Dale Bumpers

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, first of all, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Dorgan and Senator Baucus be added as cosponsors.

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, the Senator from Missouri, who is my good friend, says the Senator from Arkansas is making the same old tired arguments that he has made every year. He is absolutely right. A good argument against the space station is like a value. It does not lose its power just because time elapses. The same arguments that I made against the space station 6 years ago are just as compelling today as they were 6 years ago. We talk about the Russians participating and how wonderful international cooperation is. You think about that. The reason the Russians are cooperating is because we are going to give them the money to cooperate. So much for their cooperation. The Italians and the Canadians are cutting their contributions, and Germany and France are discussing reformulating their contribution to the space station. Why not? They know the United States will pay the difference. Madam President, here is a quote that says it all. James Van Allen, astrophysicist, discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belt, a premier physicist, said: With the benefit of over three decades of experience in space flight, it is now clear that the conduct of scientific and application missions in space by human crews is of very limited value. That is echoed by every premier scientist and physicist in America. Dr. Van Allen goes on to say: For almost all scientific and utilitarian purposes a human crew in space is neither necessary nor significantly useful. Dr. Bloembergen says that human crews are inconsistent with most microgravity research. But I want my colleagues to answer this one question. What is it about space and no gravity that makes it so fascinating for medical research, or the development of new crystals for our computer industry? I do not know the answer. But I rely on those who do. They say there is none. Dr. Van Allen, and Dr. Park, who is a leader of the 40,000 physicists in the American Physical Society say none. Do you know what else they say? Much of the research for microgravity, if it has any beneficial value, can be done on Earth which brings me to my final point, and then I will yield the floor and I will not say another word about this. You ask yourself. What do you think is more important? The planet Earth or going to the planet Mars? That is all this is about. Carl Sagan and all of them say that, if you want to go to Mars, then build a space station. If you do not, do not. You ask yourself about the needs of the children of America, about their food and their education and their clothing and their housing. They are crying on the streets. Ask yourself about the health care of our elderly. The needs are growing, but the funding is being cut. That is all happening on the planet Earth. The problems are not cosmic. The problems are here on Earth. You want to go to Mars? Be my guest. But for God sakes, do not do it when we have these unbelievable problems that are growing daily, that $94 billion would go an awful long way to cure.

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I yield 8 minutes to the Senator from Maine.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Let me just reiterate, No. 1, much has been made of the fact that the American Medical Association favors the space station. Let me point out that the American Physical Society--40,000 physicists in America--are adamantly opposed to the space station. Why? Because they say the benefits are going to be negligible. You cannot do anything in space with microgravity. Dr. Bloembergen at Harvard says, when you put men on the space station to do microgravity research, you just mess it up. The steps, a bump, destroys microgravity research. And what is there about a lack of gravity that is going to cure cancer and AIDS and all the rest of it? The answer is nothing. Here are people who really are concerned about the deficit: The Cato Institute, the Concord Coalition, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, the National Taxpayers Union, Progress in Freedom Foundation, Progressive Policy Institute. Not only do the American physicists oppose it, every one of those organizations strongly oppose it. This bill, just this bill alone, ravages housing for the elderly, ravages sewer projects, and torpedoes the AmeriCorps Program to make room for this thing. We are going to cut $40 billion out of education in the next 7 years to pay for this?

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I rise today to ask the distinguished chairman of the VA-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee, the gentleman from Missouri, to engage in a colloquy with me on an issue of importance to my constituents in Arkansas.

Mr. BUMPERS. I want to compliment the Senator from Missouri for addressing the issue of the Environmental Protection Agency's refinery MACT rule in the Appropriations Committee's report on H.R. 2099. In my opinion, if ever a set of regulations needed to be reformed, it is the refinery MACT rule.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that further proceedings under the quorum call be dispensed with.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that further reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, there is no agreement on time. I discussed this with Senator Mikulski, and at some point, perhaps this afternoon, with the consent of the majority leader, we will be able to reach a unanimous-consent agreement. My preference would be to go for an hour or so this afternoon, but most of my colleagues who wish to speak on this side of this issue are out of town and will not return until the morning. So I had hoped we could get an agreement to debate for 1 hour before the vote. I understand the majority leader wanted the vote immediately after the party caucuses tomorrow, and I have no objection to that. I would prefer the hour of debate take place after the caucuses, but I want to be cooperative with the majority leader, and I do not want to complicate his problem in scheduling the Senate. Now, Mr. President, I call up my amendment on the space station.

