Peter DeFazio

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I come from a State that back when we were fighting NAFTA, I was pretty lonely up there in the Pacific Northwest, and we were told, what is wrong with you, you are going to be a major beneficiary. The State of Oregon on the Pacific Rim, strategically perched just north of Mexico and south of Canada, your State, your people are going to be a big winner, but it turns out that we are one of the top 10 losers under NAFTA. As the gentleman alluded earlier, lumber and wood products are suffering because of subsidized Canadian lumber and wood products. The paper industry is seeing paper flee overseas to countries that do not observe any environmental practices or controls, and then a number of other more high-tech industries have gone elsewhere. I sat next to a fellow who worked for Hewlett-Packard on the plane flying home a week ago, Hewlett-Packard in Corvallis. I said, what do you do? He said, I work in the ink jet division. I do engineering, design, and development. I said, God, that is really great. I am glad to see you are still working there. I was worried about those jobs. He said, well, no, actually, he said, my entire division was exported to Bangalore, India, last year. I am just working on a special project here in the United States, but my division is gone. The next design development, the next ink jet technology is going to come from Bangalore, India. He said they can get an engineer there for 8 to $10,000 bucks a year. Are we telling Americans they should go to college for 4 years, incur $50,000 of debt to get a degree in engineering technology or whatever it is going to cost them to do it, and then they are going to work for $8,000 a year, raise a family, buy a home and all the other things that are a part of the American Dream? These people are killing the American Dream. That is what they are doing. There are a few people who are going to profit from it, and those are the people that support them; and they are so insulated from it some of them do not even realize what they are doing to destroy our country. One other point. Sometimes that is not even enough to say to an American, 4-year, 6-year degree, you are going to compete with some guy or woman from Indian who worked for $8,000. Sometimes it is not enought. You know what we also do? We are subsidizing, the American taxpayers, through our taxes, are subsidizing the export of these jobs. Here is a short list: Motorola laid off 42,900 workers while investing $3.4 billion in China with a $190 million taxpayers subsidy. In General Electric, 260,000 U.S. workers, while investing $1.5 billion in China, $2.5 billion in corporate subsidies paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Insult to injury. Steal their jobs, destroy the economic future of our country, our kids and our grandkids, and charge us to do it. That is what they are doing to average wage-earning Americans, because most of this is coming out of Social Security wages, out of payroll taxes.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is making an excellent point; but of course, they are following exactly the same rules, are they not? Do we not have a level playing field? Are they not required to provide health and safety, environmental protections, child labor protections? Are we not competing on a level playing field here?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, do not forget the farmers and ranchers. I had some cattlemen come to my town hall last week who say, hey, we are next. Not only was Canada a huge threat to our industry and not only are they bringing in stuff that might kill the American people with mad cow disease, but the so-called free trade agreement with Australia, Argentina, other target countries in CAFTA, that is going to kill off the U.S. agriculture people. So we will import the beef that will be probably ground up overseas because that is value added, but then when the frozen patties get here, we will still manufacture them into a finished device which is, i.e., a Big Mac or a Whopper, we do not want to shortchange Burger King here and/or whatever you want to call it, and somehow we will prosper as a Nation by doing this. I thank the gentleman.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. This is a must read for every American who is concerned about the future of our country, whether we will continue to be the leading industrial power in the world, whether there will be a future for Social Security, what will the rules of trade be and what are the objectives. This is the economic report of the President. Now, we have to give the President's Chair of his Board of Economic Advisors, Council of Economic Advisors appointed by the President, full confidence of the President, we have to give him some credit, because he is distressingly honest. In this book on page 229, he talks about the fact that one of the great benefits of trade is that when a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically. Of course he does not deal with the fact that Chinese labor is oppressed and abused, that they have no protections in their workplace. Basically if someone gets their arm torn off operating a machine in China, they drag him away from the machine and put a new worker there, and then, after that, they might tend to some basic first aid before they send that person home or to the graveyard, but there are no benefits or significant health care provided. So they are recommending that the U.S. workers should somehow have to compete with this. Now, it would be one thing if this was sort of a self-generated thing on the part of China or Mexico or any one of these other countries that are stealing our jobs. But guess what? It is being done with U.S. capital which are being subsidized with our tax cuts. Not only are we borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund to give to the wealthiest of Americans in tax cuts, we are also borrowing money, given our deficit situation, to subsidize the largest corporations in the world through OPIC, the Overseas Private Investment Council, and others, to export American jobs. Now, I mean, I think that is one place where conservatives, who are against government subsidies, and progressives, who are against undermining the U.S. economy and the wage and labor standards of Americans and our standard of living as a whole and our industrial infrastructure, have some grounds for agreement. Let us at least repeal the taxpayer subsidies, the borrowed money that is subsidizing these corporations to export jobs overseas. But again, Mr. Mankiw, the President's chief economic adviser, in his official report to the American people this year, the economic report of the President, he says, shipping jobs to low-cost countries is the latest manifestation of the gains from trade that economists have talked about for centuries. Now, we have to wonder what that gain is, how illusory it is, when the American middle class is being devastated by these exports. A few years ago when the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) and I opposed NAFTA, they said, oh, you Congressmen, you are like dinosaurs. You want to protect those old, inefficient manufacturing jobs. Do not worry, it will just be the low-skilled jobs that go to Mexico. Well, of course, that was a lie, and what we found out was that most of the major U.S. auto manufacturers were willing to invest in state-of-the-art plants in Mexico to access that cheap labor, and then reimport those vehicles into the U.S. And guess what? The price did not go down for U.S. consumers, but many U.S. families, those who used to be able to buy the product because they worked in the factories, could not afford to buy that product anymore. But then as things evolved, and the trade deficit began to accelerate over this last decade; when I introduced legislation to establish the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission in 1997, the trade deficit was $111 billion. It is almost quaint today. We are talking about $500 billion. We are going to borrow a half a trillion dollars to finance the purchase of goods overseas by Americans. We are going to borrow another $700 billion to run the Government of the United States and to give tax cuts to the wealthiest of Americans. And a substantial amount of this money, almost all of the $500 billion and 40 percent of the $700 billion, is going to come from overseas. We are giving unbelievable leverage to those bastions of democracy like China, who is now the largest holder of U.S. debt, and others who may not have the best interests of the American workers or our economy in mind. But in any case, Mr. Mankiw thinks this is just fine. Now, the President has tried to back away from this a little bit. He did that famous