Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, February 15, 2007, at 9:30 a.m. in Room 485 of the Russell Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing the President's fiscal year 2008 Budget Request for Tribal Programs. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, February 8, 2007, at 9:30 a.m. in Room 485 of the Russell Senate Office Building to conduct a business meeting to consider pending legislative business, to be followed immediately by an oversight hearing on diabetes in Indian Country, with particular focus on the Special Diabetes Program for Indians. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 224-2251. committee on small business and entrepreneurship

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my understanding is that I will be recognized for 10 minutes in morning business.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that all time consumed in any quorum call today be equally divided.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my colleague, Senator Feinstein of California, this weekend made a point that I think is very important. She, on a television program, said that Iraq is being debated virtually everywhere in our country: debated at kitchen tables, business places, workplaces, and schools. The only place in America that Iraq is not being debated is in the Senate. Here we are debating whether we should debate. That was what went on yesterday, and it is what is going on today, a debate about whether the debate on Iraq should occur in the Senate. It is unbelievable. We have a cloture vote on a motion to proceed to the debate, and the minority party in the Senate voted nearly unanimously to say, no, we shouldn't be debating. I don't understand that at all, Mr. President. Why would we not want to engage in this national discussion about what is happening in Iraq; what are our obligations, and what are our national interests with respect to these issues? This is not a war against terrorists in the main. It is sectarian violence that is occurring in Iraq. Yes, there are some terrorists in Iraq, I understand that, but it is largely sectarian violence, Shia on Sunni, Sunni on Shia. Let me make a point about Iraq that I think is important. The dictator who used to exist in Iraq no longer exists. Yes, he was a madman and a dictator. We have unearthed mass graves in Iraq to show that nearly a half million people were murdered by the man who ran that country. But he has been executed, and the people of Iraq have had the opportunity to vote for a new constitution. The people of Iraq have had the opportunity to vote for a new government. Things have changed in Iraq. We now have in Iraq what is largely a civil war, sectarian violence. Things have changed. What is the role, then--given that Saddam Hussein has been executed, given that there is a new constitution, given that there is a new government--what is the role for the United States and its soldiers? Is the role to continue to be in the middle of a civil war in Iraq, to surge additional troops, as the President suggests? That is what was to be debated this week in the Senate. But at this point we still cannot debate that because we are debating whether we will be able to debate it. It is unbelievable to me. Only here on this small piece of real estate, one of the wonderful places on this Earth, the United States Senate, do we have a serious debate about whether we should debate. We should have moved very quickly past this issue of a motion to proceed and been to the substance of this issue on behalf of this great country of ours. There is a majority in this Congress for a bipartisan resolution. And I emphasize bipartisan resolution. Senator Warner, a very distinguished American, a Republican, and former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Levin, a Democrat, the same. Warner-Levin. When we get to a vote on the Warner-Levin resolution, which disapproves of surging additional American troops to Iraq and deepening our involvement in Iraq, a majority of the Senate will support that resolution. There is a clear majority for that resolution. The question is, Can we get to that point? I hope in the coming hours that the minority will relent and give us the opportunity, the opportunity the American people would expect to exist in the United States to debate one of the most important questions of our time. This is about obstruction and it is about political maneuvering and about protecting the White House. It is about a lot of things, unfortunately. It ought to be about this country's national interest, this country's best interest. It ought to be about the soldiers we have asked to don America's uniforms and go fight for this country and what is best for them as well. Two months ago, General Abizaid said this in open testimony in the Senate: I met with every divisional commander. I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now--he is talking about Iraq--does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they all said no. That is what the commanding general said 2 months ago in testimony before the Senate. Why did they all say no? Here is what General Abizaid said the reason is: We want the Iraqis to do more. It is easy for the Iraqis to rely upon us to do more. I believe more forces prevents the Iraqis from doing more and taking responsibility for their own future. Finally, Mr. President, a week ago, the head of our intelligence services came to the Senate and testified in open public hearings. Here is what he said: Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization that poses the greatest threat to U.S. interests, including the homeland. That is from the top intelligence chief of our country. Here is what he said: Al-Qaeda continues to plot attacks against our homeland and other targets with the objective of inflicting mass casualties. They continue to maintain active connections and relationships radiating outward from their leaders' secure hideout in Pakistan. Let me say that again. Our top intelligence person says that al-Qaida is the greatest terrorist threat to our country; that they direct their operations from a secure hideout in Pakistan. Mr. President, a question: If al-Qaida is the greatest terrorist threat to America, and our intelligence chief says it is directed from their secure hideout in Pakistan, and we know that Osama bin Laden continues to talk to us in his missives that they send out; if we have 21,000 additional soldiers to surge anywhere, why on Earth would we not use those 21,000 soldiers to eliminate the greatest terrorist threat to our country, which would be to eliminate the leadership of al-Qaida? No, that is not what the President recommends. He recommends we send 21,000 additional soldiers into the neighborhoods of Baghdad where sectarian violence is occurring in massive quantities and a civil war exists. With all due respect, and I do respect the President, he is wrong, and I believe the majority of this Senate would say he is wrong by voting for the Warner-Levin resolution. In a Byzantine twist, however, on