Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, some things in the Senate are heavy lifting and tough to deal with. This is the easiest decision ever to be offered to this Senate. The question is, for what purpose do we offer a farm program in this country? The answer is, because family farmers cannot make it over the valleys of despair. With precipitous drops in international prices, devastating weather disasters, we will not have family farmers left unless we have a basic bridge across the valleys. That is the purpose of the farm program. Instead of a bridge across valleys to help family farmers populate the prairies of this country, the farm program has become a set of golden arches for the biggest and the wealthiest farms in the country. Senator Grassley and I proposed something that is kind of novel here. We proposed that the farm program be redirected to help family farms. What we say is this: At a time when we are going to cut price supports and cut the safety net for family farmers, we say maybe the better approach would be to restore those cuts and get the money by shutting down the millions of dollars in checks going to the corporate agrifactories in our country. Is that a novel solution? No. It is what the farm program was supposed to have been. Let me describe what we have in this country. This is from a story in the Washington Post a couple years ago. A prominent and well-respected businessman who lives in a million-dollar home, sits on a local bank board and serves as a president of a tractor dealership with sales last year of $30.8 million . . . He is also, by some definitions a farmer--the principal landlord of a 61,000-acre spread, $38 million from the Federal Treasury in 5 years. Like other large operations this farm was structured to get the most from government programs. In other words, this was farming the farm program. A novel idea, farming the farm program. Perhaps we ought to stop people from farming the farm program. Some of my colleagues say you have to be big in some parts of the country. That does not mean the taxpayer has to be shipping checks totaling $68 million or $38 million to those operations. Want to farm the whole country? God bless you. You have every right in this country to do so and we sure hope you are successful. But I don't see that the taxpayer ought to be the one who bankrolls the financing operation if you want to farm the entire county. That is all this is about. My colleague Senator Grassley and I offer this not to penalize any part of the country. It is to refocus the farm program to where it ought to be, to help family farmers through tough times. I mentioned that millions of dollars go to corporate megafarms. I also pointed out this is not what I came to the Congress to fight for. I want good support prices to go to family farms to help them through tough times so that in the long run we still have yard lights around this country with families living on the farm producing America's food. That is the purpose of a safety net. Now, I described some of the megafarms, the corporate agrifactories getting millions of dollars. The Grassley-Dorgan amendment says, let's put some limits on it. We asked the USDA, who gets the farm program payments? Do we have some evidence about how much goes to the big interests? It is interesting, the USDA does not know to whom it is making the farm program payments. It does not know. In our piece of legislation, we require it to know. When they are shoveling millions out the door at USDA, they should figure out where they are sending them. I was thinking about the payments that are made to farmers in the country. We care about family operations. That is the whole purpose of this. By the way, if the purpose is not to support family farming, we ought not have a farm program. We ought to get rid of it if it is not the purpose. I believe it is the purpose and should be the purpose. Remember that movie, ``Weekend at Bernies,'' while they haul around a dead guy for the whole weekend? They put him in the car, by a swimming pool with sunglasses on, and hauled around a dead guy. The movies don't have anything on the USDA. The USDA sees dead people on farm subsidy rolls. In fact, you have to be ``actively engaged,'' the law says, in farming. And yet they are making payments to dead people. How can you be ``actively engaged'' as a farmer if you are dead? But the USDA does not know who it is sending money to so we could not expect them to answer this question: Why are 55 dead farmers receiving more than $400,000 each in farm program payments? I understand my colleagues exerting a lot of muscle trying to help live farmers. Maybe at least we could agree on dead farmers not receiving nearly half a million each. Let's back up for a moment. Let's try to ask ourselves, why do we have a farm program? Of what value is it to our country? My great- grandmother actually ran a farm. She lost her husband, an immigrant from Norway, took a train to Eagle Butte Township, and with six kids, pitched a tent, worked a farm, had a son who had a daughter who had me, which is how I came to southwestern North Dakota. It was a family farm. Think of the courage to run this family operation. Over time, this country said we will not have them left on the prairie if we do not provide some basic support over tough times, a bridge over price valleys. So we did. It is called price supports, to try and help family farmers. Boy, has that grown. This little price support program trying to help family farmers through tough times has grown to become a huge boon to some of the biggest operators in the country, having nothing to do with families, having to do with corporate agrifactories. Is that what we want the program to be? The choice Senator Grassley and I offer is a simple choice. The committee brings to the Senate a proposition that says let's cut farm program payments for every farmer. Let's cut farm program price payments for every farmer. We say there is a better way. How about rather than pull the rug out from other family farmers, we decide to do what we should have done long ago, and that is, shut off the spigot on the money that is going to the big corporate agrifactories that have nothing at all to do with families. I am not suggesting they are unworthy, the corporate agrifactories. I am not suggesting that at all. I am saying if they want to farm the whole county, half a State, or they want to get bigger and bigger and bigger and decide to separate into 49 or 69 or 89 entities in order to farm the farm program, God bless them. I just don't think there is a requirement that the American taxpayer or the Federal Government has to bankroll them. I don't think that is our requirement. The urge and the urgency for Congress should be to want this country to maintain a network of family farms for the people who risk everything. We are not trying to define exactly what a family farmer is. Some are quite large. But I know what it isn't. Michelangelo was asked, how did he sculpt David? He said, I took a piece of marble and chipped away everything that wasn't David. We can have a family farm and chip away that which it is not. That which it is not, which we are defining today in some respects, represents the enterprises that do not need the Federal Government's help to grow. They have already grown to the point where they are farming a substantial part of our counties around the country. This is a choice. We can decide to cut farm program payments for everybody and pull the rug out from under a lot of families out there barely making it, given energy costs and the price of grain, or we can provide the kind of program payments over tough times that we told family farmers we would provide and get the money to do that by limiting the payments that go to people who are getting $38 million in the case of the first enterprise I talked about. That is sensible. The question is very simple: What do you think the purpose of the farm program is? Whose side are you on? Who are you trying to help? I suppose my discussion about dead farmers was tongue-in-cheek, but it raises an important question. If we had 55 farmers who are dead who receive $400,000-plus, each of them, nearly half a million each, it raises a pretty important question about the golden arches that exist here for some of the biggest enterprises out there in rural America. This is not difficult. I understand, and I don't denigrate my colleagues who are forced to support the biggest corporate farms and to support the way things are. I understand that. Everyone has a constituent interest here. But our interest, the interest of Senator Grassley and myself, is not to try to injure anybody or injure any part of the country. Our interest is to say this country should aspire to say to family farmers, You matter in America; we want you to be able to make it through tough times. That is why we have a farm program. When the choice is, do we pull the rug out from under you with the cuts coming from the proposal today, or is there a better way by which we can limit payments to the largest corporate farms and use that money to restore the kind of help we have always said we wanted to provide family farmers, isn't that a smart thing to do? Isn't that the right thing to do? Isn't that what public policy was designed to do, to help America's family farmers? Take a poll, any time, any place in America, and ask the question about whether they value family farmers. They do. Farmers and ranchers who live on the land risk everything. Every spring all they have is hope, the hope that maybe they will get a crop. Maybe it won't hail. Maybe it won't rain too much. Maybe it won't rain too little. Maybe somehow they get a crop, after they put all the money in, in the spring. And when they harvest it, the hope they get a price and maybe they will make a living. That is all they have, is hope. That is why this Congress has in the past said, let's try to make sure they have some capability with a safety net to make it across these price valleys and these tough times. That is what Senator Grassley and I are trying to preserve. Every year people try to chip away more and more and more. We are trying to preserve that hope, trying to preserve a way of life, something we think is important to the future of this country. We can have corporations farm from California to New York, I suppose, big agrifactories. But what are the consequences of that? We lose something very important in this country when we lose America's family farm producers and family ranchers. How much time did I consume?