press event in front of a bunch of boxes which they had to repaint. Actually they said, oh, it was just an overzealous intern from the White House at one of his unbelievable staged press events that cost an average of $400,000 each paid for by the American taxpayers, of course; the boxes, when he went to this one particular plant, all said ``Made in China'' on them, but he wanted to talk about American jobs; a little embarrassing. So this, of course, intern, with no direction from the political staff at the White House or anybody else, somehow came up with all new labels to run through and label them all ``Made in the U.S.,'' of course another lie. So what they are doing, Mr. Mankiw is an unbelievably honest man, because he admits that they are exporting jobs, and they think that is good because it makes a few people rich and just impoverishes a majority of the people in this country, and deprives them of their livelihoods, and undermines the industrial and economic might of our country; but the President is trying to pretend that he does not really believe in this stuff, but I guess why is his signature on page 4 if he does not really believe in it? There it is, the President's signature on this report, basically endorsing these policies. We cannot continue this way. Do we know what that means? Let us break it down a little bit, and then I will yield back to the gentleman. Our current trade deficit, that is the amount of money we are borrowing from overseas to finance the purchase of goods, many of those goods manufactured by formerly U.S.-based corporations that have now seen fit to chase cheap labor and lack of environmental standards and other things overseas, is $1.5 billion a day. Mr. Speaker, $1.5 thousand million a day. Now, how is that sustainable? That is $1 million per minute of U.S. wealth that is flooding overseas, giving unbelievable leverage to foreign governments over the U.S. dollar. Just one last point on this, and then I am certain we will get on to other things. What do the economists say? Oh, do not worry, it has always been this way. What will happen is the U.S. dollar will decline, our goods will become cheaper, and then we will begin exporting again. But as I said to a number of these economists, none of whom can answer this question, I said, I understand how that used to work when we made things, but when we do not make things anymore, how does that work? If the dollar gets cheaper, then all of those imported goods we are buying become more expensive. We will see inflation in the United States. We will see the dollar continue to drop. We will see higher interest rates in the United States. We will see the dollar continue to drop. We are headed toward an incredible economic train wreck here. And the chief engineer, George Bush, who signed this report, thinks it is just fine. Because guess what? A few tens of thousands of people, CEOs, his buddies, his principal campaign contributors, they are all going to make out like bandits. The profits are up. Wall Street's profits are up. We are just having this little problem called a jobless recovery; jobless because those jobs have been exported. The means of the production has been exported. The industrial might of this country has been exported. And I would say to the hawks on that side of the aisle, in fact, you are exporting the capability of defending the United States in the future against adversaries around the world. With that, I am happy to yield back to the gentleman for a little further discourse on this.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, people are going to think we are making this up. I am not making this up. But let us go to the source. Economic Report of the President, signed on page 4 by President George Bush and endorsed by all of his economic advisers, and it says right here: ``When a fast food restaurant,'' this is page 73, chapter 2, halfway down the page, ``When a fast food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a service, or is it combining inputs to manufacture a product?'' Well, we can erase that very embarrassing manufacturing job loss that George Bush has provided, the largest manufacturing job loss in the history of the United States, worse than the Great Depression, we can erase that in one fell swoop. All we have to do is turn to page 73 and say, well, of course, as the President's chief economic adviser says, that is manufacturing a product. That is not a service.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, this book has not hit the best seller list yet, but it should. This lays out the agenda of the President for the future of our economy, jobs, Social Security, and other programs. Actually, we have got to give the principal author, Mr. Mankiw, the President's chief economic adviser, some points for extraordinary honesty. A quote from page 229, in reference to trade, of course, the United States of America is running a huge and growing trade deficit. We will borrow more than one-half of $1 trillion, $500 billion, from overseas to finance this. We are hemorrhaging jobs. U.S. corporations flee overseas to exploit cheap labor and Mr. Mankiw says that is all to the good. ``When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically.'' He went on to say that exporting trade jobs realizes the dream of free trade that economies have talked about for 2 centuries. But then he says not to worry, because, of course, we have a comparative advantage. Well, the question would be, a comparative advantage in what? Well, since they told us first we are going to lose those obsolete manufacturing jobs, which I disagreed with, because I do not think you can be a great Nation if you do not make things anymore, but then they said, do not worry, we are going to go to the intellectual jobs. We will do those sorts of things, and we will protect those through these trade agreements. Well, we now find we are exporting those intellectual jobs, and, in fact, we are also losing them to unfair trade. But, remember, this President supported Most Favored Nation status for the bloody dictators of Beijing, the Communist Government of China, because of the insistence of U.S. corporations. It says here, do not worry, we will defend our intellectual property against countries like China, which regularly steal it. It said that if you bring intellectual property into China, within 24 hours it will be on the streets in counterfeit form; but yet this administration, which says if a country is found to be in violation of their obligations under a trade agreement, the United States could retaliate against those countries, against the entire range of transactions covered by the agreement. That is right. Could. But guess what? Will not. How many trade complaints has the United States filed against the Communist Government of China for wholesale theft of American intellectual property, which is leading to our $124 billion trade deficit with China and the flood of U.S. jobs into that country? None. Zero. None. A company in my district, Videx, an American dream. The guy started with Hewlett-Packard and came up with a new scanner technology. It is all made in America. All of it. He employs 160 people directly, and even in Texas he has contractors making this good. He has also developed an electronic lock. One day he found out, and he is operating in 44 countries, that he had been cloned. His company had been entirely cloned in China, including the Website, including the software language that says U.S. copyright or patents, translated into Chinese. The Chinese had even gone one better. They took the Videx Website and put a little waving American flag up in the corner on this phony Website for a Chinese company, and condoned by the Chinese Government. I thought, well, certainly the Bush administration, who say they want rules-based trade, they will help this company. They are for small business; they will help this company. We went to the Commerce Department and the answer was, nope, sorry, you are out of luck. In fact, in a conference call just 2 weeks ago, this company, Videx, Corvallis, Oregon, was told by the Bush Commerce Department, those great defenders of free trade, intellectual property and rules-based trade, that, in fact, they would do nothing to enforce their intellectual property rights or prevent the theft of their entire company and product in China, as is happening to dozens of other American firms, because the big corporations do not want such complaints filed against China because it might make them mad, and they might lose access to the cheap labor to produce the goods that they export back here. That is what this administration is all about. They talk about small business, but they are just there for a few multinational corporations. They have a real chance here to help an American company to save hundreds of American jobs, to stop the Chinese from stealing that product and the product of many other American firms and stop stealing those jobs. All they have to do is file a complaint. The company cannot file the complaint at the World Trade Organization. The Bush people stacked the deck. The only way it can be filed is by the United States Government and the Commerce Department, and they are refusing to do that. If they care about jobs, if they care about the future of this country, they will eschew these radical free trade policies. And they are not only free trade, they are theft policies being pursued by other countries against the U.S. This is not a level and fair trade field, and it is time that things changed. But I doubt very much under this administration that they will, because small companies cannot afford to contribute the millions of dollars to the reelection campaign that the big ones can.