this Tuesday morning, we find ourselves debating the question of whether we should debate one of the central questions of our time. That is unworthy of the Senate. What is worthy of this Senate, and I am proud to be a part of it what is worthy of us is to have on the floor of the United States Senate the great questions before this country, the questions the American people ask this morning and discuss this morning all across this country: What is our role here? What is happening here? How have things changed in Iraq? What is the greatest threat to our country? How do we deal with that threat? What about Mr. Negroponte pointing out that the greatest terrorist threat is al-Qaida? What about the fact he says they are in a secure hideaway in Pakistan? What about the fact that no one has done anything about it? What about the fact that if 21,000 soldiers are available to be surged, that the President says let's send them to Baghdad, in the middle of a civil war in Iraq, rather than going to Pakistan after the leadership of the greatest terrorist threat to this country, according to our intelligence chief? I simply do not understand this logic. There is a lot to be said about these issues. All of us in this Chamber want the same thing for our country. All of us love this country. All of us respect our soldiers and will do everything to make sure we support them. All of us want this country to do well and to make the right decisions. In the last 5 years, however, we have been involved in a war that has lasted longer than the Second World War. We have been in a war that has cost us far too many lives and too much of America's treasure. We have been put in a situation in which there has been dramatic change. Yet the policy has not changed. This is not the circumstance for which we went to war in Iraq. All of that intelligence, it turns out, was wrong. Colonel Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's aide for 17 years and was present when the information was compiled that led to the presentation at the United Nations, testified before the Senate, and he said publicly that it was the perpetration of a hoax on the American people. That is not me speaking. That is someone who had a distinguished record and who served 17 years with Colin Powell. He was a Republican and proud of his service to this country, but he said all of the intelligence that was basketed together and presented was the perpetration of a hoax on the American people. Whatever happened, happened. We went to Iraq. Saddam Hussein has now been executed. Iraq has a new constitution and a government. It is time, long past time for this country to say this to the country of Iraq: Saddam Hussein is gone. You have a new constitution. You have a new government. The question is this: Do you have the will to provide for your own security? Because if you don't, no one in the world can do it for you. Do you have the will to take your country back? This is your country, not ours. This country belongs to you, not us. Do you have the will to provide the security for a free Iraq? Because if you do not, I say to the people of Iraq, American soldiers cannot, for any indefinite period, provide order and security in Iraq for you. You have to make that judgment, and you have to understand that it is your responsibility to provide security in Iraq. This is not a circumstance where we are trying to embarrass anybody. We are not trying to say to the President: You have an awful situation you have created, shame on you. That is not what this debate is about. All of us understand that things have changed. This debate is about what do we do at this point. Do we agree with the President that we should send 21,000 more American troops into Baghdad and surge and deepen America's involvement in this war? Quite clearly, if we are allowed to get to this debate and have a vote on Warner-Levin, a bipartisan resolution, this Senate will say, no, we believe it is the wrong thing, and that will be the first step in beginning to change policy. It will say to the President, we believe you must change the policy, and then use our energies and our efforts to go after the leadership of al-Qaida. They are the ones who murdered Americans on 9/11, and they still exist in secure hideaways, according to our intelligence chief. Let's deal with the greatest terrorist threat to this country, according to Mr. Negroponte, the head of American intelligence. The greatest threat to our country. They exist. They live today, he says, in Pakistan. Let's deal with those issues. As I indicated earlier, all of us want the same thing for our country. This is not about politics. It cannot be about politics. It is about policy and what works for America's future, what strengthens our country, what keeps our promise to our soldiers, and what keeps our commitment to ourselves as one of the great symbols of freedom in the world. That is why I hope we will get past this issue that has now impaled this Senate, a debate about whether we should debate. The answer clearly ought to be, yes, we ought to get to the debate that is significant and important to the future of this great country of ours. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today marks the start of American Heart Month. I note the occasion not as a reminder to my colleagues to purchase flowers or chocolates for their loved ones for Valentine's Day but as a reminder that we need to redouble our efforts to fight heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases. More than 80 million Americans--about 1 in 3 adults--are living with some form of cardiovascular disease. Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in America and stroke is the No. 3 killer. These devastating diseases have touched the lives of nearly every family in America. Heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases will cost our Nation more than $430 billion in 2007, including more than $284 billion in direct medical costs. While it is true that we are making some progress, we can't win the fight against heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases without the support of Congress and the administration. Next week, the President will send Congress a budget proposal for fiscal year 2008. The budget is more than just a lengthy document--it is a statement of our Nation's priorities. I believe investing in cardiovascular research, prevention, and treatment programs should be one of our highest priorities. I was disappointed by the budget the President proposed last year. The administration's proposal would have scaled back funding for heart disease and stroke research at the National Institutes of Health, NIH, prevention programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, and a program that helps rural communities purchase lifesaving medical equipment. The administration's fiscal year 2007 budget would have cut funding for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute by $21 million and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke by $11 million. I am grateful that