Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in recess until the following days and times for pro forma sessions only, with no business being conducted: Monday, November 24 at 9:30 a.m.; Wednesday, November 26 at 10 a.m.; Saturday, November 29 at 2 p.m.; Tuesday, December 2 at 10:30 a.m.; and Friday, December 5 at 11 a.m.; and that when the Senate recesses on Friday, it stand in recess until 3 p.m., Monday, December 8; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate proceed to a period of morning business for up to 1 hour, with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, over the next few weeks, Senators will be continuing to negotiate a bill to provide assistance to the auto industry. If an agreement is reached--for the information of the Members--the Senate will turn to its consideration when the Senate returns on December 8. That is a message from the majority leader, Senator Reid.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand in recess under the previous order.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 20 minutes as in morning business.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I think it is obvious to all Americans that we face a very severe and difficult financial crisis. We have had an election. The American people have voted for change. We now face significant challenges. I was thinking, as I was walking over to the floor of the Senate, about a visit I had recently at a nursing home in North Dakota. This financial crisis is probably the most significant financial crisis since the Great Depression. We don't know where this will go. We don't know how many will ultimately be unemployed. We don't know how long it will last. This is a recession. We hope it is not extraordinarily deep. We hope we can find the menu to overcome it and the kinds of policies to try to make certain we move from this position to a position of economic strength and economic growth, once again. But I went to a nursing home in North Dakota because North Dakota's oldest citizen was there. She had a birthday. She is a 110-year-old woman; very lucid, very conversational. We talked about the Great Depression, as a matter of fact. We talked about the tough times in her life. She was born in 1898. By the way, her niece was there at the nursing home who had put on a birthday party for her in August. Her niece is 103 years old and her son, who is still farming, is 80 years old. I had a chance to talk to them all about what life was like from 1898 to 2008. One of the significant things she remembered was the difficulty of the Great Depression in the 1930s, when it was hard to find jobs and people had soup lines in the major cities and people were struggling to try to make ends meet. Well, I think a lot of folks from the 1930s forward felt we would never again see these days because we put in place economic stabilizers and we put in place provisions in law that prohibited the kind of activities in the roaring 1920s that led us to the 1930s and the excess, the unbelievable debt, the greed that resulted in the economic collapse of the 1930s. So we put in place things such as the Glass- Steagall Act and other provisions that prevented banks from being engaged in real estate and securities and things that were inherently risky that caused major problems and collapse in the 1930s. It is easy to forget lessons. The Congress over the years, Presidents over the years, and certainly the financial services industry moved ahead. I harken back to 1999, when something called the Financial Modernization Act was passed by the Congress. I said then it was a terrible thing to have done. It stripped apart the Glass-Steagall Act and essentially said you can create big bank holding companies, you can put firewalls in, you can merge real estate and securities with banking; it will all be fine. That was in 1999. In fact, here is what I said during that debate on the floor of the Senate: I say, to people who own banks, if you want to gamble, go to Las Vegas. If you want to trade in derivatives, God bless you. Do it with your own money. Don't do it through deposits that are guaranteed by the American people. When we passed the Financial Modernization Act--and I was one of eight Senators to vote no, I said this during debate: The bill will, in my judgment, raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts. It will fuel the consolidation and mergers in the banking and financial services industry at the expense of customers, farm businesses, and others. I regret I was right. Massive taxpayer bailouts. It didn't take quite a decade. It took 9 years. Now we see the largest proposed bailouts in the history of our country. It was a time of self-regulation. Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve Board, said the financial services industry will regulate itself. Well, not quite. Here is what Alan Greenspan said last month: I made a mistake in presuming that self interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms. What an unbelievable mistake. Regulators that were willfully blind saying: You know what. We will pass the Financial Modernization Act allowing real estate, securities, and banking to come back together, forgetting the lessons of the Great Depression. Then, those who were hired to regulate decided self-regulation will work. We don't have to regulate. We will be willfully blind. So what happened? Well, the subprime loan scandal happened. The subprime loan scandal, of course, is at the root of this because it is most evident of the greed that exists in our economy in recent years. It resulted in bad mortgages spread all around this country and around the world. They were put into securities and sold up through banks into hedge funds, into investment banks, and then all of a sudden it all turned sour. Here is what the subprime loan scandal is all about. The biggest mortgage bank in America, just to show you what they were saying: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? If you have been denied by other lenders, well, call us. It is a new business model, apparently. Are you a bad credit risk? Call us. Countrywide said that. The CEO of Countrywide was given the Horatio Alger award--until it all collapsed. Millennium Mortgage said: Twelve months, no mortgage payments. That's right, we'll give you the money to make your first 12 payments if you call us in the next 7 days. We pay it for you. Our loan program will reduce your current monthly payment by 50 percent and allow you no payments for the first 12 months. Zoom Credit, another mortgage company, said this: Credit approval is just seconds away. Get on the fast track at Zoom Credit. At the speed of light, Zoom Credit will preapprove you for a car loan, a home loan, or a credit card. Even if your credit is in the tank, Zoom Credit is like money in the bank. Zoom Credit specializes in credit repair and debt consolidation, too. Bankruptcy, slow credit, no credit-- who cares? That is the bottomless pit of greed that resulted in massive numbers of mortgages being put out there in this country. Then the brokers were making an enormous amount of money. The mortgage bankers were making money and business fees, and then they securitized it, like they put sawdust in sausage in the old days--good loans and bad loans. They wrapped them into securities and chopped them up and sold them upstream. By the way, what they did, when they locked people into that kind of credit, those loans, they put in resets of higher interest rates in 3 years, where they would have known the homeowner wasn't going to be able to pay the monthly mortgage, and they put in prepayment penalties so they could not pay it off if they wanted to. That is how they made these attractive investments with high rates of return. So the subprime loan scandal made everybody rich, like hogs in a trough grunting and shoving and making lots of money. Then one day it collapsed like a house of cards. The hedge funds that were investing in these--the credit default swaps that surrounded them with massive amounts of leverage, it all collapsed. When you create a house of cards, it is destined to collapse. I mentioned hedge funds. Some of you may have seen the hearing held in the House a few days