Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, let me thank the chairman of the committee, Senator Levin, and Senator McCain, for their work on this bill. We talk about a lot of things in this bill: jet fighters, bombers, tankers, submarines, unmanned aerial vehicles--lots and lots of subjects. The subjects are about the defense of our country, what provides national security for our country, so these are all very important. I wish to speak, however, about one piece of this legislation that probably is not mentioned much but I think is very important; that is, the reduction of the threat of nuclear weapons. There is something over $400 million in this bill that deals with the efforts to try to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons. I have had at my desk in the Senate for a long while some pieces of equipment. I ask unanimous consent to show them.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this is a piece of a wing of a Soviet Backfire bomber. We did not shoot this plane down. This was sawed off of a wing of a Backfire bomber that would have carried nuclear weapons, presumably, to threaten our country. But under something called the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program that we engaged in with the countries of the former Soviet Union, bombers were destroyed--oh, not by bullets, but they were sawed in half and the wings were taken off and so on. This is a tube of copper, I show you, from the electrical wiring of a Russian submarine that carried nuclear weapons targeting this country. This was ground up by the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. The submarine was not destroyed by American bullets. This is part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction effort. This, I show you, is a hinge from a nuclear weapon on top of a missile that was in the Ukraine, presumably aimed at an American target. Where this missile once sat now grows sunflowers in the Ukraine. The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program--now, why is that important? Mr. President, we have a lot of threats to this country, but none is as great as the threat of a nuclear warhead being exploded in a major American city or any metropolitan area of this world, for example. Here, as shown on this chart, is how many nuclear warheads we have. This is from the Carnegie Endowment in 2009. They estimate the number of nuclear warheads that exist on the planet--Russia, about 14,000 nuclear weapons; the United States, 10,500 nuclear weapons; China, about 125; France, about 300; Britain, about 160 nuclear weapons; Israel, 80; India, 50; Pakistan, 60, and so on. Let me tell you a story, if I might. It is a story that has been written about extensively. In fact, it was the lead for a book called ``Nuclear Terrorism,'' written by Graham Allison. It was 1 month after 9/11/2001. It was October 11, 2001, when, at the Presidential daily briefing to President George W. Bush, George Tenet, the then-head of the CIA, informed the President that a CIA agent code named Dragonfire had reported that al-Qaida terrorists possessed a 10- kiloton nuclear weapon, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, the CIA agent, it had been smuggled into an American city, probably New York City. Again, at the President's daily briefing, 1 month to the day after 9/11, it was said that al-Qaida had smuggled a 10-kiloton stolen nuclear weapon into perhaps New York City. The CIA had no independent confirmation of it, but in the hours that followed, the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser, and others struggled with the question of whom do you call to talk about the threat and how do you do it without the news media putting out a bulletin that there is a rumor that a stolen 10-kiloton Russian nuclear weapon is in an American city without causing panic and mass exodus? So they tried to determine what to do about this and analyzed: Was it plausible, possible that al-Qaida terrorists had stolen a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon? The answer is yes. Did the Russians possess 10-kiloton nuclear weapons? Yes. Did they have good command and control over them, absolute command and control? No. Was it possible, having stolen it, that the terrorists could have smuggled it into New York City or, perhaps, Washington, DC? Yes. And could the terrorists detonate it? The answer is yes. If it were trucked, for example, to Times Square and exploded, would half a million people be killed instantly? Yes. But they did not tell anybody. They did not tell the mayor of New York. They sent nuclear weapons search teams to New York. The President sent teams to New York but did not inform anybody, for obvious reasons. About a month later, while there were a lot of people having an apoplectic seizure about this prospect, it was determined that perhaps the report by the CIA agent, Dragonfire, was not credible. Now, think of that. Think of the unbelievable angst about the potential of one rather small nuclear weapon, a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, having been stolen on a planet where there are 25,000 of them-- most of them much larger than that. Think of the angst about the potential of having one stolen by a terrorist group and exploded in the middle of an American city. That is just one weapon, and there are 25,000. There are a lot of people who are good thinkers and very experienced in these areas who will tell you, including former Defense Secretary Perry and others, that there is a very high probability that within the coming 10 years there will be a nuclear weapon exploded in a major city. So with all of the talk about planes and ships and all of the issues in this bill, this issue of the threat reduction, with $400 million- plus in this bill--the threat reduction that allowed us to dismantle nuclear weapons, cut off the wings of an adversary's bombers, grind up the wiring, and destroy the submarines--that is critically important. The question for us is, What are we going to do to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and to stop the spread of nuclear weapons around the world? Because almost certainly there will be an explosion of a nuclear weapon in a metropolitan area at some point in the future unless we provide the leadership in arms talks and arms reductions. It is our responsibility to lead. It falls on our shoulders to bear this burden to lead. I know there are some who would say: Do you know what, that is a sign of weakness to be talking about reducing nuclear weapons. I am not suggesting reducing America's strength or allowing America to be undefended. I am suggesting the world will be a much safer place if we do not have 25,000 nuclear weapons, and this world will be a much safer place if we find a way to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Every day now, we see the spectacle of Iran. Iran possessing a nuclear weapon? That is scary. North Korea. We do not know how many weapons North Korea has, but the Carnegie Endowment says perhaps less than 10. But what do we do now? What do we do to decide we are going to be involved in a very aggressive way leading the world in the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and beginning to reduce the number of nuclear weapons? We are operating now under what is called the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, also known as the Moscow Treaty, that our last President negotiated. It required the United States and Russia to have no more than 2,200 operationally deployed nuclear weapons. It does not mean that is the limit. That is just the operationally deployed limit. They can have far more nuclear weapons than that. By 2012, they had to be down to 2,200 operationally deployed. It does not restrict delivery vehicles of any kind--missiles, ships, planes. It does not have any verification measures, and it expires in 2012. There is another treaty called the START Treaty, which was superseded by the treaty I just described. But some parts of the START Treaty are still in force because it does have verification and onsite monitoring and confidence-building measures and it does limit delivery vehicles. But that limitation is going to expire, and that START Treaty expires at the end of this year. So the point I want to make today simply is this: We are talking about a lot of very important things, and I think the bill put together by the chairman and ranking member, this Defense authorization bill, is very important. I understand that. We need an Army, a Navy, the Marines, the Air Force. We need them well equipped. This is a troubling world in some corners. We face an enormous threat of terrorism. We face a lot of different threats. We must keep our eye on the ball. We, above all, here in the United States have a responsibility to provide the leadership that is necessary to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and to try to push and push and push for agreements that would reduce the number of nuclear weapons. As I said before, when, again, a CIA agent code named Dragonfire shows up and says to the CIA, I have picked up information which indicates there is one nuclear weapon that has been stolen and it is in the hands of terrorists, and it is now in New York City, ready to be detonated, when that happens next, we had better worry a great deal if we haven't prevented it, if we haven't taken all of the steps necessary to say, that can't happen. That report in October of 2001 turned out to be false, but all of the post mortems by experts understood that it could well have been true, and all of the elements could have been accurate. A weapon could have been stolen, smuggled into the city, detonated and a half a million people within three-quarters of a mile of Times Square would have died immediately. If that would have happened the world would never be the same. Everything will have changed. So it seems to me we have a responsibility to aggressively pursue arms control agreements. We have an opportunity now, and a responsibility to pursue aggressively, even in legislation such as this, the reduction of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles to try to see if we can step back from the abyss and actively engage with other nuclear powers to do things that will tighten controls, and in a very significant way, prevents the opportunity from other nations, and especially rogue nations, and especially, most especially, terrorist groups, from acquiring nuclear weapons. We know, we have the history, that Osama bin Laden has been fascinated with and has wanted to acquire the mechanics for nuclear weapons and the materials for nuclear weapons for a long time. We know that. Al-Qaida is still there. As far as we know, Osama bin Laden is still leading al-Qaida. It is pretty unbelievable to think about that. On 9/11 we were told there isn't one acre on this Earth that would be safe for the person who designed the attack against our country, but it is now 8 years later and we are told in the public briefings by our CIA that the greatest threat to our homeland is al-Qaida, a reconstituted al-Qaida. The terrorist threat which is the greatest threat to our homeland is a reconstituted al-Qaida with training camps where they are designing attacks against our country. Let us hope that we are able to make the kinds of efforts and provide the kind of leadership that singularly says to the world: It is this country that leads the way to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and it is our country that wants to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on this planet. No, that won't make us weaker; I don't suggest any approach that would ever weaken this country relative to its adversaries. But it will certainly strengthen the future of this planet if we reduce the number of nuclear weapons below the 25,000 nuclear weapons that now exist as well as take very significant steps to stop other countries and certainly to prevent forever rogue nations and terrorist organizations from acquiring nuclear weapons. That needs to be job one. We don't talk nearly enough about it. We don't talk about the subject as much as we should. But I wanted to bring this issue to the floor during this discussion because it is in this bill, Cooperative Threat Reduction, which we know works and which we have funded in the past and will continue to fund in this bill again, and is something that addresses the issue of not just building more weapons but actually finding ways to engage with our adversaries to reduce the weapons that can, frankly, threaten the existence of this planet. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, in recent days and weeks, the House of Representatives has passed legislation sponsored by Congressman Waxman and Congressman Markey, called the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, that deals with the issue of climate change. And more specifically, it deals with taking steps to decarbonize the energy use in this country in order to protect the planet. I support the goals of a low-carbon future by decarbonizing our energy sources to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The scientific consensus is that by maintaining our current course of burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases we are threatening our planet with future warming. So I support the goal of trying to deal with this issue of climate change. The question is, how do we address it? How do we move forward to meet this challenge? The House of Representatives has established one approach. I think we need to explore other approaches that still achieve the goal of reducing our carbon emissions. This is a very big issue with consequences for virtually all Americans--for families, for businesses, and for our climate. The question for us is: How do we move forward in a way that allows us to use our energy resources in a such a way as to protect the environment and grow the economy? Now, we all wake up in the morning and begin our day taking energy for granted. One of the first things we do, for example, is flick a switch and a light comes on, plug in a hair dryer, or turn on the toaster oven. In so many different ways, virtually everything we do involves using energy. We get in our cars and drive to work, or we get on a subway. In both cases, we are using energy. And no doubt about it, we are using a lot of energy. The current Secretary of Energy, Dr. Chu, is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. I once heard him use the following analogy to describe how we use energy today. He talked about going back a couple thousand years. For most of human history, we move no faster than a horse could take us. A couple thousand years ago, if someone wanted to go out and find something to eat, he got on a horse. These days, of course, times have changed. We still use horses, but in a different way. We measure the power of our engines in horsepower. If one wants to go get a loaf of bread, then we simply jump in a truck and crank up about 270 horses, and away we go to the grocery store. We never think much about the advantage of having energy at our command at almost any moment, and we certainly don't think--and haven't thought very much--about what the use of that energy does to the climate. So here we find ourselves in the year 2009 with what the vast majority of scientists say is a very serious problem for the future of this planet and the security of our civilization. Most of our energy is fossil energy. That's the carbon from plants that has accumulated as coal and oil over millions of years. As we burn these fossil fuels to power our economy, we release that carbon back into the atmosphere. The accumulation of these greenhouse gases warm the planet and cause other harmful consequences. Therefore, we need to try to find a way to decarbonize our energy to bring about a low-carbon future, and thereby lower our emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. So how do we do that? Well, as I indicated, the House of Representatives has written a bill, Waxman-Markey. It is a 1,427-page bill, and very, very complicated, I might add. Let me describe another path. The Senate Energy Committee worked to write a new Energy bill. It was completed some weeks ago and passed with bipartisan support. Let me describe just a bit of what we have done in that Energy bill: We included provisions to reduce our dependence on foreign oil; increase domestic production of electricity; electrify and diversify our vehicle fleet; create a transmission superhighway so we can produce renewable energy where it is most plentiful, and then put it on the transmission grid to move it to the load centers where it is needed; and train our energy workforce of tomorrow. These are just a few of the things we have done. We establish a national renewable energy standard of 15 percent by 2020. And I believe the standard needs to be stronger. But the fact is, this is the first time the Senate has sent a clear signal by demonstrating support for such a standard. This standard says: We want to maximize the production of renewable energy, which means a carbon-free energy source. We are producing green energy when we take energy from the wind, gather energy from the Sun, and put that electricity on a transmission grid to send it to where it is needed. This is an essential step to building the low-carbon economy we need to address the threat of climate change. And our energy bill does so much more to set the stage for helping address climate change. When we talk about energy, climate is one of the twin challenges that we need to address. With respect to the vulnerability of our country, we must also consider our energy insecurity. It is the case that we import 70 percent of our oil coming from off our shores. We need to put into place an energy policy that will make us less dependent on foreign oil. One way to reduce our oil dependence is to electrify our vehicles. Moving toward an electric drive transportation system has the benefit of replacing foreign oil with domestic electricity. Further, as we decarbonize our electricity generation, we get the additional benefit of reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from our transportation sector. Our legislation moves aggressively to promote electrification of our vehicles. In addition to producing more renewable energy, the Energy bill expands the production of energy in this country by opening some areas that have not been opened in the eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas development. As my colleagues know, natural gas is a cleaner-burning and lower carbon fossil fuel. We need to increase production of natural gas where it is appropriate. So the Energy bill does many things to move toward the low-carbon future we need to ensure the security of our planet and our nation. So I believe we ought to take up the piece of legislation we passed in the Energy Committee, bring it to the floor of the Senate, debate it, and pass it. I have talked about this at some length in recent weeks. I think the Energy bill we have produced is a significant step toward addressing the climate change challenge. So it seems to me it would make sense to do the energy piece first, get it to the President, and get it signed. With that progress in addressing climate change in the bank, we should then legitimately be able to boast about what we have done in a significant way to maximize the production of green energy from wind, solar, and biomass. This would not be an insignificant achievement. I think we ought to do that. Second, I would like to discuss the question of cap and trade or Waxman-Markey or some other carbon-constraining piece of legislation for a moment. Clearly, the Senate is going to deal with this issue. My preference would be that we not take up the Waxman-Markey bill in its current form. I know a lot of work has gone into that legislation, but my preference would be that we start to explore other directions. It is not that I oppose capping carbon. I believe we need to move toward a low-carbon future. I believe we will have to cap emissions of carbon. The question is what are the appropriate targets and timelines that would allow us to mitigate climate change and at the same time, prevent a substantial disruption to our economy. We have to be careful to avoid creating targets and timelines for reducing CO2 emissions that are simply unachievable. We have a lot of people across this country who are doing inventive work--interesting, world-class, cutting-edge research. They are working to create the next generation of technologies that could unlock the opportunity of capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide, or developing ways to beneficially reuse CO2. These technologies hold the promise of allowing us to continue to use our abundant fossil fuels while protecting our environment. I am convinced--absolutely convinced--that we will achieve that goal. The opportunity, through research, to unlock the mystery of how we separate and capture carbon, store it or reuse it beneficially, is critical, and I am convinced we will do that. I don't think there is much question about that. But what I have difficulty with is not the goal. I am for a low-carbon future. I believe we are going to move in that direction, and I will support that goal. I do not support, however, establishing a new trading system for carbon securities, as would be the case under the 400-page cap-and- trade provision of the House bill. Let me describe why. In my judgment, there are better ways to deal with these issues than establishing a very substantial carbon securities trading system. Such a system is ripe for the biggest investment banks and the biggest hedge funds in the country to sink their teeth into these marketplaces and make massive amounts of money. My profound feeling about this is that we have seen now a decade in which many of these markets have been manipulated and have failed to work at all with respect to the market signals of supply and demand. I have very little interest in consigning our low-carbon future to a trading system of carbon securities that will be controlled by the biggest trading companies in the world. And it would not be very long before these entities will have created derivatives, swaps, synthetic CDOs, and more. It will be a field day for speculation, which I think is not in the interest of this country. Let me just describe something I think might be a harbinger of things to come. Here is chart showing how oil prices soared in 2008. We all remember what has happened to oil prices in the last two years. They went from $60 a barrel up to $147 a barrel in day trading last July. Even as the price of oil was going through the roof, the best experts looking at supply and demand were predicting that the price of oil would only slowly increase over many months. They said: Well, here is where we think the price of oil is going to be. Straight on across, through the end of the year. Here is what they suggested in May of 2007, and here is the price. The fact is, the price of oil shot up like a roman candle. Here is what they suggested in January 2008. Here is the price they predicted, but the price went up much more quickly. Why is it we have an oil futures market in which supply and demand doesn't determine where the price goes? The price goes right off the chart, and yet supply was up and demand was down. So what we saw in the oil futures market last year should be a wake- up call. This included speculators engaged in about two-thirds or three-fourths of all the trades. They were trading at 20 to 25 times the amount of oil that is produced every single day, and creating an orgy of speculation as shown by the red line on this chart--and by the way, it went right down like a roller coaster. And the same people who made money going up made money when prices went back down. If we like that sort of thing, we are going to love the carbon market piece in cap and trade because we are going to create a big, perhaps trillion-dollar market for carbon securities. It would not be long before the same investment banks and hedge funds will all be engaged in trading carbon derivatives, swaps, and you name it. I happen to think that makes no sense at all. The New York Times said: Managing emissions has become one of the fastest growing specialties in financial services. Investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have rapidly expanded their carbon businesses. I am told, by the way, that most of the large investment banks right now have created carbon trading units. Charlotte Observer: Firms such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley already have carbon desks and teams . . . Peopling those carbon desks are the former commodities traders or former securitization or structured finance professionals--like many who've lost jobs at Wachovia (now Wells Fargo) and Bank of America . . . The New York Times says in a news story: As Congress gears up for a debate on a national ``cap-and-trade'' program to limit greenhouse gas emissions, resumes from Wall Street--or from ex-Wall Streeters--are flooding into the Nation's few carbon-trading shops. Chris Leeds, the head of emissions trading, carbon trading at Merrell Lynch, said carbon could become: one of the fastest-growing markets ever, with volumes comparable to credit derivatives inside of a decade. Louis Redshaw, head of Environmental Markets Barclays Capital says: Carbon will be the world's biggest commodity market, and it could become the world's biggest market over all. So do we want to sign up for a future in which we consign our ability to constrain carbon and protect this planet by creating a carbon securities market that, in my judgment, would likely subject us to the same vision of the last decade with unbelievable speculation, movements in markets that seem completely disconnected from supply and demand? That is not a future I want to see happen. There are other ways of capping carbon and addressing these issues. I want to be clear, I am for capping carbon. I am for a low-carbon future, but, in my judgment, those who would bring to the floor of the Senate a replication of what has been done in the House, with over 400 pages describing the cap and ``trade'' piece, will find very little favor from me, and I expect from some others as well. There are better, other, and more direct ways to do this to protect our planet. I have been to the floor many times talking about what has happened with credit default swaps, what has happened with CDOs, what has happened with the oil futures market, on and on and on. If what has happened gives anybody confidence, then they are in a deep sleep and just don't understand it. Again, I come back to the chart I showed a moment ago, the head of emissions trading at Merrill Lynch saying carbon could become one of the fastest growing markets, with volumes comparable to credit derivatives. Think of this, the unbelievable volumes of credit derivative swaps that most people couldn't even pronounce and didn't know existed, and it turns out we had tens of trillions of dollars worth of these things, and worldwide these products were supposedly worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. Frankly, I think it is not in the country's interest to establish a new financial market and to have the same players engage in the same games that gamble on this country's future. I think two things: No. 1, there is a piece of energy legislation that is ready to come to the floor, passed by the Energy Committee, that moves in the direction of addressing climate change. We ought to get the benefit of that legislation and pass that bill along to the President for signature. It maximizes renewable energy, and there are a lot of things that will dramatically reduce the impact of our carbon footprint. No. 2, those in the Senate who are working very hard and talking about the issue of climate change, and how we can take steps to cap carbon, and what kind of a low-carbon future we might be able to achieve. There are some of us--and I speak only for myself--who believe cap and ``trade'' in terms of speculative carbon futures markets makes no sense. We ought to explore a carbon cap with different approaches. I wanted to raise these concerns at this point, so that those who are working on the climate change bill and attempting to replicate the House approach will understand that some of us will aggressively resist the carbon market ``trade'' side of cap and trade.