Congress rejected this proposal. Our investment in the NIH holds enormous promise to turn the tide against so many devastating diseases, including heart disease and stroke. The President also proposed scaling back funding for the heart disease and stroke prevention program at the CDC. This program helps States design and implement plans to prevent cardiovascular disease before it occurs. Despite the fact that heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in the country and stroke is the No. 3 killer, the CDC does not have enough funding to implement this important program in all States. The CDC provides funding for 19 States to develop plans and another 14 States to implement the plans. Finally, the administration tried to eliminate funding for a program that helps rural communities purchase automated external defibrillators, AEDs. AEDs are small, laptop-size devices that help restore normal heart function after cardiac arrest. AEDs save lives, especially when placed in areas where large numbers of people congregate and in rural communities where emergency medical personnel are not readily available. I believe Congress should continue to provide grants to help communities purchase these lifesaving devices. I hope that the President does not send Congress another budget that proposes Draconian cuts in funding for heart disease and stroke research, prevention, and treatment programs. Failing to make these investments will have real consequences. It is projected that, if we don't act today, deaths from heart disease alone will increase by nearly 130 percent by 2050. I encourage my colleagues to take a few minutes during February to recognize American Heart Month and to join me in starting a national dialogue about making the fight against cardiovascular disease a priority.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. I ask the manager, how many days have we been on the bill? I know this is legislation to increase the minimum wage. It has been on the floor for some long while. I understand there is a 30-hour postcloture period. I am curious: How long we have been on this bill and might we expect, for example, tomorrow to be able to complete legislation that would increase the minimum wage after 10 long years?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, if the Senator will yield for one more question, this vote was encouraging. It gives us an opportunity to take another step. It has been a long and tortured trail because this subject has been discussed not just this year but in the last session and the session before that. This has been a long and tortured trail to get an increase in the minimum wage after 10 long years. My hope is that this cloture vote will give us an understanding that there is good will on all sides and a desire to move forward and get this completed. My hope is that we can complete this tomorrow. We have a lot of other issues Senator Reid and others have suggested we ought to be moving to. I thank my colleague for yielding.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I voted in opposition to the Gregg amendment, No. 101, which he said would establish a legislative line- item veto. However, the Gregg amendment is not a line-item veto at all. It is an enhanced rescission proposal that would give the President unprecedented powers to wait for up to 1 full year before unilaterally deciding to rescind areas of spending that Congress has previously determined are in the public interest. That is not what I call a line-item veto. A line-item veto would give the President short term authority when he is signing legislation to extract certain portions of that legislation. But to suggest the President should have the power to decide, up to 1 year after the appropriations process has been completed, that he wishes to withhold certain areas of expenditures is one of the most unusual transfers of power from the legislative branch to the President that I have ever seen proposed. The power of the purse belongs to the legislative branch, and I am willing to work with the legislative branch and the White House to try to find a way to reduce inappropriate Federal spending. But I am not willing to give the President the authority that would allow him to use a fast track process or enhanced recission authority to undermine Social Security or take any number of other actions that would give a President virtually unlimited powers of the purse. That is not the way the Constitution intended the separation of powers to work and I could not support the overreaching amendment offered by Senator Gregg. order of procedure Madam President, if I may, I ask unanimous consent that at 4:10 p.m., the Senate proceed to executive session to consider en bloc Executive Calendar nominations 6 and 7; that there be 10 minutes for debate equally divided between Senators Leahy and Specter or their designees; and that upon the use or yielding back of the time, the Senate proceed to vote on the nomination of Lisa Godbey Wood to be United States District Judge, to be followed immediately by a vote on the nomination of Philip S. Gutierrez to be a United States District Judge; that motions to reconsider be laid on the table, the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then return to legislative business; that all time consumed in executive session count postcloture; and that there be 2 minutes between each vote.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, by previous order, I am to be recognized; is that correct?

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, on Saturday of this past weekend, I was in Minneapolis, MN, for some meetings. In the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper, there was on the front page a story that I read with substantial disappointment and concern. I will relate it to my colleagues. Kevin Giles for the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote a story: This Marine's death came after he served in Iraq. The subhead is: When Jonathan Schulze came home from Iraq, he tried to live a normal life, but the war kept that from happening. The story is a lengthy one about a man who served in Iraq, was a marine, very proud of being a marine, a combat marine. His name was Jonathan Schulze. In Iraq, he carried a heavy machine gun as part of his combat experience. He apparently indicated he had watched about 16 of his unit members and close friends die in some very aggressive fighting in Iraq, described the battles. He was twice wounded, earned two Purple Hearts, came back to this country, was discharged, and had very serious post-traumatic stress disorder, severe psychological problems. He couldn't sleep, reliving the combat during his sleep and then having flashbacks when awake. On December 14, he went to the VA center in Minneapolis, met with a psychiatrist, according to this news account, and was told that he could be admitted for some treatment in March. This was December. On January 12, a couple of weeks ago, he went to the VA hospital in St. Cloud, according to this account. He told the people at the