ago. The highest income earner in the hedge fund industry last year earned $3.7 billion. So we create this crisis, get rid of the protections that existed from the Great Depression, abolish Glass-Steagall, and create a Financial Modernization Act, and say everything will be great. Then the regulators turn into willfully blind public servants, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve says let them regulate themselves, and it all turns sour and the house of cards collapses. What is happening now is, the Treasury Secretary came to the Congress and said: We face very serious problems. I must have $700 billion in 3 days and, if not, I believe there is going to be a financial catastrophe of sorts. So the Congress didn't do it in 3 days, or with a three-page bill, as the Treasury Secretary suggested. But the Congress passed a $700 billion bailout proposal. The Treasury Secretary said he wanted to do that because he wanted to purchase toxic assets from the balance sheets of the firms that invested in all of this. So he got the $700 billion. Then he said: I have changed my mind. That is not what I am going to do with the $700 billion. I want to purchase capital from banks to extend their credit or lending opportunities because the credit markets are frozen. He took $125 billion of the $700 billion and gave it to nine banks, some of whom didn't want it. But he gave it to them with no strings attached, no requirement that they expand lending or not use it to pay substantial bonuses. We have seen examples of bonuses, with $33 billion in bonuses on Wall Street in 1 year. So no- strings-attached money was given to nine banks with no requirement to expand lending, no requirement to cut back on dividends, and no requirement that they not provide hefty bonuses. So the question is, is that going to inspire confidence out there someplace? Now we discover there has been no expansion of credit as a result of $125 billion of taxpayer money being put into those nine banks because it was no strings attached. So the next piece that occurs is unemployment. We hear constantly-- nearly 24 hours a day--about the financial sector. I agree the financial sector is unbelievably important to an economy such as ours, no question about that. How about the manufacturing sector, the working folks? Is that important? About a week ago there was almost an apoplectic seizure over the notion that consumption was down. Consumers weren't consuming. It is not a surprise when there are more people out of work and people have less money that they are going to consume less. Does it concern anybody out there as they listen to Mr. Paulson say the $700 billion that Congress gave him is destined only to be used for the financial industry? Does it concern anybody out there that the consumers losing their jobs are not going to be able to consume? That is part of this economy as well. Here is what we see on unemployment. The U.S. employment ranks have shrunk by 1.2 million in the first 10 months of this year--more than half of those jobs lost in the past 3 months alone. Last month, 240,000 jobs gone. About 800,000 workers exhausted their extended unemployment benefits, and more than 350,000 will exhaust theirs in November and December. This chart shows what is happening in the industry in 2008. Manufacturing, down nearly a half million jobs. Construction, nearly 400,000 jobs. Business services, 361,000 jobs gone, vanished. These are hundreds of thousands. Behind every one is somebody coming home at night to his or her family and saying: Honey, I have lost my job. I don't know why. I did a good job. I worked there for 10 years, but I was told the job doesn't exist anymore. This is about heartache by a lot of families. We experienced this before. Will Rogers, one of the interesting commentators on American life in the Great Depression, said: The unemployed here ain't eating regular, but we'll get around to them as soon as everybody else gets fixed up OK. I wanted to visit a moment about these issues and ask the question, is there going to be a laser-like focus on working people just as there has been on the financial services sector? There are a good many in the financial services sector that caused this wreck. They are the ones who steered this country into the ditch with all kinds of financial engineering and exotic new products that turned out to create a house of cards. It seems to me that one of the things we ought to look at is creating protection with respect to these new exotic financial products that turned out to be enormously risky and dangerous to our economy. Some have talked about creating a financial products safety commission. We have a Consumer Product Safety Commission to worry about unsafe products. That turned out to have been a commission without much teeth because of the person who currently runs it. Perhaps we can have a financial products safety commission that would take a look at derivatives, credit default swaps, and the kind of sophisticated engineering going on on Wall Street which might produce a lot of money for some in the short term but pose a great deal of danger for this economy in the intermediate and long term. That all makes a lot of sense. I just described the Treasury Secretary talking about the $700 billion he has now been provided, and that it is going to go to the financial service industry exclusively, he says. So it is not available to those who might be creating jobs out there or trying to avoid losing jobs. At the same time, the Treasury Secretary is saying: I have this pot of money, and we are going to use it to try to unfreeze the credit markets. The Treasury Department is saying they favor new bank mergers, which is exactly the last thing this country needs. We already have big banks that are too big to fail, which means if they are set to fail, we have to rescue them. Now the Treasury Department says the solution is bigger banks; let's have more mergers. It is unbelievable to me that the Treasury Department would not have learned a lesson. Instead, they are out there promoting more mergers. I guess those mergers will be promoted with the very money appropriated by the Congress. Mr. President, the action we have to take now, it seems to me, is to try to find ways to establish some confidence in this country. I have said often that I used to teach a bit of economics in college, briefly. I was able to overcome it. Economics is not a science; it is psychology pumped up with helium, and you can call yourself an economist, but nobody really knows. The economy in this country is not about dials, gauges, knobs, levers, and all of the things like investment tax credit, depreciation, M-1B, and all those things economists study. It is about confidence. When people are confident in the future, they do things that manifest that confidence. They buy a car, buy a new suit of clothes, take a trip, or maybe buy a house. They do the things that you do when you are confident about your future and your job. That is called economic expansion. It is not sophisticated. It is about how people view the future. When they view the future with great alarm and less confidence, they do exactly the opposite. They defer the purchase or decide not to buy that suit of clothes or buy that car until next year, or we will not move into that other home or take that trip. That is the way an economy contracts. It is all about confidence. The question is, what can provide that confidence now? One of the concerns I had about the original bailout was that it did nothing to provide a set of regulations that stops the very behavior that caused all of this. You have to learn from it. It seems to me you have to provide the regulation and say to the American people that we will not let this happen ever again. So there are a number of things we have to do. Any recovery plan--and I think we need a recovery plan, and some call it a stimulus. I think we need a recovery plan that gives people a sense that we care about whether they have a job. For example, there is discussion about the automobile industry. I don't view this as three companies or one industry. I view it in the context of what do we do to deal with this economy, especially as it relates to jobs. We are told that