Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Will the Senator from New Mexico yield for a question?

Mr. DORGAN

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for 5 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN. I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I am a member of the Energy Committee along with my colleague from Wyoming. I happen to share his desire to get the Energy bill done. With regard to the statement by the majority leader that it is going to have to be done this week, with the number of amendments out there and the difficulty we have, it is very unlikely it will get done this week. My hope is that we can find a way to move most of the way down the road, and understand that, if necessary, when we come back we will finish it quickly. We need to get an Energy bill to the President's desk on a timely basis. It should not be just any Energy bill. It has to be an Energy bill that works, one that advances the interests of America. We have 5 days in the workweek. We end on Friday. Today the chairman and ranking member are both out for a funeral. That is something no one can control. So at least much of today is not going to be particularly productive in advancing the bill. Given what we are going to face this winter in natural gas prices, given the problems we have in a range of areas, it would be in the interest of the country, Republicans and Democrats, to finish an Energy bill. Let me mention a couple things we need to do in a serious way. Simply to paste together an electricity title and say, let's get it out there and get it voted on--if you missed what happened in California and this ``restructuring'' notion that has been around, you missed one of the largest bilking of consumers ever to occur. A circumstance existed in California where some companies were able to control supplies and, as a result of controlling and manipulating supplies and recreating congestion, they bilked California and west coast consumers to the tune of billions of dollars. We need some consumer protection. I need to understand what the electricity title does. This headlong rush to restructure in electricity is one that can pose some significant problems for consumers. Restructuring means you will move electricity around the country from low-cost areas to high-cost areas and replace electricity from low-cost areas with more expensive electricity. Studies I have seen tell us that rural States such as North Dakota and others are going to lose and will have to pay much higher costs for electricity. Perhaps if we are past the urge to restructure and to create the circumstance that allowed what happened on the west coast, particularly in California, we can have an electricity title that really works for energy and for consumers. There are four steps to this bill that are necessary. One is to incentivize production. I agree with my colleague from Wyoming. Oil, natural gas, coal--all can and will play a significant role in our future. We should incentivize that in thoughtful ways. If debate on the Energy bill this year becomes a debate about ANWR and CAFE, then the American people lose. These are just two hood-ornament debates, and we will lose. What we need to do is find a way to pole-vault over what we have been doing and do something dramatically different in the future. I introduced the first bill this year, before the President called for it in his State of the Union Address, to move us towards a hydrogen fuel cell future. We have been putting gasoline through America's carburetors for almost a century. If our future is to find a way to keep putting gasoline through carburetors and debate how efficient they are, in my judgment we don't have much of a future with respect to energy; we will always be dependent on finding energy from off our shores. Fifty-five percent of the oil is now found outside our borders, much of it from very troubled areas of the world. We could wake up one morning and discover that the supply of oil coming in has been interrupted by the concerted act of terrorists, and we could find our economy flat on its back, because the American economy runs on energy. The assured future supply of energy is essential to jobs and economic opportunity. Fifty-five percent of our oil now comes from offshore. That is set to go to 68 percent. It is an unforgivable dereliction of duty if we policymakers don't decide that that has to change. That is dangerous to our future, and we must change it. How do we do it? Four steps: Incentivize additional production in a thoughtful way and compatible with our environmental interests. Two, promote conservation. We waste an enormous amount of energy. Conservation should be a significant part of any Energy bill. Three, an efficiency title that provides efficiencies with respect to all those appliances we use every single day. And four, the development of incentives for limitless and renewable sources of energy. Let me talk for a moment about that because that is one of the reasons I believe so strongly this bill must move. I am a big believer in wind energy. My State is ranked No. 1 by the Department of Energy in wind energy potential. We understand that the new turbines with which you can take energy from the wind and turn it into electricity are much more effective and much more efficient than they have ever been in the past. The ability to put up a 1-megawatt turbine and take energy from the air and turn it into electricity and put it on the line and use it to extend the energy supply makes great sense. It is nonpolluting. It is available wherever the wind blows. That makes great sense. The problem is, we have a lot of interests and a lot of projects on wind energy on the drawing boards ready to go, and we have this production tax credit that starts and stops and starts and stops, that is available for a year, 2 years, 3 years--maybe 1 year, and by the time it is implemented, if you put a new 3-year provision in, you may only get a year and a half or 2 years out of it because by the time the bill is implemented, you have already wasted part of that. For those who are interested in developing these new sources of energy, renewable and limitless sources of energy, this Congress ought to pass an Energy bill, and that Energy bill should have a 5-year extension on the production tax credit. This one only has 3. Nonetheless, whether it is 3 or 5, you need to get a bill passed in order for that to be part of the calculation of those who have projects on the boards and want to build these projects. Speaking for me, although I regret I don't think we will be able to finish the Energy bill this week, I want an Energy bill. I want one that works. I want a good bill, one that goes to the White House for signature. I don't know what we are going to get done this week. I know today, as I said, the chairman and ranking member are necessarily absent for a funeral. Tomorrow there is a meeting at the White House that, I suppose, will take an hour and a half or 2 hours out of the day for Energy Committee members. There are a series of things going on. I feel strongly we need to send some signals to our country, to the American people, that we are putting together policies for the future. I mentioned a moment ago that a hydrogen fuel cell future is very important for our country. This Congress passed my amendment--frankly, I was surprised by it--that said let's set targets and timetables for this. We all say use hydrogen, which is ubiquitous--use it to power fuel cells and then to power our vehicles. It is twice as efficient in getting power to the wheel as putting gasoline through a carburetor. So let's do that, we say. In order to do that, you cannot decide tomorrow that is going to happen because we are still in the development stage of fuel cells. There are fuel cells that are commercially available and operating. I have ridden on a fuel cell bus, driven a fuel cell car run by hydrogen. They exist, but they still literally are in the developmental stage. Then, in addition to deciding here is our future, you have to do a number of other things. You have to deal with the issues of the production of hydrogen, exactly how to produce it and from what. There are a series of opportunities. You can produce it from natural gas or from coal. You can take electricity from the wind and use the electricity in electrolysis and separate hydrogen from oxygen and water and pull the hydrogen out of the water. In addition to production, you have storage, transportation, and infrastructure. Who will build the service stations where you can fill up with hydrogen? These are things I think will last some while in terms of their early stages to solve and to create an infrastructure that leads us to a new energy day. The President spoke about it in the State of the Union Address. Prior to that, I offered legislation in the Congress calling for a fuel cell hydrogen future. So I embrace the President's goals. In fact, I significantly enhanced them with my colleagues on the Energy Committee, nearly tripling the amount of money the President suggested. I got the full Senate to set targets and timetables--150,000 vehicles by 2010, 2 million vehicles by 2020-- saying let's set targets and timetables, instead of saying 20 years from now, where are we, and saying that is where we are. We need to set up a road map and say, here is what we as a country aspire to do, here is what we aspire to achieve for our country's energy future. The reason using a hydrogen fuel cell economy to solve this country's energy future is important is these significant increases in energy use in the country are through transportation--particularly vehicles, but transportation. That is where the line is. That is the line that is going up. With CAFE standards, which we will debate on the floor of the Senate, people will say, let's solve that line that goes up with more efficient carburetors or engines. Look, I am for more efficient carburetors and engines, but that will not solve the problem, as long as we have gasoline that costs less than bottled water. By the way, you can do that with an SUV. You may have four kids in the back and you drive up to the gas station and buy gas and then buy bottled water for the occupants in the car. Per gallon, it will cost you more for the water. As long as gasoline costs more than water, people are going to want to drive 5,000-pound vehicles. The fact is, they are going to want to drive the big vehicles. That is a fact. That is what is happening in this country. The conversion has been quite extraordinary. Although I think CAFE standards are useful, and it is a provocative debate, and to the extent we can encourage additional efficiencies with internal combustion engines and carburetors through which all of the gasoline flows, that is fine, but that is not going to solve the problem of the increasing transportation line of energy usage. As long as we import most of our oil, with much of it coming from troubled parts of the world, this country is held hostage. How do you resolve that? You pole-vault to a different ground, it seems to me. After three-quarters to one whole century of putting gasoline through carburetors, I agree with the President; let's decide to have a different energy future and use hydrogen and fuel cells that are twice as efficient as now exist in getting power to the wheel from an internal combustion engine. Let's use the fuel cells and hydrogen as a fuel source and have our children and grandchildren be able to escape being held hostage from foreign supplies of oil. Now, let me say again, I want to end where I started. I want this bill to pass. I want a bill to pass and I want it to be a good bill. That means the bill can be improved with amendments. You have to have debate on issues on which Senators have a right to offer amendments. I would like to see a bill pass the Senate and the House. If we can get to conference in September, perhaps we can get a bill to the President and have it signed in late September or October. I would like to be able to say--especially in my State, where we have these promising wind energy projects--that the production tax credit has been extended, it is certain, and it is done, and you can count on it. As a result of that, we are going to produce more energy. As I conclude, I will say, incidentally, we have had a rewrite of the electricity title. I believe that was made available Thursday night. There were rumors the majority party was rewriting an electricity title, but I was not aware of how it was being written or by whom. Someone just pushed aside all these issues that have been raised about restructuring. As you know, for 4 or 5 years, we have had this urge for restructuring. Where does that come from? From some of the biggest users of electricity who want to pay lower costs for electricity. They want there to be retail competition for electricity. That retail economy situation--called restructuring--would embrace wholesale and retail competition for electricity and would give the opportunity in this country for electricity to flow to various marketplaces unimpeded. There has been a study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture about the ultimate impact of restructuring. I can tell you what it says about my State. It says consumers of North Dakota would end up paying a substantial additional price for electricity under so-called restructuring. Aside from the dislocations of it all, if you want to wonder about what restructuring might mean, especially when you have very big interests controlling energy--and that is not like a phone call, by the way, when you make a phone call and you may get a busy signal. Energy is different. When you need energy and energy isn't there, you are cold or hot. They are both universal in nature in terms of need, but energy is different. We need a supply of energy in this country that moves to the areas of need in a way where you don't have large interests in supply and manipulating the marketplace. The FERC has just released a study with respect to the west coast. We all know what happened there. We know people colluded with--Enron had plans and they were named and we uncovered them--Fat Boy, Get Shorty, Death Star. Sounds like comic books, doesn't it? Those are not comic books; they are internal memos from one corporation that was using strategies to cheat and to steal. That cheating and stealing from west coast consumers amounted to billions and billions and billions of dollars. Now, is it important to have in an energy bill protections for consumers to make sure that doesn't ever happen again? Some would push it away and say let's put some soft words in here. We will get a thesaurus and find out what seems appealing, and we will put all these soft words and say we have done it. Well, take a hard look at the energy title and make sure that even as we have done what is necessary to make sure we have a supply of energy, we have also done what is necessary to protect the American consumer against the manipulation of that supply and the overpricing of that supply to the detriment of the American consumers. There is a lot to do. I followed my colleague from Wyoming in his presentation, and I must say to Senator Thomas, we don't disagree that we should do this bill. Speaking for myself, I will do everything I can this week to try to cooperate. I hope we can offer amendments, have the debate, dispose of amendments, and move on to the next subject. I hope at the end of the day we have passed an Energy bill of which we are proud, one that really does advance this country's energy interests because as we head into this fall, we understand, more than ever, what is going to happen to natural gas prices. They are going to spike dramatically. But even more than that immediate natural gas price spike, we understand, with the mosaic of what we see in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world, this country will be enormously foolish if it does not pay substantial attention to the fact that we are held hostage to foreign supplies of oil in a way that is very detrimental to our long-term economic outlook. I hope we can work together. Speaking for myself, I want us to move and get our work done, get a bill to the President's desk, and when his signature is put on that bill, we can all say: We really did advance this country's energy future in a significant way. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. If the Senator will yield further, if, in fact, these are image trades or virtual trades to crank up a price and injure the consumer, in which a company is moving a kilowatt hour or MCF to another State, then back in, buying and selling to and from itself to jack up the price and cheat the consumer, in some cases, I am sure the Senator from Wyoming agrees, we should not conform to a new practice, but when we think the new practice is stealing from consumers, we ought to stop it and prevent it from ever happening again.