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we are on the Defense authorization bill, apparently stranded, unable to vote on an amendment that had been offered dealing with the issue of the F-22. The F-22 airplane is a remarkable airplane. I have talked to pilots who have flown it. I have seen it at Edwards Air Force Base. It is an extraordinary airplane. It costs a lot of money. We have built as many as the Defense Secretary wants built at this point. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Defense Secretary, the head of the Air Force, has indicated they want to cap the F-22 at that number--I believe it is 187--and do not wish to build more. They say that is all we need. That is all we want. There is a $1.75 billion fund that was put in this bill, now, as an amendment in the Armed Services Committee, to build more F-22s. So the amendment by the chairman of the committee and by Senator McCain, the ranking member, was to take the $1.75 billion out of the bill. I support the amendment--not because I don't like the airplane, I do; but if those who are in charge of the Pentagon, Secretary Gates; Admiral Mullen; the head of the Air Force, Secretary Donnelly; General Schwartz and others say we do not want anymore F-22s, don't need anymore F-22s to do the mission that we believe is necessary for that airplane, and instead we want to move toward the Joint Strike Fighter--if that is their judgment, in my judgment we ought not put another billion back into this bill. Yet that is what happened in the subcommittee. I wish to call attention to the fiscal policy and where we are in this country. President Obama has been in office a relatively short period of time. He inherited an unbelievable mess. There is no question about that. We are in the deepest recession since the Great Depression. There is a substantial decrease in revenues and increased spending this year as a result of this very steep recession. Social service costs are going up, and there's more unemployment, more food stamps and so on. I believe there is close to a 20-percent reduction in revenue for the government and close to a 20-percent increase in spending. On top of that, Congress passed a stimulus or economic recovery program. All of this has driven the deficit up in this fiscal year, a very sizable deficit. That deficit will be very sizable next year and the year after. It begins to go down and then goes back up in the outyears. This is a fiscal policy that is not sustainable for our country. It just is not. It is not a Democratic or Republican policy that is not sustainable, it is a fiscal policy of trillions and trillions of dollars of red ink that we must change. If we cannot even deal with the issue of adding $1.75 billion to build more planes that the Defense Department says they do not want, we will hardly be able to deal with the more difficult fiscal problems in the future. So I support the amendment offered by the chairman and the ranking member. I hope we get a chance to vote on that amendment. The issue of spending money we do not have, often on things we do not need, is not new in any committee in this Congress. There are plenty of areas where we can take a pretty big slice out of spending. You can do it, not with just big programs, you can do it with smaller programs. I brought to the floor a couple charts that show an issue that, in my judgment, is flatout total, complete, thorough government waste. I have tried, now, about 5 years in a row to get rid of it and have been unsuccessful. I finally got an amendment this past week added to an appropriations bill that shuts down the funding. But now we will see, there will be a big fight on the floor to restore the funding. Let me tell you what this is. Again, we are not talking about a lot of money. In my hometown, this would be a lot of money, but my hometown is 300 people, so $20, $30 million is a lot of money. This is a picture of Fat Albert, which is an aerostat blimp or aerostat balloon. This is Fat Albert, purchased by the government. In fact, we purchased a couple of them so we can put it way up in the air on a tether, and it would broadcast television signals into the country of Cuba because the Castro brothers run an operation down there that doesn't provide any freedom to the Cuban people, so we are sending them television signals to tell them how wonderful things are in the United States and how awful things are in Cuba. Actually, the Cuban people do not need those television signals to know that because they can simply listen to Miami radio, or they can listen to what is called Radio Marti, which actually gets into the market in Cuba. We broadcast Radio Marti. I don't object to that. It costs a fair amount of money. I don't object to that. We get radio signals into Cuba to tell the Cuban people what is going on in our country and the problems they face in their country. I have been to Cuba. I think the Cuban people know pretty much the problems they face with the Castro regime, a regime that squeezes the freedom out of the Cuban people. But here is the deal. We have aerostat balloons, first of all, to put television signals into Cuba. The problem is we have spent a quarter of a billion dollars doing it and the Cubans can't get the TV signal. Why? Because the Castro government jams it easily. They jam it just like that. We used to broadcast from 3 in the morning to 7 in the morning a signal no one can see, so we use these balloons on a big tether and broadcast a television signal to people who can't see it. We kept spending money thinking it was a great thing to do, broadcasting a television signal nobody can see. In fact, one of these balloons got loose, got off its mooring, and wound up somewhere in the Everglades. They had a devil of a time trying to catch this balloon; and another balloon disappeared in a hurricane, and they have never seen it since. They decided, you know what, we can actually clip the American taxpayer for more than a balloon. What we will do is buy an airplane and broadcast the television signal the Cuban people can't see from an airplane, so the American taxpayers bought an airplane. It flies, I think, 5 or 6 days a week, broadcasting television signals into Cuba that the Cubans block, that no one can see. You talk about ignorant? At a time when we are deep in debt, spending money we don't have to broadcast television signals to people who can't get it? That is unbelievable to me. Here is what the Cuban people see. All of us have seen bad television with snow covering the entire screen. Here is what is broadcast--it is programs with caricatures of the Castro brothers. The Cubans don't need to be reminded the Castro brothers are a scourge in that government. Let me describe what John Nichols, who is a professor of communications and international affairs at Penn State University, has said: TV Marti's response to this succession of failures over a two-decade period has been to resort to ever more expensive technological gimmicks, all richly funded by Congress. And none of these gimmicks, such as the airplane, have worked . . . It's just the laws of physics. In short, TV Marti is a highly wasteful and ineffective operation. . . . Even as I speak, I assume our airplane is broadcasting a television signal to the Cuban people who cannot receive it. TV Marti's quest to overcome the laws of physics has been a flop. John Nichols says, the same witness. Aero Marti, the airborne platform for TV Marti, has no audience currently in Cuba, and it is a complete and total waste of $6 million a year in taxpayer dollars. The audience of TV Marti, particularly the Aero platform is probably zero. . . . Talking now about the airplane platform. We are talk about the GAO report. The best available research indicates that TV Marti's audience size is small . . . telephone surveys have reported less than 1 percent had watched TV Marti over the last week. I don't know what 1 percent is. I don't know what less than 1 percent is. That is minuscule, right? But I have offered an amendment that takes out about $15 million to support TV Marti, which is a program that has now wasted about a quarter of a billion dollars sending television signals to Cuba that no one in Cuba can see. You know what, it is very hard to get this kind of thing stopped. The reason I wish to mention it today is we are on the floor talking about $1.75 billion for the F-22. We are, I assume--almost everyone here is supporting the next generation fighter we are building, the Joint Strike Fighter. But the Pentagon says they want to stop and not order anymore of the F-22s. It is a reasonable thing, to me, that being deep in debt, choking on red ink, at least we might want to accept the recommendation of not building that which they do not want. At least with respect to Aerostat balloons and airplanes and television signals to Cuba that no one can see, the very least the taxpayers should expect of us is that perhaps we would stop spending money sending television signals to no one. Maybe that is not too much to ask. Let me ask consent to speak in morning business for 5 minutes on a different subject.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today House and Senate leaders appointed members for a Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. That is the title, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. I have been calling for both a commission and also a select committee of the Congress because I think that we have a requirement and responsibility to establish what is the narrative that has caused this economic and financial crisis in this country. We are in a deep financial crisis and have been for some long while. This didn't happen as a result of some giant hurricane or some tornado or some flood, or some other natural disaster visiting our country. No, this was not a natural disaster. This happened as a result of decisions being made by human beings here among us. The question is who? And what decisions? How did this happen? What is the narrative that has caused the most significant crisis since the Great Depression? Very smart economists have said, you know what, over a long period of time from the Great Depression forward, we created stabilizers in this country so we would not see steep recessions or certainly not a depression in our future. We are evening things out, they would say, and that was probably true for a while, but this recession is deep, this hole is steep. The question is, What caused it? What happened. I support the creation of a commission today. I offered legislation in January of this year, called the Taxpayer Protection Act, which called for the creation of a commission to investigate this financial crisis. My colleagues, Senator Conrad and Senator Isakson, similarly offered a commission proposal, a piece of legislation during debate earlier this year. I support the notion of going forward. The appointments today to this Commission are welcome. I hope the Commission does all that is necessary to uncover what has happened here. I still believe we need a Select Committee in the Senate. The New York Times said it in an editorial, nothing can substitute for the work the Senate must do itself. I say that because we now have, in recent days, additional news items in the paper you read. Let me pick one. I don't mean to pick this company out just to be punitive, but it is a good example in recent days: Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo is a FDIC-insured bank. It is one of the biggest banks in America: Wells Fargo to expand securities business. It plans to grow and invest in securities activities that it largely inherited from Wachovia. The business is to be called Wells Fargo Securities. What is Wachovia? Wachovia is a bank that was failing because Wachovia had all kinds of problems. Wachovia was a bank that had purchased Golden West Financial, which had about $120 billion, we are told, in toxic option adjustable rate mortgages. By the way, related to this, I saw in the newspapers the other day that pick-your-payment mortgage plans have actually now had a higher default rate than other subprime mortgage loans. Think of that. You look at that and think, What was the pick-your-payment plan? That was the plans put out by these mortgage companies--sophisticated, exotic plans--saying to people, you know what, pick your own payment. You tell us what you will pay and we will write a mortgage around it. So we had all of these strange plans out there, exotic plans, some of which were creating an unbelievable bubble of speculation. We had bank holding companies buying them and we had FDIC-insured banks actually trading them. Pretty soon you got toxic assets lying in the belly or the gut of these financial institutions, and they are going to go belly-up unless somebody else buys them. So Wells Fargo buys Wachovia, and then Wells Fargo announces that, well, our investment banking and our capital markets businesses are now going to operate under a new name, ``Wells Fargo Securities.'' The question is this: With the biggest banks in the country operating, in many cases with holding companies engaged in real estate and securities issues, having demonstrated now that these holding companies do not have firewalls that are much thicker or much more beneficial than tissue paper, are we still going to continue to see all of this? Are we still going to see FDIC-insured institutions, for which the taxpayers are ultimately responsible for failure, talking about: We are going to get involved in more risk trading, more securities? Wachovia. Well, Wachovia Bank, I have spoken of them before. Wachovia Bank was one of those banks buying sewer systems in Germany. Why? Because an American bank wanted to own a sewer in a German city? No. They wanted to avoid paying U.S. taxes, so they did sale-lease back