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and I thank my colleagues for considering this legislation today and certainly hope that it is successfully passed by the House later this evening. Mr. Speaker, this is an issue upon which I and other members of the Oregon delegation have been working for a number of years. The issue of Winchester Bay, Salmon Harbor, and the Dunes access, which is an extremely popular OHV area, has been a growing problem because of the growing popularity. This is sort of a bright light on the coast of Oregon where the economy has been lagging and so many other industries are in a depressed state. The tourism and the support this provides for local community and small businesses is very welcome. What has been happening is that, because of a county campground nearer to the harbor and other camping, a number of people have been driving their OHVs actually on the road to access the nearest point into the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. That causes obviously congestion, conflicts with other vehicles on the road, and in some cases has been very problematic in the community and been a law enforcement problem on some of the big holiday weekends. This could be easily rectified, and hopefully will be today, by transferring this parcel of land. I visited the parcel in question. It is extraordinarily underutilized at the moment. It is virtually unpoliced because of the cutbacks in BLM law enforcement and Forest Service law enforcement because of the Federal budget. There have been problems there with illegal camping, with the use of fires in areas that are not contained, and with the dumping of trash. If we are successful in implementing this legislation today, we will see control pass to the county who will properly police it, who will develop it into a regular campsite, and who will provide excellent access for OHV users without having to drive on the public roads. They will be directly adjacent to the Dunes National Recreation Area. This legislation, as passed by the Senate, is identical to legislation introduced into the House, H.R. 514, by myself and the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden). So since this is identical, and I believe it enjoys extraordinary widespread and bipartisan support, as the gentleman from Arizona already pointed out. I would recommend this legislation to my colleagues and urge that everyone vote in its favor so that we can enhance these recreational opportunities and protect the public health and safety and do just a little bit to help the economy of the south coast of Oregon. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his generous grant of time.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, here is another thing that the Republicans have been talking a lot about. The President is concerned about jobs. Despite the worst job-loss record of any President since Herbert Hoover, he is really concerned. He has been appearing around the country with people and actually I kind of doubted him, but I found out yesterday in reading the Los Angeles Times that he does really care about jobs. The President really does care about creating jobs. The only problem is, he does not put any priority on where those jobs are created. Here it is right here. Los Angeles Times, Bush supports shift of jobs overseas. Whoa. Where is that coming from? Well, we have a few quotes to back it up. The administration's top economic adviser, ``Outsourcing,'' i.e., moving American jobs overseas, ``is just a new way of doing international trade. More things are tradeable than were tradeable in the past. And that's a good thing,'' says the President's own personally chosen senior economic adviser, Mr. Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. He goes on to say, ``The market is the best determinant of where the jobs should be,'' and that is according to Bush and Mankiw, overseas, not in the United States of America because there is cheaper labor over there. He says here, people are concerned, maybe we will outsource a few radiologists. What does that mean? That means the false promise that was heard for years, do not worry about the industrial jobs; they are obsolete. They say, I wonder how you are a great Nation if you do not make things. Let us accept their argument for a moment. Then they said they would retrain American workers for those high- tech knowledge industry jobs. Radiology, that is a pretty educated job. We are going to export those. We are going to export a whole host of IT jobs. In fact, the prediction is we will export 3 million U.S. IT jobs over the next 10 years. This is the next huge hemorrhaging of U.S. jobs overseas, and what does the President think? He thinks it is a good thing because the labor is cheaper over there. It gives a better bottom line for the corporations. What about the American workers? What are they going to do? Here are a couple of other quotes from Mr. Mankiw: ``Shipping jobs to low-cost countries is the `latest manifestation of the gains from trade.' '' Shipping U.S. jobs overseas by the Bush administration is considered to be a gain from trade. This is unbelievable, but at least they are finally being honest with us what they really believe, and they are now engaged in negotiating an expansion of NAFTA through the entire Central America, and they tell us this will be good for America. Why? Well, because the jobs would not have to travel quite as far from the United States. They would not have to go all the way to India or China. Maybe we can just export the jobs 1,000 miles down to South America so the owners of the corporations, the few managers that are left in the United States, can more easily get there to occasionally supervise their new workforce working down there in Chile or Argentina or someplace else. That is their bottom line agenda here. They do not give a darn about American workers, American jobs, the industrial might of this country, the economic base of this country, the huge and growing trade deficit. We are going to borrow more than $500 billion from overseas this year because of our trade deficit. That is not sustainable. The dollar is dropping like a rock, and the Bush administration says that is a good thing because our goods will become cheaper. Guess what. We do not make much in America anymore; and if Bush has his way, we will not make anything in America anymore.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I did not come to the floor to speak about prescription drugs, but I cannot let what the gentleman before me in the well said. He voted to prevent the Federal Government, unlike any other industrial nation on Earth, any other developed country, negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry for lower drug prices, unlike the private insurance industry, that can negotiate lower prices. He says market forces will do better. Well, that is funny. Maybe the pharmaceutical industry would have fought against market forces. They plain and simple want to continue to gouge American consumers. The Bush administration's working day and night on this. The Australian Free Trade Agreement prohibits the reimportation of U.S.-manufactured, FDA-approved drugs from Australia if they are cheaper than sold in the United States. They are working day and night to get Canada to agree to raise the price of FDA-approved, U.S.- manufactured drugs exported and sold in Canada at a lower price. They want the price lifted for the reimportation to the United States, and he comes to give us this little joke here after he has voted to prevent the one most effective measure we could have taken to give seniors and everyone else in this country a better deal on prescription drugs than market forces would do better. Yeah, sure. Job Creation in America

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone).