Mr. DORGAN. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. DORGAN. The Senator makes two important points. On the supply side, we have evidence that the supply was manipulated. That has been a great concern to FERC. While supply is important in terms of price, when there are large participants in the marketplace that take plants offline for the purpose of reducing supply and jacking up the price they receive, that is manipulation. We want to have an electricity title which deals with all of these issues, all forms of manipulation. The Senator mentioned supply, and I wanted to make the point, that especially in California substantial criminal behavior existed. As we know, FERC has already prevented some companies now from trading. Enron, of course, is essentially bankrupt and cannot trade there. There was substantial wrongdoing and criminal activity, much of which is still under active investigation by the Department of Justice. That is why having an electricity title that is good and well done is very important. I thank the Senator for yielding.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we are on the Energy bill, but I wish to take a moment, inasmuch as my colleague from Wyoming has finished his statement, to speak on another subject. This morning my colleague, Senator Wyden from Oregon, and I had a press conference disclosing something that is going on in a small corner of the Department of Defense. It is pretty disconcerting. I should say at the outset that over recent months, Senator Wyden and I have tried to put together a little project dealing with Government waste. Both of us believe very strongly Government does a lot of things to improve people's lives. It funds education and highways and provides for this country's protection and defense. There are a lot of things the Government does that are important to our daily lives, but when there is waste of money in Government, it is appalling. We have discovered in a small corner of the Pentagon something that is going on that ought to be stopped immediately: In three days, a program sponsored by an agency in the Pentagon called DARPA will begin to allow sign-ups for the creation of a futures program for people to buy and sell futures contracts. It is an approach to try to use the market system to predict future events in the Middle East, they say. I encourage people to go to their Web page and take a look at it. They say, for example, they will create a futures market in which buyers and sellers will make judgments and price futures contracts on predictive events such as: Will Mr. Arafat be assassinated? Will the King of Jordan be overthrown? Will there be a bioterrorist attack against the country of Israel? I told someone about discovering that this was going on at the Pentagon. They said I am clearly wrong about that; there is not any way the Pentagon can be setting up a futures contract system in which people will make bets on the Internet about whether some leader will be assassinated or whether there will be a bioterrorist attack. The answer is, they are wrong. That is exactly what is happening. I say to anybody who wonders about it, go to the Internet. It is unbelievably stupid as a public policy, in my judgment, to think that real intelligence can be replaced by a betting system involving people connected to the Internet around the world; that you can replace real intelligence with a so-called market-based system in which presumably informed buyers and sellers would make bets, wagers--they call it futures contracts, but in fact it would be wagers--on whether a foreign leader would be assassinated, on whether there would be a bioterrorist attack, on whether North Korea would launch missiles. I am using all of these examples because they are on the Internet site sponsored by the Department of Defense. This is real. I thought immediately, this clearly must be someone who went to The Onion and it is a spoof. No, it is not. One does not find this on The Onion. They find it on an Internet site sponsored by DARPA at the Department of Defense, saying they are going to create this system and the sign-up starts August 1. The trading on futures contracts on these kinds of questions trying to be predictive about future events in the Middle East will begin on October 1, and they hope to ultimately have 10,000 traders. It is the most Byzantine, harebrained scheme I think I have ever heard coming from Government. I say to DARPA, and to Admiral Poindexter, who I understand is running this program: Stop it. End it. If not, we will try to end it in the appropriations process. The Department of Defense does a lot of wonderful things. I have great admiration for them, and I serve on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. But putting together a program for trading of futures contracts on the kinds of propositions I have just mentioned-- assassinating leaders, bioterrorist attacks--is not a project that warrants any credibility at all. It is a tragic waste of the taxpayers' money. It is offensive and, in my judgment, it will have no value to anyone. My hope is that Senator Wyden and I will have convinced the Pentagon today that enough is enough. Stop this kind of nonsense.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the Senate will be asked to approve two free-trade agreements with respect to Singapore and Chile. I expect the Senate will approve both trade agreements by very wide margins. I intend to oppose both and wanted to explain why. It is not the case that I believe a free-trade agreement with Singapore is inappropriate. It is not the case that I believe a free-trade agreement with Chile is inappropriate. It is the case, however, that this country has a trade regime that is in total chaos and it is a significant mess. For 20 years, under Republican and Democratic administrations, we have seen our trade deficit ratchet way up. We now have the largest trade deficit in human history that has occurred anywhere on the globe. It has been rising very rapidly. Instead of fixing the problems that exist in international trade and demanding fair trade and demanding from our allies fair trade treatment and doing something to prevent the erosion of American jobs which, incidentally, are now moving overseas at a rapid pace, we have trade negotiators rushing across the world trying to do new agreements. I say fix the old agreements before we start running around doing new agreements. The reason we are going to consider new agreements today under something called fast track is that Congress decided to handcuff itself and agree to a procedure by which no amendments will be able to be offered to either free-trade agreement. Singapore is a tiny nation of 3 million people a half a world away. We already have a very favorable trade relationship with Singapore. It has little manufacturing and little agriculture. It is wide open to imported goods. Singapore is not an example of a trade problem for us. So it does not matter much to me whether we have a free-trade agreement with Singapore. The trade ambassador has brought us an 800-page free-trade agreement with Singapore. But demonstrative of the problem we have created for ourselves is a small provision in the free-trade agreement with Singapore that provides an authorization for the opportunity for Singapore to send to our country 5,400 people under a visa program to take jobs in this country. Normally that would be a circumstance that would be dealt with by other committees in Congress, in which we evaluate how many people do we want to come in under a visa to work in this country, but instead this has been negotiated in a foreign-trade agreement negotiation somewhere, perhaps most of it overseas, certainly behind closed doors, inevitably in secret, and they put an immigration provision in this proposal. The immigration provision would allow 5,400 immigrants to come from Singapore to the United States to take jobs in the United States. Think of this for a second. We have 8 to 10 million people out of work, desperate for jobs, needing to go to work, who cannot find a job in this country. We read a story every day in the major newspapers about someone who has hundreds of resumes out, they spend all day desperately trying to find a job because we have lost 2\1/2\ million jobs in the last couple of years. It is not as if our economy is growing by creating new jobs. To the extent there is any growth at all, it is jobless growth in this country. Some have made the point that, no, there are jobs attached to this growth, it is just that jobs do not exist in the United States. The growth occurs here in terms of profits and economic expansion of sales and profits, but the jobs attached to that growth are in Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, and elsewhere. So if we have a jobless expansion, which we have, having lost 2\1/2\ million jobs in the last couple of years, and we have people desperately searching for jobs, and then we get a free-trade agreement brought to the Senate floor our trade ambassador negotiated with Singapore, and deep in the bowels of that agreement is a provision that says 5,400 people from Singapore will come to this country to take jobs in this country and we ask the question: Why? Why would we do that? So then the immediate instinct is, if there is a provision in this free-trade agreement with Singapore that is that odious, then let's get rid of it by offering an amendment. Dump it. The problem is, fast track means trade agreements brought to the Senate floor prevent any Member of the Senate from offering any amendment under any circumstance. This Congress foolishly decided that it would straitjacket itself and whatever is negotiated anywhere by our trade ambassador and brought back in the form of a trade agreement, we will agree that we will be prevented from offering an amendment. So we will vote on this. The majority of the Senate will vote yes to free trade with Singapore, and yes to 5,400 immigrants from Singapore to come to this country to take American jobs. I am not going to vote for that. Once again, the lesson is, those who believe fast-track trade procedures make sense ought to think again. Also, this trade agreement with Singapore provides for transshipment. It provides for transshipment of high-tech products from anywhere, China, Burma, Indonesia, if they are transshipped through Singapore to the United States to get the full benefit of the Singapore free-trade agreement. Singapore is already one of the largest transshipping points in the world. Should we be negotiating trade agreements that encourage transshipment so we do not know the origin of shipments to this country of high-tech products or others? I do not think so. I understand, interestingly enough, that a bipartisan group of my colleagues will offer a resolution on the immigration piece that is in the free-trade agreement. The resolution is going to be a sense-of-the- Senate amendment. I think I was asked if I put my name on it. I am happy to put my name on it, but it does not mean anything. It is beating someone over the head with a feather. It is a sense-of-the-Senate resolution that says: You better watch it; you should not have done this. But it cannot be more than a sense of the Senate because we cannot take out this provision. This provision is stuck in the trade bill and we cannot get it out. This Senate has already agreed we will not allow amendments. I didn't vote for that; I voted against it. But the majority of this Senate says: Let us line up so we can be subservient to the trade ambassador--whoever it is, Republican or Democrat--and agree whatever they negotiate in secret overseas that affects American jobs, count us out. We will not be able to offer amendments. That is just fine with us. Apparently, these are colleagues who have