Mr. BUMPERS. Now, just for opening, Mr. President, this amendment cuts $1,833,000,000 from the human space flight portion of the NASA budget, and it terminates the space station program. Now, Mr. President, I guess this is about the sixth consecutive year I have stood here in an effort to kill this program. I do not do this every year because I enjoy it; I do it because I have a deep and abiding feeling, a passionate feeling that there is not anything wrong with this country except the priorities Congress has set for the Nation. When it comes to the space station, let me just begin by making a simple proposition for my colleagues. If you think going to Mars is a highly desirable thing to do, even though in today's dollars it would cost $500 billion, then you should vote against this amendment. If you think determining how well the human body copes with long periods in space and that that is a sufficient justification for the space station, vote against our amendment. If you think the United States ought to equivalent of $25 million a day for the entire 10-year period the space station will be deployed--let me repeat that--if you think the benefits from the space station justify taking $25 million of taxpayers' money every single day for 10 years, vote ``no'' on this amendment. If you think it is a wise use of the taxpayers' money to build something which indeed will be an engineering feat--not a scientific feat; please distinguish between the two; there is not any question, Mr. President, about our ability to throw this space station into space; we can do that; we may have a few calamities along the way, but we can do that--but if you think it is a wise use of the taxpayers' money to build something--you have heard that old expression, my mother used to say, ``It is worth its weight in gold''? If you think that the space station is worth 25 times its weight in gold, vote ``no'' on our amendment. If you think it is worth it to put this engineering feat in space with some idea of going to Mars and beyond--which I will prove to you categorically in a moment is the only justification for it--and that it is worth $12,880 of the taxpayers' money for every pound of water, chicken breast, supplies, or anything else we send up there--that is right. You can buy chicken at Giant for 59 to 69 cents a pound. For the space station, it is $12,880 per pound. If you believe all that, vote ``no'' on this amendment. Now, Mr. President, Carl Sagan, is a well-known physicist and author, and I want to quote some of the things he says in a new book he has written. Let me say at the outset that Carl Sagan favors the space station. I can understand why somebody of his stature and in his position would favor the space station. But a moment ago I told you the only justification for the space station is to explore Mars and beyond. And from Carl Sagan's new book, let me give you a few quotes: I would argue that if we are not eventually going to send people to worlds as far away as Mars, we have lost the chief reason for the space station. If you want to argue with that, be my guest. A permanently occupied human outpost in Earth orbit, a space station, is far from an optimum platform for doing science, either looking down at the Earth or looking out into space or for utilizing microgravity. The very presence of astronauts messes things up. Almost every physicist in the country, Mr. President, will tell you that [[Page S 14183]] doing research in microgravity with human beings on board is an oxymoron. You bump your head against the bulkhead, you take a step, you jar the space station and your experiment is lost. Continuing to quote Dr. Sagan: A space station is also unnecessary for human exploration of the Moon. Apollo got there very well with no space station at all. . . . But the only substantive function of a space station, as far as I can see, is for long duration spaceflight. Now, if this were country lawyer Dale Bumpers, Charleston, AR, telling you this thing, I would not expect you to pay any attention to it. And Carl Sagan is not the only person I am going to quote. I am going to quote some of the most outstanding experts in America who agree with me. Carl Sagan goes on: The only tangible and coherent goal of a space station is eventual human missions to near-Earth asteroids, Mars, and beyond. And listen to this, I say to my colleagues: Historically, NASA has been cautious about stating this fact clearly, probably for fear that Members of Congress will throw up their hands in disgust, denounce the space station as the thin edge of an extremely expensive wedge and declare the country unready to commit to launching people to Mars. Well, I would certainly hope Congress would do that. In the past, the authorities at NASA have been very reluctant to talk about Mars, because when you talk about Mars, you have to talk about $500 billion in today's dollars. Is it not amazing our priorities around here? I do not want to get ahead of myself. I will come back to that in a moment. Carl Sagan goes on, and I agree with him totally on this one and I think most people will, but they will not vote that way: There are other matters, clear crying national needs, that cannot be addressed without major expenditures; at the same time the Federal discretionary budget has become painfully constrained. Disposal of chemical and radioactive poisons, energy efficiency, alternatives to fossil fuels, declining rates of technological innovation, the collapsing urban infrastructure, the AIDS epidemic, a witches brew of cancer, homelessness, malnutrition, infant mortality, education, jobs, health care--there is a painfully long list. Ignoring them will endanger the well-being of the Nation. I do not see how anybody could say that any better. Mr. President, if you are one of these poor, innocent souls that has been deluded into believing that somehow or another we are going to do medical research in space, let me give you some more. This is Dr. Allan Bromley, Presidential science adviser, in a letter to the Vice President: The space station is needed to find means of maintaining human life during long space flights. This is the only scientific justification, in our view, and all future design efforts should be focused on this one purpose. Further, The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology opposes using biological research as a major justification for the space station. A quote from the American College of Physicians: We agree that much, if not all, of the money slated for the space station, the superconducting super collider-- This is before we killed that thing-- SDI, defense intelligence, could be better spent on improving the health of our citizens, stimulating economic growth and reducing the deficit. I could not have said it better. And here is a statement by the American Physical Society from July 1994. The American Physical Society is 40,000 physicists. Virtually every physicist in America belongs to it: The principal scientific mission of the station is to study the effects on humans of prolonged exposure to a space environment. Medical