Mr. DORGAN. I reserve the final 4 minutes of my presentation.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, how much time is remaining for the entire debate?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I want to correct, I think, an impression that was made. I do not think it was intentional, but the impression was that the Grassley-Dorgan amendment would prohibit the largest corporate farms from getting payments. We do not do that. They are limited in the payments they would receive. We do put a limit on it. We do not prohibit them. They will still get payments right up to the top limit. But that is all. To further make my point, in one case, a Mississippi cotton farmer set up a web of 78 corporations and partnerships that collected $11 million in subsidies. The name of one of his companies was Get Rich Farms. The farm program is not about getting rich for anybody. The farm program is to try to provide some protection and some help for family farmers, who are left to the vagaries of a marketplace that whipsaws up and down with weather, natural disasters. This is not about getting rich. It is about getting through tough times. That is what Senator Grassley and I wish to do. Now, Mr. President, my colleague from Iowa has arrived. I know he wishes some time. We have very little time left, but I will truncate my remarks so the remaining time will be available to Senator Harkin, who is also a cosponsor of this legislation. Mr. President, how much time remains on our side?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, let me provide the 6 minutes that is available to Senator Harkin. I say to Senator Harkin, there are 6 minutes available on this debate. I will yield my time at this point in order to make that available. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for yielding. The chairman of the Agriculture Committee used the word ``resent''--I don't remember the exact context--and suggested that somehow what has been presented on the floor of the Senate about the size of the corporate agrifactories sucking money out of this farm program is inaccurate. I stand by my statement and say there is plenty of evidence. I will put even more in the Record about the size of these enterprises that are sucking massive amounts of money out of the farm program at a time when family farmers are seeing their farm program payments cut. That is the purpose of our amendment. I don't wish to extend this any great length. I only respond because the Senator used my name. I will be happy to put in the Record the specific and exact representations about the size of family farmers, the largest corporate agrifactories taking massive amounts of money out of the program trough. I want family farmers to be available to have access to that farm program payment that they need in order to survive. That is the purpose of the amendment. I thank the Senator from New Mexico for allowing me to respond. Amendment No. 2365

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I believe I am yielded 10 minutes per the instructions of the Senator from Wisconsin.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, first I will say a word about the leadership of this subcommittee, Senator Bennett from Utah and my colleague, Senator Kohl, from the State of Wisconsin. I appreciate the work they have done. This is not easy to do. The product that came out of the Senate was a good subcommittee bill. To the chairman, the ranking member, and their staffs, I thank them for all of the work they have done on this legislation. As they might know, while they are complimented, there is something that comes behind the compliment. They both know that I did not sign the conference report, having nothing to do with their actions or their activities. I refused to sign the conference report because of what happened in the conference. I wish to describe just a little of that. The process by which we went to conference with the U.S. House was one in which we expected we would be treated with some respect and we would, through the normal course of things, make judgments and decisions and have votes. That did not happen. It did not happen on the issue especially of the country-of-origin labeling for meat--something my colleague just described. This is a commonsense, farmer-friendly, rancher-friendly law that has always been opposed by the big meat- packing plants and those who do their bidding. The fact is, it is the law of the land and should have been implemented last year. One day, I brought a porterhouse steak to the floor of the Senate. I had to ask consent to show it on the Senate floor. I held up a porterhouse steak and I said: I would like to know if anybody can tell me where this piece of meat came from. Anybody? Well, nobody could tell where the piece of meat came from. It is just a piece of raw meat in cellophane. It comes from the store. I asked the question: Might it have come from this particular packing plant? This packing plant, by the way, was only inspected once by a USDA inspector. It happens to be in Mexico. Here is what he said he found. This is a packing plant sending meat to our country. The inspector found: Shanks and briskets were contaminated with feces, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official later wrote of his tour of the plant on the floor. In the refrigerator, he wrote, a diseased, condemned carcass was observed ready for boning and distribution in commerce. The audit noted paint and viscera containers, condensation from dirty surfaces dripping into the exposed product . . . Did anyone know if that piece of meat came from that plant? No one could tell because it was not labeled. I thought then about something I read when I was in school. Upton Sinclair wrote the book ``The Jungle'' in 1906. He described the conditions in the packing plants of Chicago. He said: There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. Then he described how they would lace loaves of bread with poison and lay them around, and the rats would eat the poison and die, and they would shove it down a hole and grind it up and ship it out as meat. People read ``The Jungle'' written by Upton Sinclair and demanded something be done in this country, and it was. We have a wholesome supply of meat in this country that we are proud of. Our farmers and ranchers who produce it have a wholesome supply that is inspected. We are proud of it. ``The Jungle,'' 1906--I just read what he said in the book. May 1999, one inspector goes to Mexico--by the way, he has never gone back. This plant was closed, opened immediately thereafter with new owners and a new company name, and has never been inspected since. Condensation from dirty surfaces dripping into the exposed product . . . Carcass shanks and briskets [were] contaminated with feces. . . . Does it sound like 1906? Sound like ``The Jungle''? Or if you are reading ``The Jungle,'' 1906, by Upton Sinclair: There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of . . . germs. The employees' feet touched carcasses . . . a diseased condemned carcass . . . was observed in the chilling room ready for boning and distribution in commerce. How much progress have we made? So we go to conference and there is a requirement there be meat labeling, and the big packing houses and those that do their bidding in this Congress say it would be way too complicated. We can drive a remote car on the surface of the planet Mars, and we can't stick a label on a piece of meat, for god's sake? We did require that of seafood. Go to the local grocery store and buy some seafood and you will find a label. Let me tell you what the manager of the meat department at a supermarket had to say about implementing labeling for seafood. On April 4, 2005, asked about labeling seafood, this fellow at a supermarket said, ``It's just a matter of putting a sticker on the package.'' Not a problem. So why, then, are the American consumers now told, as a result of this conference, that not only are you not going to get country-of-origin labeling last year when you were supposed to have had it--and then we extended it, the folks over there on the House side extended it--so now they extended it 2 more years. And they did that after they recessed the conference and extended the date for implementation of this law--and it is a law--by 2 years, never having a vote, never notifying anybody. I would expect the chairman and ranking member of this subcommittee should be furious about that. They probably are. I wrote, by the way, the chairman of the conference and said to the chairman of the conference: That will only happen once because you will not have a second conference in which we sit around and somewhere between the issue of thumb-sucking and daydreaming, believe there is a crevice