forgotten what is written in the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution clearly says that trade is the Senate's responsibility, not anyone else's; not the President but the Senate. Fast track trade agreements have been disastrous for this country. This chart shows the runaway deficits we have experienced. It does not matter which administration is in office. A person could be blindfolded and listen and cannot tell if it is a Republican or Democratic administration. They all say the same thing: all we care about is getting another trade agreement. Meanwhile, we had $470 billion in the year 2002 in merchandise trade deficits. Is that alarming to some? One cannot detect it in the Senate. No one seems to care much about it. There are only two or three Members who talk about this, and we are considered the xenophobic isolationist stooges that do not get it. What I get is this country fought for a century for a series of things that make life better in our country. There are people who died in the streets of America for the right to organize in labor unions. We fought about child labor laws, saying you should not work 12-year-old kids 12 hours a day in a coal mine or manufacturing plant. We fought about prohibiting companies from dumping chemicals into the air and the water. We fought about safe workplaces, believing the American workers have a right to work in safe workplaces. We fought about all those issues for a century. Now some have decided you can pole-vault over all of that by producing what you want to produce elsewhere, where you do not have to worry about hiring children, where you do not have to worry about clean air and clean water. You do not have to worry about safe workplaces. You could prohibit all workers from organizing any bargaining unit. We have decided that is OK, let companies do that. They pole-vault to China or Indonesia or Bangladesh, produce there but sell here. The problem is, in the long term, it does not work because the very people who earned the income in the manufacturing plants in this country are the people who were able to purchase the products off the store shelves. Without the incomes from those jobs--and our manufacturing sector is shrinking badly--from that manufacturing sector, who will buy these products? This morning in the Wall Street Journal an article reads, ``U.S.- Chinese Trade Becomes a Delicate Issue of Turf.'' It is talking about the debate within the National Association of Manufacturers between the big manufacturers that are international in scope that want to move their manufacturing to other countries where they can pay pennies on the dollar for labor, and the other businesses, medium and small businesses, that rely on the business from the larger companies to spill over to them. It is a fascinating article. I commend the reading to people who are interested in the subject. Jim Schollaert, a lobbyist with the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, says simply: The big companies are following a new business model--pay Chinese wages but charge U.S. prices. That is the question these days for us. Is there a price of admission to the American marketplace? We understand we have a globalization of the international economy, and it will not stop. But have the rules for this new global economy kept pace with globalization itself? The answer, clearly, is no. If a large international company has a choice to decide where it wants to produce, and it flies its jet around the world and looks down at the landscape and sees different kinds of governance, different philosophies, different local politics, and different labor forces and decides to choose where to produce, does it not all too often these days decide to produce where it can hire a 12- year-old, work them 12 hours a day and pay them 12 cents an hour? You think it does not happen? Of course it does. We can describe it and use names in the Senate, names of workers and names of companies. Not only can they settle on a site in the world where they can put a manufacturing plant, hire kids and adults and pay them pennies on the dollar and pollute the air and water and decide they shall not be allowed to organize as a bargaining unit and they do not have to have safe workplaces in which the workers conduct their daily activities, and then produce there, but they also ship it back to Toledo, Anchorage, Fargo, or Los Angeles and sell it on the store shelves in this country. That is the global marketplace. Let me talk about a series of specific countries. First, I will talk about China. China has the largest trade deficit with us. It is $103 billion a year. They ship us their trinkets, trousers, shirts, shoes. We are a huge sponge for Chinese production. One reason we have a very large trade deficit with China, which hurts us and strengthens them, is because the Chinese do not want certain things from us. They are not buying our grain in any significant way. They do not want our wheat. They do not want to buy airplanes. They need airplanes, but do not want to buy our airplanes off the shelf where we manufacture them and send our airplanes to China. They say they want some of our technology, but they want us to build our airplane plant in China and hire Chinese workers. That is the way they would like to buy American airplanes. The problem is, it does not work that way. That is not what international trade is about. We buy that which we can best use from China, they ought to buy what they can best use from us. That is the doctrine of comparative advantage. It is as old as the study of economics itself. Our negotiators, our U.S. official negotiators negotiate with other countries and typically underserve American interests. About 2\1/2\ years ago we had a bilateral trade agreement done with China. It was a prelude to China joining the WTO. At the end of the agreement, there was once again celebration by negotiators because negotiators judge their success by whether or not they got a negotiated agreement. It is a terrible agreement, I might say. They decided, for example, that if there is automobile trade between the United States and China in the future, after a long phase-in, the following will exist: China will be allowed a 25-percent tariff on United States automobiles sold in China, and we would have a 2.5-percent tariff on any Chinese automobiles sold in the United States. Our negotiators went to China and said: All right, we agree if there is automobile trade, vehicle trade between the United States and China. We will agree that you shall have a tariff that is 10 times higher than what we will impose on your products. Who negotiated this on our behalf? Did they forget who they were working for? Do you know how many movies we get into China? Before the trade agreement, only 10 imported movies could be shipped to China in a year. Just 10. So after the agreement, we get to ship 20 movies. People say, Look at that; what a great thing that is, to double it to 20. Our expectations on fair trade are pathetic. The Chinese, by and large, keep their market reasonably closed to us, prevent us from accessing opportunities in their marketplace but expect our marketplace to be wide open to Chinese goods. We have become a cash cow for the hard currency needs for China, and it is hurting our country. The imbalance in the trade relationship that exists between the United States and China is almost unforgivable. Is anybody doing anything about it? Not a thing. Nothing. Just nothing. All you get, when you talk to the trade ambassador's office, again under Democratic and Republican administrations--all you get from them are a few grunts and groans about we would like to do better and then they rush off and do a new agreement with some other country. This is what we have with Korea. I mentioned the absurd situation with automobile trade with China. Well, in 2001, 618,000 cars were shipped from Korea to the United States. I believe last year it was 680,000 but use this as a working number; 618,000 cars were shipped from Korea to the United States to U.S. consumers--Hyundais, Daewoos. Probably they are wonderful automobiles. I have not driven one but I am sure they are fine automobiles. They sent us 618,000 into our marketplace. Can anyone guess how many U.S. automobiles were sold in Korea? It was 2,800; 618,000 coming into our marketplace; we got 2,800 into the Korean market. Korea ships us as many cars as they can get into our marketplace and the Korean Government will keep out as many U.S. cars as they can. A recent example of that is the Dodge Dakota pickup, which showed great promise in the Korean marketplace. The Dodge Dakota pickup, after 2 months, started penetrating the Korean marketplace. The Korean Government cracked down on it, big headlines in the newspapers, and immediately most of the orders were canceled. My State produces potatoes in the Red River Valley, great potato country. We produce potatoes and we ship potato flakes to Korea for use in confection food--potato flakes. Do you know what the tariff on potato flakes is to Korea? It is 300 percent. Why do we allow that? I don't know. Our country doesn't seem to be interested in standing up for its economic interests. Perhaps we should say to the Koreans, these great cars you are shipping into the marketplace, if you don't allow our cars into your marketplace and fair access to your consumers, then you ought to take your cars and sell them in Zaire. Try to sell them in Zaire. If you don't like it, then open your marketplace. Until your marketplace is open, we are not going to absorb more than a half a million of your vehicles. That is simple enough. But we will not do that because our country is unwilling to stand up for its economic interests. In fact, that which I am presenting today on the floor of the Senate, I can't even present in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. The Washington Post wouldn't run an op-ed piece in a million years talking about this because they are for one thing: free trade, free trade, free trade. It is as if they were wearing a robe, standing on a street corner chanting, and they only want one view expressed in their op-ed pages. Those of us who raise questions about the requirement for fair trade to stand up for the interests of American jobs are called protectionists. My goal is not to put a wall around this country. I want to expand trade. I think expanded trade will be good for everyone, provided the rules are fair. When the rules are not fair, it is time for this country to stand up for itself and stand up for its jobs and stand up for its businesses. I will give some other examples. I have mentioned Korea and I mentioned China. Now let me discuss Europe. I am using some agricultural examples simply because I come from a farm State. There are so many other examples. If you take a look at what is happening in beef with Europe, the Europeans do not want U.S. beef in their marketplace because they say it is produced with growth hormones and is therefore harmful to their health. There is no scientific evidence of that. In fact, all the evidence is on the other side. But Europe says, We are not going to allow American beef into the European marketplace. In fact, they portray our beef as two-headed cows, some sort of obscene animal that would be terribly harmful to the marketplace, so they say, Keep it out. So we go to the World Trade Organization and file a complaint against Europe and we win. It doesn't matter to Europe that we win. They are still not going to allow American beef into Europe. So what do we do? We are going to get tough. This is symbolic of the lack of backbone we have in this country when it comes to trade. How do we get tough? We decide to slap some retaliation on Europe. We hit them with some tariffs on truffles, goose liver, and Roquefort