researchers scoff at claims that these studies might lead to cures for diseases on Earth. Dr. Rosenthal, Harvard Medical School, testifying for the American Cancer Society in 1994: Statements have been made and published to the effect that vital cancer research would be done in space, and that is cited as a reason for supporting space station funding. We cannot find valid scientific justification for these claims and believe it is unrealistic to base a decision on funding the space station on that information. Based on the information we have seen thus far, we do not agree that a strong case has been made for choosing to do cancer research in space over other critically needed research here on Earth. Dr. Sean Rudy, Arthritis Foundation, before the Budget Committee of the House: Space station proponents have indicated that the space station will provide a first-class laboratory. We used to have first-class laboratories in universities and medical schools across this country. Reports by the NIH and National Science Foundation have indicated that over 51 percent of the biological laboratory research space is deemed inadequate for the conduct of research. Furthermore, the National Science Foundation report estimated that the capital construction backlog for laboratories on Earth is $12 billion. Should our priorities now be a first-class laboratory in space or correction of a longstanding deficiency in laboratories throughout the country? James Van Allen, world-famous astrophysicist and discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belt around the Earth: There's been nothing that resulted from the manned space program, essentially nothing in the way of extraordinary pharmaceuticals or cures for disease or any extraordinary crystals which have revolutionized electronics. It's all false, it's not true. That is not Dale Bumpers talking, but Dr. James Van Allen, one of the premier astrophysicists of this century. Mr. President, so much for life sciences. And then there is that thing about microgravity. Dr. Bloembergen of Harvard summed up, ``microgravity is of microimportance.'' I am reluctant to continue reading what scientists say, but repeating Carl Sagan, ``The very presence of astronauts messes things up.'' Dr. Allan Bromley again, Presidential science adviser, said, The human habitation of the space station is fundamentally incompatible with the requirement that microgravity experiments be unperturbed. The Space Studies Board of the National Research Council: The Board believes specifically that more microgravity research progress could be achieved in a shorter period of time and at a fraction of the cost through an expanded program of Spacelab missions and of free flier experiments. In short, you do not have to have a manned space craft to do microgravity research. Mr. President, let us go to spinoffs. Everybody is always talking about what the spinoffs are going to be. I have yet to find anybody who says that the spinoffs are more than negligible. We have developed a space suit. There is no great demand for space suits in our Nation. There is, however, a great need to reduce crime, to feed the hungry, to educate our children, to house our people. But there is no demand for space suits. As Carl Sagan said, ``The spinoff justifications constitute an admission that the program cannot stand on its own two feet and cannot be justified by the purpose for which it was originally sold.'' And listen to this one from the Wall Street Journal. I want all my opponents to scratch this subject out of their comments. They always make this point, and I want to kill it before it gets off the ground: Many widely believed origins of consumer products in the Apollo program are simply untrue. Tang, hyped by General Foods Corporation as a drink of astronauts, was first marketed in 1957. Velcro . . . was developed in the 1940's. And teflon . . . emerged from company labs in 1938, long before rockets cleared the Earth's atmosphere. So too, Corning Ware cookery hit the market several years before man reached space. Now, Mr. President, there is an argument that we can grow protein crystals in space, or that we can do valuable research in physics by growing gallium arsenide metal crystals that could be used in manufacturing semiconductors. I am not going to continue reading to you, but I have quote after quote after quote saying: Totally false. Just use your common sense, colleagues. I want you to get up in opposition to this amendment and tell me about all the medical advances we have gotten out of the billions and billions we have spent on the space program. Tell me what it has done for cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, arthritis. Tell me what single advance made in the last 30 years came out of space. The Russians have had space stations since the mid 1970's. They are lucky that one has not been knocked out of the sky by a piece of debris. Something could happen one of these days. We can only hope that, after spending $90 billion to deploy this thing, it will not be knocked out of the sky by a baseball-size piece of space debris. When I talk about $94 billion for the cost of this thing, that is just this [[Page S 14184]] year's estimate. Last year, the estimate was $72 billion. It goes up monumentally every year. Do you know what it does not include? It does not include that 1 to 2 percent chance that one of the shuttles is going to meet with a major catastrophe. Do you know what else it does not include? It does not include the risk, as I said, of a baseball- size piece of debris hitting the space station, which is goodbye, adios, adieu, space station. No, the $94 billion figure assumes that everything is going to go perfectly. Who here believes that? Carl Sagan wrote me a letter and told me--I think perhaps you all got the same letter--how excited the people were about ``Apollo 13.'' I have not seen it. I understand it is a great movie, and I intend to see it. They were very brave men, but no braver than the one sitting near me right now, the first American to orbit the Earth. I consider John Glenn one of the dearest friends I ever had, but he just happens to be wrong on this issue. Everybody is entitled to their own positions. I will tell you all an interesting little anecdote. I was down at the Smithsonian one day and I saw that capsule John Glenn orbited the Earth in, and I came back and I said to him, ``John, weren't you terrified? I would be scared to death to get in that thing.'' He said, ``Well, to tell you the truth, I was sitting up their whistling. They had already scrubbed the flight a couple of times and I expected they would scrub it again. And then they said, `You have 60 seconds,' and I did not have time to get scared.'' I looked at that capsule with new admiration for my colleague, one of my dearest friends. When I saw those people retrieve the Hubble telescope, I was glued to my television set just as you were. And last week, the astronauts were out on the arm of the totem pole retrieving another satellite that had gone awry. These are magnificent, brave people. But, colleagues, that is not