industry relates to about 3 million to 5 million jobs. That is the connector all the way through the industry. If that is the case, what would it mean if 3 million to 5 million jobs are lost in the next few months, coming from America's manufacturing base? It seems to me it would be devastating to an economy already at great risk. So the question is, when will we also ask whether we will be willing to support, through a recovery program, the kinds of jobs that we need in this country and willing to support a world-class manufacturing base without seeing that base decimated as the economy gets weaker? I don't think you will long remain a world economic power unless you have world-class manufacturing capabilities. When we look at those sectors of the economy that have that capability and then decide, as some suggest, that it doesn't matter who loses their job or gets laid off, well, it sure does matter. It matters to me. If there is all this concern about the financial sector, what about the concern about the job-creating sector in the manufacturing area? I think we need to do a number of things. No. 1, I think we need a stimulus or a recovery plan that would make significant investments. I don't think you do that by just giving people checks. That is not the way forward, in my judgment. I think you do it by putting people to work on public works projects, by investing in roads, bridges, schools, and libraries--the infrastructure needs that have been so long deferred in this country. All of those projects are ready across this country to be done. It will put people back to work, and give people confidence about the future. Second, we ought to take action this week so that we say to the Treasury Secretary: If you are going to continue to move money out of that $700 billion pot, you have to put conditions on it. We don't want the American people to have to read that they are anteing up money so the Treasury Secretary can move it to Wall Street and Wall Street can then pay bonuses in December and January and they can use that in any way they want without conditions that require them to expand lending or any other conditions that ought to be attached to that money. We ought to insist those conditions exist. Third, we ought to require regulations be put in place as soon as possible to prevent the kind of things that we have seen happen that caused this financial wreck in the first place. Those regulations do not now exist. I know the former Fed Chairman Greenspan said he believed in self-regulation. He sure got a bellyful of self-regulation, and it completely collapsed this economy. We need to put in place a regulatory approach that gives people confidence that this kind of thing is not going to happen again. We also ought to say to the Treasury Department: Stop the nonsense about more bank mergers. It is the last thing we need. Nor should we want the public money to be used to accommodate more bank mergers. I know some have celebrated the news of bank mergers. Not me. I think it weakens this country, not strengthen it. I also believe we ought to create immediately an investigative task force of sorts that will begin to investigate and prosecute, if necessary, criminal behavior that was engaged in some of the practices that I described earlier. All of that, I think, is necessary. I believe if and when we begin doing those kinds of things, we will give, once again, the American people the confidence about the future that they must have in order for this economy to get back on track. There is, I know, a lot of discussion about what went wrong, and some might say: You know what, that is pretty irrelevant. It is not irrelevant at all. We are destined to repeat mistakes unless we understand the mistakes we have made. The route out of this circumstance where there is great economic peril to this country and its future, the route ahead, in my judgment, must be an active, aggressive set of actions by the Congress, working with this President and the new President, to understand the urgency of the things I have described. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 778, H.R. 3480.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, tragically, a month and a half ago, we lost a wonderful colleague of all of ours, Stephanie Tubbs Jones-- Stephanie Tubbs Jones was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a wonderful Congresswoman who, whenever you met her, had a big, broad smile on her face. She obviously loved her work on behalf of her country. All of us miss her. There is legislation called the Stephanie Tubbs Jones Organ Transplant Authorization Act of 2008. I have worked on it in the Senate. I provided a companion bill in the Senate. Yesterday, I worked with Dr. Coburn on the other side to resolve any differences. I understand it is still being reviewed. My hope is that this legislation will be enacted today. Let me describe the importance of this legislation. We have more than 99,000 Americans right now awaiting organ transplantation. They are on a waiting list to find an organ. In fact, two-thirds of those on the waiting list are waiting because they suffer from end-stage renal disease, and they are waiting for a kidney transplant. About 6,000 who are on that waiting list will die this year. We know how to save them, but they will die because they did not get a transplant--a kidney, heart, lung. They will die. I have worked on this issue for many years. I recall some long while ago I worked on legislation that required every tax refund that went out to the American people in that year to be accompanied by a little sheet that told you how you could become an organ donor, how you could sign up. Seventy million Americans got a little piece of information on how to sign up to become an organ donor. On my driver's license in my wallet, it says ``donor.'' It is pretty easy to do for most Americans. As I indicated, two-thirds of those on the waiting list are waiting for a kidney. Many will die before they get one. On the day the legislation that informed 70 million people how to become an organ donor passed, I held a press conference with a group of my colleagues. Senator Strom Thurmond came to the press conference. I believe Strom Thurmond was 90 years old then. He came to the press conference to sign a big plaque we had, to sign up as an organ donor at age 90. You had to know Strom Thurmond to understand the irony. He was a remarkable American, a remarkable Member of the Senate. At age 90, he signed an organ donor card, and here is what he said: When I am gone, I don't know if I have anything anybody wants, but they are welcome to it. That was his notion of an organ donor card, and he signed up. The fact is, not just in memory of our wonderful colleague, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, but in pursuit of doing the right thing. We can save a lot of lives by passing this legislation. This legislation will authorize an increase in the Federal contribution that has been the same since 1984. The Federal contribution to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. The Federal contribution to that network was $2 million in 1984, and that is what it is today. This legislation proposes an increase in that authorization--not a major increase but an increase that will allow us to do greater work to try to match those available organs with those who desperately need a donation. The good news is that patients no longer have to wait for someone to die, for example, to get a kidney. Living donations and paired donations have dramatically increased the number of kidney donations every year. That is saving lives and, by the way, saving taxpayers money. The cost of renal dialysis is very high. I come to the Senate floor today only to say this is a very important piece of legislation for tens and tens of thousands of people in this country who even now are waiting for an organ transplant, some of whom will die before they get it. We can save many lives with this legislation. My hope is that at the end of today we will have cleared the bill on both sides and then send it back to the House. They will then clear it tomorrow because it has had a very small change that we negotiated yesterday but not a material change. When we do that, we will have done something very important in terms of organ transplants and the ability to save lives in this country. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 7082, which was received from the House.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read three times and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read three times and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Rules Committee be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 6296, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the tragedy of 9/11 is indelibly imprinted on the minds of all of us. What is not so well understood or remembered was that one month later, October 2001, something else happened. Graham Allison, someone who has worked on nonproliferation in the Clinton administration, has written a book about it. Time magazine wrote about it in March of 2002. Here is what they said: A month after 9/11, for a few harrowing weeks, a group of U.S. officials believed the worst nightmare of their lives--something even more horrific than 9/11--was about to come true. In October of 2001, an intelligence report went out to a small number of government agencies, including the Energy Department's top secret nuclear emergency search team based in Nevada. This is a Time report, but I have it also in a book written by Graham Allison. The report said that terrorists were thought to have obtained a 10- kiloton nuclear weapon from the Russian arsenal and that they planned to smuggle it into New York City. The source of the report was a CIA agent named Dragonfire. Dragonfire's report actually was something that was claimed to be undetermined in terms of reliability. But it was something the CIA agent named Dragonfire had picked up. Dragonfire's claim tracked with a report from a Russian general who believed his forces were missing a 10-kiloton device. Since the mid-1990s, proliferation experts have wondered whether several portable nuclear devices might be missing from the Russian stockpile. That made the Dragonfire report all that more alarming. Detonation of a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon in downtown New York would kill about 100,000 civilians, irradiate 700,000 more, and flatten everything for a half a mile. So the counterterrorist investigators went on the highest alert, we are told. The search team went to New York City. It was kept secret so as not to panic the people of New York. Mayor Giuliani was not informed. If terrorists had managed to smuggle a nuclear weapon into New York City, the question was, could they detonate it. About a month later, after this report from a CIA agent named Dragonfire of a nuclear weapon having been stolen by terrorists, smuggled into New York City, about to be detonated, about to kill massive numbers of people, it was determined that perhaps this was not a credible intelligence report. But in the postmortem evaluation, they determined it is plausible to have believed a Russian nuclear weapon could have been stolen. It is plausible to believe, having stolen it, terrorists could have smuggled it into New York City, and plausible to believe they could have detonated it; one low-yield nuclear weapon. There are 25,000 of them on this planet. Think of the apoplectic seizure that occurred in October of 2001 over a report by a CIA agent that he picked up some information about one low-yield nuclear weapon being smuggled into New York City. There are 25,000 nuclear weapons on this Earth. Our job is to provide the leadership to begin to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. The bill before us will almost certainly expand the production of nuclear weapons by India. Here is what it says to India: Even as we take apart the basic architecture of nonproliferation efforts, the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which India is one of three countries that has never signed, even as we take that nonproliferation architecture apart with this bill, we have said to India, with this agreement, you can misuse American nuclear technology and secretly develop nuclear weapons. That is what they did. You can test those weapons. That is what they did. You can build a nuclear arsenal in defiance of United Nations resolutions and international sanctions. After testing, 10 years later, all will be forgiven, and you will be welcome into the club of nuclear powers without ever having signed the nonproliferation treaty. Let's understand what this does. First, let me say that never has something of such moment and such significance and so much importance been debated in such a short period and given such short shrift: one very brief committee hearing in the Senate and a total of a couple of hours here on the Senate floor today; pretty disappointing. What this agreement says is, India needs various kinds of equipment and technology to produce and build nuclear powerplants. They need more power, and they want to get it from nuclear powerplants. They have been prevented from accessing the kind of material and equipment to produce those plants because they have not signed the nonproliferation treaty, and they developed nuclear weapons outside of the purview of all of us, misusing American nuclear technology to secretly develop these weapons. Now we have said in an agreement with them, yes, we will allow big companies now to sell you this technology--this is all about big companies being able to access a new marketplace for technology, to sell the technology and the capability to develop nuclear powerplants-- we will allow you to do that, and we will have the opportunity in this agreement for you to put eight of your plants behind a curtain that will have no international inspections, which is a green light to say, you may produce additional nuclear weapons. That is not just a supposition. Almost everybody understands that is going to happen. This agreement does not prohibit them from nuclear tests in a way that would nullify the agreement, if they do test. The Administration's interpretation of this agreement is very ambiguous about that. I want to go through a couple of points. India would have unlimited ability to import fuel for 14 civilian powerplants under this agreement. That is what they want. They want to produce additional power with nuclear plants. Then it says India could have eight other power reactors behind a curtain that we will not be able to inspect. India can then divert its entire domestic fuel supply to eight military reactors to produce additional nuclear weapons. What does that mean? It is our agreeing that India, that has never signed the nonproliferation treaty and has tested nuclear weapons and developed nuclear weapons in secret using our technology, is now given an agreement that allows them to build more nuclear weapons. Their neighbor is Pakistan, also possessing nuclear weapons. Pakistan warned the international community yesterday that a deal allowing India to import United States atomic fuel and technology could accelerate the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947 and, through a peace process, have stabilized relations since 2004, but they remain deeply distrustful of each other. We have now reached an agreement that says one of them may begin to produce additional nuclear weapons. UPI--Islamabad, Pakistan: Without naming sources, the Press Trust reported Wednesday that the Pakistani Prime Minister has reported construction of two nuclear powerplants with Chinese assistance. The move appears aimed at counterbalancing a nuclear fuel deal negotiated with India. The decision was made on September 19 in Islamabad. The point is, we will allow you to put eight reactors behind a curtain. We will allow you to produce additional nuclear weapons that we won't know about. Is there a reaction to that? Pakistan has a reaction, to engage with the Chinese. The United States had agreed that the purpose of the agreement was not to contain India's strategic program but to enable resumption of full civil nuclear energy cooperation. So that is the India separation plan. That is what they say. They say the United States and India agreed the purpose of the agreement is not to constrain India's strategic program. That means they