cheese. God bless us, we are really getting tough with Europe. We are going to sock them around with truffles, goose liver, and Roquefort cheese. So what is Europe's idea to retaliate against us? Tariffs on U.S. steel and textiles. Can you just see the difference? We simply do not have the backbone, the nerve, or the will to stand up for this country's economic interests. I am mentioning Europe. There are plenty of problems with Europe in terms of our trade agreements. We continue to see country after country--with respect to Europe, we see the entire continent--with large, abiding, yearly trade deficits that relate to jobs lost in this country. If we were losing those jobs just because we couldn't compete, that is one thing. That is fine. I wouldn't like it but I would understand it and I would say we better figure out how to compete in the international marketplace. But if we are losing those jobs because the basis of competition is fundamentally unfair to America, then I say there is something wrong with the trade agreements. We connect to other countries in a way that says to other countries: All right. We will trade and this is the circumstance. We will just tie one or two hands behind our back and then we will start. You can hire kids, you can put them in plants that are unsafe, dump your chemicals into the streams and the air, and you can prohibit them from organizing by law. You can do all those things and it is fine. Make your product as cheap as you can make it and ship it to the marketplace in Bismarck, ND, or Boise, ID, or Fairbanks, AK, or Los Angeles, and we would love to purchase that. How absurd is that? Is there not any basic standard at all? Are the standards we fought for in this country for so long so old-fashioned? Is it not a timeless truth that workers ought to be able to organize, they ought to be able to expect a fair wage, and that you ought not be able to work 12-year-olds 12 hours a day 7 days a week? If you wonder about that, let me give an example of a story. This story is entitled ``Worked Till They Drop.'' This happens to be about a 19-year-old girl but it is happening way too often in parts of the world where they do not care about the conditions of production that we have cared about for a long while and that we fought over for many decades. This is a story about Li Chunmei, May 13 of last year. She had been on her feet for 16 hours, her coworkers said: . . . running back and forth inside the Bainan Toy Factory, [in China] carrying toy parts from machine to machine. Let me read a bit from the piece. This was the busy season, before Christmas, when orders peaked from Japan and the United States for the factory's stuffed animals. Long hours were mandatory, and at least 2 months had passed since Li and the other workers had enjoyed even a Sunday off. Sixteen hours a day, 7 days a week. Lying on her bed in the night, staring at the bunk above her, the slight 19-year-old complained she felt worn out. She was massaging her aching legs, coughing, and she told them she was hungry. The factory food was so bad, she said, she felt as if she had not eaten at all. . . . ``I want to quit,'' one of her roommates . . . remembered her saying. ``I want to go home.'' Her roommates had already fallen asleep when Li started coughing up blood. They found her in the bathroom a few hours later, curled up on the floor. . . . She was dead. The exact cause of Li's death remains unknown. But what happened to her last November in this industrial town in southeastern Guangdong province is described by family friends and coworkers as an example of what China's more daring newspapers call guolaosi. The phrase means ``over-work death,'' and usually applies to young workers who suddenly collapse and die after working exceedingly long hours, day after day. This is the sort of thing that is happening in some factories around the world, producing, in this case, stuffed toys. They could have been producing baseball caps. A prominent Ivy League college buys baseball caps from similar factories. They pay \1/5\ cent labor for each cap produced and each cap is sold at $17 on the campus of the Ivy League university. Fair trade? The question is, What did we fight about all these years? It seems to me we fought about having an economy that gave American businesses a chance to compete fairly and provide good-paying jobs to American workers. On issue after issue in international trade, we have trade agreements being brought to the floor of the Senate that have been negotiated with other countries in a way that is fundamentally incompetent. One other example I have spent 10 years working on is the aftermatch of a free-trade agreement with Canada. The free-trade agreement with Canada is one I voted against. Incidentally, it was a vote when I was serving in the United States House Ways and Means Committee. It was 34- 1. I was the one who voted against it. I was told by my colleagues we really need to make this a unanimous consent vote, that Canada was our good neighbor to the north and we share a common border. I said no. What you are proposing here is wrong. It is going to dramatically injure family farmers in this country. But the deal was passed under fast track and no one could offer amendments. Oh, we had an assurance in writing from Trade Ambassador Yeutter that it would not represent a change or a significant change in the quantity of grain going back and forth across the border. The minute it was passed, we began to see a flood--a virtual avalanche--of Canadian wheat coming into this country sold by the Canadian Wheat Board, a state-sanctioned monopoly that would be illegal in this country. Our farmers were badly undercut by this unfair competition. We haven't been able to do a thing about it--nothing. I had the GAO go to the Canadian Wheat Board because we think they are dumping in our marketplace. The Canadian Wheat Board simply thumbed its nose at the General Accounting Office, saying we don't intend to open our records to you at all. We intend to show you no information. Year after year, we face this unfair grain trade from Canada. In fact, one day I went to the Canadian border--I have mentioned this many times--with a man named Earl Jensen in a 12-year-old orange truck with a couple hundred bushels of durum wheat. We drove to the Canadian border. All the way to the Canadian border we saw 18-wheelers coming south full of Canadian grain being dumped on our marketplace injuring our farmers. We saw semi load after semi load. I bet we met 20 semi loads of Canadian grain. When we got to the border in the 12-year-old little orange truck, guess what. We were stopped dead in place and we could not get that truck across the border because you couldn't take 200 bushels of durum wheat into Canada. The Canadian market was closed to us, but our market was wide open to unfair Canadian trade in this country. This has gone on for 10 years and we have not been able to do a thing about it. Today we have a trade ambassador who has been scurrying around the world doing new trade agreements. So we have two new agreements to vote on, one of which has a 5,400 immigrant quota of people coming into our country from Singapore to take American jobs. Everyone knows that is wrong. Everybody in this Chamber knows that is foolish. That is not the way you do immigration policy--behind closed doors in secret on a trade bill. And yet no one in this Chamber will be able to get rid of that provision. That provision will be ratified by this Congress either this afternoon or tomorrow. Not with my vote. At some point, somehow, somebody will have to wake up on trade. It is not the case that I believe we ought to shut down trade or that we ought to build walls and prevent trade. It is the case that this country needs to have a backbone and some nerve and some will--yes, dealing with China, Japan, Europe, Korea, Canada, and Mexico. And until we get that will and are willing to protect American jobs with the requirement for fair trade, this country is going to continue to lose economic strength. After the Second World War, for a quarter of a century our trade policy was almost exclusively foreign policy. It wasn't trade. It wasn't economics. It was all foreign policy coming out of the State Department. It didn't matter because we were the biggest, the best, and the strongest country in the world by far and we could tie one hand behind our backs and out-compete anybody under any circumstance. So it was just fine. We could have mushy-headed foreign policy masquerading as trade policy. It didn't matter. We just would win. But in the second 25 years after the Second World War, we saw the development of some pretty tough and canny competitors--Japan, Europe, now China, and others. Still much of our trade policy is fuzzy-headed foreign policy. Now you tie one hand behind your back with moves that are fairer and this country loses. Again, what do we lose? We lose jobs, economic expansion, opportunity for businesses, opportunity for workers, and some say it doesn't matter; it is just irrelevant. I do not for the life of me understand that. It makes no sense that this country does not any longer understand that international trade is a significant foundation for this country's economic future. That foundation is either a foundation of cement with strength or quicksand that washes away quickly. I have a chart which I believe shows a graph of where we have been with all these trade agreements. One after another of these trade agreements has traded away this country's economic interests. You can see the line. It describes when the Tokyo round of GATT was approved. It describes the Uruguay round of GATT. It describes where we are with WTO, and with NAFTA. It seems to me when something isn't working, you ought to change it. Yet we see no proposal here for change at all. It is just let's have a couple more helpings from the same menu, and the menu isn't working for our country. There are so many issues related to this. I talked about jobs because, in my judgment, that is central to this. First, you have currency issues and the fact that China, for example, dramatically undervalues its currency against the U.S. dollar. They have a terrific advantage in our marketplace in trade. There are so many different facets of trade that it is almost hard to describe. You have the political issues. Some countries as a matter of governance decide here is the way we will compete. For example, I have mentioned on a couple of occasions today that some countries will prohibit workers from organizing. We are proud that our country protects those rights. We understand it has strengthened this country and it is good for our country. In fact, the way we have developed a strong middle class in our country is with the development of a manufacturing sector in which workers are organized and have been able through their strength to collect a reasonable share of the national income from manufacturing. But some countries say we will prohibit as a matter of political choice workers from organizing. Then there are some others who say it doesn't matter that our manufacturing base is eroding; if that is what happens as a result of some natural function of trade, that is all right for our country. Well, it is not all right. There is no country that will long remain a world power--none--without a strong manufacturing base. You cannot be a world economic power without a strong manufacturing base. Those who think this country will remain a strong, vibrant, growing, economic superpower are dead wrong if they allow this manufacturing base to be dissipated. Too many of my colleagues seem to think it is just fine; whatever happens, happens. It is not fine with me. All you have to do is look at where this country is headed in international trade. Look at what