what this debate is about. We have a lot of brave people in the country who cannot find jobs. But back to what you get out of it, I am just simply saying the American people have a right to expect us to do what is right for the future. The 1994 revolution, in my opinion, said: We do not believe your priorities are right. I can tell you, a lot of people who are on Medicare would not have voted the way they did if they had known Medicare was going to take a whopping $270 billion trouncing. Carl Sagan said in his letter to me that he was for the space station because he believed in the exploration of space. So do I. He said he believed in it because it was a case of international cooperation with the Europeans, Russians, Canadians, and the Japanese. He thinks that is healthy. I think it is healthy for there to be international cooperation on anything, whether it is space, medicine, you name it. Let me tell you something, colleagues. In a perfect world, I would be for this. If we did not have a nearly $5 trillion debt and the threat of certain people in the U.S. Congress saying we are going to bring this country down--can you imagine somebody saying that? If the President does not do what we tell him to, this country is coming to a screeching halt. Words should be measured very carefully because people pay attention and get justifiably frightened. It scares me to think that people in this body have the power to do that. But let's look at the international cooperation on the space station: The Canadians and the Italians are cutting back; the Germans and the French are negotiating on what they want to do. The Russians, who intend to do a lot, will only do it if we give them the money. Russia does not have enough bread to feed its people so they are not going to be able to participate unless we give them the money. I am not all that opposed to helping Russia. I want to do everything I can to help democracy work in Russia, and one of the best ways to make democracy work is to give people jobs and bread and something to eat. The reason they have the revolution is they did not have bread or food or anything to eat. I want to help them make it work. Where is the Russian launch going to take place? It will take place in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is no longer a part of Russia. That is where their cosmodrome is. That is where their launch site is. It is not even in Russia. So talk about things that can go wrong, this one can go wrong. I think about the problems here, and those that I mentioned a moment ago. It drives me crazy that Public Broadcasting is being cut dramatically. It drives me crazy that the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities are being virtually eliminated, cut in half. Those are things that have a civilizing influence on our society, that would make us a little more cultured and therefore a little less likely to kill each other because somebody dented your fender at the stoplight. The New York Times last week said that the demand for student loans is skyrocketing. Do you know why? Because tuition is skyrocketing. Everybody is saying how are these college kids who are getting out of school, how are they going to pay this debt back? They are loaded with big debt. So our answer is to cut student loans and that way they will not accumulate the debt in the in the first place. However, they will not get an education either. Every one of the things I mentioned--from crime, to medical research, to education, to infant mortality rate, cutting health care for the elderly, cutting health care dramatically for the poorest of the poor, cutting money for the Environmental Protection Agency because they regulate things so we can drink clean water and breathe clean air--we are cutting. But we fund the space station. Six Senators took a trip overseas about a month ago. We did not dare drink the water. We brushed our teeth with bottled water that we took with us. Fortunately, in this country we have made some progress in cleaning up our drinking water. So what is our solution to the progress we have made? Two-thirds of the water is now swimmable, two-thirds of the water in the country is now fishable, whereas in 1971 only one-third was. So now the idea is to cut back on the regulation. So we, too, will have the opportunity to brush our teeth in bottled water until it runs out. Just last Friday the House said we are going to cut the earned-income tax credit that poor working people use to stay off welfare, something the majority leader, President Bush, President Reagan, almost everybody, has applauded as the greatest program we have ever invented to keep people off welfare. What are they going to do with it? Whack it in half. I talked to a woman the other day who works hard and does not make very much money. She told me how much money she made. I said, ``How much do you pay for child care?'' She said, ``I pay $50 a week for one child,'' she is a single mother, ``$50 for one child and $43 for one child.'' That is $93 a week. If you knew what she made, you would wonder how on Earth she is doing it. Let me digress another moment to say we are not providing enough child care in the welfare bill to allow the people to go to work that we say have to go to work--50 percent by the year 2000. No woman is going to go to work and leave her children at home alone. If you do not have child care, she will not go to work. She will sit home and starve. But the other thing, this woman gets no help. She works. She works 8 hours a day and sometimes longer and she works hard. She gets at the end of the year that earned-income tax credit which is oftentimes the difference between eating and not eating for families. So what are we doing? We are dropping that program from a program that covers 20 million people to a program that covers 9 million in the House of Representatives and 11 million in the Senate. We will probably compromise at 10 million. When it comes to cutting around here, if you are poor, it is easy to cut you because you do not have a PAC. You do not make campaign contributions and you do not provide jobs in your State. So it is easy to cut poor folks. It is easy to cut the Environmental Protection Agency. It is obviously easy to cut student loans, though I thought that program was sacred. But we are cutting it. We are cutting title 1, which is the program that is a remedial education program to give first graders a start in life--teaching them to read. We are cutting that. [[Page S 14185]] But we are not cutting the Seawolf. We are not cutting the B-2 bomber. We are not cutting the space station. I know the Presiding Officer would be disappointed if I did not point out we are not going to stop giving away billions of dollars worth of gold underneath Federal land--the rankest form of corporate welfare. I can say if you do not want to be cut around here, just make something that explodes and we will give you all the money that you want. I give NASA credit for one thing. They took a leaf out of the Pentagon's book. They spread the contracts for the space station among 36 States. A person does