VA hospital in St. Cloud that he was thinking of committing suicide, thinking of killing himself. His parents were with him at that point. They verify that is what he told the VA hospital in St. Cloud. He was thinking of committing suicide, and he wanted to be admitted as a patient. They told him they could not admit him as a patient. The next day, he called the VA, called them back, and they told him that he was No. 26 on the waiting list. Four days later, he hung himself. This young man who served his country honorably as a U.S. marine reached out for help. According to his parents, who were there at the time, he went to a VA hospital and said: I need help, I want to be admitted, I am having thoughts of suicide, and he was refused. The next day, he was told he is 26th on the list. I don't know all of the facts about this. I only know the facts I have read in a newspaper. But the story is nearly unbelievable to me. The newspaper description of the flag-draped coffin of this young marine who earned two Purple Hearts fighting for his country in Iraq contains a sad, sad story of a young marine who should have gotten medical help for serious psychological problems that were the result of his wartime experience. I am going to ask the inspector general to investigate what happened in this case. What happened that a young man who was a marine veteran with two Purple Hearts turns up at a VA center and says: I am thinking of committing suicide, can you help me, can you admit me, and he is told: No, the list is 26 long in front of you? Something dreadfully wrong happened. The result is a young man is dead. What happened here? Does it happen other places? We know the heavy toll war imposes on these young men and women who wear America's uniform and who answer this country's call. My colleagues and I have all been to Bethesda and Walter Reed, and have visited the veterans who have lost arms and legs, who have had head injuries, especially, because the body armor these days means that the injuries more often sustained are the loss of an arm or a leg or a brain injury due to the improvised explosive devices. We know about the VA health care system. The VA health care system has been excellent in some respects. It has gotten good reviews. But what has happened here? Are there others who show up at a VA center and say: I need help, only to be told no help is available? I hope that is not the case. But I am going to ask the Inspector General to investigate this case and find out what happened. Is it happening other places? And what can we do to prevent this from happening again? It is the unbelievable cost of war.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. This week or next week we will discuss once again the war in Iraq--a war that has now lasted longer than World War II. President Bush has indicated to the Congress and to the American people he has a new strategy. The new strategy he is proposing is to move an additional 20,000 American troops into Iraq. This morning, the more recent polls suggest the President's approval is at 30 percent. Polls also suggest the American people do not support deepening our country's involvement in Iraq. It is quite clear that the Congress does not support it either. The decision by the President comes on the heels of the Baker- Hamilton commission that had some of the best minds in this country-- Republicans and Democrats, old hands and younger people--who took a look at this, who understand foreign policy, understand military policy, and evaluated what are the potential choices, and decided that the deepening of our country's involvement in Iraq would be the wrong choice. The blue ribbon commission told the President it would be the wrong choice to deepen our involvement in Iraq. Yet, the President decided that is exactly what he is going to do. It is important, I think, as we discuss it this week and next week, to understand this Congress will always support the men and women whom we have asked to go to battle for our country. I would not support any effort by anyone to withdraw funds for our troops. If our troops are there, they must have everything they need to complete their mission and finish their jobs. But the fact is, in all of these discussions, I regret to say the President and Vice President do not have all that much credibility. Four years ago they presented to this Congress--much of it in top-secret briefings in this Capitol--intelligence that supposedly buttressed the Administration's request that Congress pass a resolution that would give them the authority to use force against Iraq. It turns out now that much of that intelligence was wrong. Much of it was just fundamentally wrong. Now we know that those who offered the intelligence assessment to Congress knew there were serious doubts about it even as they were offering it to Congress as fact. They are some of the highest officials in our Government. I wish I did not have to say that, but it is the truth. It was not good intelligence. For example, take the mobile chemical weapons labs that we were told existed for sure. We now understand that was the product of a single source of intelligence, a person named ``Curveball,'' a person who was likely a drunk and a fabricator. On the basis of a single source, whom the Germans, who turned Curveball's information over to our country, thought not to be reliable or likely not to be reliable, we were told by this administration in briefings that this was a case that would justify going to war. The aluminum tubes. We now understand the aluminum tubes were not for the purpose of reconstituting a nuclear threat. We also understand there are those in the line of--well, I was going to say the chain of command--those at high positions in our Government today who knew there was substantial evidence and disagreement from other parts of our Government who did not believe the aluminum tubes were for the purpose of reconstituting a nuclear effort or nuclear capability in Iraq. Yet, that information was withheld from the Congress, probably and apparently deliberately withheld from the Congress. Yellowcake from Niger: Again, another case of almost exactly the same thing. It is the case that the Congress was misled by bad intelligence, and the American people were misled by that same intelligence. That is not me saying that. It is Colonel Wilkerson, who worked 17 years as a top assistant to Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, who made the case at the United Nations. Colonel Wilkerson, who was involved in all that activity, spoke out publicly, and he said it was the ``perpetration of a hoax on the American people.'' That is not me. Those are the words of a top official who was involved, who was there. Yet, no one has had to answer for it, no one. Hearings. No oversight hearings by the majority party in the last Congress. No one has answered for it. Now we have a new Iraqi policy, new warnings about more danger in Iraq. But it comes at a time when there is precious little credibility. We now find ourselves in Iraq, longer than we were in the