Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, would the Chair advise me when I have 30 seconds remaining?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, let me stand up and say a word on behalf of chicken pluckers. I had no idea that was the debate. But they will never get $15 an hour as long as we bring in cheap labor through the back door to pluck chickens. I am more interested in the issue of manufacturing. I am interested in people who got up this morning and packed a lunch pail and they are going to have to shower after work because they work hard and they sweat and they do not get paid very much. They have waited for 9 years for an increased minimum wage; it has not come. They are worried about whether they are going to be there. They are worried whether they are going to be called into a meeting someday and be told: Your job is gone. We are either moving your job to China or we are bringing in someone from the back door to take your job at much lower pay. That is what workers face now. No one in this Chamber will face it. Nobody. We all get up and put on a white shirt and a blue suit. We come here and talk. No one is going to lose their job. None of it is going to be outsourced, and no one who comes through the back door is going to jeopardize a job in this Chamber. It is not going to happen on an editorial board in a newspaper. It is just the folks this morning who got up and had an aspiration of going to their job and working hard and providing for their families. They are the ones who are wondering: What is my future? Now, let me make a very important point. The assumption is that if we defeat the temporary worker program we are not going to have immigration. The fact is, we are going to have a million and a half people coming into this country under legal immigration having nothing to do with this program. We are going to have over a million people coming into this country for agricultural jobs having nothing to do with this program. Oh, we will have immigration. It is just that those who wrote this said: That is not enough. We want more. Now, my colleagues keep saying: Well, if we dump this thing called temporary workers, they are just going to come here anyway. They are going to be illegal. Wait a second. I thought you were going to provide border security. Now you are telling me there is no border security because if you do not decide to call them legal, they are going to come anyway. If that is the case, point to the area of this bill that says that you provided border security. You know, this is like Groundhog Day. We have been here once before, 1986. We are going to secure the border. Twenty years later, 12 million people are here without legal authorization. Now we are going to secure the border. But now we are told at this hour, just before the vote on my amendment: Oh, by the way, if we don't provide for temporary workers to call those coming in legal, if we do not do that, they will come in illegally anyway. So, then, where is the border security? Is that a false promise? One of these two options is the case. You either have border security, and people are not going to come here by the hundreds and thousands because they can't, or you have no border security so you have decided we will just name them all legal and call them temporary workers. My colleague cited a Harvard economist. Many of these economists cannot remember their home phone number, and they are giving us their thoughts on what is going to happen 5 years from now. This one, Professor George Borjas from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said: Here is what has happened to U.S. workers. U.S. workers have lost income in the 20 years as a result of immigration. That is not disputable. Is anybody here disputing that? I don't think so. We have had downward pressure on U.S. income as a result. This proposition in this bill says: You know what. That may be the experience, but we have not had enough of it. We want more. We want more of it. Again, finally, if you decide to vote against my amendment, I want you to have a town meeting and explain it. We allow 400,000 workers in the first year. They can come for 2 years. They can bring their family, if they wish. Then they have to go home for a year and take their family with them. They can come back after going home for a year, for 2 more years. Then they have to go home for another year. Then they can come back for 2 more years unless they decided to bring their family with them in the first place. In that case, they get two stays for 2 years, with 1 year back home in between. We will do that cumulatively, and what you have here in 10 years is roughly 12 million man-years of work by people who come in, leave, come in, leave. By the way, how many of you think these people are going to leave?