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, we are in incredible denial on the other side of the aisle. Once again, it is not needed, not now, not this way. Nationwide, 375,000 people will exhaust their unemployment benefits this month. In Oregon, by March, 43,000 will have lost all their benefits. We hear the unemployment rate is dropping. Yeah, the statistic is dropping. We are not creating jobs. People no longer qualify for benefits. Well, they do not count as unemployed anymore. We heard this extraordinary statement that some have become entrepreneurs, some are the modern day equivalent of selling apples and pencils on the street corner. Yeah, the entrepreneurs in my district are picking up bottles and cans for the five cent deposits, and it is really ironic. Unlike the tax cuts for the billionaires where we have to borrow money from average working people and the Social Security trust fund to give tax breaks to billionaires, we do not have to borrow money to extend unemployment benefits. Working people have already paid the tax. There is $17 billion in the unemployment trust fund. All we need is for the majority to allow us a vote to authorize spending that money that is on account to help these people in their time of desperation and the President to sign the bill. Vote ``yes.''

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, unemployed Americans are about to get their annual Christmas gift from the Republican majority, and that is the end of their unemployment benefits. This is not the first time this happened. Last year, Congress went home without extending unemployment benefits for those who, through no fault of their own, cannot find a job and have exhausted their benefits. Now they say, well, we just cannot afford it. They can afford hundreds of billions of dollars of other things in this bill, foreign aid other things, much of it borrowed, but they cannot find the money for unemployed Americans. Well, that is actually a lie because there is $20 billion in the unemployment trust fund. They do not even have to borrow the money to help unemployed Americans like they are going to borrow to help many of the special interests. All they have to do is agree to spend some of the taxes paid and on deposit to help unemployed Americans, paid by workers, paid by employers. That is why that money is there. Every week, 400 Oregonians exhaust their benefits in this jobless recovery. Nationwide, tens of thousands of Americans are losing their unemployment benefits. They cannot find work through no fault of their own. They want to work. They want to work, but they cannot find a job. Their job has exported to China or to Mexico or from my district, some of them even to Canada. They cannot find a decent paying job. And now what is the Republican majority going to do? They are going to go home without extending unemployment benefits for these people. Many will lose the benefits Christmas week or New Year's week or in the month following. They may not be able to make the payments on their house. They are not going to be able to help their kids get the things they need to go to school, to feed their family, to pay their electric bills. These are basics. We cannot find that money. We have the money. It is sitting in the bank. All we have to do is agree to spend it. We have to stop pretending that everything is good with the economy, that America's just booming ahead again. We have what is called ``a jobless recovery'' in this country, and those are real people who do not have jobs. They are real people in my district. And Congress could do something real for them today. It is just choosing not to. It will help the special interests but not working Americans.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, today Congress will take up one of the largest single aggregate spending bills in the history of our Nation. There are billions more for foreign aide, there are many questionable projects and priorities; but what is most glaring about this legislation is what is not in it. The interesting thing is that much of the money that funds the agencies and the projects under this bill will be borrowed. And Americans, working Americans, for the next 30 years, will be paying that bill. But there is one glaring oversight, one thing that is left out where we would not have had to borrow money, and that is to take care of the long-term unemployed here in the United States of America. Why would we not have to borrow money to take care of them? Because there is $20 billion in the unemployment trust fund, taxes that were paid in by employers and employees, that were set aside to take care of Americans in a time of need when they have lost their job and they cannot find another job through no fault of their own. $20 billion is there. So out of the hundreds of billions of dollars in this bill that will be borrowed and spent elsewhere, including foreign aid, we could have taken care of the unemployed in the United States at no additional cost. So why is it that they have been omitted for the second year in a row? Last year we notified the Republican leadership and the President that unemployment is a problem outside the Beltway of Washington, D.C. People are exhausting their benefits and they need help. That fell on deaf ears here in the House. The Republican leaders refused to bring forward legislation to help the long-term unemployed. Finally, sometime between Christmas and New Year's, when these people were receiving notices that their benefits would no longer be coming, Merry Christmas, the President woke up and asked the Congress when it reconvened in January to extend benefits further. Unfortunately, the leaders, again, here in the Congress, the Republican leaders, chose to bury deep in that reauthorization of extended unemployment benefits something called a look-back provision. What it says is if half the people in your State are unemployed today, you can get extended benefits. But if a year from today, you still only have half the people in your State unemployed, those benefits will expire. The look-back provision says your unemployment has to get worse before we will extend benefits again. Oregon and many other States are falling into this trap now. Our economy has not gotten significantly better. There are still many thousands of Oregonians unemployed who cannot find work. Many of them fall into this category of long-term unemployed. Thousands of them are going to see their benefits expire this month and tens of thousands more over the next couple of months. But because of this so-called look-back provision, they are no longer eligible to get unemployment benefits. This is just extraordinary that this Congress would again think about leaving town for the Christmas and New Year's holidays and into the next year without authorizing extended unemployment benefits for tens of thousands of Oregonians and other Americans at no additional cost to taxpayers, just spending down those reserves in the unemployment trust fund. But Congress, the Republican leaders, do not want to do that because that would make the obscene deficit look just a tiny bit bigger. We would not have to borrow that money to pay those benefits; but it would make their $300 billion or $500 billion, however you want to calculate it, if you calculate the fact that they are borrowing and spending every penny that is flowing into Social Security this year, no more lockbox around here, that money will be spent and borrowed and spent and borrowed and spent. But if you exclude that, we are in the $300 billion range, the largest deficit in the history of the United States and spending down the unemployment trust fund would, on paper, make it look bigger; but it would not be anything that would be borrowing to obligate future generations of Americans, unlike the hundreds of billions of other spending in this bill. So Congress wants to do one thing for this country and one thing for some of the people who have the most merit and are hurting through no fault of their own in this so-called jobless recovery, people whose jobs have been exported, in the case of my district to Canada, Mexico and China, under the trade policies of this administration and, yes, the past administration, which I opposed. These people want to work. They are productive people. They are hardworking people. They are willing to work. They just cannot find a job in the jobless recovery. So let us just give them a little bit of help in the interim so they do not lose their home, so they can feed their kids, so they can keep the lights on. Do not go home, Congress, until you extend unemployment benefits for all Americans.