not have to be a rocket scientist to know all you have to have around here are 26 States that have as many as 10 jobs, and you cannot kill it, because that is 52 votes. So we have 36 States with a piece of the action. Do you know what is interesting? Eighty-three percent of this $94 billion goes to California, Alabama, Texas, and Florida. All the other 32 States are fighting for 17 percent of the money. But if there is $1 million in your State, that means you probably have 50 jobs. People will come up on the floor and say, ``I do not like the space station, and I would like to vote with you, but we have a few little jobs down in my State.'' Mr. President, 44 States contribute more as a percentage of the tax burden for the space station--listen to this--44 States contribute more than they get back. The thing that drove me nuts about the B-1 and the B-2 is they changed missions. When the cold war ended and we found out the B-2 was not as stealthy as we thought, we just said, ``Well, we will make it a conventional bomber.'' All you have to do is change the mission to keep the money flowing. We also have now made a conventional bomber out of the B-1. The space station had eight missions. Here they are. This is what we started out to do with the space station. Over a period of 10 years, we scrubbed it as a staging base; we scrubbed it as a manufacturing facility; we scrubbed it as a space-based observatory; we scrubbed it as a transportation node; we scrubbed making it a servicing facility; we scrubbed making it an assembly facility; we scrubbed making it a storage facility; and we are now down to the last possible mission, a research laboratory. And I just got through telling you that almost every physicist and physician in the country says that is palpable nonsense. Let me show you some figures. Bear in mind that when Ronald Reagan made his great speech about how we were going to go build the space station, that was in 1984. Mr. President, just to remind you--and I know I do not need to; you were there. You heard President Reagan say we are going to build this space station, and it is going to cost $8 billion; 10, 11 years ago it was going to cost $8 billion. By 1994, we had already spent $11.2 billion. The construction of the project will cost $17.4 billion between 1995 and the year 2002, the magic year that we are going to balance the budget. But the money we have spent, the money we are going to spend in building it, you add to that the shuttle flights needed to launch it, service and use the station, $50 billion. And just to operate it for 10 years is $13 billion and station-related costs is $1.9 billion, for the total paltry sum of $94 billion. What you get out of the eight missions is a space laboratory. The other seven are gone. It is all a question of priorities and where your heart is, colleagues. Here is what it is going to cost us over the next 7 years to build the space station and deploy it--$32 billion. Here is the tax cut we are going to give people who make $100,000 and more, $245 billion. A vast majority of these people are ``them what has.'' We used to have an old expression in Charleston, AR: ``Them that has gets.'' Two-hundred and forty-five billion dollars for that, and then a $58 billion increase over the next 7 years for defense. What are we doing to accommodate all of this? We are going to cut Medicare by $270 billion and Medicaid by $182 billion. I promise you that I intend to vote against both, if those are the final figures. We are cutting student loans by $10 billion at a time when the need for loans is soaring because tuition is soaring. The earned income tax credit, which I mentioned a moment ago, we are cutting by $23 billion; other domestic programs by $188 billion, so that we can increase defense by $58 billion and fund the space station. When are we going to learn that our national security does not just depend on how many tanks, planes and guns we have? It has nothing to do with the space station. As an aside, I stood on this floor a few weeks ago and debated creating yet one more method of financing foreign arms sales. In the 1980's, Mr. President, we sold about 20 to 25 percent of all the arms sold in international commerce. In the 1990's, we have gotten up over 50 percent. We already have four methods of financing foreign arms sales. And the Defense appropriations bill comes in here and approves yet a fifth method of financing foreign arms sales to some of the countries that are most likely to default. And, if that happens, the taxpayers will pick up the tab. Mr. President, what does it take to kill a program? I do not know. I believed when I came here that one Senator could make a difference. There have been a few times that I have been able to make a difference. It was a very difficult thing for me coming from the Governor's mansion to the U.S. Senate where you have to introduce bills, hold hearings, finally get it passed through a subcommittee, get it passed through the full committee, and hope to get it on the floor and send it over to the House where it goes through the same procedure, and then the President may veto it. That takes about a year. But when you are a Governor, you can just sign your name occasionally and make something happen. I used to go home at night about 50 percent of the time immensely gratified for something which I had signed my name to that day that I knew was going to happen. Here it is totally different. I am not going to belabor this any further. I have said about all I can say. There are a lot more quotes that I could use. But I am asking you to search your own conscience. If you were debating this on national television, how do you think it would come out? If you were debating mining land reform on national television, how do you think it would come out? Everybody knows how it would come out--about 90-10 to fix mining law. The space station would be a little bit closer. But, you see, there will not be a national television debate. We will all go home and tell the chamber of commerce that the hardships they are enduring and all the cuts we had to make in their health care and education programs was to balance the budget by the year 2002. And they will never really know why their lives grow more precarious and why they are more unsettled, and why they think affirmative action, or gays in the military, or prayer in school, or term limits, or desecration of the flag are really their problems. As long as you can keep them talking about those things and divert their attention from the real problems in the country, you have a winner. So far it has worked magnificently. The reason is because they work for a living. They do not have time to keep up with what we are doing. So when you say, ``We had to do this for you, we had to liberate you from welfare, we had to do all of these things to balance the budget,'' you have no choice but to believe it. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside in order for me to offer an amendment dealing with the space station.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Leahy be added as a cosponsor.