Mr. DORGAN. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this amendment is very simple. It strikes the temporary worker provision. It does not mean there won't be immigration coming into this country. We will have 2.5 million people coming in under legal channels, agricultural work, so on. This is extra. We are told that 2.5 million is not enough. When you cast this vote, cast this vote on behalf of American workers who want American jobs that pay well, and that has been all too hard to find recently. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I was listening to the description of these offshore tax havens. Senator Conrad and I have worked on these issues for some while. It is interesting, with respect to the revenue stream into this country, that if we close down some of these tax shelters, the result would be increased revenues for the Federal Government and a requirement that those who benefit from the opportunities of being an American company, that they would start paying taxes. Now, we have had example after example--the Senator used a chart showing a building called the Ugland House, a quiet little 4-story building on Church Street in the Cayman Islands which 12,748 corporations call home. Of course none of them are home there. If you go there--there is an enterprising reporter named David Evans who worked on that particular issue. He went there, and there is nobody there. There are just some windows in a building, and it is quiet in the lobby. Nothing is going on. This is a legal fiction created by lawyers for the purposes of allowing companies to avoid paying their U.S. taxes. It is not just that building, though. That building is an example of the unbelievable abuse of the creation of massive offshore tax shelters. There are hundreds and hundreds of tax shelters. I asked the Senator to yield to make a point. When I chaired the hearings on the Enron scandal, when I had Ken Lay come by and raise his hand and take an oath and then refuse to testify, and then Jeffrey Skilling, whom you couldn't hardly get to stop talking--he is now in prison. But the fact is, the Enron Corporation, in addition to all of the other things--and part of that we understand now is a criminal enterprise; the evidence exists for that--in addition, they have hundreds of offshore entities. Why? For the purpose of avoiding taxes. That is the purpose of offshore entities and tax havens. No one runs to these countries like the Cayman Islands for the purposes of creating a big manufacturing plant and saying: That is where we want to move our business. It seems to me what they do is they hire a lawyer to create a legal fiction saying: We now want to be a resident of a tax-haven country because we don't like the obligation of paying taxes to the Federal Government. I would just ask the Senator, isn't it the case that the Senator's proposition, and mine, the one I have introduced with legislation, is very simple? It says: If you are going to be an American company, why don't you simply decide to pay taxes to this country? If you move your operation somewhere else, we understand that. We don't support that-- there ought not be a tax incentive for it--but if you are creating a legal fiction through lawyers telling us you are moving, we are going to treat you for tax purposes as if you were right here, an American company that is required to pay its appropriate taxes. I know the Senator is probably also going to talk about the sale and leaseback of sewer systems and trolley cars and all the nonsense that is going on. I would just commend Senator Conrad for doing this, for finally saying in this budget that we are going to shut all this down. Those of you who want to get the revenue in order to move us toward fiscal sanity here, if you really want to help us get the revenue, then join us in shutting these tax scams down, shutting down these tax havens. I am sorry I took more time for this lengthy question, which turns out not to be much of a question after all, but I did want to point out that I believe this is a very important part of this budget agreement, and I commend Senator Conrad and those who have put this together because this significantly benefits our country. Mr. President, I appreciate the Senator yielding.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, that was a clever question from our colleague from New Hampshire. I would observe that the discussion I just had about the Enron Corporation--I think the largest financial supporter of the current occupant of the White House for his first run for the Presidency--it was a corporation that had hundreds of offshore tax-haven subsidiaries. It is also the case that it is not new for us to try to shut these down. As we have tried to shut these down, it is not new, either, to find that the current White House by and large opposes the legislation on the floor of the Senate to shut down these tax scams. I hope that perhaps we can get some support to do what Senator Conrad and I and others believe ought to be done, to shut down these kinds of tax scams.

Mr. DORGAN. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, regarding the first chart the Senator used, which showed the steps of additional debt, I was intrigued, as I was walking through the Chamber, to hear our colleague from New Hampshire say, ``This is your money.'' I understand the origin of that comment. The implication is we don't have to fund schools and roads and law enforcement and defense, and so on. We all have some responsibility to the country, so part of the money has to go to the Federal Government or State governments to pay for that. But when he says, ``This is your money,'' should he not also, when you hold up that chart, say to the American people: This is your debt? Isn't it the case that in the years in which they ratcheted up that debt by spending money and not asking for the revenue for it, they are saying to the American people: We will load you up with some debt, and by the way, this is your debt. You pay it later. We will probably be done, but you pay it later. Shouldn't that be the second verse to that song?

Mr. DORGAN. Twelve or fourteen minutes.