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, Congress has one last opportunity to provide unemployment benefits for Americans who have lost their jobs and been unable to find new jobs. It is quite astounding. We at this point have what is called a jobless recovery. In my State, tens of thousands of people are unable to find employment with their benefits exhausted or near exhaustion. Across America it is millions. I know budgets are tight around here. I know that Congress can afford to borrow money to pay Iraqis for no-show jobs, but the President says we cannot afford to spend down the $20 billion balance in the Unemployment Trust Fund, taxes paid by employers and employees, for just such a situation. So we cannot afford that. We cannot afford to spend that. We can borrow money to send to Iraq, but we cannot spend down the trust fund for unemployed Americans. Is he saying it is their fault they are unemployed? Is he saying he does not care they are unemployed? Is he saying he does not care they might lose their home; they cannot feed their kids; they cannot afford essentials; they cannot even buy gas for the car to go out and look for work; that they are having their phones shut off? I am getting those kinds of calls. We have the highest unemployment rate in the United States in Oregon. It is chronic. And there are a lot of people who want to work and cannot find jobs. The least this Nation could do would be to help them with a modest extension of unemployment benefits. Now, this is not the first time this has happened. Last year, Congress skipped out of town, the President did not raise any concern, and unemployment benefits expired for millions of Americans. This year, we are confronted with the same situation. Two days after Christmas, Merry Christmas, 90,000 workers will lose their extended unemployment benefits and have no income, and yet they cannot find a job. And it will be 90,000 workers a week. In 6 months, 2.2 million Americans will have lost everything, probably their homes, maybe their families, because this kind of breaks up families. This is, of course, a family-friendly Republican majority and White House, but they just do not seem to care about these people wanting and needing jobs. Their jobs are being exported and have disappeared in the jobless recovery, or whatever. They cannot find work. In my State, it will be 43,000 people by February who will lose benefits. Now, there is $20 billion, that is 20,000 million dollars, in the Unemployment Trust Fund. We do not even have to borrow the money to give Americans a little bit of help to stay in their homes and keep their families together. We do not have to borrow it because they pay the taxes, their employers pay the taxes. All the President has to do is say, I think that is a good idea, and the Republican majority will jump to it. We could do it right here, now, on the floor, by voting ``no'' and bringing that bill up today.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, it was just a little over a year ago that the Biscuit fire was raging in southwest Oregon in an area shared by myself and the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden). We held a hearing in the Committee on Resources during that fire about the issue of the fuel buildup in our forests. After I listened to a few of the witnesses, I really did not ask any questions, I gave a pretty impassioned speech about how I was tired of the fact that we all kind of went to our political corners on this issue when a real solution was warranted. Surprisingly after the hearing I was approached by a number of Members that people would be surprised could sit down in a room and work together on an issue like this, but notably the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis) came forward and said to me, I really agreed with a lot of what you said and I would like to try and work something out, as did the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg), the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden), and the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller). We sat down and began some very difficult negotiations. Unfortunately, last year the clock ran out on us. We had an election year, so we did not get the bill done. But now here we are hopefully at the point of adopting the bill in the House and the Senate and seeing it signed into law. This is not exactly the bill I would have written. It is not exactly what we negotiated last year, but I believe it is a bill that can get the job done. Most importantly, it authorizes $760 million. I think we could even authorize and do more work than that on an annual basis given the unnatural buildup of fuels in the forests, but if we can get that money actually spent, it will provide for a lot of jobs. It will provide for tremendous protection for communities and resources. The bill has language about how the work should be conducted. The idea is to leave the big old fire-resistant trees and return the forest to what we call a presettlement condition, before we began unnaturally repressing fire more than 100 years ago with the settlement of the West. What you need to do, and there was a dramatic example at the Davis fire in central Oregon this year, you could see where the lodgepole pines were growing up into the crowns of the big old fire- resistant Ponderosas and unfortunately a lot of those Ponderosas went because that is called a ladder fuel. It just ran up this crummy old lodgepole and right up into the beautiful old Ponderosa and we lost everything. We need to go in and remove those lodgepole pines and other unnatural fuel buildups. That will provide both for jobs, potentially for some merchantable material in certain areas, and eventually we will be able to manage our forests back or help return them to a state where low-intensity fires can burn through, fires that do not destroy whole stands, that do not turn the Earth into glass and sterilize it. That is the condition that prevails today in the West. This bill is not without controversy. That is again part of the process. I think the protections are there. People still have a right to appeal but appeals will be expedited. People have to participate meaningfully in the process. I do not have a problem with that. I think people should participate meaningfully in the process and we should open it up to everybody who is concerned. People will still have a right to go to court if they feel that the law is being violated but we are going to have the money, we are going to have the tools and if this administration applies this properly, if they get and spend all the money that is promised under this bill, we will begin a very long process of restoring our forests to a more natural state in the western United States and in a state that will not lead to a multi-number of catastrophic fires on an annual basis, which is the state we are seeing today. I want to thank my colleagues on that side. I neglected the Committee on Agriculture, where I do not serve, but I know that the Committee on Agriculture also played a key role in this legislation. I think we will be all the better for it.