transactions with German sewer systems. That is part of a culture issue with companies, it seems to me, when you do that sort of thing. But now we have Wells Fargo that bought Wachovia, announcing the best part of what they bought was Wachovia's securities business. The fact is, Wachovia was not going to make it. That is why Wells Fargo purchased them. We ought to be asking a couple of questions these days about the Administration's announced plans for new financial reform, which I welcome by the way. This President inherited this mess, so he is talking about financial reform, and I welcome that discussion. One, I think we ought to have a healthy and robust discussion about whether the Federal entity that shall become the systemic risk regulator in this country should be the Federal Reserve Board. Not me. Not me. The Federal Reserve Board is what has helped cause this problem. I mean, the Federal Reserve Board acted blindly for over a decade. In addition, the Federal Reserve Board by itself is almost totally unaccountable to anyone and operates in very substantial secrecy. Why would we decide to have an agency that has failed over the last decade or so in managing and supervising the financial industry in this country, that watched the creation of these big holding companies, watched what happened with the mortgage companies with unbelievably speculative instruments, watched the advertisements on television saying: If you have been bankrupt, slow pay, no pay, got bad credit, come to us. We will give you a loan--the Federal Reserve watched all of that and did nothing. Now we are going to be told they are the ones to save us with respect to systemic risk in our economy? I do not think so. That is No. 1; the Federal Reserve Board is going to be the entity to deal with systemic risk? Boy, there is no evidence, at least in recent years, to suggest that makes much sense. No. 2, no discussion yet, and there might be, on this issue of too big to fail. Does it matter that we have allowed the creation of entities in the financial sector that are too big to fail? In my judgment it matters because if they are too big to fail, then the American taxpayer bails them out. That is what happened last fall. The Treasury Secretary leaned over the lectern to us one Friday and said: Look, if you do not pass a bailout bill in 3 days, a three-page bill giving me $700 billion, this economy is going to fall off a cliff. Well, I did not believe it. I did not vote for the bailout. But the fact is, all of this was because some of the largest financial institutions in the country, he said, were in deep trouble. Why were they in trouble? Because they loaded up with substantial risk. Congress, in the last decade, has passed laws that allowed them to do that. They said this is modernization. But when we create institutions that are too big to fail and then they load up with substantial risk, especially those that are FDIC-insured with holding companies now, engage in securities, and that is exactly what Wells Fargo is announcing: We bought Wachovia. Now we will take the securities on with Wachovia and decide to juice it up. Should we continue with the doctrine of too big to fail? I do not believe so. Yet in the intervening months, the last 8 months or so, the very institutions that were judged too big to fail and were required to get bailouts from the American taxpayer are still engaged in merging with other institutions, making them bigger and even less able to fail. So is there someone willing to intervene to say too big to fail has to change? Must we perhaps at least have a discussion about breaking up some institutions that are too big to fail? What about very large strong regional interests that are not too big to fail? I am just asking the question because nobody, in talking about financial reform that I am aware of these days, is willing to address the question of too big to fail. And you cannot address this question of financial reform without including it. All of us want the same thing for this country. We want this country to recover. We want our economy to expand and grow and create jobs and be healthy again. The fact is--I have talked about this many times. I taught economics briefly in college. The fact is, all of the charts and graphs and indices are irrelevant as compared to the confidence of the American people. When the American people are confident about the future of this country and about their future, about their job, about their family, then they do things that manifest that confidence. They buy some clothes, buy a car, take a trip, buy a house. They do the things that expand the economy because they are confident about the future. When they are not, they do exactly the opposite and that contracts the economy. The question is, how do we give the American people confidence going forward that things are going to be better? Month after month, because unemployment has a long tail even past recovery, we see hundreds of thousands of people having lost their jobs. Obviously, those folks do not have a lot of confidence. They feel helpless and hopeless. How do we give people confidence we are going to fix things that are wrong so this will not happen again? That is where this issue of financial reform comes in. Part of that confidence, it seems to me, can come from this institution, from the Congress and the President. Part of it can come from the people watching this institution. Take a look at this amendment, an amendment that says: Let's not spend $1.75 billion we do not have on something the Pentagon says they do not want. Confidence can come from affirmative action on that. Part of that confidence could come from 100 or 1,000 of these examples, a little program called TV Marti, broadcasting television signals to people who cannot see it, and doing it for 5, 10, 15 years and spending a quarter of a billion dollars. Part of that confidence could come from the American people taking a look at our deciding to shut these kinds of things down and trimming back government that has become bloated. So we can do some of this to create confidence. But another part of it, it seems to me, has to come from the administration's judgment about what is real reform in financial reform. That must include, in my judgment, the issue of too big to fail. It must include effective regulatory oversight so we do not have the kind of activities going on that we saw for the last 10 years: financial institutions engaged in unbelievable practices with no one minding the store and no one watching who were the referees of the system, wearing striped shirts and whistles and blowing the whistle when they saw a foul in the market system. We cannot continue that. We need effective regulation. We need effective reform. When we get that, the American people will feel: You know what. They fixed that which caused this serious problem, and we feel better about the future of this country. We have a lot to do in a short time. Some big issues of health care, energy, and climate change, and others. I am going to visit about the issue of climate change tomorrow. But we have very big issues that have great consequences for this country. But at the moment, we stand in a very deep recession. The American people are concerned about the future and want some assurance that all of us are doing the things necessary to put the country back on track. One step today is the amendment that was offered by the chairman and the ranking member of this committee. It is $1.75 billion. That is a lot of money. But step after step after step in the right direction can give people confidence about the future of this country. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Bill Curlin, an Air Force fellow in my office, be granted the privilege of the floor during the debate on the Defense authorization bill of 2010.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I will perhaps come back later to speak on the F-22 and the work my colleagues, Senator Levin and Senator McCain, have done. But I want to speak about another amendment I have offered that I hope might gain acceptance as we move forward, and that is an amendment to the Defense authorization bill that would require contracting officials in the Pentagon to take into account evidence of bad past performance by a contractor when deciding who should get future contracts. You might think that contracting officials would already be required to take past performance into account. But the fact is, that is not now required over in the Pentagon. I want to go through some thoughts with you about this issue very quickly. I have held 19 hearings on contractor waste, fraud, and abuse. I have to say, going back some years now, we have had the greatest amount of waste and fraud and abuse by contractors than we have seen in the history of this country. Let me give you some examples. Shown on this chart is a man named Efraim Diveroli, 22 years old. Oh, by the way, he is the CEO of a company. That is right, the president and CEO of a company. The company is a shell company his father used to have. But he took it over, and he hired a vice president, as a matter of fact. The vice president's name is David Packouz, 25 years old, the former vice president of the company. He is a massage therapist. So this is a company in Miami, FL, that does business out of an unmarked door. Through the best evidence, there are only two employees--a 22- year-old president and a 25-year-old massage therapist who is the vice president. Well, guess what. These two guys got $300 million in contracts from the U.S. Government. Can you imagine, $300 million in contracts from the Pentagon? There have been arrests in this case. But the question is, Why? I called a three-star general to my office to say: How on Earth could you have done that? How could you possibly have done that? Did you not check? I checked. These guys also had some small contracts with the State Department which turned out to be bad contracts. But they could have at least done a small amount of checking before committing $300 million of the American taxpayers' money. What they did for that money was ship a bunch of shoddy products over to Afghanistan to the military, bullets and guns that were dated from the 1960s. That is one of the reasons this company and these fellows ran afoul of the law. But the question is, How did all this happen? This guy, as shown in this picture, with a striped shirt is named Frank Willis. This is he, in the striped shirt. He is holding a Saran- wrapped pack of money. This is part of a couple million dollars that went to a company called Custer Battles. This is he, by the way, in Iraq. He said: Our motto was, You bring a bag because we pay cash. He is talking about defense contracting. Custer Battles is alleged to have taken--they were going to provide security for the Baghdad Airport, which had no commercial airplanes flying in and out. It was alleged they took the forklift trucks off the airport and put them in some sort of machine shed and repainted them blue and then sold them to the Coalition Provisional Authority. So you bring a bag because we pay cash, it was said. Here is what the guy over at the Baghdad Airport said. I am just telling you all this because I held 19 hearings. I have done 19 of them. Here is what the guy who is the airport director of security said in a memo to the Coalition Provisional Authority. Here is what he said about Custer Battles, which was given the contract. They got over $100 million in contracts. Custer Battles have shown themselves to be unresponsive, uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative and war profiteers. Other than that they are swell fellows. Think of it. So what do we think of these contractors? They got a lot of the taxpayers' money. This is a picture of Cheryl Harris with her son Ryan Maseth, a Green Beret, Special Forces. Ryan, unfortunately, tragically was killed in Iraq--no, he was not shot by some insurgent; he was electrocuted in the shower. His mother Cheryl was told that they thought maybe he went into the shower carrying a radio and therefore was electrocuted. It turns out that was not the case at all. The fact is, he took a shower in a place where the wiring had been done improperly. Why? Because Kellogg, Brown, and Root, which was paid to do the wiring, hired third-country nationals in most cases who could not speak English and did not know the wiring codes, and they wired up a shower and this poor soldier lost his life because he was electrocuted in the shower. I held hearings about that. Eric Peters, who was working in Iraq as an electrician, said: Third-country nationals performed the majority of KBR's electrical work. Most have absolutely no knowledge of the National Electric Code or British Standards, and the quality of their work reflects that. Much of this work is not clearly inspected by licensed electricians. I personally have refused to sign off on work they have performed because I knew it was not up to code. That is what we paid for, and some soldiers have lost their lives. This list goes on and on and on. Eric Peters, a brave soul who worked in Iraq to do electrical work, worked for KBR. He came back and testified: I concluded that KBR was not capable of performing quality, legal, electric installations in Iraq. I worried every day that people would be seriously injured or killed by this defective work. The reason I want to tell you about this is, not only have soldiers lost their lives, but the task orders for which that work was done resulted in award fees, bonus fees, to the company that did shoddy work. As a result of my hearing, they sent a task force over to investigate all of the buildings in Iraq. The fact is, we have testimony and evidence that there was a massive amount of wiring that was done improperly that put soldiers at risk. Yet the Pentagon provided award fees, which are fees designed only for excellent performance, of $83 million of the taxpayers' money to a company that did shoddy work; work sufficient so we had to come back around and do what is called, I believe, a corrective action request order, where