Mr. DORGAN. I thank my colleague for his leadership. I don't know where to start with the issues of the pig in the poke and the hog rules and all these issues. But I will talk a little about issues that are probably close to something I called the hog rule. First, let me say this: Mark Twain once said, when asked if he would engage in a debate, he said: Sure, as long as I can take the negative side. They said: We haven't told you what the subject is. He said: It doesn't matter. The negative side will take no preparation. It is easy to oppose. That takes no preparation. We have brought a budget to the floor of the Senate and have kind of broken tradition. We haven't had a budget on the floor that got passed for a year. Under the leadership of Senator Conrad, we are going to have a budget today. That is a pretty big step forward. Let me say that with all the budget talk, we went to war a few years ago and we sent soldiers halfway around the world to go to war. The country didn't go to war. This Congress didn't go to war. Every single dollar we have used to fight that war has been borrowed. We say to the soldiers: Go, fight, put on America's uniform, go represent your country. But the fact is, the President says: I want emergency supplemental appropriations for it all, and we will add it all to the debt. It is an unbelievable fiscal policy. Send the soldiers to war; Americans, go shopping. That is what we were told to do by the President. By the way, let's not ask anybody to sacrifice. We see significant fiscal policy problems. This budget begins to start to try to deal with them. They have been growing now for about 6 or 7 years. This administration inherited a surplus and very quickly turned it into a large budget deficit. This is a budget. Someone once asked the question, if you were asked to write an obituary about someone and knew nothing about the person, had never met the person but only had their checkbook registry as a frame of reference, what kind of obituary would you write? You would probably be able to take a look at what they spent their money on and tell a little something about their value system, what did they think was important, what did they treasure, what did they value. You can do the same thing with this country's budget. It is true that 100 years from now we will all be dead. But history will record what we have done. They can look at the budget we passed, and they can see what we believed were the priorities for this Nation. The President sends us a proposal and says: Here are my priorities. Let's propose spending in a way that loses ground on the issue of funding the National Institutes of Health and making the investments in needed cancer research and research into other dread diseases. Let's cut back on Head Start relative to the money that is needed to continue Head Start for young children. Let's decide that energy efficiency and renewable energy are not as important. These are priorities from the President. I could go on at some great length. I disagree with that. I think many of these things represent investments in the country's future. My colleague and those who work with him on the Budget Committee have put together a different set of priorities. It is a better set of priorities that says: Yes, there are some areas that are just spending money. There are other areas that represent an investment in the future. That is why I think this budget is a good document. I am pleased today to support it. Let me go to one other piece because I feel so strongly about it. I have offered amendment after amendment on this subject. My colleague has included proposed revenues in this budget from those who are not now paying their fair share. Some say that is a mirage, that is a shell game. You know what is happening. We have a pernicious tax break that says: Shut down your manufacturing plants in America, fire your workers, move your jobs overseas, and we will give you a big tax cut. I can't believe anything quite as foolish as that, but we have it. We have voted on it four times here. I am going to offer an amendment this year again that says: Let's not subsidize moving jobs overseas with a tax cut for those who do it. Even more than that, I have used this on many occasions for 2 years now. This is the Ugland House. It sits on a quiet little street in the Cayman Islands called Church Street. It is a 5-story building, home to 12,748 corporations. Thanks to some enterprising reporting by David Evans from Bloomberg----

Mr. DORGAN. I regret I don't have the time.

Mr. DORGAN. Let me finish my comments. If I have time, I will be happy to engage. This represents a legal fiction, 12,748 corporations say that this is their home. No, it is not. This is a playhouse for tax avoidance. That is what this is about. They get to run their income through here so they don't to have pay taxes to the U.S. Government. They want all the opportunities that come with being an American except the responsibility to pay taxes. Thousands of companies take up residence in tax haven countries for the purpose of avoiding taxes. Many other companies use entirely different, yet legal, tax avoidance schemes. One example is the sale of a German sewage system in Bochum, Germany, that nets Wachovia Bank $175 million in tax savings. I don't even understand how the transaction works. Does someone walk into an investment banking firm and say: Do you have a sewer section here, or do you have a sewer specialist I could talk to? Because I would like to avoid taxes by investing in a German sewer system. Maybe the receptionist says: We have a section over here in our investment banking firm that actually specializes in foreign sewers. Wachovia apparently found one. They saved $175 million. Does that