to do the right thing. If you decide you are not going to allow votes and then get rid of the conference and go behind a closed door with one party from one side of the Capitol and decide you are going to change the law and shove it down everybody's throat, you are only going to get to do that once. The next time you go to a conference like that, it is going to be a much different circumstance because we now know how at least some are willing to treat others in the conference. It wasn't so much about treating us, it was about how you are treating farmers and ranchers who are proud of what they produce, and it is about how you are treating consumers in this country. Oh, in this Congress, regrettably, the big interests still have a lot of sway, a lot of influence. They somehow at the end of the day get their way. They especially get their way when the door is closed, when the lights are out; the door is closed, and it is done in secret. And that is exactly what happened here. People should be furious about what has been shoved down the throats of the Congress as a result of a few people in that conference. So the result will be bad public policy. The result will be consumers consuming food, consuming meat that they do not know the origin of. Why? Because the Congress said: You don't deserve to know the origin of that meat. There is much to say about this subject. My colleague from Montana described his disgust. My colleague from Iowa will as well. I probably should, in the middle of this angst, say again that this is not the fault of the Senator from Utah, Mr. Bennett. It is not the fault of the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. Kohl. They did not do this. My guess is--I have not talked to them at great length--they would have provided a conference that is the regular order: have debate and have a vote, have a debate and have a vote, and you count the votes and, in this system of ours, determine who has the votes and what policies prevail. That is not what happened with respect to this conference with the House, and I regret that. We will have another opportunity. In the meantime, the consumers lose, the ranchers lose, the farmers lose because those, whose names I don't have in this statement, behind closed doors, in secret, decided to pull the rug out from under all of those interests. I assume they are applauded today by the big economic interests, as is always the case in this Congress. But one day soon, I think consumers and others will say: There is no cause for applause for you. In fact, you really should be doing something else. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent to follow the Senator. I would like to speak as well in morning business. I would like to speak for 15 minutes. I ask unanimous consent to speak following the presentation by my colleague.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, will Senator Sessions yield for a question?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, earlier this morning I was in the Senate rotunda with Senator Sessions and Senator Levin from Michigan. As we stood in the Rotunda, in addition to paying honor to this great woman whose body lies in State in the Capitol Rotunda, we spoke just a bit about each of our recollections of what Rosa Parks meant to us and to our country. I want to follow on the statement by Senator Sessions to say that as I was in the Rotunda this morning, I was thinking about what kind of courage it must have taken for this woman, a 42-year-old seamstress, getting on a bus at the end of the day, perhaps tired from working all day, understanding that there were then police dogs and fire hoses and clubs and beatings and a lot of trouble, a lot of trouble, I was thinking about the courage it would have had to take for that woman to have done what she did. Her actions of sitting in that seat on that bus and refusing to move to the back of the bus were simple, elegant, dignified but also enormously courageous. I think that is a lesson for all Americans. I couldn't have been more pleased when the Congress, the House and the Senate, did something that was unusual in the history of America. We took action to have the remains of Rosa Parks lie in State in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building, the first woman to be so honored in the history of the United States of America. I was enormously moved this morning, standing with my colleagues, Senator Sessions and Senator Levin. I know most of our colleagues visited the Rotunda this morning as well. But I did want to follow on his comments about this extraordinary woman who will live forever in the history of this great country of ours. Mr. SESSIONS Mr. President, I thank the Senator for his eloquent comments. It was, indeed, a pleasure to be with Senator Levin--she was his constituent when she moved to Michigan--and hear some of his insights and hear him say that Michigan had bought the actual bus in which she rode on that day and has restored it and made it a museum. So her life, indeed, continues to reverberate all over the country and, as Fred Gray said, the impact of her actions have spread worldwide. I thank the Senator for his comments and yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, there is much happening in Washington, DC, and in our country. Picking up the periodicals, Newsweek or Time magazine, or the morning paper for that matter, you see stories of scandal and stories of controversy and all kinds of interesting things with respect to politics and the economy and things that affect our daily lives. I wanted to talk for a moment, once again, about the issue of energy because, while we will deal with a lot of things--this week, for example, something called the reconciliation bill--most people will deal this week with the challenge of pulling up to the gas pump and putting perhaps 16 or 18 gallons of gas in their tank and trying to find $50 to pay for it. As the chill is in the air these days in our country, people will begin thinking about how they will pay for the increased cost of natural gas to heat their homes, particularly in our part of the country where that will increase by 60 percent over a year ago. They will wonder about how they will find the money to pay for that cost because heating your home is not a luxury. Heating your home is a necessity. I have spoken previously about a woman named Sarah Swifthawk. She was a grandmother. She died in the United States of America--she froze to death. She was a member of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. This grandmother laid down to go to sleep on a cot in a home that had plastic where windows should have been. At, I believe, 30 or 35 degrees below zero that evening, others huddled together for body warmth in that family, but this grandmother was laying on a cot, and the next morning she was dead; frozen to death--in the United States of America, not a Third World country, in the United States of America. I point that out only to say this issue of the cost of shelter, the cost of energy, the requirement that we find ways to keep people warm during cold temperatures can mean the difference between life and death. It did for Sarah Swifthawk. Now the question is, in this month, October, and then November of the year 2005, what do we do about the prices and the cost of energy now for this winter? Perhaps it is not such a big problem for people who serve in this Chamber or in the House of Representatives. Perhaps they can easily pay the monthly heating bill. But there are many in this country who cannot. The question is, What do we do for them? The oil companies will say: This is about the free market system and the price of oil, and therefore the price of gasoline and natural gas and home heating fuel, it is just a function of the free market system. The price of oil is to the free market system like mud wrestling is to the performance arts. It has no relationship at all--none. Let me describe why. There are three things that happen with respect to the price of oil. No. 1, we have this planet in which a substantial portion of the oil reserves are under the sand halfway around the world. So oil ministries from those countries get together around the table and decide how much they are going to produce and how much that production should impact prices. Second, the largest oil companies--much larger and bigger and stronger because of blockbuster mergers--decide how they are going to use more raw muscle in the marketplace. And believe me, they have plenty, given the blockbuster mergers. Third, the futures markets which are supposed to provide liquidity for trading of commodities--in this case, oil--have become orgies of speculation. So you have these three issues that together tell us now that a barrel