Mr. Speaker, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo recently spoke to the National Italian American Foundation as part of its Congressional Lunch Series. Andrew Cuomo is a model for those who would serve the nation, and while he comes from a distinguished family, he has already made his own indelible mark on our society.
His remarks were filled with humor and passion about family and culture, discrimination and opportunity, and the economic success so many communities are enjoying today. Andrew Cuomo also spoke eloquently about helping all Americans share in that success, so that our nation can truly be its best. It is with great pleasure that I ask for this transcript of Secretary Cuomo's remarks to NIAF to be entered into the Congressional Record.
It is a pleasure to be with NIAF once again. They are a great organization telling the truth about the Italian-Americans. The President just released our new State of the Cities report. I think it frames a few issues, that--as this is a policy forum--would be a good stepping off point.
The State of the Cities report says basically two things. It says first there is a great apparent success story that is this nation, and one that we should celebrate because it is true: this is the strongest economy in history. It breaks all sorts of records. The President relishes that fact, the Vice President relishes that fact, the Congress relishes that fact and we all should, because it is true.
But it is not at the same time the only reality. There is another reality for people and places that are left behind in the new economy. Their reality of failure is as stark as the other reality of success, and it is also more painful as a reality.
So you have a time where you have this great economic success. Eighteen million new jobs, lowest peace time unemployment since I was born 41 years ago, crime down, poverty down, welfare down--that is one story of America.
But there is also another story. A story of those places that are left behind where three out of five people aren't even in the stock market--so they don't celebrate when you go to 10,000 or 11,000.
Yes, you have more millionaires than ever before, but you also have the greatest income inequality in over 20 years. You have the highest homeownership rate in history--66.7 percent--but you also have 600,000 homeless Americans, at the same time that you have the highest home ownership rate. So you have two very accurate realities, both stark in their own way--both a story of success and a story of failure.
The paradox, however, is in many ways antithetical to what we believe in as a nation and what is in the long term health of this nation. You cannot survive, you cannot flourish with those disparities, with those polarities. It is especially true in the cities, as the report goes on to point out.
The numbers are staggering. Most of the cities are doing well and I do not mean cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. I mean cities quite large, if you look at the 900 cities in the nation. Most of them are doing very well--about one-third of them are either smaller, poorer, or have higher unemployment.
The strong cities, the cities that have done well in the transition to the new economy, are doing very, very well. The cities that have been trailing are falling farther and farther behind.
You can see the story in the numbers, or you can just go down here to Anacostia in Washington, D.C. and drive through Anacostia and you will see the story. Or you can drive through parts of the South Bronx or through parts of Watts in LA and you will see the same story.
Or go visit a public housing project. Pass by Cabrini-Green in Chicago and the situation is as bad as it has ever been. Talk about the Dow Jones index and they won't know what you are talking about. And if you look at the conditions and you feel the pain in the hallways you see how hollow our success truly is. The statistics tell one story, the lives tell a different story.
Well, what do we do about it? This is not an overly complicated problem. We don't need to do any fancy studies to determine what to do. We just need to look at what we were taught originally.
For me, the model was my grandfather Andrea Cuomo--I was named for him, Andrew--Andrea Cuomo, a little man, 5 ft. 6, 155 pounds dripping wet with change in his pockets, but he knew what needed to be done. The very concepts that he talked about--and I can hear his voice today, God Bless him--are still the concepts that we have to strive for. He would talk about this land as a land of justice, justice was so important to him. He would talk about this as a land of opportunity. Opportunity for all, opportunity for all, he would keep saying.
We have to get back to those core principles and make them happen because they are not yet a reality. We need `opportunity for all' translated into what we are talking about in this town. You need economic development measures that get jobs back to cities. 84 percent of all new jobs over the past two years were created in suburbs--84 percent. The cities are losing the jobs. As you lose the jobs you will lose the people and you can not sustain it.
Opportunity for all. Everybody should work, but that means there has to be a job there. It is hollow rhetoric to opine that welfare was no good and we really have made people work.
One problem: Where are the jobs? Where is the training? Where is the day care? Where is the transportation? If you look at what the economy is doing, it is pulling the jobs from the people and places who need it most. We can correct that, we know we can correct it. We do it very well--we have economic development incentives, we can use the tax code, we can use grants, we can get the jobs back to where we need them. We have to do it.
We have to fix the education system. Why? Because the education system was the insurer of opportunity for all. The public education system was the great equalizer, it said you can come from anywhere but you go to our public education system and if you work hard you can wind up being Mario Cuomo or Colin Powell or Bill Clinton--all from the public education system.
We are losing that. When people get up and give speeches and say there is a crisis in education in this nation they forget the second part, there is not a crisis in education in this nation. If you are rich you get the best education on the planet in this country. If you are poor and cannot afford a private school or you are from a poorer school district, then you get a substandard education and you never catch up.
The education system in this country is moving to two education systems--one for the rich side of town, one for the poor side of town. Go into the richer suburban school districts in the first grade, they'll show you that they put the child on the Internet in the first grade. You go to the same town, the poor school, they don't even have a basketball net. In first grade they will put them at computers with Pentium Processors--but in poor schools the most sophisticated piece of electronic equipment is the metal detector that they walk through on their way to the classroom.
That is not opportunity for all. We are 19th out of 21 in 12th grade math and science. The countries we beat were Cyprus and South Africa. That is not a formula for long-term global economic dominance.