say the agreement is to not constrain India's ability to produce nuclear weapons. That is what that means. I am going to offer an amendment today that the managers will oppose. The conferees believe there should be no ambiguity regarding the legal and policy consequences of any future Indian test of a nuclear explosive device. That is from a joint statement of the conference of the Hyde Act which passed the Congress. There should be no ambiguity. Here is what the Administration says it thinks the agreement provides: Should India detonate a nuclear explosive device, the United States has the right to cease all nuclear cooperation. Well, we know we have the right. Are we going to do it? No. That is deliberate ambiguity to say if India were to test a nuclear weapon, there is nothing that will require us to decide to nullify this agreement. Let me say again, the India Prime Minister says the agreement does not in any way affect India's right to undertake future nuclear tests, if necessary. This is a planet with 25,000 nuclear weapons, tactical and strategic. The suspected loss or stealing of one caused an apoplectic seizure in October of 2001. We have 25,000 of them. Our job as an international leader, a world leader, our job is to begin marching back from the abyss; that is, to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. Instead we are taking apart the basic architecture of nuclear nonproliferation that has served us for many decades. We are saying to India, who has never signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, it is OK if you produce additional nuclear weapons we can't see and we don't know about. We are going to sign an agreement that allows you to do that. That is almost unbelievable. India is a very important trading partner. India is a very important ally for our country. I believe that. I accept that. But this administration and those in the Congress who have agreed to the measure before us today are making a grievous mistake. We will not have second chances with respect to this issue of nuclear weapons. If we don't provide the world leadership to begin marching back from the prospect of terrorists using nuclear weapons, the prospect of nuclear weapons being stolen and developed by terrorist organizations, we will one day wake up and tragically read that a nuclear weapon was exploded in a major city on this planet. This agreement marches in exactly the wrong direction. Do you think this agreement allowing India to produce additional nuclear weapons has no impact on Pakistan, has no impact on China, has no message to the rest of the world? The message is: You can misuse American nuclear technology and secretly develop nuclear weapons. You can test those weapons. You can build a nuclear arsenal in defiance of United Nations resolutions, and you will be welcomed as someone exhibiting good behavior with an agreement with the United States. What kind of message is that? What message does that send to others who want to join the nuclear club who say: You have nuclear weapons, we want some. If we don't find a way to begin systematically reducing the number of nuclear weapons and stop the spread of nuclear weapons and try to find every way to prevent a nuclear weapon from ever again being exploded in anger on this planet, one day we will ruefully regret what we have done here. Again, let me close by saying that never in my life has such a large issue been given such short shrift. This issue has great consequences for this country, the world, and their respective futures for that matter, and this administration is, in my judgment, making a very serious mistake. Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I say to the Senator from Connecticut, I am waiting for the Senator from New Mexico to come to the floor. What we are going to do is we are going to combine our two amendments.

Mr. DORGAN. We will still wish to take the 30 minutes each, but we will combine the two amendments and have a vote on one amendment, provided, of course, that meets unanimous consent. But I will, in a few moments, be ready to consume my half hour on this subject if that is your desire. I want to wait for Senator Bingaman to come in order to consult. He should be here momentarily.

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, Senator Bingaman and I will be combining our amendments into a Dorgan-Bingaman amendment, with other cosponsors, and that is now being put together by legislative counsel. So we will have that here briefly. But why don't I proceed with my 30 minutes. I think Senator Bingaman will have 30 minutes. Then apparently there is going to be a response following that, and we will conclude a portion of this debate. So, Mr. President, on the 30 minutes I now have available, let me read to my colleagues something written by Graham Allison. Graham Allison is someone who has been involved in nuclear nonproliferation with the Clinton administration. He wrote this in a book, and this, by the way, is published in an article. I want to read it. I will quote it: One month after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on October 11, 2001, President George W. Bush faced a more terrifying prospect. At that morning's presidential daily intelligence briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent codenamed ``Dragonfire'' had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was in New York City. Continuing to quote: The government dispatched a top-secret nuclear emergency support team to the city. Under a cloak of secrecy that excluded even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, these nuclear ninjas searched for the bomb. On a normal workday, half a million people crowd the area within a half-mile radius of Times Square. A noon detonation in Midtown Manhattan would kill them all instantly. Hundreds of thousands of others would die from collapsing buildings, fire and fallout in the hours thereafter. Continuing to quote: In the hours that followed, Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, analyzed what strategists call the ``problem from hell.'' Unlike the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union knew that an attack against the other would elicit a retaliatory strike of greater measure, Al Qaeda-- with no return address--had no such fear of reprisal. Even if the president were prepared to negotiate, Al Qaeda has no phone number to call. Again, continuing to quote: Concerned that Al Qaeda could have smuggled a nuclear weapon into Washington as well, the president ordered Vice President Dick Cheney to leave the capital for an ``undisclosed location,'' where he would remain for weeks to follow--standard procedure to ensure ``continuity of government''. . . . Six months earlier the CIA's Counterterrorism Center had picked up chatter in Al Qaeda channels about an ``American Hiroshima.'' The CIA knew that Osama bin Laden's fascination with nuclear weapons went back at least to 1992, when he attempted to buy highly enriched uranium from South Africa. . . . As CIA analysts examined Dragonfire's report and compared it with other bits of information, they noted that the September attack on the World Trade Center had set the bar higher for future terrorist attacks. . . . As it turned out, Dragonfire's report proved to be a false alarm. But the central takeaway from the case is this: The US government had no grounds in science or logic to dismiss this possibility, nor could it do so today. Now, think of that. That is a discussion about one low-yield 10 kiloton nuclear weapon allegedly stolen from the Russian stockpile, smuggled into New York to be detonated by terrorists--one nuclear weapon. There are 25,000 on this Earth. One small weapon caused an apoplectic seizure about the prospect of hundreds of thousands of people being killed. What does that have to do with this? Well, what it has to do with this is we have struggled since the end of the Second World War to try to put a cap on the bottle here and make sure a nuclear weapon is never again exploded in anger--not by a military power, not by a terrorist group. We have tried to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. We have tried to see if we could find a way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. We