Mr. BUMPERS. I yield back such time as I may have remaining.

Mr. BUMPERS. It is true that aquaculture is of great importance to the States of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. In Arkansas, the aquaculture industry is growing by leaps and bounds and the Stuttgart Aquaculture Center has been vital to that growth.

Mr. BUMPERS. The modification I just sent to the desk took care of the very thing that the Senator from Washington was complaining about.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 30 seconds.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I would like to have the attention of my colleagues because this will take just about 1 minute to explain to you what I have done on the Market Promotion Program. I do not believe that it is defensible for the U.S. Congress to be giving money out to the biggest corporations in the world. I have no quarrel with the thrust of the Market Promotion Program. So here is what I have done to that program. Four things: First, eliminate foreign corporations from eligibility; second, leave all the agricultural cooperatives as they are regardless of size eligible for the program; third, we cut the amount from $110 million to $70 million; and the coup de grace is make it a small-business program. Small businesses are the ones who have the most difficulty in exporting. It is not Gallo Wine. It is not Pillsbury. It is the small-business community. So I make it small business, other than agriculture cooperatives. I make it a small-business program as defined by the Small Business Administration. While that varies, it is essentially a company that does $50 million a year or has 500 or fewer employees. Here is a chance to make the program defensible. You can go home and talk to anybody you want to. Your farmers will love it because they stay eligible. Your small-business people love it because they will be eligible to export. Everybody else will love it because you are eliminating foreign corporations. And, finally, everybody will love it because we are cutting from $110 million to $70 million in the full knowledge that we are very likely to have to do some compromise with the House. I thank the President. I also ask unanimous consent that Senator Kohl be added as a cosponsor.