mean they used the sewage system? No. Does it mean they actually have a need for it? Does it actually change hands? No, it is still underground in Germany. What it does is, it allows this company to avoid paying U.S. taxes. How about an American company leasing a city hall in Germany? This is a town hall in Germany, leased by an American company. For what purpose? To avoid paying U.S. taxes. Wouldn't it be great if folks down the block or up the street or out on the farm who have to pay taxes in this country could say: You know what, I have a new idea. You and I are going to buy a sewage system in England. People would say: Are you nuts? That is what is happening in corporate boardrooms. Another example is leasing transaction involving streetcars in Germany. An American corporation wants to operate German streetcars. Why? Because they enjoy riding in streetcars? No. They will never get in them. It is because they particularly want to avoid paying U.S. taxes. In Chicago, they put together something called a 911 emergency call system. They put that together. Guess what: When Chicago shoppers hunted for bargains a few days after Christmas last year, two big financial firms landed their own sweet deal. FleetBoston Financial and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking bought Chicago's 911 emergency call system. No, Chicago was not in the throes of privatization, the story says from the Wall Street Journal. This was companies again deciding: We would like to buy assets we have no need for that belong to the public, and what we would like to do is use them to avoid paying U.S. taxes. That is unbelievable to me. I would think every single Member of the Senate would look at this and say: That makes me sick, and it has to stop--not tomorrow; no, we are not going to begin to wean off this system--but, right now, we are going to say that nobody is going to be able to buy a foreign sewer system in order to decide they are not going to pay U.S. taxes. Go to any restaurant in this country, any small town cafe in this country, and sit around and order a cup of coffee and ask the folks you are sitting with: Do you think this should be allowed? They would look at you and say: Are you out of your mind? Well, the reason I talk about this is because this is in this budget to be shut down. Senator Conrad has said--and I have offered amendments on the floor of the Senate--we are going to shut this kind of thing down. The other side kind of laughs and scoffs at this and says: Well, you can't shut that down. I know, in fact, no one will stand up, if I ask: Will someone today come over to the floor of the Senate and stand up and say: Do you know what? Count me in. I am a big fan of having U.S. companies buy foreign sewer systems. Sign my name to it. Give me credit for it. Nobody will do that. It is kind of in the dark of the night that all this tax policy gets made. That is what my colleague says in this budget: Let's begin to shut that down. Let's begin to collect the revenues, reduce the Federal deficits. These deficits--at some point somebody is going to have to pay them. This administration inherited a very large budget surplus. I stood on the floor of the Senate and said maybe we ought to be a little conservative here, and the President and his minions said: No, no, no. Let's decide that we want to give it all back, despite the fact we did not have it yet. It was 10 years of projected surplus. Guess what. In a matter of months, we found out we were in a recession. Then we had 9/11. Then we had a war in Afghanistan. Then we had a war in Iraq. Huge surpluses were turned into huge deficits and much more spending for a war, for which the President said: Oh, by the way, we are not going to pay for that. We are going to ask that all of it be funded with zero requests in the budget because we are going to send you emergency requests, and you can add it to the deficit. So we send soldiers to war, and when they come back, they can help pay the cost of the war because we are not going to do it. That is what is wrong with this fiscal policy. We were on a road to nowhere and a road to real trouble, and finally we have a budget that begins to force change. Is it going to happen overnight? No. It is going to take some time. But this budget is a budget that moves us finally in the right direction. I commend Senator Conrad and all those who worked on it. I am proud to be part of it and will be proud to vote for it. Madam President, how much time remains?

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, May 17, 2007, at 9:30 a.m. in room 485 of the Russell Senate Office Building to conduct an oversight hearing on law enforcement in Indian Country. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this has been a very disappointing week from the standpoint of a discussion about international trade. Yesterday morning, at about 8:30 in the morning, we learned the trade deficit for the previous month has once again spiked up to a $63.9 billion trade deficit in 1 month. And yet, most of this town continues to say how successful it is, this strategy of free trade. This what has happened with our trade strategy. This chart represents an ocean of red ink. You can see, going back to 1995, we have had nothing but trouble, increasing deficits year after year. We are deep in debt with respect to our combined trade deficits. This is not a trade strategy that is working. At about the same time that I learned that our trade deficit spiked up once again to $63.9 billion in 1 month, I also learned that one of the largest employers in North Dakota, Imation, is leaving our State. They announced they are going to be closing their plant in Wahpeton, ND. They have actually announced it well ahead of