Second World War, in the middle of a civil war. Most of the violence in Iraq is sectarian violence: Sunnis and Shias killing each other; American soldiers placed in the middle of a civil war. The fact is, the leader of Iraq is now gone, dead. He was executed. Saddam Hussein does not exist. The Iraqi people were able to elect their own Government. They were able to vote for their own constitution. That is done. That is progress. But now Iraq is in the middle of a civil war. And to deepen America's involvement in the middle of a civil war in Iraq makes little sense to me. What does make sense to me is to say to the Iraqis: This is your Government, not ours. This belongs to you, not us. And you have a responsibility now to provide for your own security. Here is what General Abizaid, the head of Central Command, said 2 months ago. He said: I met every divisional commander, General Casey, the corps commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, ``in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq?'' And they all said no. ``I met with every divisional commander.'' ``They said no.'' Now, General Abizaid, also in testimony 2 months ago, said: And the reason [his commanders said no to additional troops] is because we want the Iraqis to do more. It is easy for the Iraqis to rely upon us to do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future. In other words, the Iraqi attitude is: if American troops can do the job, that is fine. Let the American troops do the job. Our responsibility, it seems to me, is to say to the Iraqi people: This is your country, not ours. Security is your responsibility. And if you cannot provide for security, the American soldiers cannot do that for any great length of time. You have to decide whether you want to take your country back. Now, as the President says, his change in strategy is to move more American troops to Iraq. I want to describe what John Negroponte, the head of our intelligence service, said in open testimony to the Congress 2 weeks ago: Al-Qaeda is the terrorist organization that poses the greatest threat to U.S. interests, including to the homeland. That is testimony from the top intelligence chief in our country: Al- Qaida is the greatest terrorist threat to U.S. interests, including to the homeland. Then let me show you what he says beyond that. He says: al-Qaida ``continues to plot attacks against our homeland and other targets with the objective of inflicting mass casualties. And they continue to maintain active connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders' secure hideout in Pakistan. . . .'' Understand this is who attacked America: al-Qaida. They described it. They boasted about it. They murdered thousands of Americans. They attacked America on 9/11. Their leadership is now, according to our top intelligence chief, in testimony before this Congress 2 weeks ago, in a ``secure hideout in Pakistan.'' It seems to me if there are 20,000 additional soldiers available, job one for this country is to eliminate the greatest terrorist threat--the greatest terrorist threat--described by the intelligence chief the week before last as al-Qaida. It ``poses the greatest threat to U.S. interests, including to the homeland.'' He also says they are in secure hideaways in Pakistan. I do not understand for a moment why the greatest priority for us is not to eliminate the most significant terrorist threat to our country and to eliminate the leadership of the organization that boasts about murdering Americans on 9/11. If that were part of the new strategy, I would be here saying: I am for it. But it is not. There is not, regrettably, an easy answer or a good answer with respect to Iraq. The President described, last fall, prior to the election, false choices. He said the choice is between stay the course and cut and run. That was always a false choice. We have to find a way to resolve this and be able to bring American troops home. It is just that simple. We have to say to the Iraqi people: This country belongs to you, and you have responsibilities. Meet those responsibilities. We have responsibilities here at home--plenty of them--and we need to turn inward to meet those responsibilities. That does not mean we should pay no attention to what is going on around the world. But we also need to begin taking care of things here at home. I was at a meeting in Minneapolis, a listening session with American tribes this weekend. Let me tell you what one fellow stood up and said. He was a tribal chair, a chairman of the tribe. He said: My two daughters are living in rehabilitated trailers that were brought to our reservation from Michigan. They heat those trailers with wooden stoves. The trailers have no plumbing. There is no running water and no indoor toilets. This is in South Dakota. Sound like something in a Third World country? He said: One of my daughters has eight children. The other has three. They live in donated trailers that came from Michigan, with no water and no toilet. And they heat it with a wood stove. Sound like the United States? No, it doesn't to me. It sounds like a Third World country. We have lots of people in this country living on Indian reservations in Third World conditions. We are told there is not enough money to respond to their housing, education, and health care needs. That is wrong. We are going to have presented to us in a couple weeks another proposal for as much as $120 billion in emergency spending to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan. That will bring to roughly $600 billion what we have provided for the war. But when we have needs here at home, it does not matter whether it is health care needs or housing or perhaps energy needs, the Administration tells us we cannot afford to spend for that. Well, we have afforded now what is going to be about $600 billion that the President has requested, all on an emergency basis, most of it for the war in Iraq. So we will debate and have great controversy, I assume, in the next couple weeks on the issue of a resolution dealing with Iraq. But controversy is not a stranger to the floor of the Senate. Minimum Wage Increase Mr. President, we have a provision on the floor of the Senate today that should have been completed long ago dealing with the minimum wage. I mentioned the other day when I was talking about issues that come to the floor of the Senate that butter the bread of big interests, man, they float through here like greased lightning. We do not get it through fast enough, at least in the last Congress. Do you want to give a big tax break to the biggest interests in the country? Be my guest. We get it through here in 1, 2, 3 days. Do you want to help the people at the bottom of the economic ladder, the people who make the beds in hotel rooms for the minimum wage, the people across the country in convenience stores getting the minimum wage--often working two, three jobs a day, 60 percent of whom are women, one-third of whom are working at the minimum wage for the only income for their family--well, then, you have some trouble