has happened to our manufacturing base. Look at how good jobs have shrunk in this country. I am talking about those people who worked in the coal mines, those who worked in the steel mills, those who worked in our manufacturing plants who used to earn a good wage with good benefits and good job security, and who now discover we are racing toward the bottom to figure out how we can compete with other countries that pay a dime an hour or 20 cents an hour. How can we compete with other countries that have no laws that prevent them from abusing the environment with chemicals going into the airshed and into the water? If you wonder about that, just travel a bit. Go to those countries--I have--and take a look at what happens. Then ask yourself, Is that the level of competition? Is there an admission price to the American marketplace that says it is almost free? That you don't have to reach any threshold? And any trade--using circumstances I have previously described--is fair trade to which we ought to subject our workers and our employers? I have explained at great length why I intend to vote no on these two trades agreements. It is not about Chile. It is not about Singapore. It is about a process that is fundamentally bankrupt. It is about trade negotiators who ought to be ashamed of themselves. It is about past trade agreements that are incompetent, whose repercussions we are dealing with today. I have, from time to time, threatened to offer legislation that would require all U.S. trade negotiators to wear a jersey. When you are representing the United States of America in the Olympics, you wear a jersey that says ``USA.'' It seems to me that perhaps our trade negotiators--more than almost anyone--need to have a jersey to be able to look down at and understand who they represent. Will Rogers used to say: The United States of America has never lost a war and never won a conference. He surely must have been thinking about trade negotiators. This country had better develop a backbone and some will and some nerve to stand up for its economy and stand up for its workers and stand up for its employers--no, not in a way that is unfair to any other country but in a way that says to any other country: We are open for business, we are ready for competition, and we will compete anywhere and with anyone in the world, but we, by God, demand that the rules be fair. And if the rules are not fair, then we intend to change them to create rules that are fair to our country. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I recently joined Senator Hagel of Nebraska in introducing legislation that is important to the survival of farm families and rural America. Our bipartisan legislation, called the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Tax Incentive Act, provides significant capital gains tax breaks to encourage retiring farmers and ranchers to sell their farm property to others who will continue to use the property in the farming business. Identical legislation has been introduced in the House of Representatives. As many of our colleagues know, the economic well-being of many rural communities across the country is at a crossroad. Over the past several decades, jobs on family farms and in Main Street businesses in small towns have been disappearing from the Nation's Heartland. Rural communities are facing an out-migration crisis of epic proportions. Senator Hagel and I have been working at the Federal level to adopt fiscal policies that will give rural America the tools and funding it needs to reverse the out-migration problem. One of the challenges for stabilizing and revitalizing our rural communities is to ensure that the Federal Government backs strong farm policies that support this generation and the next generation of family farmers. A strong farm economy is critical to the survival of many rural communities over the long term. But the number of family farmers, who are the backbone of the agricultural sector, has been steadily declining over the course of the past century. In the 1930s, North Dakota had over 85,000 farms. That number has dwindled to just 30,000 in 2002, the lowest number of farms in North Dakota's history. More and more of our young people are leaving rural communities in pursuit of jobs elsewhere and the remaining farmers are growing older. A recent report prepared by the Center for Rural Affairs found that almost half of the Nation's farmers are age 55 or older. The already small number of farmers and ranchers under age 25 (about 1 percent of farmers and ranchers) has dropped significantly in recent years. If we don't act quickly to address the aging of the farm sector, the prospects for many farm communities appear bleak. The Center's report found that one of the major impediments to individuals who want to start a farm or ranch is the cost of land and other farm property. The legislation that Senator Hagel and I have introduced speaks to this issue by providing substantial capital gains tax incentives for farmers and ranchers who are retiring or forced to get out of farming to sell their farm operations to beginning farmers and ranchers or others who will continue to use the property in farming. Because of the extra benefit the retiring farmer would receive for selling to a first-time farmer, for example, he or she could accept a lower price from such a buyer and still come out ahead economically as compared to a sale that would otherwise take the land out of agricultural use. Specifically, our legislation allows farmers and ranchers to exclude up to $500,000 in capital gains that are derived from the sale of qualifying farm or ranch property over their lifetime. The benefit of the capital gains tax exclusion provided by this legislation is greater for the sale of such property to first-time farmers and ranchers or to others who continue to use such property for farming purposes. To encourage farm sales to beginning farmers, this legislation provides a 100-percent exclusion from gross income of the long-term capital gain from the sale of qualifying farm property to a first-time farmer who certifies that he or she will use the property for farm purposes for at least 10 years. Our bill also provides a 50-percent exclusion from gross income of the long-term capital gain from the sale of farm property to any other person who certifies that the property will be used for farm purposes for at least 10 years. Finally, this legislation provides a 25-percent exclusion from gross income of long-term capital gain from the sale of such property to any other person for any other use. If anytime within 10 years after the sale, the property benefiting from the 100-percent or 50-percent capital gains exclusion is disposed of or ceases to be used as a farm for farming purposes, then a penalty shall be imposed as a proxy for recapturing the capital gains tax benefit. However, the penalty for disposition or cessation of the use of qualifying property as a farm for farming purposes may be waived by the Secretary of the Treasury in the case of hardship. Senator Hagel and I believe that if we are going to deal with the economic problems facing much of rural America that we must ensure that tax and other Federal policies are in place to encourage a new generation of young people to enter into farming and ranching. This legislation should help in this endeavor and we urge our colleagues to support our effort.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my understanding is that we are on the Energy bill. My colleagues are speaking of forests. I come from a State ranked 50th among the 50 States in native forest land. So I am much less acquainted with the challenges of America's forests, forest fires, and other issues than are my two colleagues. I wanted to make a comment about the Energy bill. I had come to the floor to speak about trade. My understanding from last evening is that we were going to be on the free trade agreement. My understanding is that perhaps we may still be on that later in the day, after the Energy bill is off the floor. Maybe that is not the case. Let me just say, as a member of the Energy Committee, I feel very strongly that this country needs a new energy policy, an Energy bill. I think it is unlikely that we will be able to finish an Energy bill by the end of next week. There are very significant issues that remain. Speaking for myself, I want this Senate to pass an Energy bill. I want it to be a good one, one that does all four things that are necessary in a good bill: One that promotes additional production of the sources of energy that we need; one that promotes increased conservation, which is a significant part of our energy needs; for a barrel of oil conserved is about the same as a barrel of oil produced. So we need production and conservation. We also need strong provisions dealing with efficiencies of all of the things we use day to day that use energy. Fourth, we need an opportunity in this legislation to aggressively pursue both renewable and limitless sources of energy. So production, conservation, efficiency, and renewable and limitless sources of energy are very important provisions. I want to mention one point with respect to an Energy bill that would be a balanced bill, including those four pieces. In addition to that, we must deal with this question of consumer protection. The reason I say that is, having chaired hearings in the Commerce Committee on what happened in the State of California and in the entire set of Western States some while ago--a year and a half or so ago--it is quite clear to me that having chaired those hearings, we had wholesale cheating going on, and ratepayers from the Western United States were bilked of billions of dollars. I am saying this money was stolen and bilked from consumers. It happened because some companies decided to collude in ways that they were able to cheat the consumers. Regarding Enron Corporation, for example, we unearthed memoranda that described strategies by which they were going to bilk consumers--Get Shorty, Fat Boy, Death Star. They sound like movies, but they are not; they are strategies by which one company decided to cheat west coast consumers. There are many other companies also. The FERC, a regulatory agency, has been investigating this. They have come up with some hard words, tough words, but not quite as tough a set of actions as I would have liked. My point is, having learned what we did about what happened in the energy markets on the west coast, we need strong consumer protection provisions in the bill that is voted out of the full Senate to go to conference with the House. I feel strongly that we need to pass a bill. We will head into the winter with severe dislocations between supply and demand of natural gas. Natural gas prices will increase dramatically. They are already on the rise. That is going to be exacerbated in the coming months. Coming from a northern State where natural gas is a pretty important commodity to us in the cold, with our hard winter climates, this will be a very important issue. We are not going to be able to fix that in the Energy bill in the short run. But we need to tell the American people we have set in place policies that help resolve these issues for the long term and intermediate term. I hope we are able to do that. I ask the chairman, if I may, I had hoped to be able to make a presentation on the issue of trade. If there are others wishing to speak on energy, I will defer. If not, I would like to proceed perhaps to make the statement on trade, understanding that if Members with amendments are coming back to the floor, they could interrupt me, and I will relinquish the floor so they can clear the amendments. If that is satisfactory to the chairman, I will proceed in that manner.

Mr. DORGAN. About 20 minutes, I would guess.