of oil is worth $60 or $65. Let me tell you the results of all of that. The oil companies are filling up their treasuries, and the American consumers are emptying their bank accounts. Let me give you some examples. ExxonMobil last week said their profits were up 75 percent for the third quarter--$9.9 billion. Conoco-Phillips--by the way, ExxonMobil used to be two companies, Exxon and Mobil. Then they fell in love. That is economic talk, I guess, about mergers and acquisitions. And they get married. Now it is ExxonMobil. Conoco-Phillips used to be Conoco and Phillips, two companies. Now it is one company. They too had some sort of financial romance and got married, Conoco-Phillips, profits up 89 percent, third quarter to third quarter. Last year--I am not talking about this year's prices--the world's 10 biggest oil companies earned more than $100 billion on sales of over $1 trillion. This year, of course, it is going to be much higher than that. ExxonMobil last year had $25 billion net profit and spent almost $10 billion of it to buy back their stock. BusinessWeek asked this question. This is not some liberal journal, this is BusinessWeek. They asked: Why isn't big oil drilling more? Rather than developing new fields, oil giants have preferred to buy rivals, drilling for oil on Wall Street. While that makes financial sense, it is not a substitute for new oil. Again, this is BusinessWeek. This isn't some politician, it is not some liberal publication someplace. Oil has been over $20 a barrel almost continuously since mid-1990's. That should have been ample incentive for oil companies to open new fields, since projects are designed to be profitable with prices in the low- or mid-teens. Nevertheless, drilling has lagged. Far from raising money to pursue opportunities, oil companies are paying down debt, buying back shares, and hoarding cash-- And drilling for oil on Wall Street. Sixty-six million homes in this country are heated mainly with natural gas and home heating oil. Their heating bills this winter are going up on average 48 percent. It is going be up over 60 percent for those in my region of the country who are heating with natural gas. What have I proposed with respect to that? I proposed that if the oil companies are not using this additional cash--unprecedented amounts of cash in the history of corporate America--to explore for more oil or build more refineries--and oh, by the way, they are the ones that have been closing refineries. I know it is fashionable during political discussions to talk about, It is the environmentalists' fault or Calvin Coolidge's fault or somebody else's fault that we don't have enough refinery capacity. It is the energy companies that have themselves shut down refineries. When they have mergers, they shut down refineries. If they are not using these unprecedented gains in corporate America to explore for more oil or build additional refineries, then I believe they ought to be recaptured with a windfall profits tax, the proceeds of which should be sent back to the American consumers in the form of a rebate. I noticed last Friday that my colleague from New Hampshire, Senator Judd Gregg, indicated that he would support--he called it an excess profits tax. He would use the proceeds, at least from the press reports, of an excess profits tax for the purpose of providing additional low-income home heating fuel assistance, among other things. I believe we should provide additional low-income energy help for low- income citizens in this country. We are going into a winter season. We don't have that adequately funded. Three times we have tried on the floor of the Senate, and three times we failed. We should try again--and we will. And this Senate one day will decide that perhaps keeping people warm in the winter is as important as providing millionaires tax cuts on their yearly tax bills. Someone will say that is class warfare. I don't mean class warfare at all. I just make the point that the last two tax cuts have produced $32 million a year in tax reductions for people whose incomes are over $1 million a year, and more. Perhaps we should capture a part of that $32 million. Surely those who are earning $1 million-plus a year could give up just a little of the tax cuts they have received, and we could divert it to try to help those who are low-income folks going into winter trying to figure out how they will pay a 60-percent increase in natural gas bills to heat their homes, at a time, by the way, when the Exxon Corporation and others are showing the highest profits in their history. The American people who struggle to pay these bills, take a look at these companies: ExxonMobil, Shell-BP, Chevron-Texaco, Conoco-Phillips. By the way, Chevron-Texaco used to be two companies. There used to be Exxon, and then there was Mobil; then there was Chevron, then there was Texaco; then there was Conoco and then there was Phillips. They all got married. So now we have just a few companies--75-percent increase, 68- percent increase, 89-percent increase. I am talking about increase in profits. At the same time this is going on, by the way, the American people are paying through the nose at the gas pumps, and we are setting them up to pay a dramatic increase to heat their homes this winter. Once again, one group is filling their treasury, and the other group is emptying their bank accounts. Guess which is which. The oil companies are filling their treasuries, and average Americans are having to empty their bank accounts to pay the price. Let me give you some numbers, if I might. In January of last year, the price of a barrel of oil was $34.50 a barrel. At that price, the oil companies had the highest profits in the history of the oil industry. Now it is almost $30 a barrel above that. That is about $7 billion more a month in profits. The Shell report, which was received in my office about two months ago talked about their financial performance in 2004. This is last year, when prices averaged around $40 a barrel. The report says: We achieved the highest net income in our history, 48 percent higher than the year before, as a result of higher oil and natural gas prices. It goes on to say that these higher profits occurred even though the company produced less oil than the previous year. They produced less and saw a 50-percent increase in their profits. The same is true with other companies saying: We had higher profits, but we produced less. As I indicated, my colleague, Senator Judd Gregg, has indicated publicly that he would support an excess--I call it a windfall profits tax. He would use it for the purpose of providing low-income energy assistance. I personally believe that this money doesn't belong to the Government. I don't want to bring it in the Treasury. I want to capture some of that which they are not using to expand our energy supply and use it to give rebates to the consumers. They are, after all, the ones paying the price. Taking it from the consumers, putting it in the energy companies' treasuries, and then bringing it into the Government means you have taken money from the consumers to Government. I would just as soon provide a rebate back to the consumers. I know that when we talk about this, the oil industry has an apoplectic seizure. They get all upset. I understand that. They are making more money than ever. I have been supportive of the energy industry. I hope we find substantial new reserves. While I don't support opening ANWR, I believe that is one of those pristine areas which was set aside, not to be opened first, but to be opened last, if ever. I do support opening up Lease 181 in the Gulf of Mexico. I hope we can do that. I would like to see us vote on opening that lease area. We have substantial proven reserves that exist there. There are other things on which I do support the energy industry. People said: Well, if you think prices are too high, what about when they are too low? I was one of those who supported an $18 price and did support a proposal for an $18 price, including tax credits to get to that price for marginal wells. I have supported the energy industry in many areas, but I cannot support, I don't think the American people support, and I don't believe the Senate should support these kinds of excess windfall profits that far exceed anything that is reasonable and seeing these profits gathered at the expense of the American people often who can least afford it. There are some who, as I said when I started, make the case, Well, this is just the market system at work. This isn't the market system. That is all nonsense. The market system is fine. I used to teach some economics at college. I was able to overcome that afterward. I understand free markets and the market system. The free market system needs a referee