time, and they are not going to be completely gone until the year 2009. It is helpful that we received some advanced notice. But this is a company that has 390 employees. It produces high-tech products in data storage and so on. Mr. President, 390 workers who are paid well, who have good jobs with good pay and good benefits, facing the prospect of all that disappearing. I was on the phone yesterday with the CEO of this company, Imation, and asked questions. The company has said to its employees and to me that they are closing down this factory in North Dakota because it produces floppy disks, and that is yesterday's technology. Floppy disks are on the way out, not on the way in. The market has moved and that is just the fact. So supposedly that has required them to make a decision to close this plant. Come to find out, though, that only 55 people in a plant of 390 people are making floppy disks. The rest of the employees, of course, are not. They are involved in the production of other things. So it doesn't really make sense that they are closing the plant because of floppy disks. Yesterday, in a conversation with the president of the company, after a lot of probing, I found out that 168 of the jobs in this plant are in fact going to moved to Juarez, Mexico. Why? Undoubtedly because of low wages paid in Juarez, Mexico. You can produce things less expensively if you are paying people 50 cents an hour, I suppose. But at its root it is exactly what is wrong with what is happening in international trade and our participation in it. Instead of lifting others up, our entire trade strategy has been a strategy that says it is all right to push the standards in this country down. No, the workers in Wahpeton can't compete with Mexican workers, nor should they be expected to. And by the way, I will bet some others of these jobs will be migrating to China and some other places in Asia. I am not here to trash a corporation; that is not my point. This company has been a good employer in our State for a long time. But I am very disappointed and very troubled they have announced they are leaving. In the last 5 to 7 years we worked hard to get them Federal Government grants, almost $3 million in Federal grants, plus a guaranteed Federal loan to expand their plant in Wahpeton, ND. Then, just a few short years later, there is a U-turn in the corporate board room that says they have decided not only are they not going to want to proceed here, they are going to leave. What about the millions of dollars of grants that we worked to get because we want to support those jobs? This, in a microcosm, is exactly what is going on all across this country. It is Wahpeton this week, but I could name almost any city and you will have the same thing. I have been on the floor of the Senate many times talking about who is leaving and when and where and why and how. Levis--gone. They don't make any Levis in America. There is not one pair of Levis made in America. Fruit of the Loom underwear--all gone; no underwear made in America by Fruit of the Loom. Fig Newton cookies, they, too, went to Mexico. If you want to eat Mexican food, buy Fig Newton cookies. Radio Flier, Little Red Wagon--gone to China; Huffy bicycles, gone to China. I could go on forever talking about things. But what happened in Wahpeton, ND, brings it home in a stark way to the people who dressed up in the morning to go to work, appreciating those jobs, believing those jobs were important in their lives, just to find out that one day they are gone. And at least part of the reason they are gone is they can't compete with people who will work for a whole lot less money in other parts of the world. Should they be required to? Is our strategy to say, after we have built a set of standards for a century in this country, that those standards don't matter because you have to compete against a different standard? And the different standard is what they pay in China, what they pay in Mexico? We can't live on that in this country and that ought not be the standard. I showed a chart with the red ink in terms of international trade deficits that we have. Our trade deficit last year was $832 billion. You can make a case with the budget deficit, where the Congress spends more than it takes in--you can make the case from an economics perspective that is money we owe to ourselves. You can't make that case with the trade deficit. That is money we owe to foreigners, and we are going to repay it someday with a lower standard of living in this country. That is a fact. I wake up and read there is apparently some sort of fiesta at the White House. It is probably appropriately following the Cinco de Mayo period. They gathered together, Republicans and Democrats, and said: We have reached a deal on trade. So now we have a couple of trade agreements coming up--Peru, Panama, maybe also Colombia and Korea. And we have some folks who got together and said: We reached a deal on trade. No one I know of in this Chamber has reached a deal on trade. I think there are plenty of voices in this Chamber that will rise in the coming week to say, no, the trade debate has to involve people in this Chamber who know that the current trade strategy doesn't work for this country. It is not because we don't want to be engaged in trade. We believe in trade, and plenty of it. We support international trade. But we support international trade that is mutually beneficial to us and others. What has happened in recent trade agreements? I come back now to the issue of Mexico. We do a trade agreement with Mexico, and you turn a $2 billion surplus into an annualized trade deficit now with Mexico--in the first 3 months of this year it is going to be $70 billion a year, with Mexico. Think of that. We