Mr. DORGAN. That will be fine. I will relinquish the floor to my colleague from Idaho.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my colleague from Idaho has described accurately the provision in the free-trade agreement dealing with immigration. But I must say, and he will agree with me, I am sure, that a sense- of-the-Senate resolution that says, in effect, you better watch it, is the equivalent of hitting someone on the forehead with a feather. The reason there has to be a sense-of-the-Senate resolution at the moment, if we are to express displeasure, is because we cannot offer any amendments to a free-trade agreement. It is brought to the floor under fast track. This Senate, in its wisdom--or in its lack of wisdom--said we agree to put our arms in a straitjacket so whatever the trade ambassador negotiates anywhere in the world, he can bring it back here and we agree to prevent ourselves from offering amendments. That is fast track. I do not have any big issues with Chile or Singapore. The free-trade agreement coming to the Senate floor is not even a very big deal with respect to Chile and Singapore, the two countries with whom the agreements are made. The big deal to me is that we have made agreement after agreement in international trade. In each case, this country has lost, and lost big time. We have lost jobs. We have lost economic strength. We have massive problems in previous trade agreements. None of them are being fixed. None of them get solved. What gets done? Well, new trade agreements seem to emerge on the Senate floor. Rather than fixing old trade agreements and beginning to support this country's interests, what we want to do, according to the trade ambassador, is bring new trade agreements so we can debate and vote on those. What I want to do this morning is talk a little bit about some of those old trade agreements and talk about what ought to be done rather than debating new trade agreements at this point. First, it is worth noting what our trade deficit is at this point. This is an article from the Washington Post. It shows the trade deficit the end of last year. It is the highest trade deficit in history. The trade deficit soared to $435 billion on an annual basis in 2002, and it is worse now, of course. Nearly one-fourth of the year's deficit in goods trade was with China, which sold $103 billion more goods to the United States than it bought here. I will talk about China. It is a story in itself. They ship us all their trinkets, trousers, shirts, and shoes, and they come into our K- Marts and our WalMarts and our grocery stores and we buy all of these things from China. Guess what. China's market is not very open to the products our employees and our businesses produce. They are not buying very much from us. What does it mean to us? It means we do not have jobs. It means we have people today looking for work who cannot find a job in this country. Now, it is interesting, there was a story recently about this being a jobless recovery. Of course, we do not have much of a recovery. It is pretty anemic at this point. We have very slow economic growth. So this economy is just sort of bumping along, just hiccuping from day to day, week to week, and month to month without much strength at all. So they say, this is a recovery that is jobless. Well, they miss the point on that. Oh, there are jobs created by American enterprise. There are jobs created by ingenuity that comes from U.S. firms. It is just that the jobs that are being created are not being created in this country. This is a recovery, all right, an anemic recovery with jobs, but the jobs are not here. The jobs are overseas. More and more, we see jobs in factories that are moved overseas that used to be good American jobs. So if in fact this is a jobless recovery, it is jobless only to the extent that it is jobless in the United States. We have millions of Americans who desperately want a job, they want to go to work, but there are not enough jobs available. Two-and-a-half million people who were working a couple of years ago now are not working because this economy is not producing the jobs here. Too many American corporations are producing the jobs in Asia and elsewhere. I want to talk a little about that. Ambassador Zoellick is a perfectly nice person. He is our U.S. trade ambassador. Most people would not recognize his name from a cord of wood, but he serves in a pretty important role. He is the trade ambassador. He goes overseas with his staff and they negotiate trade agreements. These are the agreements by which we trade with other countries. They negotiate behind closed doors. We are not there. Our constituents are not there. These are trade negotiations behind closed doors in which they decide what kind of trade relationship we will have in the future. Then they come back to us with a trade agreement and they say, here is our agreement between our country and China, our country and Japan, our country and European countries. Then they say to the Congress, because the Congress previously agreed: you cannot change the agreement. We negotiated it in secret, but you have a responsibility to vote on it, up or down, yes or no, with no changes, no amendments. And the Congress was foolish enough to agree. Here we are. This morning we are talking about a sense-of-the-Senate resolution to say to the trade ambassador: Better watch it. Why? Because he went off to Singapore and negotiated a free-trade agreement with Singapore that said: By the way, in this free-trade agreement having nothing to do with trade, we will insist that a provision will allow 5,400 immigrants from Singapore into the United States under 1- year visas that will be renewed indefinitely. What are they going to come here for? To work. Will they come to see movies, drive around on Sundays? No, they are coming here for a job, to work. We have millions and millions of Americans who need a job, who are out of work, who are struggling every single day. And this trade agreement says: What we would like to do, in addition to creating the trade circumstances that exist by this agreement with us and with Singapore, we agree 5,400 people from Singapore will come here to work. Usually, if one disagrees with that--and I certainly do--we would offer an amendment to strip this from the trade agreement. But we cannot in this instance, because of the fast track authority we handed to the executive branch. If ever you want a description of why it is ``dumb'' for the Congress to decide to put itself in a straitjacket, this is it. We are going to vote, probably Monday or Tuesday, on a free-trade agreement with Singapore. That free-trade agreement has a provision in it that will have 5,400 people from Singapore coming to this country to take jobs in this country, when we have 8 to 10 million Americans out of work; and we cannot do a thing about it--not a thing. Frustrated? Sure, as I am sure are many others. Can you do anything? No, what we can do is say to Mr. Zoellick, the ambassador, with the sense-of-a-senate resolution: You better watch it. I will vote for it, but it is like beating someone over the head with a feather. It does not mean anything. Let me talk about what they should be doing instead of creating new fast-track agreements. Instead of rushing off to create new trade agreements, let me make a couple of suggestions. I will vote against these trade agreements because we ought to be fixing old problems before we create new ones. That is not a judgment about Singapore or Chile. It is a judgment about what I think the obligation of our trade ambassador is. Under Republican and Democrat administrations, they have systematically failed in the obligation to correct trade problems. Let me mention a couple. Japan has a very large trade surplus with us. We have a very large trade deficit with Japan. Each year, we have a $50, $60, $70 billion trade deficit. One of the products that we would like to export more of to Japan is beef. Fifteen years ago we reached a new beef agreement with Japan. We had negotiators over there negotiating, and they finally reached an agreement. It was front-page headlines in the American newspapers. You would have thought they won the Olympics. They were celebrating and rejoicing and feasting. Big beef agreement with Japan. It is 15 years later. Where are we 15 years after a beef agreement with Japan, a country with whom we have a very large deficit? Every single pound of American beef going to Japan has a 38.5 percent tariff on it 15 years after the agreement. And that is set to snap back to a 50-percent tariff on every single pound of beef we send to Japan. Does Japan need more T-bones? Of course. More hamburger? Of course. But every single pound has this extraordinary tariff on it. Why? Because the Japanese are trying to keep it out. They do not want as much as we should be sending at a time when we have a huge trade deficit with Japan. It is unforgivable. Do you hear complaints from our country about it? No, no one is talking much about it. It is fine with most people around here to run a huge yearly trade deficit with Japan. It is not fine with me. The trade ambassador, it is fine with him. They are so busy negotiating new agreements with new countries that they cannot seem to resolve these issues. A country with whom we have a $60 to $70 billion trade deficit ought not apply 38.5 percent tariffs on the products our ranchers want to send to the dinner table in Tokyo. What about wheat with China? We just did a trade agreement with the country of China, in order for China to join the WTO. China has a $103 billion trade deficit with us. They send us everything. They send us their trousers, trinkets, shirts, and shoes. They send us everything. Our marketplace absorbs it all. But the fact is, their marketplace is not open to us. What does that mean? It means jobs move from this country to China. People here are unemployed, out of work, and we are running up this huge trade deficit with China. Let me mention the agricultural side of trade with China because I care a lot about that. I come from a wheat-producing State. And our trade officials dealing in agriculture on our side recently stated that China has failed miserably to live up to the promises it made when it joined the WTO in 2001. In fact, before he resigned, the top U.S. trade official dealing with agriculture in China said we should file a trade complaint against China, but we are not doing so. Despite a recommendation that we should, we are not doing so for foreign policy reasons. We do not want to upset the Chinese. God forbid we should upset the Chinese. So we have a $103 billion trade deficit with China and our jobs are evaporating in this country, moving to China for lower wages. And we do not want to upset them. We do not want to demand their market be open to our products. Instead of having a trade ambassador working on that problem, we have new trade agreements. I do not understand that at all. Automobiles and China has always been interesting. Our trade negotiators, a couple years ago, went to China regarding the bilateral trade agreement under a Democratic administration--all the Democrats and Republicans in the White House have the same trade view. But let me give you a description of the bilateral trade agreement on automobiles. China is a country of 1.3 billion people who want substantial additional growth. Our trade negotiators said we agree, after a phase- in, China can have a 25-percent tariff on any automobiles we send into China, and we will have a 2.5 percent tariff on any Chinese automobiles sent to our marketplace. Our negotiators said they agree to a tariff that is 10 times higher on U.S. cars being shipped to China than we would impose on a Chinese car coming to the United States. Why on Earth, on a bilateral agreement in this sector, would our negotiators ever agree to something like that with a country with which we have a $100 billion trade deficit? I don't have the foggiest idea. This is a 1.3 billion person country that will need automobiles at some point in the future, and we say: We will give you a deal. You have a huge surplus with us, or we have a big deficit with you. We will give you a deal. On automobile trade, we will agree you can have a tariff 10 times higher than ours to keep our cars out. Unforgivably incompetent, I must say. I am not talking about people, I am talking about the policy. Something also of interest to me--again, I mention China, but I will get to a couple of other countries--is movies. Our country is pretty good at making movies, the best in the world. Do you know that before China entered the WTO, China allowed 10 movies into the Chinese marketplace a year--just 10? Not 11, not 12--but 10. That was the limit. But when they joined the WTO in 2001 there was this giant liberalization