you had to go back and inspect everything and redo the work. The question is, How is all this going on? Let me describe the story of Bunny Greenhouse. A lot of people do not know Bunny Greenhouse. What an extraordinary person she is. She grew up in southern Louisiana in a family who had nothing. Two in their family teach college. Her brother is Elvin Hayes, one of the top 50 basketball players of all time. Bunny Greenhouse has a couple of master's degrees, is very well educated, and rose to become the highest civilian in the Corps of Engineers over in the Pentagon. Here is what she testified to with respect to some of the contracting that went on. She lost her job as a result of having the courage to speak publicly. I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career. For that, she lost her job. It is not just KBR. I mentioned Custer Battles, Efraim Diveroli. How about Parsons Corporation? This, by the way, is a photograph every American should remember when you talk about waste and fraud and abuse. This is called ``The Whale.'' This picture is a picture of a prison in Iraq that was never completed and will never be used. Mr. President, $31 million was paid to the Parsons Corporation for building a prison the Iraqis said they did not want and would not use. The $31 million was colossally wasted in unbelievably bad construction. That is after this same company was given a couple hundred million dollars to rehabilitate 140 health clinics in Iraq, and we were told later that most of those health clinics are imaginary, quote/unquote. They do not exist. Well, the money is gone. The $200 million is gone. But the health clinics are imaginary. Well, the same company was contracted to build the prison in Iraq. It is called the Kahn Bani Sa'ad prison, but it is referred to as ``The Whale.'' Here is what it looks like, as shown in this picture. We spent $40 million. The first $31 million was paid to Parsons. Another $9 million was paid to an Iraqi contractor. And here it sits in the desert, never ever to be used, paid for by the American taxpayer, and paid to contractors who did shoddy work and were kicked off the site. The question is, What do we do about all that? I have proposed an amendment that is pretty simple. It is interesting. There is currently no requirement that contracting officials over in the DOD have to take into account shoddy work practices or shoddy performances by contractors. There is a requirement they take into account criminal actions, civil fines, that are leveled against contractors. But there is no requirement they must consider bad past performance. It is unbelievable, but it is true. I offer an amendment that says, Do you know what, the time is past when bad performance by big contractors gets you a slap on the wrist and a pat on the back and another contract. It is time--long past the time--we put an end to this. I know my colleagues, Senator Levin and Senator McCain, feel strongly about this issue as well. I appreciate the work they have done. All of us need to do everything we can to assure the American taxpayers they are getting their money's worth. Defense is something we invest in for this country. It is very important. As I conclude, I want to say this: I put together a chart, and I am going to speak about it in the next day or two. But it relates to this question of the F-22. This chart shows Federal budget deficits. We are on an unsustainable path. It is not a Republican path or a Democratic path. It is just an unsustainable path that cannot work for this country's future. Take a look at this chart. Here is the middle of a deep recession, $1.9 trillion in deficits, and then it gets a little better, and then goes back down. We are on an unsustainable path, and it does not matter what you are talking about, whether you are talking about an airplane or some other area of Federal budget responsibility. We finally have to decide: Things have changed. We have to invest in things that provide dividends for this country's future. We cannot continue to spend money we do not have on things we do not need. That is not a sustainable course for this country. So I will speak more about these issues, including the F-22, at some other point. But let me thank my colleague, Senator Levin, and my colleague, Senator McCain as well.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 10 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, this morning the New York Times wrote an editorial I wanted to commend my colleagues' attention to and take some issue with. The editorial in the New York Times this morning is called ``Elk Hunting in the Badlands'' referring, of course, to the Badlands of North Dakota where Theodore Roosevelt went out and lived and ranched. The Badlands of North Dakota encompass, in large part, the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a wonderful park, and the Badlands are about as beautiful as anything you will find in this country. Theodore Roosevelt National Park has elk. In 1985, a number of elk were released in the Badlands in the southern section. There were, I think, around 50 head of elk that were released in the Badlands, and that has now grown to somewhere close to 900 elk, which is about 600 more than can reasonably be handled in that area. So they need to cull the elk herd. They need to thin out the elk herd because we can't allow it to grow so large that we don't have the carrying capacity on that land. So as is the case with too many Federal agencies, once they started thinking about how we will cull the elk herd, how we will take care of this problem, they came up with an idea--actually, a number of ideas. Among them was an idea that they would go hire Federal sharpshooters and then cull the herd with Federal sharpshooters, and then have helicopters transport out the carcasses once the sharpshooters had done their job. It seemed to me to be boneheaded to be thinking in those terms. Much better, it seemed to me, was to develop an approach that was used in the Grand Tetons, where they deputize hunters as volunteers, and each volunteer can take an elk from the park. Now, we don't allow ``hunting'' in national parks. I understand that, and I am not proposing an open hunt. But in cases where you have to thin a herd, rather than have the Federal Treasury decide that we are going to hire Federal sharpshooters and then gas up the helicopters so you can transport the carcasses of the dead animals, a much better solution that you could find in almost any cafe in North Dakota, talking to three people over strong coffee, is what about finding qualified hunters, deputizing them, allowing each to take an elk and take the meat home; ergo, you haven't cost the Federal Government money. Under park supervision, you can have deputized, qualified hunters whom you could easily qualify, and you have solved the problem. This is not rocket science or a big, significant, complicated issue. It is not a serious illness for which we don't know a cure. This is a very simple issue of culling an elk herd. So I proposed that. The Park Service said, well, there is a restriction here and there, so we are going to hold a series of meetings. They held a series of meetings in North Dakota. As is always the case with bureaucracy, they hold a lot of meetings and come up with multiple alternatives, and they study them to death until the alternatives are nothing but carcasses. This is an issue in North Dakota in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park that has gone on for some years. The Park Service had several different alternatives. We were waiting for a long while to see what they were going to announce. And it became clear to me that they weren't going to get to a common-sense decision. So I included a provision in the Interior Appropriations bill in committee last week that is simple and it does as I have said: simply cull the elk herd by deputizing qualified hunters, under the supervision of the Park Service, who would be able to take the animals--the carcasses--and the meat out of the Badlands. So that is in the Interior Appropriations bill. The New York Times today takes great issue with that. It says it is not the right proposal at all, it is a terrible idea, that it would legislate a management issue better left to the Secretary of the Interior and the National Park Service. Well, the Secretary of the Interior was in North Dakota with me about 5 weeks ago, and we had a long discussion about this issue. And I know our former colleague Ken Salazar, and I know he would want to come to a conclusion that represents a deep reservoir of common sense as well for the taxpayers. I understand that we don't want to open hunting seasons in national parks. I propose only in a circumstance where, in this national park, just as we have done in the Grand Teton National Park, which is embedded in law, when you need to thin the herd, don't spend a pile of taxpayers' money, don't gas up helicopters to haul carcasses around. Deputize local qualified hunters and allow that. It is not a hunting season. In this case, you are thinning the herd by using qualified hunters, who could be deputized and operating under the supervision of the Park Service, to remove the meat from the park. It is very simple. The New York Times is a fine paper, but I doubt that it has a lot of hunters on its staff. I know a bit about hunting, and I know a fair amount about Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the Badlands. I know the people I represent, who looked at this, and most North Dakotans said: Why don't you get real and use a deep reservoir of common sense and solve this problem the right way. Spare taxpayers the expense of spending a lot of money, and do what we have done in the Grand Teton National Parks. That is the reason that last week I included the provision in the Interior Appropriations bill. I wanted to describe it to my colleagues. On behalf of the American taxpayer, let's do what is right and use some common sense. This is not that complicated. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, there is no State in the Union that is prouder of its military heritage than North Dakota. When I began the North Dakota Veterans History Project a few years ago to record the stories of our veterans for future generations, the outpouring of interest around the State resulted in more than 1,500 interviews. In the past, I have spoken in this Chamber about the nine North Dakota soldiers who earned Medals of Honor during a single campaign in the 1899 Philippine Insurrection, about the famed 164th Infantry Regiment of the North Dakota National Guard, about the ``Happy Hooligans'' of the North Dakota Air National Guard's 119th Fighter Wing, and about Woody Keeble who won the Medal of Honor for his heroism in Korea. Today, I would like to tell you about some more North Dakota military heroes. On July 4 of this year, the city of Park River, ND, is going to devote part of its 125th anniversary celebration to recognizing the military service of a truly remarkable North Dakota ``band of brothers.'' In 1920, Edward Lothspeich of Langdon, ND, married Rose Dirkes of Sauk Centre, MN. They settled in Wales, ND, where Ed managed a lumber yard. In time, Ed and Rose Lothspeich became the proud parents of nine sons and one daughter. The nine Lothspeich brothers hold a unique record in the history of the State of North Dakota. Each one of them served in U.S. Armed Forces. That is most from any single family in our State. Let me tell you a bit about each of them. Eugene Lothspeich, the eldest son, served in the Army from 1942 to 1945. He was a machine gunner with the 337th Infantry Regiment through three campaigns in Italy. He received the Purple Heart for wounds received in the Apennines. Harold served in the Army from 1943 to 1946. He served in the Pacific theater and saw combat on the islands of Leyte and Luzon. Edward served in the Navy from 1943 to 1946. He was a machinist's mate and repaired damaged ships while stationed in Hawaii and San Diego, CA. Donald was inducted in the Army in 1950 and served for 2 years in Germany. Gerald was drafted into the Army in 1950 and was stationed at Fort Lewis, WA, for 2 years, except for a short period when he was sent to Nevada to support nuclear weapons testing. Lyle was inducted in the Army in 1951. He served in Hawaii, Iceland, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he was a rifle instructor. Marlin served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1955. He served in Japan in the Air Force Medical Service Corps. Franklin entered the Army in 1955. He served in Germany as a tank gunner. Leon, the youngest of the nine Lothspeich brothers, served in the Army from 1954 to 1957. He was stationed in Germany where he worked with guided missiles. From World War II, through the Korean conflict and into the early years of the Cold War, Leon, Eugene, Harold, Edward, Donald, Gerald, Lyle, Marlin, and Franklin Lothspeich served with honor and bravery. These nine men, a ``band of brothers,'' made many sacrifices for the safety and freedom of our country and the world. Today I want to particularly honor three of the brothers who are still with us: Lyle, Marlin, and Franklin. Our Nation is what it is today because of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen like the Lothspeich brothers who were willing to leave their homes so many years ago and travel around the world to protect our freedom. They did it without complaint and without question. They loved their country. There is a verse that goes, ``When the night is full of knives, and the lightning is seen, and the drums are heard, the patriots are always there, ready to fight and ready to die, if necessary, for freedom.'' These brothers I have just described are true patriots. The story of the nine Lothspeich bothers is a remarkable one. It illustrates the strength of character and hardy determination that has served America so well for so many years. The Lothspeich brothers loved their country and answered the call of duty. They stood up for America, and I am honored to salute their service today in the Senate.