have created something called the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the NPT. We have created something called the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which I regret to say our country has not ratified. But we have tried to find ways to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, stop the building of additional nuclear weapons. One of three countries that did not sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was India. They refused to sign it. In these intervening years, what we have discovered about India--a respected ally of ours, a trading partner of ours, a country we hold in high esteem--we have discovered that they misused American nuclear technology to secretly develop their own nuclear weapons. We have discovered that they tested those nuclear weapons. They have defied the United Nations resolutions and international sanctions. Now we have discovered that an agreement has been reached with the Government of India that all will be forgiven. We will sign a new agreement with you--that I believe unwinds and undoes the entire architecture of nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. All will be forgiven. In fact, what we will do is we will say to you that you can create nuclear powerplants because you need nuclear power, and our corporations and international corporations can sell--this is about business, a lot of business--can sell to you the technology and the construction materials to produce nuclear powerplants. And, oh, by the way, the agreement also says you can have eight nuclear powerplants that are behind a curtain that will never be inspected by international inspectors. That is where you can produce additional nuclear weapons, which the Indian Government wishes to do. This agreement is an unbelievable mistake. At exactly the moment when this country should exhibit its leadership, its world leadership that is required of this country to not only stop the spread of nuclear weapons but to begin marching back to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, at this exact time, this Government, this administration and this Congress, is saying to an ally: We will give you the green light to produce more nuclear weapons even though you have never signed the nonproliferation treaty. That is almost unbelievable to me. The nonproliferation treaty prohibits peaceful nuclear assistance to so-called nonnuclear states unless they agree to put all their facilities under international safeguards and give up the option of producing nuclear weapons. With this agreement, we say that does not matter anymore. It does not matter. You do not have to subject these eight plants to international safeguards. You do not have to give up the option of producing nuclear weapons. The five traditional nuclear powers in the post-Second World War period--Russia, the United States, Britain, France, and China--all have signed the nonproliferation treaty. All other countries are considered to be nonnuclear states according to the nonproliferation treaty. Article I of the NPT obligates the recognized nuclear weapon states, including the United States, ``not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear weapons State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons. . . .'' With this agreement, we have decided that does not matter. We have no intention to pay attention to Article I any longer. Section 128 of the Atomic Energy Act requires all states other than the five I mentioned to have full-scope safeguards as a prerequisite for receiving U.S. civil nuclear exports. That does not matter anymore. Section 129 of the Atomic Energy Act requires the termination of nuclear exports if a nonnuclear weapon state has, among other things, tested nuclear weapons after 1978. We have said that does not matter anymore. Section 102 of the Arms Export Control Act requires sanctions on any nonnuclear weapon state that has detonated a nuclear device. That doesn't matter anymore. The United Nations Security Council resolution 1172 condemned India and Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests. The United States-India agreement says that none of these provisions will be applicable to India anymore, even though it secretly used our technology to develop nuclear weapons and then tested them. Now, a working nuclear bomb can be produced with as little as 35 pounds of uranium 235 or 9 pounds of plutonium 239. I think nuclear terrorism and the threat of nuclear terrorists gaining access to nuclear weapons represent the gravest security threats to our Nation, bar none. Retired GEN Gene Habiger, who commanded America's nuclear forces, has said that nuclear terrorism ``is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when.'' In 2006, Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post: The world is faced with the nightmarish prospect that nuclear weapons will become a standard part of national armament and wind up in terrorist hands. It will become a standard part of armament for countries, because they want to possess it, and it will inevitably end up in terrorist hands. Former Senator Sam Nunn wrote in the Wall Street Journal: We know that terrorists are seeking nuclear materials-- enriched uranium or plutonium--to build a nuclear weapon. We know that if they get that material they can build a nuclear weapon. We believe that if they build such a weapon, they will use it. We know terrorists are not likely to be deterred, and that the more this nuclear material is available, the higher the risks. We know Osama bin Laden has been seeking the opportunity and the materials to build nuclear weapons since the early 1990s. In 1998, Osama bin Laden issued a statement titled ``The Nuclear Bomb of Islam,'' declaring: It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God. I described the book entitled ``Nuclear Terrorism'' written by Graham Allison, an official in the Clinton administration who worked on these issues: The potential stealing of one low-yield weapon terrorizing the country and a city. Nowhere is the threat of nuclear terrorism more imminent than in South Asia. It is home to al-Qaida, which is seeking nuclear weapons. It is an area where Pakistan and China and India have always had tense relations. All three possess nuclear weapons. India and China fought a border war in 1962. India and Pakistan have fought three major wars and had two smaller scale contests. Both detonated nuclear explosions in 1998 and declared themselves a nuclear power. After that, the world held its breath while India and Pakistan fought a limited war in Kashmir. India is thought to have a modest cache of nuclear weapons at this point. You can go to the journals and get estimates of 25 to 50 or 60 nuclear weapons, but India wants more. It seems to me that to do this in the absence of an understanding of what it means in the region, and in the absence of what it means to unravel the regime by which we have tried to move toward nonproliferation of nuclear weapons is a dangerous step. I wish to describe something The New York Times wrote yesterday, and I fully agree: President Bush and his aides were so eager for a foreign policy success they didn't even try to get India to limit its weapons program in the future. They got no promise from India to stop producing bomb-making material, no promise not to expand its arsenal, and no promise not to resume nuclear testing. The Senate should postpone action until the next Congress can figure out how to limit the damage from this deal. I fully agree with that. I don't have any understanding why we are rushing--with one short hearing before one committee in this Congress-- to a short, truncated version on the floor of the Senate, and then agreement. Here is the agreement: India would have unlimited ability to import fuel for 14 civilian nuclear powerplants, and it could then divert all of its current domestic fuel supply to 8 military reactors which are used for nuclear weapons production, with no international inspection at all. If anyone thinks this makes sense for our country, I think there is something wrong with that thinking. Will it have a consequence with respect to Pakistan? I expect so. Pakistan warned the international