of trade by China. Do you know what they do now? They allow 20 movies into the Chinese marketplace. I guess that is all right with us. In fact, I had people in that industry say we have really made progress here, big advantages, double the movies into China--10 to 20. We have such low expectations of our trading partners it is incomprehensible to me. Let me talk about beef with Europe, turning to Europe for just a moment. The occasions in which I have traveled to Europe and opened the pages of the European newspapers, I hear the concerns of the Europeans about growth hormones in American beef. Here is the way they picture American beef: Two-headed cow. Right? Growth hormones, God forbid you raise two-headed cows and you can't eat them because it will ruin your health. Of course, none of that is true. But nonetheless they have effectively kept U.S. beef out of Europe. So we filed a trade complaint and our trade complaint on European beef was upheld. And Europe is supposed to let our beef in. But they have not. So we said: All right, Europe, you are not letting our beef into your marketplace and you should, the WTO says you must, we won the case, and since you are not going to abide by the decision, we will play hardball. Do you know what we did? We said: All right, we are really going to whip you into shape, we are going to take tough, no-nonsense enforcement against you. We said: We are going to impose tariffs on your truffles, goose liver, and Roquefort cheese. That will scare the devil out of a country, won't it? Take action against truffles, goose liver, and Roquefort cheese. Is there a reason people think we are wimps in international trade? I think so. It is bizarre. When the Europeans want to get tough with us, they pick sectors like steel and textiles. That sounds robust, doesn't it? But we are going to go at them on goose liver. Shame on us. We ought as a country to decide we are going to protect our marketplace, not against competition, but against unfair competition, that we are going to demand of other countries, if our marketplace is open to them, their marketplace be open to us. I am not a protectionist. I don't believe we ought to put walls around our country. I believe our consumers are advantaged by expanded trade. But by the same token I believe very strongly that trade ought to be fair. It is not fair trade with respect to the Chinese and the circumstances I mentioned. Let me mention Korea, just for a moment. I talked about China and Europe. Let me talk about automobiles in Korea. Do you know in the last year we sent automobiles to Korea, about 680,000 Korean automobiles came into this country--Daiwoos, Hyundais-- Korean automobiles. They are probably wonderful cars. I don't know, I have not driven them. But 680,000 Korean cars came into the United States. Do you know how many U.S. cars we got to Korea? We sold 2,800 cars to Korea. They shipped us 680,000; we sent them 2,800. Do you know why? Because Korea doesn't want American cars in its marketplace and they put up barriers and impediments to keep them out. What are we doing about that? Nothing. We don't do anything about anything. All we do is go negotiate a new agreement and bring it to the Senate and say, Oh, by the way, we have stuck some extraneous things in and if you don't like it, tough luck, because you can't offer amendments. Does anyone care about the imbalance in Korean automobile trade? They sent us 680,000 cars and we only get 2,800 to Korea. Does anybody care about that? There is an interesting example about the Dodge Dakota pickup, just recently. In February of this year, DaimlerChrysler started to sell the Dodge Dakota pickup in Korea. The pickup is made in Detroit, by the way. Korea doesn't manufacture pickups like the Dakota, so DaimlerChrysler thought it had pretty good potential in Korea and the company started marketing to small business owners. It was initially quite successful. It got orders for 60 pickup trucks in February and another 60 in March. Guess what happened? In March an official with the Korean Ministry of Construction and Transportation decided Dodge Dakota pickup trucks represented a hazard. He said some people were even putting optional cargo covers on the vehicle and that might be dangerous if passengers rode in the back, so he announced that cargo covers on pickups on Dodge Dakotas were illegal, and drivers of the pickups would be fined if they put on a cargo cover. And the Korean newspapers had huge headlines: ``Government Ministry Finds Dodge Dakota Covers Illegal.'' Guess what happened. Korean consumers got the message. They canceled 55 out of the 60 orders they had placed for March. The Korean Government has done this time and time and time again, to shut down our exports of automobiles to Korea. On the subject of trade with Korea, I could tell you if you try to send potato flakes to Korea from this country you will find there is a 300 percent tariff on potato flakes used to make confection food. I could go on for some length at the barriers we face sending America's products overseas into markets that ought to be open to us because our markets are open to them. But we as a country don't seem to think too much about that, we are so busy doing new agreements. I have a chart here that shows where we are with trade deficits. With almost every country in the world, we have very significant trade deficits. And ironically, the U.S. trade ambassador has been negotiating with the very few countries with which we have surpluses, like Singapore and Australia. I expect those will soon turn to deficits, given our proclivity to negotiate trade agreements that don't work for our country. Let me talk just for a moment about Canada. We face wheat coming into this country from Canada, sold by an entity that would be illegal in this country, called the Canadian Wheat Board. It is a state-controlled monopoly that would be illegal in the United States. Yet every day we have Canadian wheat shipped into our country at what we allege are prices below the cost of acquisition, dumping in our country. It is unfair trade. It has been going on for a decade and you can't stop it. You just can't stop it. It is enormously frustrating for our farmers because it takes money right out of their pockets. One day some while ago I went to the Canadian border with a man named Earl in a 12-year-old orange truck. He and I went to the Canadian border with about 200 bushels of durum wheat. All the way to the Canadian border we met 18-wheel semi-trucks loaded with Canadian wheat being shipped into this country. When we got to the Canadian border, we couldn't take a small amount of durum wheat in a 12-year-old orange truck into Canada. They stopped us cold. We couldn't move. At the same time, we had all of these semi-trucks coming into this country loaded with wheat. Unfair? You are darned right it is. In fact, Canadian wheat is dumped into our country below the cost of production. Yet we are not able to get satisfaction. Regrettably, the same is true in almost every circumstance. Instead of trying to resolve these issues for our producers, for our employers, and for our employees in this country, we have this free trade fever to negotiate all of these new agreements, and we are correcting none of the problems in previous agreements. Those who speak as I do, we are often referred to as ``protectionists.'' The papers will not print op-ed pieces by someone like me on this subject. They will print reams extolling the virtues of this trade policy that comes from Republican and Democratic administrations, but they will never print an op-ed piece by someone who speaks as I do about the need to enforce trade laws. The view of most around here is that there is a globalization going on and that there are some of us don't get it; we are the xenophobic, isolationist stooges who simply can't see over the horizon; that they know better; and, if we understood all of this, we wouldn't be critical of it. But the question that is fundamental to me is this, Should we not require that trade be fair? Let me give an example of what I mean by ``fair.'' Our trade relations are unfair in so many different ways. Is it fair, for example, for a worker in a manufacturing plant in the State of Georgia to compete against a 14-year-old young man or a 14-year-old young woman working 14 hours a day, being paid 14 cents an hour in a manufacturing plant in Bangladesh or Indonesia to produce a product that is then sent to our marketplace to sit on a store shelf in a small town in Georgia? Is that fair competition for the company in Georgia that makes the same product, that pays the minimum wage, that prevents the dumping of chemicals and sewage into the water and air, that makes sure they have a safe workplace because they understand those are requirements in this country, because there are prohibitions against child labor and prohibitions against working people 100 hours a week? Is it fair competition to allow into that store and onto that store shelf for the consumer a product made by somebody who works 14 hours a day and is being paid 14 cents an hour? This is a true story. A worker in Bangladesh is paid 1.6 cents for every baseball cap she sews, which is then sent to a store in this country to sit on the shelf and is sold for $17. Is there a company in this country that can compete with that? I don't think so. Is it fair trade? Let me give you an example, if I might. The story is entitled ``Worked Till They Drop.'' It tells of a woman named Li Chunmei. Unfortunately, it is not a very unusual story. Li Chunmei was 19 years old. She worked in a toy factory in China. They made stuffed animals for the U.S. marketplace. Let me read from the article. On the night she died, Li Chunmei must have been exhausted. Co-workers said she had been on her feet for nearly 16 hours, running back and forth inside the Bainan Toy Factory, carrying toy parts from machine to machine. Long hours were mandatory, and at least two months had passed since Li and the other workers had enjoyed even a Sunday off. It had been two months since she and other workers had a Sunday off. The factory food was so bad, she said, she felt as if she had not eaten at all. ``I want to quit,'' one of her roommates, Huang Jiaqun, remembered her saying. ``I want to go home.'' Her roommates had already fallen asleep when Li started coughing up blood. They found her in the bathroom a few hours later, curled up on the floor, moaning softly in the dark, bleeding from her nose and mouth. Someone called an ambulance, but she died before it arrived. The exact cause of Li's death remains unknown. But what happened to her last November in this industrial town in southeastern Guangdong province is described by family, friends and co-workers as an example of what China's more daring newspapers call guolaosi. The phrase means ``over-work death,'' and usually applies to young workers who saddenly collapse and die after working exceedingly long hours, day after day. Li worked for 16 hours, running back and forth on the factory floor, and had not had a Sunday off for 2 months--not even a Sunday off. I don't know the wages Li made, but I can tell you that I have gone to some of those places in the world. There are circumstances in which 12- year-old kids are working 16 hours a day and are being paid 14 cents an hour. It is not, in my judgment, fair trade. If they take the product of their work, send it to our store shelves, and tell American workers and businesses, Compete with this, it is not a standard with which we ought to aspire to compete. We ought not be racing to the bottom on the question of workers' standards, on the question of child labor, and on the question of basic fairness and wages. We ought not be racing to the bottom. Yet that is what we are being set up to do with some of these trade agreements. Let me say again that this trade ambassador and others have a responsibility to be solving trade problems created by past trade agreements and not presenting us with new trade problems in new agreements. My main interest today is not Chile or Singapore. My interest is that this country has the largest trade deficit in human history, and this country is suffering a mass exodus of jobs that used to be held by Americans, which are now moved to plants and factories where they can pay pennies on the dollar for an hour's wages. My concern is that the rules of trade have not kept up with the galloping globalization of trade. The winners are not, as some would have us believe, poor people in other countries who now have jobs. There are plenty of studies and evidence showing that in the last 20 years of globalization, the poor have not improved their lot in life. These trade agreements are about raw profits. These profits have increased because those who produce those