turned a trade surplus with Mexico, a $2 billion surplus, into a $70 billion deficit. You talk about incompetence? You talk about bad trade deals? This is the cherry on top of the sundae in bad trade deals. Among the things they discussed yesterday is Korea. They made brief mention of that today in the paper. You have a couple of problems with Korea, aside from the fact that the agreement was generally negotiated incompetently. Here is an example of what is wrong with Korea. Mr. President, 99 percent of the automobiles in Korea driven on the streets are made in Korea. Is that an accident? Why is that the case? Because that is the way Korea wants it. They don't want imported vehicles. They want the people of Korea to buy Koreans cars that produce Koreans jobs in the manufacturing marketplace. Here is what has happened with Korea. Last year we sent Korea 4,200 American cars. That is our export market to Korea. Last year, Korea sent us 730,000 Korean cars to be sold in our marketplace. So Korea said: Load all these cars on ships, send them to America, sell them to American consumers and, by the way, while we send you 730,000 Korean cars, we will limit you to 4,200 American cars coming our way. You say maybe there is not a market for American cars in Korea. Talk to the folks who try to sell Dodge Dakota pickups and learn that story, and then you will learn what happens with respect to American vehicles that are attempted to be sold in Korea. Now, in the discussion this morning, I read of the celebration at the White House by Members of the House and the White House, making some sort of deal with respect to Panama, Peru, Colombia, I guess. They talked about labor standards, which I think is very important. In fact, the only trade agreement that has ever had labor standards is the Jordan agreement. The Clinton administration agreed that the free-trade agreement with Jordan would have labor standards. Well, guess what. Last year there were findings of sweatshops operating underneath the umbrella of a free-trade agreement with supposedly strong labor standards is in Jordan. Laborers were brought over from Bangladesh to sweatshops in Jordan, to turn Chinese materials into garments for sale in the U.S. market. The workers were forced to endure 20-hour days; yes, 20-hour days in sweatshop conditions in a country with whom we have a trade agreement where there are labor standards. These standards mean virtually nothing unless you have enforcement. All of these are just words unless you have enforcement. And this Administration has certainly demonstrated that it has no interest in enforcing labor standards. The Government of Jordan has taken some steps to try to fix some of these problems. Is that because our U.S. trade officials tried to enforce the labor provisions in the trade agreement? No. It's because a labor rights group called the National Labor Committee exposed these problems, and because the New York Times wrote a front page story about them. So it's not the labor standards in the trade agreement that got the Jordan government to start to do the right thing, because this Administration never tried to enforce those standards. It was the fact that these abuses were independently exposed and held to the light. These failed trade policies are undermining our country. This is pulling the rug out from under our country. But this is kind of a Rip Van Winkle moment again. We have an announcement of surging trade deficits, and the Congress just sleeps through it, the White House sleeps through it. Instead of deciding there is a crisis we ought to deal with, we now see a bunch of people going to the White House and embracing, saying: We have got a new agreement between House leaders and the President with respect to how we are going to proceed on certain trade agreements. Well, let me say to them there is another voice in this Congress, a voice that will come from the Senate. There are some of us that will insist we stand up for the economic interests of this country. I am not suggesting we are against trade. That is not the case. But we will insist there will be a new day in trade agreements that stand up for our economic interests. That has not been the case to date. Now, let met finish by going back to the issue of what has happened this week in Wahpeton, ND. Those workers in Wahpeton, ND, appreciated those jobs; good jobs that paid well with good benefits. I appreciated the company that was there that made those jobs possible. But I do not appreciate the circumstance where we are told one day: It is over. Just a few years after we worked to get substantial Federal grants and guaranteed Federal loans to expand the manufacturing plant, the very plant we are now told is obsolete, or at least the very plant we are now told houses the production that will be moved elsewhere; production that will be moved to Mexico because of lower labor costs. We did not strive for a century to raise standards in this country just to find them undermined day after day, by 30-cent or 20-cent-an- hour labor in China, or 50-cent-an-hour labor in Mexico. That is not the right approach. It is not an approach that strengthens, it is an approach that weakens our country. We expanded the middle class in this country over a century by lifting people up. I will not go into great detail about it, but I have told this story 100 times about James Fyler, who died of lead poisoning. He was shot 54 times. That is lead poisoning, I guess. He was shot 54 times. The reason he was shot was because in the early part of the last century, he insisted that people who went into a coal mine to work ought to be able to be paid a fair wage and expected to be working in a safe coal mine; for that he was killed. Over a century, so