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, today the House will take up an incredibly complicated $400 million bill which purports to provide seniors something they need: help in buying pharmaceuticals. We could do this more simply and more cost effectively. We could have the government negotiate lower drug prices on behalf of seniors as they do for the Veterans' Administration, a minimum of a 24-percent reduction for veterans' drugs and actually an average of about 50 percent. There is a bigger group of Medicare people. We could do better. It would not cost anything. We could also allow the free reimportation of FDA-approved, U.S.- certified, U.S.-manufactured drugs from Canada and other countries. Many seniors in my district are doing that now, saving an average of 50 percent. But, no. Instead, this bill is going to prohibit the reimportation. This bill is going to prohibit the government from negotiating lower prices for pharmaceuticals, all to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical industry at a time when many seniors cannot afford the drugs they need to maintain their health.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time. Would every Member who is on the floor and who has read all 691 pages of this bill since it was made available at 1:30 in the morning please raise your hand. I do not see any hands raised, but we are going to vote on it very soon. We are not doing a service to the American public by violating the rules of the House and not allowing this bill to be held over for 3 days, as required by the rules, so Members of Congress, and maybe even members of the public and the fourth estate, could read it, analyze it, and report it so we could better hear the opinion of the American people. But from what I know of it and the bits I have read, it is not much of a benefit, and it is not what seniors need. Americans pay more for U.S. manufactured, FDA-approved drugs than anybody else in the world. Our neighbors in Canada pay half as much, on average, for drugs manufactured in the United States of America. Now, how could that be? Well, the government of Canada bargains lower prices on behalf of Canadians. Well, maybe that would be a solution to the problem here in the United States: let us lower the extortionate price of drugs. Let us put the 40 million people in Medicare into a buying group, that would not cost anything, and let us negotiate lower prices. No. This bill, at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, a generous contributor to the Republican Party and the President, prohibits the Government of the United States of America, unlike any other industrial nation or democracy on Earth, from negotiating lower drug prices for its citizens with these multinational conglomerate pharmaceutical companies. There is no pain for the pharmaceutical industry in this bill. In fact, their stock has gone up dramatically in the last week. The analysts have read it, and they said, what a sweet deal for the pharmaceutical industry. Too bad it will not give seniors what they need. Well, there are $400 billion of taxpayer money, copayments, premiums, deductibles, the doughnut exclusion. There is a nice $20 billion subsidy to private HMO insurance companies who might or might not offer benefits. But seniors, on average, are going to get a benefit that is less than they could get by mail-ordering their drugs from Canada. Oh. Well, the bill is going to take care of that problem too. Despite the fact that this House of Representatives is on record by a large margin allowing the free reimportation of U.S.-manufactured, FDA-approved drugs for Americans from other industrialized nations that regulate safely those drugs, this bill is going to begin to block that process. They say, oh, well, that is not in the bill. We give the authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to allow the importation if he sees fit. Yes, sure. Except he has already said that he does not see fit and he will never, ever do that; and the FDA commissioner has said oh, no, we are not going to ever do that. We cannot certify that those U.S.-manufactured, FDA-approved drugs that took a little vacation in Canada are safe. This is simply legislation that is not going to provide the benefits that seniors need at an extraordinary cost to the ultimate detriment of the core Medicare program. Vote ``no.''

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding me this time, and I thank all of the members of the Committee on Agriculture and the Committee on Resources who have put so much time and effort into this. Yes, it was a long process, but I believe that a good result is worth the work. I wish we had got it done a year ago; but, hey, we are now finally going to get something in place long ahead of next year's fire season. This bill, if properly implemented, will begin to carefully undo 100 years of mismanagement of our national forests. It recognizes that this is going to be a long and expensive process. It recognizes that it cannot be done for nothing. This bill includes a $760 million-a-year authorization. I think we could even go higher. Mr. Speaker, $1 billion a year could be productively spent in the West, given the magnitude of the problem; but it is a significant increase over the commitments we are currently making. It will bring jobs to hard-hit rural areas in the forests. It sets a priority that half the funds should be spent in proximity to high-risk communities in the West, and it also sets priorities for protection of other high-value resources in high-risk areas. If properly implemented and fully funded, I believe that we can begin to step incrementally away from the catastrophic, or potentially catastrophic, conditions that exist throughout the West today. It contains old-growth language that clearly reflects the intent of Congress that the objective is to return the forests to presettlement conditions, which means there will be large, fire-resistant trees more widely spaced, particularly in the inter-mountain areas; that we would leave native stands intact, but we would aggressively thin from below. We would remove ladder fuels, we would remove trees that are growing into the crowns of the larger trees. I mentioned earlier the Davis fire in Oregon and the lodgepole that carried the fire into the crowns of the Ponderosa, that would have survived the fire otherwise, had we gotten in there and removed those lodgepoles, which have little commercial value. That is why this program will be expensive. In many areas, what needs to be removed has little or no commercial value. Where it has commercial value, we will use that to offset the costs and to amplify the program. It does not unduly restrict the right of appeal. It does require that people participate meaningfully in the process if they are going to appeal, and that is the way it should be. I want people to be involved from the beginning in communities, meaningfully commenting on the plans and proposals of the Forest Service. It allows judicial review if the bill is misapplied by this or any future administration. But it will move the process along, and we will begin to chip away at the backlog. But make no mistake, even if we get the $760 million a year, this is going to take a long time to return our forests to their natural state.