Mr. BUMPERS. While it is true that overall, agriculture has a positive balance of trade, the aquaculture sector does not. At the present time, the United States does not have the production capabilities to meet domestic demand for fish and fish products and therefore we are placed in the position that we are forced to import to meet the domestic demand. The aquaculture industry has the opportunity to turn this situation around and we should facilitate this process.

Mr. BUMPERS. No. It was not the committee's intent to limit the activities of the certified State mediation programs as currently allowed by statute.

Mr. BUMPERS. The Senator is correct. The statute provides that certified State mediation programs are to be used for a wide variety of disputes with the Department of Agriculture. And as the law provides, in States with certified mediation programs, the Secretary of Agriculture is required to participate in ``good faith'' with certified State mediation programs.

Mr. BUMPERS. I concur in what Senator Cochran has just said. certified mediation programs

Mr. BUMPERS. Aquaculture is primed to take the next step forward and establish itself as an integral and vital form of agriculture. What aquaculture needs now is to be consolidated and coordinated under one department--the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Currently jurisdiction for aquaculture is spread out among the USDA, the Department of Interior, and the Department of Commerce. The Agriculture Research Service could truly assert itself in this regard if the U.S. Department of Agriculture is allowed to assume a leadership role in aquaculture.

Mr. BUMPERS. I move to lay that motion on the table. [[Page S 13915]] The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. rural tourism in alaska

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.