because then it is going to get stalled. That does not get through here quickly because that hallway is not clogged with people representing the folks who are making the minimum wage and working two jobs a day. It is just a fact, and it is a shame. We need to take care of some things here at home, and we need to do so soon. This minimum wage bill is not rocket science, nor should it be heavy lifting for any of us here. It has been 10 years since those who worked at the bottom of the economic ladder have had any adjustment in the minimum wage--10 years. I mentioned the other day, what about a ``maximum wage''? I am not proposing one. But I can tell you that the head of one of the largest oil companies in our country, when he left his company, was making $150,000 a day in total income. Can you imagine that, $150,000 a day? Then when he left, the papers reported, in addition to having made $150,000 a day, he got a $400 million parachute on the way out. Anybody standing around here squawking about that? No, no complaints about that. It is the little guy, the person at the bottom. After 10 years, there is great complaint about trying to move a bill through the Senate that would give them some help, lift that minimum wage a bit. We are told: You can't do that without giving corporations a break. I guess I don't understand the priorities. Some of the suggestions that have been described, expensing for small business, I support that, but it has nothing to do with this bill. We will almost certainly do it in other circumstances. We have done it before. But why should we hold hostage a bill that deals with a whole lot of folks who work hard all day long and for very little money, not $150,000 a day but maybe $44 a day, because of those who have an appetite for additional tax breaks? I don't understand that. Sweatshop Abuses My point is, there is so much to do. I wish to talk for a moment about a couple of other items that relate to this. I introduced a bill last week with some of my colleagues to try to stop sweatshop abuses overseas, products made overseas in sweatshop conditions and sent into this country to compete unfairly against American workers. The fact is, American workers are losing their jobs because there is so much outsourcing to foreign countries. American jobs are being shipped to foreign countries. The very people in this Chamber who are reluctant to increase the minimum wage and are holding us up are the same people who have voted when I have offered four times a simple amendment that says: Let's stop giving large tax breaks to U.S. companies that ship American jobs overseas. Can you think of anything more pernicious than deciding, let's figure out what we have to do in America; let's give a big, fat tax break to a company that would fire their workers, lock their manufacturing plant, shut the lights off and move the jobs overseas? They move the jobs overseas, manufacture a product in Sri Lanka or Bangladesh and ship it back here and they get a big, fat tax break out of this Congress. That is unbelievable to me. We can't get that repealed. And we can't, on the other edge of the sword, get the minimum wage increased. Boy, that slices the wrong direction. There is something fundamentally wrong with that system. I introduced legislation called the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act that sets up a circumstance so that at least if companies are going overseas to find sweatshop conditions, hire a bunch of people who will work for 20 or 30 cents an hour and then produce a product and ship it back here, at least we could try to stop them. There is a lot of dispute about trade and the conditions of employment. I think we could all agree that American workers should not have to compete against the product of prison labor in China. I think we could all agree that if somebody is making socks in a Chinese prison, that is not fair competition for an American worker. So we don't have Chinese prison labor products come into this country. What about the product of sweatshop labor, where people are brought into sweatshops? I will cite an example: A sweatshop in northern Jordan, airplanes flying in the Chinese and Bangladeshis, with Chinese textiles, being put in sweatshops in northern Jordan to produce products to ship into this country. Some were working 40-hour shifts, not a 40-hour week, 40 hours at a time. Some weren't paid for months. And then when they were paid, they were paid a pittance. Some were beaten. Do we want that kind of product coming into this country? Is that whom we want American workers to compete with? I don't think so. This legislation is a first baby step toward some sanity in trying to make sure that what we are purchasing on the store shelves in our country is not the product of sweatshop labor overseas. We define what sweatshop labor is, what sweatshop conditions are. We establish a provision by the Federal Trade Commission to enforce, and we also allow American companies who are forced to compete against this unfairness to take action in American courts to seek recompense for the damages. My hope is Congress will pass this. It is bipartisan. It relates to exactly the same thing we are talking about for people in this country who work on the minimum wage. Last week, I also introduced a piece of legislation that deals with this building. This is a picture of a little white building on Church Street in the Cayman Islands. It is called the Ugland House. It is five stories. According to some enterprising investigative reporting done by David Evans of Bloomberg, this building is actually home to 12,748 corporations. It doesn't look like it could house 12,748 corporations. It is a five-story stucco building in the Cayman Islands, and it is what lawyers have allowed to become legal fiction so that companies could create a legal address in this little white building. It is their tax haven Cayman Island address so they can avoid paying taxes. Isn't that something? Twelve thousand seven hundred forty-eight companies call this place home. We ought to stop it. I have introduced legislation to stop it, to say this: When U.S. companies want to set up a subsidiary in a tax-haven country, if they are not doing substantial business activity in that country, then they have created a legal fiction, and it will not be considered legal for us. They will be taxed as if they never left our country. We can shut this down like that. If this Congress has the will, we can shut down these tax havens in a moment. And we should. Everybody else is paying taxes. It will be April 15th in a couple months. The American people work. They pay taxes and support the Government for the cost of roads and bridges and health care, all the things we do together, the National Institutes of Health, and our national defense. So they pay taxes. It is just that there are some in this country who decide they don't want to participate. They don't want to pay taxes. Here is a report from the Government Accountability Office. It was done at my request and, I believe, that of Senator Levin as