We need health care because that's opportunity for all. Healthcare: you have 43 million uninsured, 11 million children uninsured. We need housing because that is part of providing the platform for people to do for themselves.
With a strong economy, a cruel irony: we actually have the greatest need for affordable housing in the nation's history. 5.3 million Americans need affordable housing.
What's happening, interestingly, is that the strong economy is driving up the rents. In San Francisco, the economy is so strong the rents are going so high those people who are on the bottom end or on fixed-incomes can't pay the rent. We know how to solve it--subsidize the rent, which is what you did for so many years, build affordable housing. We just have to want to do it.
Opportunity for all, provide a safe community. We are doing that with a cops program--lowest crime rate, both property and violence, since 1973. You can do more as soon as we solve this insanity over the gun legislation in this town that's going on now--which I don't understand.
Some people say `well you don't understand it because you are a New Yorker, you are from the northeast, you don't understand the value of guns.' No, no, I am an educated New Yorker, I have gone hunting up in Maurice Hinchey's district, bird hunting, quail hunting. I did pretty well. And I know this--that if you need an assault weapon to hunt, if your aim is that bad, you should just take up another sport.
And I know that children don't need hand guns to hunt and I know the saying which they love to use in rebuttal: `gun's don't kill people, people kill people.' No--people with guns kill people, and if we had intelligent legislation to handle guns we would be doing even more.
My grandfather would talk about this land of justice, which for him meant that being an Italian American didn't count against you, that the premise of the country was everybody could come--Jews, Italians, Irish, Blacks, Whites it didn't matter. You came and then you did the best you could and under the `opportunity for all' agenda they would work with you to make it happen.
We still have not reached that. We really haven't. One of the things we do at the Department is Fair Housing. I can't tell you how many cases we see, every day, coast to coast, where discrimination is still alive and well--as ugly, as vulgar as it has ever been.
Last year the case in Jasper, Texas where they took an African American man, they chained him to the back of a pickup truck, and they dragged him until he was decapitated. That's America 1999, not 1969. At the cusp of a new millennium with all this economic power, they're still killing people for the color of their skin.
We had a case, a Portuguese woman moved into Missouri. First week, they planted a seven-foot cross on her lawn and burned it. Why? Because she was Portuguese--they thought she was African American--and that was their way of saying `we don't want you here.' A cemetery in New Jersey. On Rosh Hashana they knocked down all the tombstones in a Jewish cemetery.
Discrimination is very much alive and well, and for Italians it's alive and well. Mario Cuomo was thinking about running for national office. At one time we did a few polls: Six percent name recognition of Mario Cuomo. Only 6 percent had heard of his name nationally. Nine percent thought he had connections to the Mafia.
Discrimination is alive and well, and my grandfather would talk about the voice of liberty, the voice of liberty, that this country was the voice of liberty. What we did in Kosovo, thank God, was express and communicate the voice of liberty. What we are doing in China--which we should do more of--what we are doing in South Africa--is to keep that voice of liberty strong.
Those are the avenues, the agendas, that I think that we have to approach to resolve the dual realities that we are seeing in this nation. Understand the realities, expose them--don't run from them--and then approach them.
And I also believe this: That now is the time to do these things. We have a great economic success--let's use it to invest. If we are not going to do these things now, then when are we going to do them?
They say the time to fix the hole in the roof is when the sun is shining. Well, now is when the sun is shining. If we don't take these dividends and invest now in Anacostia, when are we going to do it? If we don't now take up the fight for affordable housing now, when are we going to do it? If we don't take up the fight now for healthcare, when are we going to do it? If not now, when?
I'll tell you when--never. Because all of the excuses are gone. If this Congress, if this administration doesn't push progressive government it will never happen--because you won't get a better moment than this moment.
All the things yelled about for all those years--all the obstacles are stripped away. How many years did we hear about the deficit: `well we can't do it, we have deficit'. The deficit--the great inheritance of the Reagan administration. Well, the deficit is gone. God bless President Clinton, you have a balanced budget, you are talking about a surplus.
`Well, the government can't do anything.' Well, the government's reinvented. Confidence in government is at its highest point in 40 years. If we don't do it now when will we do it? If we don't do it now, we will never do it.
And that, my friends, is a sin, because we have so much more to do, because the promise that this nation made to my grandfather and your grandfather is not yet fulfilled. They believed--they believed so much so that they came from all over the globe to this country. They got in little boats, they went across great oceans to lands they didn't even know--they didn't know how to speak the language--but the promise was so powerful.
Opportunity for all, justice, brotherhood, discrimination against none. We'll help you make it, you will lift us all. And we will work with you to make it as a community.
We are not there yet, but we can be. Now is not the time to be complacent. Now is not the time to pat each other on the back and say `boy oh boy you see how that Dow Jones is doing.'
Now is the time to lock arms and go forward even stronger and harder than before and use this moment. We can do better. We are cheating ourselves if we say, this is all we can do. We are cheating ourselves if we are saying this is the best we can be, we've done it, this is America at its best.
This is not America at its best. This is not America at its best. We can do more.
Langston Hughes wrote a beautiful poem. I just want to read you a couple of paragraphs from it:
"Let America be America Again.
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed -
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land.
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek -
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the people, worried, hungry, mean -
Hungry yet today, despite the dream.
I am the man who never got ahead.
A dream -
Still beckoning to me!
O, let America be America -
The land that never has been yet -
And yet must be."
That is our charge-together we can do it.