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, 14,345 days. That is how long it has been since Medicare was enacted, the most important social program to lift seniors out of poverty in the history of the United States. I worked with seniors, ran a senior citizen program, studied in the field of gerontology. Before Medicare, we had double the rate of poverty among seniors because they were driven there because of the cost of medical care. Medicare has been a tremendous benefit to our seniors. It was opposed by the Republicans, it was opposed by the AMA, it was opposed by the nursing homes and all of them. Now, of course, they are the greatest supporters of the program because of the reimbursement and the business it provides. But now we are about to make the most important changes in the 13,435-day history of Medicare, and we cannot have 1 day. We are not to be allowed 1 day to read a 791-page bill, which, to the best of my knowledge, and the gentleman can correct me on his own time if this is wrong, is not available in printed form. Some people like to read 791 pages on a computer screen. I do not. I think there are a lot of other Members of this Congress and the public who would like to actually have a printed copy in their hand to be able to flip back and forth easily and understand what this bill really does. But we are not going to have printed copies, or perhaps we will at some point when the debate begins. But even with speed reading, that is going to be tough. So a 791-page, unbelievably complicated bill making extraordinary changes in a program which we have had for 39 years, and we cannot take 24 hours, or even, as the rules would provide, 72 hours to read it. What would be the harm in voting on Monday? Let it sit over the weekend. Let everybody have a chance to read it. I would be willing to stay over the weekend, work through the weekend, get through the other work and vote on this bill on Monday. The gentleman talks about competition in the marketplace. This is a bizarre bazaar of a marketplace, because this is more like a souk, where there are all these back-room deals, and you do not know what is going on. Competition? Well, it has subsidies for the private health insurance industry, HMOs, who still continue to enjoy an antitrust exemption, so there will be no requirement that they offer these plans; there will be no requirement that they guarantee seniors coverage beyond a 1-year basis; and there will be no requirement for them to take seniors who are not good risks or keep seniors after they make a claim. As many of my constituents know, as soon as you claim against an insurance company these days, they tell you are going to be terminated when your renewable comes up. That is what is going to happen to seniors in these private plans. Then we have protectionism. The party of free trade, free trade over here, the Republicans are trading our jobs to China and all these other places, this bill is protectionist. It is not going to allow Americans to reimport FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured drugs from Canada or any of the other developed industrial nations who bargain on behalf of their citizens and get huge price reductions. So Americans are going to have the door slammed on the one place they can get less expensive drugs. And none of the benefits under the bill, even at the cost of $400 billion, will reach the simple benefit that my constituents can get by importing FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured drugs from Canada. So we are going to spend $400 billion, create this unbelievable Rube Goldberg, and the benefit for every one of my constituents will be less than they can get today by buying from Canada, and we are going to slam that door with this bill. So they are not going to have that opportunity any more. They are going to be forced to buy drugs at higher prices, even with the so-called coverage under this bill. That is price fixing. So we have a bill that has protectionism, price fixing, subsidies for the HMOs, the insurance industry is exempt from antitrust laws, and the gentleman says somehow this is the marketplace of competition. What a bizarre view of a true, free and competitive marketplace. We could more simply allow these Medicare constituents to have a negotiated price for the reduction of their drugs, as we do for VA, but the industry is opposed to that because there would be too much market force, too much market clout on the part of the government in those negotiations, and allow the continued, safe reimportation of drugs from Canada. And there is a big red herring here. The administration says FDA- approved, U.S.-manufactured drugs reimported from Canada are not safe, they cannot guarantee their safety, except we know that the drug custody chain in the United States of America is much more compromised than in Canada. Canada first negotiates about a 50 percent reduction in prices, licenses the importers, licenses everybody, and tracks all the people who touch the drugs. In the U.S., the pharmaceutical companies dump huge amounts of drugs into an unregulated secondary market that is licensed by the States, into these phony closed-door pharmacies, and organized crime is involved in getting counterfeit drugs into the system here in the United States. There is a huge breach of the integrity and safety of the system here in the United States, which there is no concern about because the industry is making money by having that system, but we are going to say, oh, those Canadian drugs, they are not safe. They are safer, in all probability. There have been no instances proven in Canada, unlike the United States, of organized crime getting counterfeit drugs into the system. Mr. Speaker, we could do something simpler and cheaper if we defeat this bill.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman before me waxed eloquent about a $400 billion Rube Goldberg complete with subsidies for the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry and price fixing. It is going to guarantee that there will be no reduction in the extortionate price of prescription drugs. Americans will still continue to pay the highest prices in the developed world despite the fact that the drugs are manufactured here by American companies who often receive the benefit of taxpayer-funded research. We could provide a much more meaningful benefit for substantially less and that would be if we did two simple things: Negotiate lower prices like every other nation in the world has done, but this bill prohibits the government from negotiating lower prices on behalf of Americans or Medicare beneficiaries. And, secondly, we could just engage in free trade, allow the reimportation of U.S.-manufactured, FDA-approved drugs. That would substantially lower the price. Many American seniors have already resorted to that, but this bill will prohibit the reimportation of drugs but instead it will engage in subsidizing private insurance, subsidizing the pharmaceutical industry, price fixing and protectionism. They are violating every principle they say they believe in.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, we have before us not a simple prescription drug benefit for seniors which they need and which is long overdue, not just a complicated, convoluted, expensive and inadequate benefit for seniors, it is the pharmaceutical promotion and profits protection act. It prohibits any mandated, or even negotiated reductions in the extortionate price of pharmaceuticals. Yes, it would outlaw the Federal Government negotiating for price reductions on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries. It will block seniors who are seeking to import less expensive U.S. manufactured drugs from Canada. It provides a $20 billion subsidy to the private insurance industry to undermine Medicare. It is a cruel hoax targeted on the most vulnerable among us. It is not, as the gentleman from Florida said, bipartisan. I knew Claude Pepper. I served with Claude Pepper. And FDR, I did not know him, but I know that he passed Social Security without a single Republican vote. And LBJ passed Medicare without support on that side. Now suddenly in defense of the pharmaceutical industry and the private insurance industry, they want to attack Medicare but pretend they are doing this for the good of seniors.