from time to time. Do you know that we pay one 7-foot, 2-inch basketball player the equivalent of 1,000 elementary school teachers? That is the market system. Does that make sense? Probably not; the market system. There is a judge on television, Judge Judy. It seems kind of out of sorts when I have been channel-surfing and I see her. I understand from a magazine article that she made $25 million in a year. I think the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court makes $190,000. Market system? Well, you know. You can take a look at the market system and see areas where there needs to be from time to time somebody who says: This isn't fair, it doesn't make any sense. The market system is not perfect. It is not the market system, however, that produces a $60- plus barrel of oil. I mentioned before that there are three factors. I described OPEC ministers with substantial control over the supply of oil; the larger, more muscular oil companies made larger by mergers, exerting more muscle in the marketplace; and the futures market becoming a speculative bazaar, all of which then produce this remarkable price for energy. It has an impact on every single American. Some perhaps don't care. But the question is this: If we in this country are going to pay these prices for a barrel of oil and, therefore, gasoline and natural gas, if we are going to pay these prices, should they result in more exploration in a greater supply of energy with greater energy security for this country's future? Shouldn't they? That is not what is happening. What is happening--I described BusinessWeek--is these companies more and more are buying back their stock. They are hoarding the cash. They are drilling for oil on Wall Street where oil doesn't exist. That is not in the country's interest. I take some hope from my colleague, Senator Judd Gregg's press statements last Friday. I take some hope from the statements by the Speaker of the House. He held a press conference suggesting that the oil companies should be investing more in exploration. His remedy was the equivalent of beating them over the head with a feather. But, nonetheless, he was speaking out about the need to produce more energy. It is the case even with the majority leader of the Senate talking about that. I think perhaps, if not seeing the light, at least there are people here who are feeling the heat from drivers, from people who are worried about heating their homes in the winter, who take a look at the price and say it is unfair. The question isn't whether it is unfair; the question is, What do we do about it? Apparently the Speaker of the House, the majority leader of the Senate, and our colleague from New Hampshire think it is unfair. What do we do about it? We can sit around and mop our brow, we can grit our teeth, wring our hands, and we can fret. We do that petty well. I don't know of any body that does that better than the U.S. Senate. But that doesn't do much for those being hurt in this country. What we ought to do, in my judgment, is employ and adopt a windfall profits tax, gather from that windfall profits tax the revenue that is being taken from consumers unfairly, and use it as a rebate back to consumers. My proposal would be a windfall profits tax, the one I introduced with Senator Dodd and others; that is, if the energy companies are, in fact, sinking their profits back into the ground to explore for more oil and build additional refineries above ground, they wouldn't be paying an excess windfall profits tax. That is not what they are doing with their money. Don't take it from me; take it from their own financial reports because that is not what they are doing with their money. I believe they ought to be paying a 50-percent windfall tax for oil above $40 a barrel, and that excise tax ought to be redistributed to the American consumers who are the ones ultimately paying the bill. It ought to be distributed to them as a rebate for those consumers. We will have more to talk about this week on this subject. I took some heart on Friday to hear a Member of the Senate from the other side of the political aisle has come to the same conclusion I have reached, and that is that these profits are far above that which is supportable or justifiable, profits far above that which would be created by a free market system; that the consumers are being treated unfairly. The Senate ought to do something about it. The question isn't whether we should do it. Of course we should. The question is, which method or which strategy do we employ? Do we decide this money grab goes to the Government--grab some of it and bring it here? Or do we decide this money comes from the consumer and ought to go back to the consumer in the form of the rebate? I make a final point. We will again be confronted with this question of heating fuel assistance for low-income Americans. But it is not only low-income Americans who are being injured, who will be hurt by these prices. There are a lot of working families who just get by and who will look at this 60-percent increase in the cost to heat their home this winter in my part of the country and wonder how on Earth will they be able to do that. I have described profits of the heads of the oil companies. Let me read total 2004 compensation for the chief executive officers: $33 million, $64 million, $4 million, $16 million, $8 million. These are salaries and compensation packages for the folks who run the companies that are charging these prices. The people have a right to ask the question, how on Earth is this allowed? We will have more to talk about as we go along this week. I hope, finally, there might be some tipping point at which the Senate says we must address this issue. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent on behalf of Senator Baucus that the following Finance Committee fellows and interns be allowed floor privileges during the consideration of the reconciliation bill: Ray Campbell, Jorlie Cruz, David Hain, Richard Litsey, and David Schwartz.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. If the Senator will yield, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized following the presentation by the Senator from South Dakota in morning business for such time as I may consume.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I was a member of the conference that the Senator from South Dakota just described. I, too, refused to sign the conference report this week. I think when Senator Johnson uses the term ``outrage,'' it is a very appropriate word to describe what happened in that conference. That conference recessed at the call of the Chair. We never reconvened. And behind closed doors with some secret deal, the majority party decided to hear the siren call of the big packing houses and others, and they extended by 2 years the effective date of the time when the American people would finally figure out, by labels, where the meat they were eating would come from. The reason I think this meat labeling is important, we label everything. We label T-shirts, shoes, shirts. Name it, we label it. Go to the grocery store, see what is labeled. Everything on the shelf is labeled. But then pick up a piece of meat and figure out if we know where it came from. I held up a piece of steak on the Senate floor one day and said: I defy anyone to tell me where this came from. Then I read a report from an inspector who went to a plant in Mexico, inspected the plant--this is a plant shipping meat to this country. He said there were carcasses hanging in unrefrigerated rooms, with feces smeared on the carcasses, all ready to be thrown in the hopper to be cut up and the meat sent to American consumers. That is what he found, one inspection. By the way, they closed that plant. Then it changed its name, changed its ownership, reopened, and has never again been inspected. That is why when one asks the question, How do you like your steak, the answer ought to be, I like my steak from places where it is healthy meat. We do not know where the healthy meat comes from unless we see a label to be able to determine where that meat comes from. That is why the Senator from South Dakota and I and others have fought so aggressively to get this meat-labeling law in place. It is now the law of the land. We have people making secret deals behind closed doors to try to shut it down, to prevent it from ever being implemented. That is what happened this week. That is why I refused to sign the conference report as well. I appreciate the effort of the Senator from South Dakota. There are about half a dozen of us who would not sign the conference report because this was an arrogant approach to make a secret deal behind closed doors that injures the consumers of this country. We should not put up with it.