well. The report showed the number of large Federal contractors who do business with the Federal Government--that is, they want to benefit from having contracts with the Federal Government--who set up offshore subsidiaries in tax-haven countries to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The very companies that benefit from doing business with the Federal Government in getting contracts are setting up offshore tax haven companies to avoid paying U.S. taxes. That is unbelievable. It ought to stop. I have introduced legislation--I should call it the Ugland House Act, now that I think about it--that shuts down that opportunity. This bill can shut down in a moment the opportunity for companies to decide they want all the benefits America has to offer them, but they don't want the responsibility of paying taxes. My hope is that this bill, which is cosponsored by Senators Levin and Feingold, will be dealt with by the Senate Finance Committee and the full Senate in the days and weeks ahead. Fast Track Authority One final point, if I might. We are told this week that the President Bush will be asking the Congress for something called fast-track authority. Although the Constitution provides Congress the right to regulate foreign commerce--it is a constitutional responsibility of the Congress--the Congress has, in the past, given the President something called fast track, which says: Mr. President, you go out and negotiate trade agreements in secret and then you bring them back and we will have an expedited procedure. And we will require that no Senator be allowed to offer any amendments, no matter what you have negotiated. I don't support fast-track authorization. I didn't support it for President Clinton. I don't support it for this President. This President has had it for 6 years over my objection. He is attempting to now get an extension of it by the end of June 30. I intend--and I am sure a number of my colleagues with whom I have spoken intend--to aggressively resist it. I am for trade and plenty of it. But I am for fair trade. I demand fair trade. This notion of a trade policy that has an $800 billion trade deficit is an unbelievable failure. No one can describe it as a success for this country. It is time to have a fair debate about trade, what strengthens America and what weakens it, what are the conditions under which we participate in the global economy? We have a right to participate the way we choose. We have been told in recent years that the way to participate in the global economy is to engage in a race to the bottom. If American workers can't compete with somebody making 36 cents an hour, that is tough luck. I have often told stories about the companies and the stories of struggle of the last 100 years. But James Fyler died of lead poisoning. He was shot 54 times. I suppose that is lead poisoning. Why was he shot 54 times? Because it was 1914, and James Fyler was radical enough to believe that people who went underground to dig coal should be paid a fair wage and ought to be able to work in a safe workplace. For that, he was shot 54 times. Over a century, going back to the early 1900s, we have created the standards of work. We lifted America. We expanded the middle class. We said: We will put in place fair labor standards, child labor provisions, safe workplace rules. We are going to lift America up. We are going to expand the opportunity for health care. We will have good jobs that pay well. We will give people the right to organize. We did all of that. We created the broadest middle class in the world and an economic engine that is unparalleled. Now we are told it is a new day. We should compete. If there is a woman named ``Saditia'' in Indonesia making shoes and she makes 21 cents an hour and we can't compete with that, that is tough luck. If we have people in China making 33 cents an hour producing Huffy bicycles that used to be produced here and we can't compete with that, tough luck. If the Radio Flyer little red wagon that used to be produced in Chicago went to China, it was because we can't compete with Chinese workers. If Pennsylvania House furniture left Pennsylvania and they now ship the wood to China and then ship the furniture back, those workers in Pennsylvania should not complain because they couldn't compete with Chinese workers. It doesn't matter to me whether it is Chinese workers or Sri Lanka or Bangladeshi. The fact is, we are seeing a diminished standard in which we are racing to the bottom. I read in the paper this weekend an op-ed piece. Somebody was asking: What is everybody complaining about? Things are great. Wages and salaries are the way most people get their income. They are the lowest percentage of gross domestic product since they started keeping score in 1947. We added 5 million people to the poverty rolls in the last 6 years. Everything is great. Probably for some. Maybe the guy who is making $100,000 a day running an oil company but not for the person working three jobs at a minimum wage who hasn't been boosted for 10 years, not to Natasha Humphrey. She did everything. She went to Stanford, an African-American woman, got her degree, went to work for a technology company. Her last job was to train her replacement, an engineer from India who would work for one-fifth the cost of an engineer in the United States. So things aren't so great for everybody. When you have a $700 billion-a-year trade deficit, over $250 billion a year with China alone, I say you better pay attention. You better get it straight. Energy Policy There is a lot to say and a lot to do. I was going to talk about energy policy briefly, but I will only say that one of the major challenges in our country is the challenge of energy. We are so unbelievably dependent on foreign sources of oil. The bulk of our oil comes from outside of our country, well over 60 percent. We are dependent on the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, the Iraqis, the Venezuelans, and others for oil. It is unhealthy. We need to make a major commitment to renewable energy. What we have done in energy is pretty much what we have done in too many areas. We put in place, in 1916, permanent robust tax incentives to incentivize the production of oil It has been in place for 90 years. In 1992, we said: You know what, let's boost the production of renewable energy, so we put in place a production tax credit--temporary and rather narrow. It has been extended short term five times and allowed to expire three times. There has been virtually no consistent commitment to renewable energy. It has been on again/off again, like a switch. That is not a commitment. If you are going to commit as a country to move in a direction on energy, whether it is renewable, biofuels, or hydrogen fuel cells, you should make a commitment and say: Here is where the country is headed, where we intend to be in 10 years, and we are going to give a tax incentive for 10 years for the production of these renewable fuels. You should have targets and timetables. That hasn't been the case. It has been a rather