many men and women worked to raise standards, to say: People ought to have the right to organize, they ought to have the right to a minimum wage, a safe workplace. Over a century we lifted those standards. It did something important to expand the middle class of this country. But this is being undermined by the massive trade deficits we are running, the $836 billion annual deficit we had in 2006, and the nearly $64 billion trade deficit we ran in March 2007. I hope one day there will be enough of us in the Congress who will say: Stop. Enough. We are not going to put up with it. We are going to insist and demand that our trade agreements represent the best economic interests of our country. Yes, we want to help others. But most importantly, we want to preserve a standard of living in this country that gives us opportunity for the future. Let me end by saying, again, I believe in trade. I believe in plenty of trade. I believe we can compete and compete successfully, but the rules have to be fair, and those who negotiate trade agreements have to do so with one eye on how it is going to affect this country. Regrettably, most of the trade negotiations in the last two and a half decades have been incompetent and I think have pulled the rug out from under America's workers and dumbed down the standards that many have given their lives to create in this country. I yield the floor and 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, the Cochran amendment requires a certification by the Secretary of Health and Human Services which we know from previous experience now cannot or will not be made by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Therefore, I was going to ask the Senator from Wyoming a couple of questions, if at some point he might come back so I can engage him in a colloquy. The point of the Cochran amendment is that it will now nullify the entire amendment that was offered by myself, Senator Snowe, and 33 other Senators who had cosponsored the amendment. I wanted to point out that in the amendment, it not only allowed for reimportation of prescription drugs--FDA-approved prescription drugs from other countries whose chain of custody was identical or virtually identical to ours so that the American people would have access to lower priced, FDA-approved prescription drugs--but we also included in that amendment, which would now be nullified because the Secretary of HHS will not be able to certify, counterfeit-resistant technologies. Now, I believe those counterfeit-resistant technologies are as applicable to our existing drug supply domestically as they are to any potential imports that would be brought into this country. I want to read just a couple of comments about this. Then I would like, if the Senator from Wyoming would be willing, to entertain some questions or at least engage in a colloquy on this subject. I would like to discuss with him the provisions in the bill that would be nullified by Senator Cochran's amendment because the Secretary could not certify, and so all of the amendments that we offered would be nullified. The provisions dealing with counterfeit-resistant technologies, it seems to me, probably should proceed because all of us are concerned about the issue of counterfeit drugs, whether it is through reimportation or counterfeit drugs in the existing drug supply. All of the discussions about counterfeit drugs that have been had on the floor of the Senate have nothing to do with reimportation; it has to do with the existing circumstances. So the counterfeit-resistant technologies, that portion of the amendment--which will also now be nullified--I think should be restored. I have offered a second-degree amendment to do that, simply to restore for the current drug supply in this country the safety provisions that would exist with respect to the counterfeit-resistant technologies. Let me read it for a moment. The provisions in the amendment were, the packaging of any prescription drugs would incorporate, one, a standardized numerical identifier unique to each package of such drug applied at the point of manufacturing and repackaging, in which case the numerical identifier shall be linked to the numerical identifier applied at the point of manufacturing; and, two, overt optically variable, counterfeit-resistant technologies that are visible to the naked eye, providing for visual identification of product authenticity without the need for readers, microscopes, lighting devices, or scanners, similar to that used by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to secure U.S. currency, that are manufactured and distributed in a highly secure, tightly controlled environment. But the point is, I held up a twenty-dollar bill yesterday on the floor of the Senate and said: This has designed into it--the architecture of this counterfeit-resistant bill has designed into it a lot of protections in order to prevent counterfeiting of the twenty- dollar bill. We are all concerned about the counterfeiting of prescription drugs, so we have put a provision in the amendment that we had offered, something called counterfeit-resistant technology. My point is, it seems to me we should at least make that apply to the domestic drug supply, even if we have already made a decision we are going to nullify the opportunity for reimportation. We will come back to that decision later. The Senate will debate that again and vote on that again. But for now, at least, it seems to me we should not lose the provisions of that amendment dealing with counterfeit-resistant technologies. Might I ask the Senator from Wyoming, the ranking member on the committee, his feeling about adding that provision that would, I think, substantially safeguard the domestic drug supply?