Mr. DORGAN. I do not think there is any question but that is the case. We do not have labeling of this meat; other countries do. So we have a homogenization of all kinds of meat that comes into this country, gets mixed here and there and everywhere. The Senator from South Dakota said something very important. Our farmers and ranchers in this country raise beef, meat. We raise a healthy supply of meat. We inspect it. We have the healthiest supply of meat anywhere in the world. I think the lack of having country-of- origin labeling on the meat that is sold in this country hurts all of us. It hurts our consumers as they consume. It also hurts us in our ability to get into foreign markets, as my colleague has just described. Once again, the big interests get the attention around here behind closed doors, outside of the view of the public. So we come out with legislation now that says, well, not only is there a law that requires country-of- origin labeling, we will not allow that law to take effect. It has been in place for some while. We will extend for 2 years the excuse to allow the Department of Agriculture not to put it in effect. It is, as the Senator has used the term, an outrage. It is the wrong way for this Congress to legislate. I thank the Senator from South Dakota for yielding.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today in The Washington Post, the question in the business section is: How Big Is $9.9 Billion? That happens to be the single quarter profit for ExxonMobil Oil Company. Pretty fortunate for this company to have a $9.9 billion quarterly profit. That profit comes from people who are driving up to the gas pump, putting gasoline in their car; from people who are going to be heating their homes with home heating fuel, natural gas, and propane this winter. So we have this spectacle of one industry with record profits, the highest in the history of the world. This is the largest profit of any corporation ever. The gain is here and the pain is elsewhere. What does all of this mean? Well, I come from a State that is 10 times the size of Massachusetts in land mass. We have 642,000 people spread out in 10 Massachusettses. We are a Northern State, so it gets cold from time to time in the winter. We use home heating fuel and natural gas to heat our homes. Heating our homes is not a luxury; it is a necessity. When we drive, we drive a fairly long ways. In fact, there is only one other State in which the per capita use of gasoline is higher than the State of North Dakota. It is Wyoming. We are fourth among all the States in all energy consumption, second in gasoline per capita. I am told in New York City that if someone decides to take a vacation to go see some distant relative in Bayonne, NJ, 50 miles away, they plan it for some months. They put an emergency kit in their trunk. They put blankets in their car. They probably get their car serviced. They get the gasoline all topped off. They get all ready to go 50 miles to New Jersey to see their relatives. Why is it such a big deal? Because they do not travel very much, that is why. In our part of the country, we travel a lot. We drive a lot. It is not unusual to drive 100 or 200 miles to get a part for a combine or a tractor and then drive another 100 or 200 miles back. That is not a big deal. In terms of pain, the pain in States such as North Dakota and, yes, Wyoming and other States in our area of the country is very significant related to these prices. This is not a pain that is spread evenly. We have the highest amounts in history in the corporate treasuries of the oil companies, and then we have a huge pain for American consumers who are paying at the gas pump and are going to pay for home heating fuel. I would like to put up a couple of charts to show what is happening: oil company profits. Let me make a point. I come from a State that produces oil. I do not wish the oil industry bad news. I support a number of things the oil industry does. I have supported an $18 floor on marginal wells, using tax credits to bring the oil up to $18 when necessary. I support opening up Lease 181 in the Gulf of Mexico for additional production. I support a number of things that the energy industry and the oil industry want. When I see what is happening with the oil industry at the moment, I know that a year ago last January, the price of a barrel of oil was $34.50 a barrel. Now it is almost $30 above that. At $34.50 a barrel, they were making the highest profits they had ever made. Now it is $30 a barrel above that. What are the consequences of those increased prices? The consequences are enormous for American consumers. BP, one of the world's largest companies, 34 percent profit in the third quarter; ConocoPhillips, 89 percent profit increase in the quarter; ExxonMobil, 75 percent profit increase in the quarter, $9.9 billion just for the one corporation. The question might be asked, What is happening to this profit? Well, this is BusinessWeek. This is hardly some silly liberal rag. BusinessWeek says, Why isn't big oil drilling more? It says: Rather than developing new fields, oil giants have preferred to buy rivals--``drilling for oil on Wall Street.'' Do my colleagues want to know where a lot of these profits are going, the record profits above last year? Buying back stock, hoarding cash, and drilling for oil on Wall Street. I have news for them. There is no oil on Wall Street. They are going to drill a dry hole on Wall Street. The point of the BusinessWeek article is to point out that much of these profits are used to go buy others, to merge with others. We have now seen these huge, blockbuster mergers. We now have bigger oil companies than we have ever seen. There are three things that affect the price of oil. I know we have a lot of free market advocates in Congress. I think the free market is wonderful. I do not think it is perfect. A 7-foot, 2-inch basketball player gets paid the same amount as 1,000 elementary school teachers? That is the marketplace, I guess. A short stop gets paid $250 million. Judge Judy, that woman on television--I do not watch her much. Once in a great while, I tune in cruising the trials and she seems a little crabby to me, but Judge Judy makes 10 times, 20 times, or 30 times the amount of money that the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court makes. I guess that is the market system. I believe in the market system. The free market system makes a lot of sense, but there is no free market in oil at the moment. There are three things happening with oil. One, there are the OPEC ministers sitting around a table because they were fortunate to find that on this little planet of ours, a substantial amount of the reserves of oil, the first, second and third largest reserves, exist under the sands of the Middle East. OPEC ministers sit around a table and decide quantity and price to the extent they can--especially quantity--and then the major oil companies, made larger and more muscular by blockbuster mergers, decide to use their raw muscle in the marketplace. Third and finally, the futures market, which is designed to provide liquidity for trading, has become a grand bazaar for speculation, an orgy of speculation. Those are the three elements that now give us a price of oil of over $60 a barrel. Sixty-six million U.S. homes are heated mainly with natural gas, and their heating bills this winter are going to be 48 percent on average; 60 percent in my part of the country--60 percent increase to heat one's home this winter at a time when the largest enterprises that sell the oil are filling their bank accounts and drilling for oil on Wall Street. Sound fair? It does not to me. I have proposed a windfall profits tax, the proceeds of which would be rebated back to the consumers. This is not your mother's or father's windfall profits tax. We had one once before. It did not work very well. That was to bring money into the Federal Government. I do not propose that. Last year, the average cost of a barrel of oil was $40. In January, it was $34.50. The average cost the entire year was $40, and the energy industry, the oil companies, had the highest profits in their history. I propose that above that level of $40 a barrel represents windfall or excess profits. I propose further that the oil companies have two choices: If they decide to use all of that excess or windfall profit to invest back into the ground to explore for more oil or to build refineries above ground, then they would not pay a windfall profits tax. If they choose not to do that, if they choose to drill for oil on Wall Street, if they choose to buy back their stock and hoard cash, then they would pay a 50- percent excise tax on those windfall profits, the entire proceeds of which would be sent back to the American consumers. Some say, if that would happen, the oil companies would simply drill less or explore for oil much less aggressively. No. In fact, the most significant incentive to get them to explore for more energy would be to avoid paying a 50-percent excise tax called the windfall profits tax that I have proposed. It would be the single most aggressive incentive to say, sink that money back into the ground, expand America's supply of energy. It is interesting that we use one-fourth of the oil that is produced every day. Eighty-four million barrels of oil a day are produced in the world. We use 21 million barrels of oil a day in our country. This little spot on this globe called the United States of America uses one- fourth of all oil that is produced every day. Sixty percent of that which we produce comes in from other countries. We are hopelessly addicted to foreign oil, and it is dangerous for our country. That is a longer term other significant issue we have to deal with. We cannot continue to be addicted to oil that comes from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and elsewhere. We simply cannot do that. That is why we as a country need to establish goals toward energy independence. John Kenneth Galbraith said: In the long run, we are all dead. Those people who say, Well, in the long term, it is going to work out, in the long run, we are all dead. In the short term, we have a responsibility moving into this winter to try to find a way to deal with this dichotomy of the oil companies filling their treasuries and the consumers trying to figure out, How do I pay the bill? How do I pay a 60-percent increase in natural gas prices in the northern Great Plains? How do I pay $50 to put 16 or 18 gallons in my gas tank? I think this Congress has a responsibility to address this. As I said before, yes, I support the oil industry in a number of ways. I have described them. I can describe others. I support the free market system. But I think this system is broken and I think what you have is significant pain for the American consumers, significant gain for the largest oil companies, and I think it is unfair.