Mr. DORGAN

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

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, as this country tries to pull itself out of a very significant economic crisis in which millions of Americans have lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost hope, there are a number of things we have to do that also threaten the future of this country, in addition to trying to restore some economic health, and those include health care to be sure--we are working on this issue of health care; the second is an energy policy that makes us less dependent on foreign oil, where we are far too vulnerable and far too dependent; and the third is the relentless march of increased Federal budget deficits. All three of these issues, in my judgment, threaten our country's future. I wish to speak about them in the coming days. Today, I wish to talk about health care specifically. Let me again say, I do that with the understanding that first and foremost we have to pull this country out of the difficulties we are in with the general economy and try to find ways to promote economic growth and put people back to work with jobs that pay well and give them the opportunity to care for their families. That is what gets America moving again. But when we do that, when we begin to restore this economy to economic health, the vulnerabilities that will remain are health care, energy, and the Federal budget deficits far into the future. So let me talk about health care just a bit. I know there is a lot of discussion in the committees, the two relevant committees, the Finance Committee and the so-called HELP Committee, both of which are writing pieces of the health care reform bill. It is true that increased health care costs--the increased cost of insurance for families, businesses, and governments--are on the march. Now it consumes over 17 percent of the domestic product of this country. Of all the goods and services we produce, over 17 percent of that is consumed by health care. And the rate of increase is unsustainable. Families will not be able to pay the extra cost year after year after year. We are told that nationally it now costs about $12,000 for a family health insurance policy. So what do we do about this? Well, we hear a lot of discussion on the floor of the Senate, when we start talking about health care, where people will say: Well, now you are talking about a government-run health care system in which a bureaucrat is going to make decisions about how much treatment your doctor can provide to you personally. That is just absurd. That is not what this discussion is about. But if we can get back to some thoughtful discussion rather than thoughtless discussion on health care, maybe we can all reach an agreement of how to improve this system. I personally think this system needs improving. Let me describe some things I think we should do. First of all, we do not have a health care system so much as we have a sick care system. We do not pay any attention in this country to the things that can keep you from being sick or getting sick; we just pay a lot of money to put you into acute-care beds once you have gotten sick. That makes no sense at all. We ought to change the entire model to say it is much, much less costly to do the preventive things than it is to pay for acute-care beds in a hospital once someone gets sick. This is all about behavior in many respects, and nobody wants to talk much about that. But behavior is a very important part of this. We are told that two-thirds of the American people are overweight and one- third are obese. Just that alone imposes unbelievable costs on this health care system of ours. By the way, attendant to that issue of obesity and being overweight is the march of diabetes. The incidence of diabetes in this country is unbelievable. It just ratchets up and up and up every year. Now, you wonder about that, wonder about America's children and the number of children who are overweight and obese. Walk into a school and then find out that in a number of schools in our country, they have decided to make money by allowing the soda machines, the pop machines, from the largest manufacturers in this country to sell Coke and Pepsi and other soft drinks in the school hallways. You can buy not only a soft drink full of sugar, you can then buy, perhaps, a bag of Doritos to go with it in the middle of the afternoon at school. So what kind of message is that in a country in which a substantial number of the people--especially children--are vastly overweight and in which we, by the way, minimize physical fitness in our schools because we have become very obsessed--and necessarily so--we care now more about math and sciences and getting out of our school system more engineers, more people steeped in the maths and sciences. But should that be at the expense of physical fitness? What kind of a brain is walking around without a physical being to propel it? How about some physical fitness in our schools? How about moving soda machines or the soft drink machines and the Doritos and Cheetos out of the school hallways? Those things are just common sense. It is about personal behavior, and it is about what we do in this country. By the way, the reason those machines are there is, if they can put machines in the hallways of schools, the companies will provide money to the schools. So that is how we are going to fund our school system these days--through soft drinks and chips? It does not make much sense to me. With respect to this issue of personal responsibility and behavior, let me describe a meeting we held about a week and a half ago with the CEO of Safeway corporation. I know he has met with groups of Republicans and Democrats here in the Congress. He said something very interesting, and I am using numbers that I think approximate what he said. They may not be precise, but I believe he told us there are between 40,000 and 50,000 employees at Safeway corporation who are nonunion. He began a project with those 40,000 and 50,000 people in health care, and now he is beginning to try to move that into the union contracts. Here is the project. That company says to its employees: I want responsibility for four areas in exchange for lower cost health insurance. We believe behavior is an important part of controlling health care costs. No. 1, if you have high blood pressure, we want you taking medicine to control your high blood pressure. No. 2, if you have high cholesterol, we want you taking medicine to control your high cholesterol. And I believe he said the company is paying for that. No. 3, if you are smoking, you have to have stopped or be on a program to stop. No. 4, if you are overweight, you have to be on a program to deal with that issue. Cholesterol, high blood pressure, weight, and smoking--in each case, from a baseline of the cost of health insurance policies, those who are engaged in behavior that addresses these four issues have gradations of lesser costs for their health insurance premiums. In other words, it is about personal behavior and taking responsibility for addressing the things that can keep you healthy. He indicated to us that they have had flat costs for 5 years in that body of employees dealing with this criteria in health care. That is a success. If that is the model he is using, saying: You have a responsibility. By the way, even in their cafeteria, where they have partially subsidized company food during the lunch hours, just as an example, he said: We still serve unhealthy things. But we charge much, much more for it--once again trying to induce the behavior to take a healthy alternative. So I think what Steve Burd, the CEO of Safeway, has suggested represents something we need to consider as we write our health care legislation. There is another element that was brought to my attention recently and I think has been brought to the President's attention and Members of the Congress, and that is a New Yorker article written by Atul Gawande, a doctor from Harvard. He visited McAllen, TX, and El Paso, TX, and wondered why in one city you have the highest costs per capita for health care and why the other city is just average. What caused this? He has a lot of conclusions, and I think very interesting conclusions, about overutilization in health care, and the movement of doctors' ownership with respect to the business side of health care. The doctors' ownership in a cancer clinic, ownership in a new heart clinic, those kinds of things that he suggests promote substantial overutilization. The fact is, in our part of the country, where it is reasonably sparsely populated--the northern Great Plains--almost every hospital of any size wants to have a cardiac surgical unit so they can do open- heart surgery. They do not all need to do that. In fact, it duplicates services, which then ends up costing more because you are duplicating services. But every hospital wants it. So many of our States have more than is necessary of cardiac surgical suites. This weekend, I was reading about two hospital groups merging, and one of them indicated that one of the advantages would be they would be able to then perform perhaps procedures they do not now perform, citing especially heart transplants. Why would we want duplication of a lot of facilities doing heart transplants? It does not seem to make sense to me. There are not so many done in the United States that we should not at least try to suggest that you do not need too many heart transplant centers. Some say: Well, then who should tell them they cannot do that? Well, if you just decide that overutilization is all right; whatever it costs, it costs; whatever it pays, it pays, I think I can tell you that you cannot solve this issue. Again, I am not suggesting government-run health care, but I am saying we ought to be reasonably smart about what we are doing, and that has not always been the case. I wish to talk about one of the fastest rising areas of health care costs for a moment; that is, the issue of prescription drugs. By the way, maybe they ought to tone down some of this advertising or knock it off. You get up in the morning and brush your teeth. If you have a television set near and have it on just for listening purposes, you are no doubt going to hear a commercial that says: Do you know what, you should go ask your doctor whether the purple pill is right for you. I do not know what a purple pill is, but they have described a purple pill that is going to do something for you, and they ask you to go ask your doctor if you should be taking the purple pill because you cannot get it unless a doctor thinks you need it. We have massive amounts of advertising on prescription drugs in this country. In fact, some have indicated that the promotion and advertising and marketing of prescription drugs exceed research and development by the companies that manufacture prescription drugs. Frankly, for anything that is prescribed only by a doctor and capable of being prescribed only by a doctor, why do you have direct-to- consumer advertising? Most nations like ours do not allow it. I believe there is only one other of the industrialized nations that does-- something to consider about perhaps reducing health care costs. But I want to talk about the other side of prescription drugs. Mr. President, if I might by unanimous consent show these two bottles.

Mr. DORGAN. Lipitor is one of the most popular prescription drugs in the United States, I believe, for lowering cholesterol. These bottles are identical. One is blue and one is red. They look identical because they are produced by the same company. It is produced in Ireland. Lipitor is produced in Ireland and shipped around the world. The difference between these two bottles is not the medicine inside. It is the same pill, made by the same company, in the same place. The difference is it is shipped to different places. This one is shipped to Canada, and this one is shipped to the United States. The U.S. consumer has the pleasure of paying twice the cost as the Canadian consumer. But it is not just Canadian. It is French. It is Italian. It is British. It is that almost every other industrialized country pays a fraction of the price we do. Why should the American consumer be charged the highest price in the world for this prescription drug? Because those who apply the price have the ability to do it. Some of us--Senator McCain, myself, Senator Kennedy, Senator Grassley--Republicans and Democrats--Senator Snowe, especially, my cosponsor on the importation of prescription drug legislation--some of us believe the American people ought to have the ability and the advantage of the world marketplace to purchase that identical prescription drug--FDA approved, produced in an FDA-inspected plant--to be able to purchase it from anywhere in the world at a fraction of the price. We put together legislation that dramatically improves the safety of our domestic prescription drug supply and the drugs coming in. By the way, a lot of the prescription drugs we take are imported. Lipitor is imported into this country. The pharmaceutical industry-- which has always opposed our legislation because they want to charge the highest prices in the world to the U.S. consumers--they say: Well, if you do this, if you allow Americans to import FDA-approved drugs, there is a greater possibility of counterfeiting. Our legislation actually will dramatically improve safety because we require pedigree-- we do all kinds of safety mechanisms that do not now exist with respect to our prescription drug supply. So my point is, this is not rocket science. Do you want to reduce health care costs? I would say to the Finance Committee, and the HELP Committee, make sure you put this piece in your legislation because some of the fastest rising costs in this country are prescription drugs, and we know how to solve that. If we pass the legislation Senator Snowe and I have introduced, with broad bipartisan support, that allows the importation of FDA-approved prescription drugs by American consumers, it will require the pharmaceutical industry to reprice their drugs and allow our consumers to have fair prices for the prescription drugs they take. By the way, our legislation is actually a winner. It is $50 billion dollars in cost savings and deficit reduction, according to the CBO evaluation. So the fact is, there are a lot of things we can do and a lot of things that represent common sense. I know some will want to put together a health care proposal that would look like a Rubik's Cube with all kinds of moving pieces. It need not be that complicated. I just described some of the things we can do that represent common sense. Let me make one more point. Medicare has been a very successful program. When Medicare was started, the fact is, they established a base funding for Medicare that represented the cost for health care delivery at that time from that place. The result is, those areas with the highest costs got the biggest reimbursements. And it is still true today that some of the States--including my State--measured with some of the highest quality of health care in this country get the lowest reimbursement because they are the most efficient. That is preposterous. Whatever we do on health care, it has to address that issue. Let us at least, after nearly 40 years, begin to decide we will not reward inefficiency and we will not reward higher costs. I am not suggesting this is unbelievably simple; it is not. In many ways, I kind of wish we could hearken back to the old days, but in the old days we didn't have the medical miracles and the medicine we have now. In my hometown of 300 people--a small town--we did have a doctor. He came as a young man and stayed until he died, and he provided health care. There was no Medicare. He provided health care to anybody who needed it, and if they couldn't pay him, he would take some chickens or a