Mr. DORGAN. I thank the Senator from Wyoming for his response. It is true the bill on the floor of the Senate is a bill dealing with drug safety. But I think it is also the case that a lot of the discussion on the floor of the Senate has been about counterfeiting and about the potential danger counterfeiting would pose with respect to reimportation, and also the danger counterfeiting poses with respect to the existing drug supply. If that is the case, it seems illogical to me not to include pedigrees and serial numbers and RFID technology and the latest counterfeit technology in this bill. What we had done with 33 of us cosponsoring the reimportation bill is, we understood with respect to reimportation you need to be sure it is safe before you proceed. So we drafted a section on that, consulting with all of the experts. We spent a lot of time on it. We have worked on it for a couple of years now. That section, it seems to me, would vastly improve the underlying bill. Maybe it is not a consensus. I understand the pharmaceutical industry does not want to do pedigree and serial numbers, and so on, the way we have described it. But it seems to me it certainly should be the case that we add as much as we can to this bill--not load it down but add as much as we can on the issue of protecting against counterfeit drugs, whether it is through reimportation or the domestic drug supply. I guess I do not quite understand--I don't believe there is a budget point of order. I don't believe we are talking about any dramatic new costs. In any event, I would expect we should not have a tradeoff of a less safe drug supply versus the cost of the drug. I think all of us want the same thing. I believe Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi would both want the safest possible drug supply we could have. Again, I come back to this notion of, we spend a lot of time worrying about how to detect a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, and we have engineered substantial safety precautions. Why should we not do the same with respect to this bottle of Lipitor, if I might have consent to show it again. This is produced in Ireland. It contains a 20-milligram tablet of Lipitor to lower cholesterol. Why would we not want something on this bottle from the manufacturer that gives us the opportunity to understand the pedigree, the serial number, and so on? There are some markings on it, but we can do much better. That is the purpose of my offering a second-degree amendment, to preserve the counterfeiting and safety standard a bipartisan group of us has created. I would be happy to yield for a response if the Senator wishes.

Mr. DORGAN. Might I ask the question, are you moving in your committee toward requiring a pedigree and serial numbers? Is that where you are going to move in committee to have consensus? That is what I understand.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, if I may further, this is the first I understand that there is an issue with the anticounterfeit measures we have put in our reimportation bill. We have the counterfeit-resistant technologies that we have put in the bill. I guess if I hear the Senator from Wyoming correctly, he is not comfortable with those at this point. I had thought the issue was generally the philosophy of reimportation and pricing. Then I think we have a deeper chasm than I expected. I thought there was generally consensus that the technology that now exists, whether it is RFID or lots of new things that are available, the technology that exists should be used with respect to the latest available technology to resist counterfeiting. I thought there was perhaps a consensus on that. Maybe I was wrong. If there is a disagreement about whether we should have standardized identifiers, then I suppose there should be some hearings on that. I had thought we were beyond that point. That was the purpose of my offering a second-degree amendment. I did not expect it would be controversial to apply, whether it is to the domestic drug supply or the potential reimportation at some future point, the counterfeit-resistant technologies that already exist to be made available if we simply require it.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I certainly don't intend to stall this bill. This legislation is going to pass. I indicated yesterday I wanted to see what was in the managers' package. Several of the proposed amendments, even at that point when I saw the package, were still under some reform or some change. Having reviewed it now, I can tell my colleagues I have no difficulty with the baby turtle provision, the pet baby turtle provision. I considered that at great length last night. I stayed awake considering it. But I decided to support the baby turtle provision and the tanning bed provision, for that matter, along with ginseng. I understand these are things that are being adjusted in the managers' package. I have looked through it. I don't have a problem with the specifics of the managers' package. My issue today was to come to talk about the counterfeit-resistant technologies that will be available to fight the issue of counterfeit drugs. The reason I felt it important to do that, most of the discussion to defeat the Dorgan-Snowe amendment and to impose the Cochran amendment was because of the discussion on the floor, what if we get counterfeit drugs under this proposal. So the discussion was all about not the counterfeit drugs that have come in under the proposal but the counterfeit drugs that have already come in under existing circumstances. My thought is, if counterfeiting is a big problem, then the underlying bill dealing with drug safety should have the strongest possible provisions relating to counterfeit-resistant technologies. That is regrettably not the case. I will end up voting for this bill when we get to final passage because it is a step forward. But it is not out there where it ought to be with respect to counterfeit-resistant technologies. I understand part of the reason is the pharmaceutical industry is not supportive of moving as far as we should move. At any rate, I appreciate the Senator responding to me. Frankly, it is fine on the floor to have a discussion. I don't think all discussion ought to be somewhere in committee. We ought to have pretty interesting discussions on the floor about what is in a bill and what is not, what we ought to add that would improve it. But I appreciate the Senator from Wyoming responding to me. As I indicated, I have a second-degree amendment along with a couple of others. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Might I point out, the second-degree amendment is language taken out of the Dorgan-Snowe bill that we filed months and months ago. It is identical language with respect to counterfeit- resistant technology. It is not new language.