community in July that a deal allowing India to import United States atomic fuel and technology could accelerate a nuclear arms race between Delhi and Islamabad. They have fought substantial wars before, as I said. So what does Pakistan do? They go off and they will seek nuclear fuel assistance from China to build 10 nuclear powerplants. Will they be inspected? The move appears aimed at counterbalancing a nuclear fuel deal negotiated this year between India and Western suppliers. Paragraph 5 of the India separation plan says: The United States and India--this is India's portion of the agreement--had agreed that the purpose of the agreement was not to constrain India's strategic program. That is a fancy way of saying their understanding is we are not constraining their ability to produce additional nuclear weapons. Now, the Hyde Act passed the Congress and allowed this negotiation to take place. I didn't vote for it. I was one of a minority who didn't vote for it because it had some huge holes in it, but here is what the conferees said: The conferees believe there should be no ambiguity regarding the legal and policy consequences of any future testing of a nuclear explosive device by India. That is what they said. Here is how the Administration interprets the agreement that is on the floor of the Senate: Should India detonate a nuclear explosive device, the United States has the right to cease all nuclear cooperation with India. We already have that right. But is that ambiguous? It surely is. The Administration doesn't say we are going to shut down or nullify this agreement; it says we have the right to. The proposition of the Hyde amendment that passed the Congress said it should be unambiguous. No ambiguity. Yet the Administration is deliberately being ambiguous so that if India tests a nuclear weapon, that country may still not be subject to sanctions. The BJP, which may be India's next ruling party, says: The BJP would like to clearly reiterate that any compromise on India's right to nuclear test is wholly unacceptable. Finally, the agreement does not in any way affect India's right to undertake future nuclear tests, if necessary. This last statement was from the Prime Minister of India. Do we need to say more about what might or might not be here? Senator Bingaman and I are offering an amendment, the Dorgan-Bingaman amendment, with a good number of cosponsors, that makes clear two things. No. 1: If India would test, it would nullify this agreement with respect to United States cooperation. No. 2: Senator Bingaman has added--and we are putting them together--if India were to test a nuclear weapon, the export controls we can enact to deal with other suppliers around the world and their dealings with India should be fully utilized. Let me go back to where I started for a bit. Probably all of my colleagues have been in the same discussions. I hear people say nuclear weapons are like any other weapon. I hear people say nuclear weapons are usable. I hear people say we need to build new nuclear weapons here in our country. We need to build bunker-buster weapons, nuclear weapons that can go under and bust some caves; Earth-penetrating bunker-buster weapons. Designer nuclear weapons. We have all heard it. This administration has wanted to build new designer nuclear weapons. Some believe a nuclear weapon is like any other weapon. It is not. It can never be used. To the extent and when it is used, if it is used by a terrorist group or country, nothing on this Earth will be the same. It was different in the 1940s. The last time a nuclear weapon was used in anger, outside of tests, was to end the Second World War. Then virtually no one else had nuclear weapons. Now we have nuclear weapons spread around this globe. This country has assumed the responsibility for many years--the mental responsibility to try to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. It is a desperate attempt to say: You know what. The only way this planet is going to continue is if we stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Does anybody think if people start lobbing nuclear weapons back and forth, killing millions of people, that this planet survives? I don't. We have 25,000 of them on this planet, and we are going to sign up to an agreement today that says let's produce more? Not us, although we have people here who want to produce more in this country. This says let India produce more in secret. What does that mean to Pakistan? What does that mean to China? What does that mean to that South Asian region? What does it mean to the world? This is such a truncated debate and such a shame. There are a lot of very interesting, qualified, serious people who ought to be weighing in on this to describe what we are doing here today in terms of the consequences to this planet. What are the consequences to the regime that has existed for many years--five or six decades now--to try to stop the spread of nuclear weapons? I had a hearing one day in my appropriations subcommittee, because we fund the nuclear weapons portion of the appropriations process in the Department of Energy. In that hearing, someone described the fact that the last time a nuclear weapon was used in a conflict was in 1945, and it has been all of these decades--all of these decades--that we have constrained the use of nuclear weapons. The Soviets and the U.S. built massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons under a doctrine called Mutually Assured Destruction, believing that if either attacked the other, the retaliation would essentially destroy both. The original attack would inflict massive damage on the country that was attacked, but the country that was attacked would also retaliate in a manner that virtually obliterated the attacking country. So that mutually assured destruction represented a standoff during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. In the meantime, other countries aspired to become nuclear weapons powers, to obtain nuclear weapons, and to this day not only do many countries still desire these things, but now terrorists do as well. So the question is, Who is going to step us back from this cliff? We have a former Secretary of Defense who believes there is about a 50-percent chance that a nuclear weapon--I believe he said a 50-percent chance-- will be exploded in a major city within 10 years. I don't doubt that could be the prospect if we don't use all of our energy and all of our leadership capability as a leading nuclear power in this world--a nuclear weapons power in this world--to try to march back from 25,000 nuclear weapons to far fewer nuclear weapons; to try to put up walls by which we will not allow people or countries to proliferate nuclear weapons. We have a man in Pakistan who is under house arrest, and has been for a long while, Mr. A. Q. Khan, who apparently is a national hero of sorts in Pakistan. He spread nuclear secrets all around the world for money. Our country has never even been able to interview him, to talk to him, to understand where these secrets went. As I said, he is not in prison, he is under house arrest. He is still considered a hero by some. We have to get serious about this issue of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. We are not getting serious about an issue such as this by dismantling the very structure that has helped us now for some 60 years to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons or at least prevent the use of nuclear weapons. In the Appropriations Committee hearing I described earlier, I said: We have been lucky, and someone said: Well, it is much more than luck. I said: I agree it is more than luck. It is a regime, it is a structure of nonproliferation that we have worked on. Many administrations worked seriously in this area. This administration, regrettably, appointed people to positions of authority on nuclear nonproliferation who didn't believe in the mission. They didn't even believe in the mission. The question for us now is: Is this the way forward, to take apart the structure? When I said we have been lucky, what I meant was that the structure has certainly helped, but we are going to need more than that. We are going to need some good fortune. If