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my understanding is we are on the appropriations bill. I will speak for 5 minutes or so on a subject unrelated to the bill.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, there has been a lot of information around this town about a New York Times reporter named Judith Miller. She has been central to a case that Mr. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, is looking into. There is a lot of anticipation here about what or what might not happen with respect to charges that might be filed. It has to do with the disclosure of a covert CIA agent and who might have disclosed her name and why. Judith Miller was a reporter for the New York Times and Judith Miller spent some 80-plus days in jail because she decided not to testify about that subject before a grand jury when requested by the special prosecutor. She was subsequently released and did testify. I share the common interest in what has happened, what did the special prosecutor find, were there people in Washington, DC, who were ``outing,'' as it were, a covert agent of the CIA, and if so, did they lie about it, did they obstruct justice. I don't know the answer and I don't pretend to know the answer to any of that. As one colleague suggested on television this weekend, these are not ``technical'' issues. There is no such thing as technical perjury. In any event, this is very important. But that is now why I am here now. The reason I come to the Senate for a moment to mention Judith Miller is she wrote something in her own hand that appeared in the New York Times in recent days describing her situation. She said something that was of interest to me and alerted my curiosity. I have since made a number of calls related to that. Judith Miller was embedded in a military unit and she said the following in her piece: The Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as a part of my assignment ``embedded'' with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons [or weapons of mass destruction.] We all understand in the Senate what it means to see secret or top secret material. We frequently are provided briefings by the CIA, by the Defense Department, by other intelligence units, briefings that are classified as either ``secret,'' or ``top secret.'' We understand what that means. We understand, for example, if a member of our staff is to be made available to have those clearances, clearances come only when there is a background check and people are evaluated for receiving a clearance to possess secret or top secret information. So I had a question when I read this article from a New York Times reporter embedded with a military unit: The Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information . . . My question is, What kind of clearance would that be, that a reporter, traveling with a military unit in Iraq, searching for weapons of mass destruction, what kind of clearance would that reporter have to see classified or secret information? I called the Pentagon to find out what kind of clearance would exist, perhaps not just with respect to this reporter. My interest would be on a broader basis. We had many reporters embedded with military units in Iraq during the invasion and during the subsequent activities, looking for weapons of mass destruction. Based on what I can learn from the Pentagon--although it was not all that clear from the response I received--based on what I could learn from the Pentagon, it seems there was no ``secret'' or ``top secret'' clearance given this reporter. Now, last evening I talked to a soldier in Germany, a man who was a part of the unit in which this reporter was embedded. He was very willing and interested in talking about the entire experience. The fellow from Germany, who is a sergeant in that special unit Judith Miller was embedded in, spoke at some length about what happened there. I told him of the quote Judith Miller had in the New York Times. He said he would have understood that she would have likely seen secret or even top secret information. The way the reporter is embedded in that circumstance, they have access to a substantial amount of information, could not help but have access. So the question I asked the Pentagon is, on what basis would a reporter have access to these clearances to receive secret or top secret information? Further, it is my understanding, at least from the sergeant whom I spoke with in Germany last evening, all that was transmitted from this reporter, embedded with a military unit, was approved by the colonel involved in that military unit and material was not to be published without the colonel's approval. Well, of course, that is the censoring of the material. It is also the case as reported not only by the sergeant in the conversation I had last evening but also in previous publications, that this reporter, Judith Miller, described often her acquaintance with Donald Rumsfeld and Mr. Feith and others in the Pentagon at high levels, including generals. And she expressed freely her either agreement or disagreement with the military activities of the unit she was in, and talked about complaining back to Rumsfeld, and so on and so forth. I don't know the voracity of all of that. All I am reporting is what I was told by someone in that unit. That is, perhaps, for another discussion. I intend to visit about this a bit more fully tomorrow. The first question I have is not just with respect to Judith Miller, but generally under what conditions were reporters approved to be embedded with military units and given opportunity to see secret or top secret material? Did they have security clearances or not? The Pentagon says not. This reporter said she did. If they had clearances, what kinds of clearances were they? The Pentagon said they have nondisclosure forms. How can you give a nondisclosure form to a reporter and then show them secret or top secret material? Take a look at the law, which I will read tomorrow in the Senate. That is not what is allowed. The classification of material that is secret or top secret dealing with intelligence or military operations is not a classification that is done lightly. It is not a classification that can be overcome by someone in the Pentagon who says, Okay, put on a military shirt or a pair of military trousers and go embed yourself with that unit, and, by the way, you sign a form that says ``nondisclosure.'' That is not the way we decide how to disperse information that is considered secret or top secret. Those who are in our Senate community, on our staffs and so on, those who are permitted to see classified secret and top secret material, must have a clearance. That clearance must come after an investigation to determine whether that person is qualified to have classified information. I am asking the Pentagon, did they provide a clearance? The short answer says no, they did not. The writer says they did. The Pentagon says a ``nondisclosure form.'' What on Earth is that? How many nondisclosure forms exist when they are embedding men and women in the news media with military units engaged in activities that often are secret and top secret? I will be asking the inspector general at the Pentagon to take a look at this to evaluate for the Congress. All Members should understand this. What are the circumstances by which a reporter describes her access to see secret information because she had a ``clearance'' from the Pentagon when the Pentagon said she did not have a clearance? We understand what secret clearances are around here. All of us understand that. We deal with that classification every day. What are the circumstances by which a reporter is allowed to see secret or top secret information because they have a clearance, when the Pentagon says no such clearance exists? If, in fact, it is not a clearance and the reporter has simply misspoken, if it is instead a nondisclosure form, then I would like to see the provision in law by which the Pentagon has decided to provide nondisclosure releases to journalists who join military units whose units then censor the material that comes from the journalist. And is there in any way any implied quid pro quo, saying: Give me a clearance, embed me, let me see secret material; and by the way, I won't report on the things that are secret and you can review all things I write and take out the things you do not like? I do not know the circumstance. What I have read in recent days raised questions for me beyond what has been raised in recent days which is the issue of the special prosecutor and his potential action before the grand jury expires. I don't know about all of that. I am as interested as others about what may or may not happen. I am a member of the Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations. We spend a fair amount of time evaluating weapons programs and other issues that are secret and top secret. But I don't understand this, a self- description by a New York Times reporter about her clearance to see secret information as part of being embedded with the military unit. Mr. President, I will have more to say about this tomorrow. In the meantime, I intend to try to find additional answers. They have not been forthcoming in the last couple of days. But I think all of the Congress, all of the Senate, should be asking these questions as well. