent a few thousand dollars trying 
to eliminate ticks. He spent a long time talking about ticks.
 
If you come from a rural area, a lot of my district is rural, 
that can be a pretty significant problem for people. In fact, we 
had one gentleman here in Congress, Berkeley Bedell, who had to 
leave Congress because he got Lyme disease. If you know anything 
about what can happen, it is a pretty serious area to be doing 
research on, so I didn't quite understand why he picked that 
particular few thousand dollar expenditure out.
 
Here we are talking about an enormous amount of money, and the 
gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Taylor] said, "Could we vote on 
it in the Committee on Appropriations?"
 
I asked one of the subcommittee chairs of Appropriations, "Will 
this come up before your subcommittee this year? Will we get a 
vote? How will we get a vote on this?"
 
He said, "Well, you know, yes, the Treasury Department is under 
our sub-committee's jurisdiction, but this particular fund, I 
guess it is more like foreign aid, so we don't think it would 
come under us."
 
This is the kind of fund, it is like mercury. If you have ever 
seen mercury and you try to put your finger on it, it keeps 
moving around. You can't pin it down, really; $20 billion, maybe 
$40 billion, and it is rising every day.
 
So here we stand, at 9 o'clock at night Washington time, trying 
to say it is our responsibility to vote on this kind of money, 
and putting our taxpayers at this kind of risk.
 
I yield to the gentleman from Mississippi.
 
                   [...to be continued...]
 
 +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +  +
 
[Copies of The Congressional Record are normally available for 
viewing at your local library.]
 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
     I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
If you would like "Conspiracy Nation" sent to your e-mail 
address, send a message in the form "subscribe conspire My Name" 
to listproc@prairienet.org -- To cancel, send a message in the 
form "unsubscribe conspire" to listproc@prairienet.org but with 
absolutely nothing in the subject line of the message.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Aperi os tuum muto, et causis omnium filiorum qui pertranseunt.
Aperi os tuum, decerne quod justum est, et judica inopem et 
  pauperem.                    -- Liber Proverbiorum  XXXI: 8-9 

 Brian Francis Redman    bigxc@prairienet.org    "The Big C"
--------------------------------------------------------------
    Coming to you from Illinois -- "The Land of Skolnick"        
--------------------------------------------------------------

