you had most famously upton sinclair wrote the jungle. he had an ideology. he was a valid socialist. there was a willingness to go there and speak aggressively toward the powers that be. you don't really see that anymore. people just sort of sit up there and opine and talk about what they think. none of these journalists on cable right big aggressive stories. most of the stories are broken into people like me. washington for example the washington post wrote a pulitzer -- won a pulitzer prize for investigating me not corruption in the government. you need to have the spirit of investigative reporting and citizens need to do it. have a renaissance to go back to what was done decades ago. now it doesn't happen anymore. it goes back to what i talk about in the book which is economics. the commercial imperative which a lot of news organizations have slashed their budgets. abc news recently slashed their investigative bureau. it has become a commercial enterprise not a journalism one. that's why we are philanthropic nonprofit organization. nobody tells us what to

for example, upton sinclair's the jungle. it exposes appalling conditions in the meat-packing industry in the early industrial area. it portrays how children worked in plants processing rotten or contaminated meat and earning pennies per hour for dozens of hours a week. sinclair led to federal safety laws, one of the pesky 20th- century regulations republicans love to hate. >>> new child labor laws. setting limits on the minimum age of employment and restrictions on work conditions that are hazardous to safety. another one of those regulations they would love to strip away. >>> in iowa, republican legislators are trying to pass a bill to allow 14-year-olds to work in potentially hazardous industries like mining, logging and meat-packing. the department of labor has already shown what that could look like as one of the largest food sanitation companies in the country with illegally putting migrant children to work. 102 children and is in is 13 years old are working hazardous overnight jobs cleaning slaughter houses in eight st

these are the things that one might expect to find in a charles dickens or upton sinclair novel but not an account of everyday life in america in 2023. surely, not here in the land of the free, where child labor protections have been on the books for nearly a century. not in the country that holds itself up as the paragon of democracy, guaranteeing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. yet right here, mr. speaker, we are exploiting minors from other countries, children in an all vulnerable situation to do dangerous work for low pay that often results in life changing injuries. those allowing these practices to continue should be ashamed of themselves. the company at the center of this article, which packages the breakfast cereals and snacks many of us have in our cupboards right now proudly claims that 25% of their employees have been with the company for over a decade. i wonder if they have similar statistics they could share with us about how many of their employees were even alive a decade ago. many of us in this room are parents. i have two young children of my own. t