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my colleague, Senator Landrieu from Louisiana, will be on the floor shortly. We want to talk about something that has occurred in the last week. A week ago today, I chaired a hearing of the Policy Committee. The hearing was on the subject of the reconstruction in the Gulf States in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We have held many previous hearings on reconstruction in Iraq. As you know, this Congress has literally spent tens of billions of dollars on reconstruction projects in Iraq, and the waste, fraud, and abuse there is mind-boggling. There is massive money going out the door to contractors, in many cases with large no-bid contracts, and the taxpayers are getting bilked. I will not go into the lengthy stories about it now. We decided to hold a hearing with respect to contracting in the gulf because this Congress has already approved $60 billion for reconstruction, and we have heard tales and stories that are similar to those we hear with respect to reconstruction in Iraq. At last Monday's hearing, we heard from a local New Orleans company. The owner of the company and his job foreman originally were hired to provide 75 qualified electricians to work on a project they had begun at the Belle Chase Naval Air Station in Louisiana. The project they were hired for was with Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton. This company was hired to provide 75 qualified electricians. Very soon after they started, these qualified Louisiana electricians, many of whom were victimized by the hurricanes and who very much appreciated these jobs, were replaced by others. They were replaced by workers who were not of the same training in electrical skills. In many cases, Bob Knight, the general manager of the New Orleans company that suffered this fate, described the replacement workers as follows: Almost all of their workers were from out of State, and most didn't speak English. Few seemed to me to be qualified electricians. According to the Halliburton subcontractor, they were being paid [a fraction of the] prevailing hourly wage, with no benefits. At that time they were living in small tents on the base. Here is a photograph of the circumstances of how they were living. This is, of course, a little rough shed with 2 by 4s to frame up some beds. I am guessing most of these are undocumented workers brought in to take the jobs that had belonged to the folks in Louisiana who desperately need these jobs. But because the President said there is no requirement to pay what Davis-Bacon wages, no requirement to pay the prevailing wage in this region, the result is unscrupulous contractors who bring in workers who will work for dirt cheap wages with no benefits and many hours and put them up in circumstances such as this. And, oh, by the way, some of them were told they could go to work on a crew such as this and get a fraction of what they would have to pay others who are skilled, and they can get free meals at the Red Cross. Unbelievable, isn't it? Here is what is happening to jobs that are supposed to belong to the folks in Louisiana and presumably also Mississippi. People who got hit hard by the hurricane, who lost everything, in many cases, expected perhaps to get an opportunity to get back on their feet with a good job that pays all right as skilled electricians. They put together 75 of them and are told by the contractor: This job is going to last; it is going to be an opportunity for you. And just like that, somebody else is brought in because the President said they do not have to pay prevailing wages. Guess what. Here is the circumstance, here are the people with the jobs. Most do not speak English. Most were brought, many of them undocumented. Last Thursday or Friday, following the hearing that I held, there was a raid at this military installation by what is normally called the INS. It is now I guess the ICE, as it has been subsumed into this behemoth organization called Homeland Security. At any rate, the immigration folks raided, and we are told by people on the ground that they found somewhere around 150 undocumented workers. The immigration folks now say they found 10 that they know of, but they play a little game with us because the more questions we ask, the less information we get from them. It is pretty clear to me, based on eyewitness accounts on the ground, that they went in after the hearing we did and found undocumented workers on that military installation who had taken the jobs, we believe, from the folks in Louisiana who had been victimized by these hurricanes, the jobs they were working at. Here is the Washington Post. This was last week after the hearing: Among the electricians who lost their jobs was Sam Smith, whose house in the Ninth Ward was destroyed after Katrina slammed into the Louisiana coast. Smith, 55, returned to the city because of the promise of $22-an-hour wages, and guaranteed work for at least a year at the naval base. By the way, he was a skilled electrician with all the certifications. He was quickly disappointed, however, and lost his job within three weeks. ``You would think that the federal government should be making sure that people who are trying to restart their lives and are trying to put their city back together again are out there working,'' Smith said. ``But that's not the case.'' The New York Times: The acrid smell inside trailer No. 2 is tough to take for any length of time. The linoleum floor is filthy and bare, aside from a few soiled blankets hammed in the corners. Dishes caked with leftover food are piled high in the sink, attracting flies. Two portable fans are the only things stirring the air. But six men are living here. They sleep on that floor. They swat away those flies and dodge the roaches at night. They traveled all the way from Guatemala. They are promised good pay, three meals a day and place to stay, and some contractors make good on this. But the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, an advocacy group, says many do not. So it is, without the prospect of paying prevailing wages, the jobs are going to these kinds of folks. They get $8 an hour and labor 11 hours a day, six days a week. Subcontractors pulled them together for Belfor USA, an American subsidiary of a multibillion-dollar international company specializing in restoration after disasters. Before New Orleans, they had separately held construction, farm or factory jobs from Texas to North Carolina, they said. The point is, there are other stories about workers, workers from elsewhere willing to take substandard wages to help the reconstruction of Louisiana and Mississippi. We passed $60 billion out of this Chamber in reconstruction money and, guess what. What we now understand is reconstruction is going to others, not the folks from Louisiana, not the people who have a skilled certification as an electrician who lost their homes and who need the job. No, this is about companies that decide to bring in these folks and put them in these conditions--squalid conditions--and pay them a fraction of what should be paid for those jobs. By the way, the foreman on the job who testified Monday--and my colleague from Louisiana was at that hearing--the foreman said these folks were not qualified. They were just not qualified. By the way, they were putting up 900 tents in metal frames in which our troops will live. And we have electricians not qualified wiring those tents for electricity? What on earth is going on? It is the same old thing. They are paying a fraction of what they should pay and getting rid of the Louisiana workers so they can bring in these workers from Guatemala and elsewhere. You saw the stories: Undocumented workers, INS or ICE, they call it, the immigration folks, make a raid on the base. My colleague from Louisiana will expand on that further, I am sure. They make a raid on the base, and we are told by people who were there that they found many--we heard 150 people. Now they will say there are only 10. At this point, they do not know, they cannot know, they will not tell us. It is the same old tap dance by a big Federal bureaucracy that does not want to get caught. They ought to do their job, come clean, and tell us what they found on that base. I think I know what they found. I think what they found were contractors bringing in undocumented workers, paying them pennies on the dollar, taking jobs away from the folks in Louisiana. That is what I think they found. I wonder if there is any Member of the Senate, just one, who wants to stand up and say: Yes, that is what we meant, we meant to shove $60 billion out the door of this Chamber and hope that some contractor would bring in some undocumented workers--and fire some Louisiana folks--to do the work in Louisiana. If there is one Senator willing to stand up and say that, they are not thinking very much. There is not one person in this Chamber who will agree that is what they meant, not in their worst moment. I take no pleasure in pointing this out. In my judgment, this is a corruption of the process. We know what needs to be done. We know how to do it. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and what is happening is we are seeing the wrong way implemented in the reconstruction down in the gulf coast. My colleague from the State of Louisiana participated in those hearings. I know she has been in touch with the contractors and knows what is happening with respect to that Naval air station as well, but I thank her for the work she has done. I can only imagine if it were my State or some other State of a Senator in this Chamber facing this, we would demand that those for whom those jobs were intended would have those jobs, not that they be fired so we could bring in undocumented workers and pay them pennies on the dollar. That is unbelievable incompetence, and we need to see it stopped right now. So let me thank my colleague from Louisiana.

Mr. DORGAN. Of course. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. DORGAN. I was not aware of the number. I know this is devastating, the most significant natural disaster with the greatest consequence in terms of human misery, loss of jobs, loss of homes. It is unbelievable. I realize that a lot of undocumented workers are just decent people who are trying to make a living. I don't mean to disparage them. My intention is to say, however, there are rules, and there is a right way and a wrong way to do things. We did not spend $60 billion out of this Chamber to give jobs to undocumented workers. We spent that amount of money to help the folks from Louisiana get back on their feet with good jobs for reconstruction, and the same for the folks from Mississippi. I intend to work with the Senator from Louisiana and others to put a stop to what is going on, to redirect that money. We want reconstruction to move and move quickly, but we want those jobs to go to the victims, those folks who have suffered through all of this as well. We want those workers to be paid good wages. Davis-Bacon ought to be restored. The President ought to stand up today and say: I made a mistake by repealing Davis-Bacon. This Government has a responsibility to pay prevailing wages so we have good wages that pay well and decent jobs for those folks. I again thank the Senator from Louisiana. I know she wants to make some comments about this as well. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for such time as I may consume.