toys--in this case, from a toy factory in China--don't have to pay a decent wage. But it has not improved the lot and life of those who work 16 hours a day--teenage kids--and don't have a Sunday off for 2 months. My question is very simple to this trade ambassador and others: Why will you not begin to solve some problems, demanding on behalf of the workers of this country and demanding on behalf of the businesses of this country--yes, from Japan, from China, from Korea, from Europe, and others--demanding fair trade rules and understanding there is an admission price to the American marketplace? This marketplace of ours we fought for, for 100 years. When I say ``fought for,'' there were men and women who died in the streets of this country fighting for the right to organize as workers. We have had major battles in this Chamber on the issue of child labor, on the issue of minimum wage, and on the issue of safe workplaces and polluting streams and the air shed. We fought those battles, and this country has come to grips with the understanding that you shouldn't put 12-year-old kids in factories and work them 16 hours a day and pay them 12 cents an hour. We don't do that because it is not right. It is not right either to ask American workers to compete with unfair trade practices. Unless this country starts to stand up for its interests, we will not soon have a manufacturing base left and we will not have family farmers available in the future. I know when I speak this way, there are those who take a look at it and say: Oh, again, another protectionist. Again, I believe expanding trade is beneficial to this country, but only if it is done under circumstances in which the rules are fair to those of us in this country. We ought never, ever be concerned about standing up for our interests. If we have trade agreements, trade ought to be mutually beneficial. Too often in the past our trade agreements, with country after country after country, have not been mutually beneficial. We had a trade surplus with Mexico; did an agreement with Mexico, and turned it into a big deficit. We had a modest deficit with Canada; did an agreement with Canada, and turned it into a huge deficit. It has been the same with Europe, the same with the GATT legislation. All of it has been a colossal failure, in my judgment. The biggest trade deficit in human history: $1.5 billion every single day, 7 days a week. That is what we purchase from abroad more than we ship abroad. And it means we are moving America's jobs overseas at an accelerated rate. The question is, who will be the consumers in the future? If Americans do not have access to good jobs, who will be the consumers in the future for these cheap imports into this country? We better come to grips with these trade issues, and soon. I am going to come to the Chamber on Monday and speak more about trade when we have the vote on the Free Trade Agreement. But let me again say, as I conclude, the reason we are having this vote this way is because this Congress, imprudently, in my judgment, decided to tie its hands with something called fast track. It says: Oh, yes, let's offer up our hands, put handcuffs on them so we cannot offer any amendments. So now Ambassador Zoellick brings us the Singapore Free Trade Agreement, which says we will allow 5,400 citizens from Singapore to come to this country to take jobs. We have some folks who don't like that, so they are going to do a sense of the Senate resolution. Oh, my God, that is going to make Ambassador Zoellick shake in his boots. It is like hitting him in the forehead with a feather. Sense of Senate: You better not do that again. The fact is, nobody in this Chamber can do a thing about it because this Chamber decided long ago it would not allow itself to offer an amendment. It is fundamentally at odds with our constitutional responsibilities, in my judgment. But enough Members of this Senate decided to embrace that foolishness and we are now stuck with a circumstance where this agreement will say 5,400 folks from Singapore can come here and take 5,400 American jobs, at a time when we have 8 to 10 million people who are looking for work. Boy, that doesn't add up, where I come from. I intend to speak at greater length on Monday and try to get some of this trade frustration off of my chest, at least, and see if we can't try to push people--if not pull them--into beginning to stand up for this country's economic interests. No, we don't want an advantage, we just want to stand up for our economic interests and demand fair trade on behalf of American workers and American businesses. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I wanted to speak about an amendment I wish to offer that I have reason to believe may or may not be accepted. It may be accepted, I am told. I was willing to do that in morning business or on the bill. Since we are now on the bill, is there an amendment pending?

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be set aside so I might offer an amendment.

Mr. DORGAN. I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, today we will hear the results of the 9/11 Commission, which will describe, after some study and hearings and consideration, what we knew prior to 9/11, prior to the devastating attack that occurred against this country that resulted in the murder of thousands of innocent Americans. There have been past suggestions that some of our law enforcement agencies and others had information indicating a possible attack, and that the information didn't get evaluated or moved up the chain of command. There are all sorts of discussions about what went wrong: What did we know? What could we have done with the information we had in our possession that might have foiled these attacks? It is useful to evaluate all that. I hope this report, which I have not yet read, will advance our knowledge of this situation. Information sharing is essential in the war on terrorism and in securing our country. But there is an alarming lack of information sharing when it comes to our state and local law enforcement officials. And that is the subject of my amendment here today. On October 25 of last year, a task force headed by former Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart released a report titled ``America Still Unprepared, America Still In Danger.'' The bipartisan task force, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, included former Secretaries of State Warren Christopher, George Shultz, retired Admiral William Crowe, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others. What they found was that one year after the September 11 attacks, America remained dangerously unprepared for another terrorist attack. And at the top of the list of their concerns was this: 650,000 local and State Police officials continue to operate in a virtual intelligence vacuum, without access to the terrorist watch lists provided by the U.S. Department of State to immigration and consular officials. That was the top concern raised by the report. What do they mean by that? They mean we do have a list of people who are known and suspected terrorists and individuals who associate with those known or suspected terrorists, and we use that list at the State Department to try to keep those people from coming into our country. It is made available to consulates across the world, to immigration officials across the world. It is a list meant to protect our country by preventing those who are known terrorist or those who associate with terrorists or suspected terrorists from entering our country. The problem is this. This list is not shared with the 650,000 law enforcement officials in our country. We need 650,000 eyes and ears of local law enforcement officials able to access that list to see whether the car they pulled over on the interstate highway is filled with four terrorists. Let me give an example: 36 hours before the September 11 attacks, one of the hijackers, the man who was at the controls of flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania--one of the hijackers named Ziad Jarrah was a 26-year-old Lebanese national. He was driving 90 miles an hour on Interstate 95, in Maryland. He was pulled over by the Maryland State Police. He was driving a car rented in his own name. This fellow shared a Hamburg apartment with Mohamed Atta. He was, we think, at the controls of flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania and 36 hours before that attack he was pulled over for speeding on a Maryland highway. It turns out, for a number of reasons, his name was not on the watch list. But had it been, and one would have expected it to be, that Maryland State trooper would not have been able to know that. If this afternoon, south of Drayton, ND, there is a highway patrol officer pulling over a car with three individuals in it, and if those individuals are known terrorists who have somehow come across the border from Canada, that highway patrol officer will not be able to access the terrorist watch list. So that highway patrol officer will be in the dark. He or she will stop that vehicle, will evaluate the occupants, search for information about their identity, but will not be able to access the watch list. The officer can access the NCIC data list, and determine whether the person he has stopped has a criminal record, but the officer cannot access the list that includes the names of the terrorists. That makes no sense to me and it didn't make any sense to the commission headed by Senator Rudman and Senator Hart. They said, as long ago as last October, this needed to be fixed and it needed to be fixed now so that 650,000 additional pairs of eyes and ears belonging to law enforcement officials, city police officers, highway patrol, and others are available to help us look for terrorists who may be in this country. Let me read in more detail excerpts from this Hart-Rudman report. With just 56 field offices around the nation the burden of identifying and intercepting terrorists in our midst is a task well beyond the scope of the FBI. This burden could and should be shared by 650,000 local, county and State law enforcement officers. But clearly they cannot lend a hand in a counterterrorism information void. When it comes to combating terrorism, the police officers on the beat are effectively operating deaf, dumb and blind. The terrorist watch lists provided by the Department of State to immigration and consular officials are still out of bounds for State and local police. In the interim period as information sharing issues get worked out, known terrorists will be free to move about to plan and execute their attacks. That is from the report issued last October, and nothing has been done about it. The Senate passed, at my urging, a provision in the supplemental appropriations bill that effectively says to all the agencies to work to get this done. That provision was dropped in conference. I will now offer the same piece of legislation and hope it will be attached to this appropriations bill. I hope it will be part of the bill that is signed into law. I hope we don't have to continue to prod executive agencies to do what they know we ought to do. If, God forbid, there is another attack in this country by terrorists, if that attack is perpetrated by someone who is picked up by a highway patrol officer or a city police officer on a highway or a street, and that person's name was on the watch list, and it was in the bowels of the State Department available to all of the consular affairs offices in the world but not available to that law enforcement officer and, therefore, they let that known terrorist go because they did not know this was a terrorist, and that terrorist then commits an act of terror and murders thousands of Americans, then shame on this Government for not doing what all of us in this Chamber know needs to be done--not tomorrow, not next week, not next year, right now, right this minute. The report by the task force headed by Senators Hart and Rudman was titled ``America Still Unprepared, America Still in Danger.'' Their top recommendation of last October has still not been completed by the U.S. Government. In my judgment, the American people ought to ask the question, Why on Earth is there foot dragging going on in making this watch list available to law enforcement all across this country in order to better prepare and better secure and better protect this country? It should not take a year for this database to be shared. Today, I resubmit this amendment and say we should not waste one additional day. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask for its immediate consideration and ask for a vote.

Mr. DORGAN. I move to reconsider the vote.

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 there is a 30-minute timeframe on my amendment.