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of confusion from the debate earlier tonight about what the so-called pharmaceutical benefit for seniors is or is not. Let us just clarify things a little bit. First off, there are two bedrock principles in this provision of law. It prohibits the Federal Government of the United States from negotiating lower drug prices on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries. It prohibits the government from doing that. We heard a discussion from the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Mrs. Wilson) about people who will be put together in groups and they will negotiate lower prices as much as 15 or 20 percent. Well, the government has done that with our veterans and they have lowered prices up to 60 percent for those drugs and the veterans group is much smaller than the Medicare group. So if we were to aggregate all of seniors voluntarily into a group without them paying a penny or premium of any sorts and have the government negotiate on their behalf for price reductions, one could expect that they might even exceed those of Veterans Administration. Maybe we would see prices even lower than in Canada. That is the second bedrock principle of this legislation. Not only does this legislation at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry prohibit the government from negotiating lower prices in the extortionate cost of prescription drugs, the highest in the world here in the United States, secondly, it actually would say that not only can you not do that but it is going to stop the importation or really restrain the importation of less expensive drugs from Canada and other countries because it has a provision that says the Secretary of Health and Human Services will have to say that those drugs are safe, in his opinion. Well, he has already rendered an opinion. He has already said they are not safe in his opinion. Now, there is a little problem with that. Actually, the supply chain in Canada has more integrity than the supply chain in the United States. In the United States we have a whole host of people who are out there. We have these closed-door pharmacies. We have unregulated middle men and wholesalers. The drugs really are not tracked and a whole lot of counterfeit drugs are getting injected into the system in the United States. But in Canada the Government of Canada negotiates on the behalf of the Canadian people very substantial price cuts from U.S. manufacturers of FDA-approved drugs; and when the drugs go to Canada, they are always within the purview of the government there. They track them much more carefully than in the United States. So arguably you could say that FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured pharmaceuticals returning to the United States from Canada directly to a consumer would be less likely to be adulterated or counterfeit than many of those in the supply chain in the United States of America. That is very well documented. It was particularly well documented in a recent series in The Washington Post. So what is really at risk here? If it is not the health of seniors, which is suddenly of tremendous concern to the majority party here at the behest of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, what is really at risk? Well, what is really at risk is the extortionate price they are able to extract from the American people for pharmaceuticals. Americans pay far more than any other developed nation in the world for pharmaceuticals. This bill will do nothing to help that. In fact, this bill will guarantee that price gouging will be continued. The other big benefit is that seniors would be allowed under this bill to go and buy private insurance at a price that is not yet totally determined but with substantial deductibles. And under the optimistic estimates, and these are only estimates because God forbid the government even after giving a $20 billion subsidy under this bill to the private insurance industry should mandate they do anything, we are hoping that they would offer an affordable benefit; and the estimates, optimistic, are that a person who has a drug bill of $1,000 a year would get a benefit of $109 a year after they pay their premiums, copayments, and deductibles. A person with a drug bill of $5,000 a year would get a benefit of $1,024. They would pay 80 percent of the cost. The person at $1,000 a year would pay 77 percent of the cost. If those same people were just allowed to purchase their drugs from Canada, the price would be 50 percent or less. If the government negotiated on their behalf using the market power of the people in Medicare to reduce the price, it would likely be 50 or 45 percent. So what we are really doing here is providing a huge subsidy to the private insurance industry setting up the pharmaceutical industry to continue price gouging and setting up seniors for a very big fall; and this is such a great benefit, it will not even begin until year 2007. This is really not a good deal for America's seniors, and AARP should be ashamed that they have lent their endorsement to this. I do not know what they got in return. I know what that side got and that was huge contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I am perhaps the only Member of the House of Representatives who has trained in the field of gerontology, run a senior citizen program, perhaps someone else has, and actually gone with volunteers, delivered meals in homes, supervised volunteers who delivered meals in homes, and spent a lot of time at congregate meal sites. Let me tell my colleagues this: If any motion to instruct should be nonpolitical and should receive the unanimous support of this body, that should actually be respected by the group negotiating the compromise here, it is this one, to provide the highest possible levels. Now, the President, unfortunately, proposed to actually cut funding for Meals on Wheels. Now, he has a lot of ideas about people replacing government programs and that. This is essentially a nongovernmental program. It depends tremendously upon volunteers and community assistance and a lot of locally generated contributions matched with a little bit of Federal funds to leaven the mix. And the President's cut would have eliminated this program for many. A lot of seniors, this is the only person they are going to see in a day. They are shut in. The only person they are going to see is the person that brings them that hot meal. It helps them stay connected to the community. It gives them a little bit of socialization. It allows people to know that they are doing okay in their homes. There are not a lot of other systems or places to do that. Many of them who I visited with on Friday get very nervous and they cry on Mondays when they see the people coming again. Over the weekend, they have the frozen meals and they had something to eat, but they did not see anybody. They were shut in. Mr. Speaker, to cut this program as the President has proposed would be a tremendous disservice to those who have given so much to our country over so many productive years and now just need a little bit of help to stay in their homes in their later years, the congregate meal sites, to visit those, and the vitality of our senior citizens in later years. It is inspiring to me many times when I go and I hear and I see as I visit the congregate meal sites. But, again, it is also a tremendous socialization experience. So this House could do no better than to unanimously adopt this, but not only unanimously adopt this. We vote on an awful lot of motions to instruct here that are immediately tossed in the trash can by the negotiators. I would hope that this would be one motion that is respected, where we deliver and where we give back a little bit to our seniors who gave so much to us, our grandparents, our great grandparents and others. The greatest generation deserves better than a cut in the programs that are helping the most fragile and vulnerable of them.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentlewoman just to clarify, is the VA part of the government and are we prohibiting the rest of the government from negotiating on behalf of seniors?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?