hog or a side of beef. If he was out on a ranch or a farm and delivered a baby and they didn't have any money, and somebody else had money, he would charge a little extra to make up for the people who couldn't pay, so he administered his own health care system. Then we couldn't look inside the human body. We didn't have the miracle medicines through the NIH and PhRMA and others that allow us to stay out of an acute care bed. We didn't have all of those things. So now health care has become much more complicated. According to the New Yorker magazine article, which I recommend to everybody, when we have decided to make health care a ``business proposition'' where you can get several doctors together and open a cancer center, that becomes something in which you promote overutilization. And it is happening in parts of our country. We need to be concerned about that and try to evaluate what can we do together to deal with it. One final point. Some of my colleagues march to the floor every single day and allege that a bill that doesn't yet exist is going to be a government takeover of health care. Well, apparently they are clairvoyant, because we don't yet have a bill. When that bill exists, they have every right to come to the floor and describe the facts about the bill. One would hope in this debate we could stick to those facts, but there is not yet a fact that allows somebody to say there is a government takeover of health care, because there is not yet a bill out of either of our committees. There have been some introductions of topics and legislative proposals, but that is far different than a bill from a committee. We will have undoubtedly a robust debate on this, and we should. Health care is a very important element in this country's economy. It is growing, and growing too fast, and we need to deal with it to make sure all Americans have access to health care. A sick child should not have to wonder whether they get to see a doctor depending on how much money their parents have in their wallet or their bank account. That is not what health care ought to be in this country. So we can and will do much better. I indicated I wish to talk about the future threats to this country, one of which is the march of health care costs. The second, in my judgment, is our unbelievable vulnerability on foreign oil and energy. The third is deficits. I will talk about the following two in the coming days as well. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we are to report the pending legislation.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the legislation that is now the business of the Senate, on which we will have a cloture vote at 5:30, is legislation that probably demonstrates that agreement is near impossible in this body. If you cannot agree on tourism, what can you agree on? Tourism ought not to be the subject of very substantial controversy. Yet it is. Last week, in an article in Roll Call, it says ``Senate GOP still saying no.'' The quote is: When they bring bills up, we are going to extend the debate as long as we can, block everything. So this legislation is simple, and it is bipartisan. Republicans and Democrats have both supported this legislation. I was the author of it. We have Republican and Democratic cosponsors. It is the Travel Promotion Act. Why should we promote travel? If you watched the U.S. Open Golf Tournament today, you might have seen the country of Turkey advertising during that golf tournament. They were running an advertisement saying: Come to Turkey. We want you to travel to Turkey and see the wonders of our great country. Why would they do that? Most countries are now aggressively involved in trying to attract international destination tourism to their country. Why is that the case? We know on average that an international traveler spends about $4,500 per trip, and that means they are purchasing hotel rooms and car rentals and going to see exhibits and parks and all kinds of things. The fact is, it is job creating in a country where international travelers visit. So most countries are now very active trying to attract people to their countries. Japan is, as are Great Britain, Italy, Turkey, France--you name it. I have some charts. Here is an example of what is happening out there. This is an advertisement: ``Sweet secrets from Japan.'' To learn about Japan and its culinary arts and traditions, this is an advertisement saying: Come to Japan. Come and travel in the country of Japan. Here is an advertisement from France. Picasso, Normandy Landings. Come and see France with the Eiffel Tower. Here is one for Belgium. ``Travel to Belgium where fun is all in fashion,'' they say. Brussels, ``Sophisticated simplicity, the capital of cool.'' This one says: ``One special reason to visit India in 2009. Any time is a good time to visit the land of Taj. But there's no time like now.'' Come to India. The list goes on and on. Here is Ireland. ``The Emerald Island. Go where Ireland takes you.'' And here is a beautiful picture of Ireland saying: Come to our country. Finally, we have Australia. ``Arrive for an experience to remember. Depart with an adventure we'll never forget.'' Come to Australia. I describe these and the fact that Turkey advertises on a golf tournament because here is what happened to visitors to the United States since 2000: Between 2000 and 2008, we have had a 3-percent decrease in visitors to our country from other countries. Mr. President, 633,000 fewer people have come to the United States to visit per year that existed in 2000. Over 8 years, we have actually lost ground and had fewer people visit the United States. Contrast that with the number of international visitors around the world, which is up 40 percent. The United States is down 3 percent. We have constructed--Republicans and Democrats together--a piece of legislation, which I have brought to the floor, that attempts to get our country into the game to say let's compete with Australia, France, Italy, Turkey, and Belgium and ask international visitors and travelers to come to our country to see the wonders of our great country. Spend some money here to create jobs here and create economic development here. We are not doing that now. We are not even in the game. So we suggest a private-public partnership we believe could be very helpful in attempting to stimulate international visitors to our country. The Travel Promotion Act will encourage visitors from all around the world. We establish a corporation for travel promotion. We fund it with a very small charge on international visitors coming to our country, as most countries do, by the way, a $10 fee on those who are coming from the countries that had the visa waiver provision with our country. Here is what has been said about our country recently, and here is perhaps why fewer people are visiting the United States. The Sydney Morning Herald said, ``Coming to America is not easy.'' I think there was a feeling around the world post-9/11, we are very interested in trying to keep some people out of here. Obviously we wanted to keep terrorists out. But we made it pretty difficult for people to come visit, get a visa, stand in line, wait for months. The Guardian said, ``America, more hassle than it's worth.'' The Sunday Times in London says: ``Travel to America? No thanks.'' So a group of us, a large group, over 50 in the last Congress, put legislation together saying: Let's find a unique way to promote our country. We put together the Travel Promotion Act. And by the way, unlike almost every other piece of legislation that comes to the floor of the Senate, that costs money and would increase the deficit if not paid for, the Congressional Budget Office says: Enacting this bill would reduce budget deficits by $429 million--that is almost a half a billion dollars--between 2010 and 2019. So this would reduce the budget deficit. We are not talking about something that spends money. This reduces the budget deficit over 10 years by nearly $500 million. We fund this, in large part, with a small $10 fee from the visa waiver countries in which visitors are traveling to our country. As I have described, Australia has a $37 departure fee; Guatemala, $30; the Philippines, $15; United Kingdom, $80 to $160. The fact is, this goes on all around the world. We are proposing a very modest fee on visitors from visa waiver countries. Newspapers all across this country have supported this. Dallas Morning News: The Travel Promotion Act is a sensible first step toward putting the welcome mat back on America's doorstep. The Detroit Free Press: Doesn't it make sense to encourage, at no cost to taxpayers, foreign visitors to come here and leave us some of their money? There is no good reason not to pass this bill. The Los Angeles Times: Considering that the U.S. spends hundreds of millions of dollars on public diplomacy with dubious results, and nearly nothing promoting tourism, we might do well to invest a little money in wooing travelers. The Sacramento Bee: This country needs to reclaim its status as a global magnet for visitors, even in the post-9/11 climate. And Congress could help by passing the Travel Promotion Act by the end of this year. This ought to be something that we bring up and almost pass by unanimous consent. Guess what kind of a tortured journey this bill has been on. First and foremost, the bill is reported to the floor--and you have got to have a motion to proceed. You cannot just bring it to the floor. If someone insists, no, no, you have got to have a debate and then a vote on whether you should even proceed to the bill. So we did. Not because we should have had to do that, just because someone said: You know what, we are going to decide to be a human set of brake pads and slow down everything that happens in the Senate and prevent anybody from getting anything done. So on a travel bill, the Travel Promotion Act, that actually reduces the Federal budget deficit and tries to attract international visitors to our country, which would be a good thing--there is a lot here to see and experience, and almost everyone who leaves after visiting the United States of America has an unbelievably good opinion of what we are about. This is a great country, yes, with a lot of attractions, but a country whose culture and character is something we need to exhibit to everybody in this world to say: Here is who we are. Here is what America is about. Here is the grand idea that is the most successful democracy in history. Come here. Visit here. Become a part of what we are experiencing on your international travels. We are not doing that now. But we suggest we should. The bill that is broadly bipartisan to do that is to be brought to the floor of the Senate. We are told: No, you cannot do that. First you must have a debate, and then a vote on the motion to proceed. So we have to file what is called a cloture petition, which takes 2 days to ripen. You lose 2 days. Then we have a vote. And the vote is 90 to 3 in favor of it. The implication there is we should not have had to have a vote and waste a couple of days. But we did. Then, after the cloture vote, 90 to 3, we were told: No, you cannot go to the bill yet, there is 30 hours postcloture, and we insist on burning all 30 hours postcloture. We had 2 days for the cloture petition, then a 90-to-3 vote, then we had 30 hours wasted time postcloture. Why? Because someone insisted upon it. And so now all of a sudden we are on the bill. Well, last Thursday and Friday, I worked, Senator Reid worked, and many others worked to see, all right, we are on the bill. Now can we figure out what kind of amendments are going to be offered. We had a discussion over there in the middle of the aisle with Senators McConnell, Reid, Martinez, and others. We agreed we would begin with amendments on each side. Perhaps we started with three and two, then we said five amendments on the Republican side and three amendments here at least to start the process. Can you give us a list of your amendments? We got a list of the amendments, five amendments on what is called the TARP program, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, having nothing at all to do with this bill. We said: That is fine. Okay. You want to have five debates and votes on TARP. Okay. Here are our three amendments, two of which had to do with the studies. The other was an amendment by Senator Sanders that said to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that we want them to use all of the authority they now have, plus any emergency authority, use the authority you now have to start finding a way to shine the light on these unbelievable speculators who are running up the price of gasoline. Not a very controversial amendment. It does not give the CFTC any new authority. It deals with the question of the runup in the price of gasoline. It does not give anyone any new authority. But the Republican side said: Nope, we are not going to allow you to offer that amendment. We are going to tell you which amendments we intend to offer. We said, okay, that is fine, whatever amendments you have, God bless you, go ahead and offer them. But they say, but you cannot describe to us a set of amendments, three, five to three, and if the three includes an amendment to try to see if you can shut down some of the excess speculation using the authority that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission now has, we are not willing to do that. Most people would listen to all of this and say, it is the same old thing. Nobody can agree on anything. But, you know, in every circumstance where there is disagreement, there has to be someone who is holding out. Right? We come to the floor today without an agreement on amendments, so the majority leader had to file a cloture petition. We have a cloture vote at 5:30 today. This Congress cannot even agree on tourism, for God's sake. Unbelievable to me. How dysfunctional can a legislative body become? You cannot agree on tourism. But let me at least talk for a minute, before I talk about the importance now of having a cloture vote and requiring to have a cloture vote on this, let me talk about what the other side objects to with an amendment that my colleague wants to offer. I agree that the amendment does not relate to the bill, but their first five amendments had nothing to do with the bill either. So why should the minority be telling the majority what kind of amendments they can offer? But here is the amendment. People remember when the price of oil went from about $40 up to $147 a barrel in day trading; went up like a Roman candle, then came right back down. The same hotshots, the same speculators, who made a fortune pushing up the price of oil, made a fortune on the upside, the same folks made a fortune on the downside. The victims are the people who drive up to the gas pump having to pay $4, $4.50 for gasoline. Let me show you what has happened. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission--I mean nobody knows what that is much outside of Washington, DC, CFTC. We have all of these acronyms. Well, it is a group of people who have done their level best imitation of a potted plant for a long time. They decided to do very little in areas where much was needed. The oil futures market is a very important market. You need to hedge, we understand that. The futures market is established for a very specific reason, and it is an important market. But speculators have broken the back of that market. Here is what happened. Thirty-seven percent of the trades in the oil futures market were by speculators in 2000. Now it is 80 percent. That is what caused the price of oil to go up to $147 a barrel. They were speculating on the way up; they turned it and were speculating on the way down and made money on both sides. Before I show what has happened to the price of oil now--by the way, it is starting again. Demand is down because of the recession, and the supply of oil is up, and the price is going up. What does that tell you? It tells you the same shenanigans are going on. And the CFTC, which is supposed to be our agency, that is the referee with the striped shirt and the whistle, supposed to be watching what is going on and taking action to shut some of it down, once again, not much going on. Senator Sanders says: We ought to ask them, at least ask them, to use all of their authority to shut it down. We have a government agency called the EIA, Environmental Information Administration. It costs about $100 million a year, actually over $100 million a year. Their job is to know everything there is to know about energy, and to make the best estimates they can make. I want to show a chart that shows the runup to the $147 a barrel for oil. This chart shows 2007-2008. The yellow line is the estimates by our agency, the EIA, saying: Here is where we think the price of oil is going. Each yellow line--this, for example, is January 2008. They said: Here is where we think the price of oil is headed. March 2008: Here is where we think it is headed. Of course, this was the price. One would ask the question, and reasonably so: Who are these best informed people at EIA who are supposed to give us an estimate of what is going on? Well, what is going on now? What we see now is an EIA projection made in January of this year, the yellow line. The EIA says: Here is where we think oil is going to go now. But, of course, anybody who drives a car and has stopped at a gas pump recently understands what is happening to the price of oil. The price of oil is something now over $70 a barrel, on the march from $37 a barrel. That is happening at a time when demand is down and supply is up. I taught economics in college ever so briefly. But the supply-demand curve is something you can learn the first day. When supply is up and demand is down, price is not supposed to go up. If it is going up, there is something wrong. There is something happening. And that is what is happening now. Where will it go? Will it go to $90? I notice one of our big investment banks thought it would go to $90. I would love, if I had subpoena capability, to find the position that investment bank was holding in oil futures as they made that announcement. But that is an aside for another day. The question is: Is it reasonable to have an amendment by Senator Sanders to say: We want the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to use all of their authority to try to understand what is going on? The other side says: Absolutely not. We do not intend to allow you to offer that amendment. I mean, I do not understand why. Whose interests would they be supporting or protecting? The speculators? Big investment banks? Those who are holding oil offshore in ships? Those investment banks that actually have bought oil storage for the first time in history to take oil out of supply and store it, and wait as the price goes up and make money? Is that whose interests are at stake here? Let me come back to the point I was making. We tried very hard Thursday and Friday to reach an agreement on amendments on both sides. We said: Absolutely. You want amendments. You want all five amendments on the TARP program? It has nothing to do with the bill. By all means, feel free. Start offering. We are ready. And the other side said: Well, you give us all we want, but we do not intend to agree to much of anything you want, kind of a one-way agreement that they would have known was destined to fail. Again, I do not understand how we have gotten to a point on a piece of legislation that should be so noncontroversial, sufficient so that with a 90-to-3 vote on the motion to proceed, it is brought to the floor of the Senate, a bill that had over 50 cosponsors last year here in the Senate, a bill that deals with travel and promotion of travel and tourism, that we now have this unbelievable impasse. We had to have 2 days with a cloture motion on a motion to proceed that passed 90 to 3 and then have 30 hours postcloture. Then we were going on this merry-go-round last Thursday and Friday with an absurd proposition that the minority wants to decide what amendments the majority can have, despite the fact that the majority says: You can have whatever amendments you want. They must have missed the last couple of elections. They apparently think they run the Senate. What runs the Senate is consensus--consensus by people who care about getting things done on important issues. If you cannot do something on tourism, how on Earth are you going to do something on health care and energy and climate change and a lot of things that matter a lot about this country and the future? If you cannot do a tourism bill, what can you do? It is pretty unbelievable to me. I know we can have people come and explain, even until they are completely out of breath, why they object to everything. I just described: Senate GOP still saying no. Democrats need to know when bills are coming up, we are going to extend the debate as long as we can--on and on and on. How about just picking out one or two little issues--one or two issues--that would advance the country's interests and say: Do you know what, on this issue we will just park the politics at home. We have to leave the politics back in the office. We will come to the floor and say: What is good for the country? I will tell you what is good for the country here on this issue; that is, in a very troubled world, where a lot of people have looked askance at this country and we have gotten some bad reputation around here and there--and some bad information about America--I will tell you what is good: to have people come to this country and just be around for a bit and experience this great country of ours and understand when they hit our shores this is a citadel of freedom. You can do everything you want. This is an unbelievable place, and we need people in the world to understand it and to understand especially this: You are welcome to come here. We want you here. We want you to come and see and sample and understand what America is about. That is what this bill is. If we cannot even agree on that, how on Earth will we agree on the big issues of the day? We will have a cloture vote at 5:30. My guess is, the minority will say: We believe this vote needs to be a leadership vote. All of you have to vote against cloture because we haven't offered the first amendment. Do you know why you have not offered the first amendment? Because you would not agree on anything. We tried Thursday. We tried Friday. You would not agree on anything. We agreed on all your amendments, and you would not agree on a thing. So here we are--I and my Democratic and Republican cosponsors on this bill we have worked on now for 2 years--coming now to a cloture vote in which some will say to others: You can't vote for cloture because we haven't had any amendments. I hope perhaps between now--10 to 4 o'clock--and 5:30, if there are well-meaning people in this Chamber who really wish to make progress for our country, we could have an agreement on amendments and then just go forward. Let's do that. I was there when Senator Reid said to the minority leader: Look, let's just at least start. We do not have to have a whole list of all the amendments. Let's just start. If you want the first five amendments--whatever it is you want--bring them on. We will have the amendments. And we will give you three of ours. Let's just start the process. We could not even get that done Thursday and Friday. The American people deserve better than that from all of us. They deserve a Senate that works. And if the Senate cannot work on bipartisan legislation dealing with tourism, can you name a subject where it will work? My hope is that in the next hour and a half, perhaps some will come to the floor who have the interest and the ability to reach an agreement, so we can begin the amendment process and finish the bill this week. We can do that. We should not defeat this cloture motion. In fact, we should vitiate the motion--if we could get the leadership of the other side to come to the floor and say: We agree with what you proposed last week. Let's start. Let's start now. Let's have some amendments tonight and have some votes. We can do that. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, at 5:30 we will be having a cloture vote, and the cloture vote deals with the underlying legislation called the Travel Promotion Act. As I said earlier this afternoon, if the Congress cannot agree on something such as tourism, what is to become of the issues of health care, energy, climate change or so many other significant controversial issues that come before us? This underlying bill is very simple. It is bipartisan. Over 50 Members of the Senate have cosponsored this bill in the last Congress. It actually reduces the Federal budget deficit by close to a half billion dollars. As I indicated, it should bear no controversy at all. It is simply the development of a public-private partnership that would begin to market our country, as most other countries are doing, in order to attract destination international tourism to our country. All the other countries are doing this. If you watched the golf tournament today--the U.S. Open--in the middle of the golf tournament, they broke to a commercial. It was the country of Turkey saying: Come to Turkey. Come and visit the wonders of Turkey. Well, good for Turkey. They are out trying to promote international tourism. But the same is true with France and Italy and Japan and India and Great Britain--so many other countries. Why are they doing that? They are doing it because it is unbelievably job creating to have international tourism come to your country. On average, an international tourist spends about $4,500 on hotels and cars and tourist attractions and food. So it is unbelievably job creating and boosting to the economy of the host country. But even more important than that, our country needs to do this. From 2000 to 2008, we now have 633,000 fewer visitors per year from overseas than we had 8 years ago. Why is that the case? It is because some people believe we do not want them to visit our country. Quite the opposite is true. So we suggest, rather than to keep losing economic opportunities from international tourism, let's at least join the discussion and get in the game by promoting tourism to our country as a destination for international tourism. Let's at least get in the game. So our bill creates this public-private partnership and establishes the capability to begin promoting our country. Why is that important? Well, obviously economic development and jobs. But even more important, at a time when there has been so much controversy about our country and actions abroad, and so on, to invite people to our country and have them come here and visit this country is to have them leave with a wonderful impression about the United States of America. There just is not any way to visit our country and leave with a bad attitude about what the United States is and what it means. This is a great place, the greatest democracy in all of history, with unbelievable freedoms that many people in the world do not have. But it is a wonderful country, full of natural resources and wonderful people. To come here and visit is to leave and believe very positive things about our country. That, it seems to me, makes a lot of sense these days. Madam President, a colleague was on the floor just a bit ago saying, well, he could not vote for cloture at 5:30 because he was not allowed to offer his TARP amendment. Of course, TARP has nothing to do with the underlying bill. We said that he could offer the amendment. The rules of the Senate allow somebody to offer a TARP amendment. He says, however, that the majority--that is us--is saying: We are going to obstruct your right to amend the bill. This colleague must not have been around last Thursday and Friday when we were negotiating to try to get an agreement. Their side would offer the first five amendments. We said you can offer your first five amendments. All of them were so-called TARP amendments--the troubled asset relief program. Well, TARP amendments--having nothing to do with tourism and travel, but that is fine. We said: OK, you can offer that. So how is it somebody comes to the floor of the Senate now and says they are being obstructed? We said: You can offer them. But then what they said was: Well, we want five TARP amendments, and here are your three amendments. One of your three amendments is one by Senator Sanders that we will not allow you to offer. We object to that. What was the Sanders amendment? It was pretty simple. The Sanders amendment would require that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission use existing authority to begin trying to tackle this question of what is happening in the runup of oil prices. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has acted like a potted plant for a long time. Oil prices went to $147 a barrel in mid-2008. Yet, the CFTC was explaining to us: Well, that is just supply and demand. That is total nonsense--total nonsense. It had nothing to do with supply and demand. It had to do with speculators breaking that oil futures market. So the CFTC did nothing about it. Right now, the supply of oil is up; demand is down; and the price is going up. Once again, there is something wrong. So the Senator from Vermont wanted to offer an amendment. So I included it in the list of the amendments we would offer to the Republicans last Thursday and Friday, saying: OK, you want to offer five amendments that have nothing to do with the bill. That is fine. You can do that. Here are the three amendments we propose to start with. They said: No, no, no. You cannot offer the Sanders amendment. Wait a second. The minority is going to decide what the majority can offer? We have just said to the minority: You can offer your five TARP amendments that have nothing to do with this bill. That is fine. So now we have somebody coming to the floor this afternoon saying he has to vote against cloture because the majority says: We are going to obstruct your right to amend? Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the decision by the minority has put us in this position. So apparently we will have people coming to the floor of the Senate with the belief that somebody obstructed their right to amend the bill. But the TARP amendments they proposed were agreed to by us, that we would allow them, they were fine to be offered. Everyone thought that was the case. We will have some people come to the floor apparently deciding to vote against cloture on this bill because they say somebody obstructed their right to amend. That is just totally without foundation. It is Byzantine to me that here we are in the Senate on a piece of legislation called the Travel Promotion Act, which is designed to promote tourism, to create jobs and to promote this country's interests. It is widely bipartisan. It has been around now for 2\1/2\ years or so, with no great controversy I know of. We have before us a bill for which we were required to file cloture and wait 2 days for a cloture vote just on the motion to proceed to it. Once we got to the motion to proceed, we had a vote--and guess what. Ninety to three we said: Yes, let's proceed to it. Then the minority said: And, oh, by the way, no, you can't proceed yet because we are going to insist on the 30 hours post-cloture. So you have to wait 30 more hours. Total, complete, thorough delay. So it does not sit well with me for anybody to come here to say that somebody is being obstructed.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that unless a member of the minority comes to claim time, that we be allowed to continue, I be allowed to continue. If a member of the minority does come to the Senate floor, I certainly would relinquish the time.