we think we can live on a planet with 25,000 nuclear weapons, that somehow, some way, some day, somebody is not going to steal one and detonate it in a major city--we have to be serious about this. India is a wonderful country. India is an ally of ours. It is an ally of the United States. But that should not justify our deciding to give a green light to India--a country which has never signed the nonproliferation treaty--give the green light to produce more nuclear weapons. That is exactly what this agreement does. No one can stand up in this discussion and say: This agreement doesn't allow a country that has refused to sign the nonproliferation treaty, this agreement does not allow them to produce more nuclear weapons. It does on its face, and everybody knows it. Everybody wants to pretend as though it doesn't exist. This is a horrible mistake. I am enormously surprised, after so many decades of people talking and thinking seriously about nuclear nonproliferation, that we reward those countries that misuse nuclear technology in order to secretly produce nuclear weapons and secretly test nuclear weapons. We now say to them: By the way, here is your reward, an agreement by which you can continue to do it; an agreement which is written in a way that says we will allow you to produce more nuclear weapons and, oh, by the way, if you test, we won't even put in the agreement that we will nullify it. An agreement we might nullify. We ought to put in the agreement, ``We will,'' which was promised in the conference report. So maybe I am not capable of understanding the world view of some that allowing an ally of the United States, that has not signed the nonproliferation treaty, to produce additional nuclear weapons is somehow strengthening our country or the world or is good for us. Maybe I missed something, but I don't think so. I think what is missing is the logic and the commitment to nonproliferation of those who negotiated this. What is missing is the determination and the relentless effort by this country to lead in the direction of reducing the number of nuclear weapons and not allowing the production of more. Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my time. How much time do I have remaining?

Mr. DORGAN. I reserve the remaining 5 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, providing a $700 billion financial rescue plan without requiring reform and regulation of the financial markets is a serious mistake. That is exactly what this legislation does. I believe that we are in an economic crisis that does require a response by Congress. But it cannot be a response that commits the American taxpayers to a large rescue fund for many of America's biggest financial institutions while still leaving in place unregulated financial markets that allowed this financial crisis to happen. Despite my best efforts there is nothing in this legislation that will require the regulation of the very financial markets that have, in recent years, helped create a casinolike atmosphere with large financial institutions exhibiting unprecedented greed in search of short-term profits and big bonuses that knew no bounds. I will not vote for a plan that I believe fails to address the central cause of this crisis: unregulated financial markets that hide the unbelievable speculation and reckless investments by some major financial institutions whose losses are now being loaded on the backs of the American taxpayers. Those financial markets must be regulated now! In 1999 when Congress debated a large deregulation bill titled the Financial Modernization Act, I was one of only eight Senators who voted no and I warned then in Senate debate that ``this bill will also raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts.'' I wish I had been wrong. Nine years later we are considering a ``massive taxpayer bailout'' plan that provides no regulation of the hedge funds and derivative trading that has caused much of the financial wreckage in our economy. The plan also fails to restore the protections that were removed in the Financial Modernization Act to separate FDIC insured bank operations from the risky speculative investments in real estate and securities. Under this plan the creation of exotic securities that are traded in financial darkness by unregulated hedge funds and other institutions can continue. It is estimated that there is a notional value of more than $60 trillion of credit default swaps in our economy. No one knows where they are, whose balance sheets they may threaten, or how much additional risk they pose to financial firms. Yet, I was told this plan could not require regulation and transparency of these financial markets because there was opposition in Congress and the White House. That is not a satisfactory answer for me. And I don't believe it is satisfactory to the taxpayers. The legislation contains some provisions that I strongly support. I believe we should increase the FDIC insurance to $250,000 per account. I also strongly support the tax extenders and the tax incentives for renewable energy. But in the end, if this plan is about restoring confidence, the failure to include reform and regulatory measures along with the money is a fatal flaw that I believe will end up hurting our country. The following are the six steps I called for including in the financial rescue plan. While there was some improvement in the plan along the way, it fails to do what I think is necessary to protect both the economy and taxpayers. 1. Restoring the stability and safety of the banking system by re- creating protections of the Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited the merging of banking businesses with riskier investments. That post- Depression Era protection served us well for seven decades before its repeal. 2. Addressing the wildly excessive compensation on Wall Street, which has incentivized reckless behavior. In recent years, Wall Street has doled out more than $100 billion in bonuses to the very people who have steered us into this mess, including more than $33 billion in each of 2007 and 2006. 3. Developing a system of regulation that would require accountability for the speculative investment activities of hedge funds and investment banks that create and sell complex securities. 4. Providing for a period of forbearance on mortgages where homeowners could continue to pay mortgages at a set rate. 5. Creating a Taxpayer Protection Task Force that would investigate and claw back ill-gotten gains. This would be targeted at individuals and firms that profited from creating and selling worthless securities and toxic products. Despite the fact that this practice caused the current economic crisis, many of these individuals and firms now seek to benefit from a Government bailout. 6. Making sure that U.S. taxpayers get to share in the increased values, not just the burden of risk, of the firms they are bailing out.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the amendment I and Senator Bingaman have offered is to the India nuclear agreement. We both feel it is a flawed agreement that would result in the production of additional nuclear weapons on this planet, exactly the last thing we need. But I understand--and I think Senator Bingaman understands--that this Senate will likely approve this agreement by a wide margin this evening. Our amendment is relatively simple. It says that if India tests nuclear weapons, this agreement is nullified and we work to try to shut off supplies from the other supplier groups. The last thing we ought to allow is to have India begin testing nuclear weapons without consequence to the agreement that has been negotiated with India. Once again, let me point out that this agreement, I believe, will result in the production of additional nuclear weapons on this planet--the last thing we need. Our amendment is a very important amendment dealing with the prohibition of nuclear testing, and we hope our colleagues will be supportive.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent that Jon Cary, a legislative fellow in my office, be allowed the privilege of the floor during debate on H.R. 7801.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, are we in a period of morning business?