limited, tepid, miniature kind of provision that is turned off again and on again, a stutter-stop approach that tells investors: Don't rely on this because this Government isn't committed to it. We need to do better. I hope this year we can decide, as the President asked for in his State of the Union Address, on a much more robust commitment to renewable energy. Having said that, let me point out, under this President and previous Presidents, the amount of money we have committed to the renewable energy area. We have laboratories, renewable energy laboratories, whose funding dropped consistently. Again, it is one thing to say something and have a goal; it is another thing to decide you are going to take steps to meet the goal. We have not done that. So, Mr. President, I have said a lot about a lot of things because we are facing a lot of things that, in many ways, are related, including the war in Iraq, the international challenges. All of us want the same thing for our country. We all want this country to succeed and do well. I don't think there is a difference in goals. We will have sharp debate in the next 2 weeks, but I don't believe there is a difference in the goals we have. I suspect everybody in this Chamber wants very much for the Iraq war to be over, for our troops to be home, and for stability to exist in Iraq and in that region. I expect we share the goal on energy. Does anybody think that we as a country aspire to be 60, 65 percent dependent upon oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and elsewhere? I don't think so. It seems to me that it would make some sense for us to find a way to get the best of what both sides have to offer in these discussions rather than the worst of each. I hope in the coming days we can at least clear away the bill on the floor so we can move to other issues. Last week, Senator Kennedy gave a pretty animated presentation about his frustration with the day after day after day digging in the heels of this Chamber to stop or delay the passage of a minimum wage. Again, I just walked through the halls coming over here. They are not filled with people representing the workers at the bottom. We should represent those workers. We have that responsibility. We have the responsibility to do the right thing, and after 10 long years, it is the right thing to pass this minimum wage bill and not hold it hostage for other issues and other agendas. We will have plenty of opportunity with amendments that have nothing to do with this bill; we will have the opportunity to offer them. But not now. Don't hold a bill hostage that would help those working two and three jobs a day trying to take care of their families. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record The Committee on Indian Affairs Rules of Procedure.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I regret that commitments in North Dakota prevented me from voting on the nomination of David H. Petraeus to be promoted to the rank of General in the U.S. Army and to be commander of Multinational Forces Iraq. If present, I would have voted in favor of General Petraeus's nomination. I believe General Petraeus is well-qualified to command in Iraq. He was unanimously approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee because of his leadership skills and his operational experience. And he is widely recognized as one of the military's top experts on counterinsurgency operations. He is an excellent choice to be entrusted with the operational command and welfare of over 130,000 American servicemembers who are in the middle of a bloody sectarian battle over the future of Iraq. He is familiar with the situation in that country from his experiences as an infantry division commander during and immediately after the invasion of Iraq, and from his tenure as the commander of U.S. efforts to train and equip Iraqi security forces. Altogether, he has served 27 months in Iraq since the war began. I was impressed by the fact that General Petraeus promised to regularly update Congress on whether the President's new plan in Iraq is working and on how much progress the Iraqi Government is making toward assuming responsibility for security. But my support for General Petraeus's nomination should not be taken as support for the President's decision to send additional soldiers and marines to Iraq and to escalate our military involvement there. I am very skeptical that the President's plan to send 21,500 additional troops to Iraq is going to work. I have listened to what President Bush and his advisers have said about the subject, and I listened to what General Petreaus said during his confirmation hearing. But I do not think they have adequately explained away the Senate testimony given less than 2 months ago by General Abizaid, the top commander of American troops in Iraq. In November General Abizaid said: I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the corps commander, General Dempsey. We all talked together. And I said, ``In your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does that add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq?'' And they all said no. The reason is because we want the Iraqis to do more. It is easy for the Iraqis to rely upon us to do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future. Has that changed? Has something changed in 2 months? The question for us now is: Should American troops be in the middle of that civil war? Should we send additional troops to that circumstance? If so, for what purpose? And why the change only two months after General Abizaid said the commanders do not believe additional troops will be effective? That issue is going to be debated here in Congress in the coming weeks. All of us in that debate want to find the right solution for this country to support our soldiers, make the right choices for them, and make the right judgments for our country's long-term interests. I believe that sending General Petreaus to Iraq will help accomplish that. I wish him well and Godspeed.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, February 1, 2007, at 9:30 a.m. in Room 485 of the Russell Senate Office Building to conduct a confirmation hearing on the President's nomination of Mr. Carl Joseph Artman, to be Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior, to be followed immediately by a business meeting to approve the nomination of Mr. Carl Joseph Artman, to be Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this week I am introducing a bipartisan piece of legislation that every Member of the Senate should support. The legislation aims to crack down on sweatshop abuses taking place in overseas factories that produce merchandise for sale in the American marketplace. The United States currently prohibits the importation of products made with prison labor but does not similarly prohibit the importation of products made in sweatshops under slave-like conditions. What is more, if a U.S. retailer finds that one of its competitors is importing products made in a foreign sweatshop, it has no recourse in U.S. courts and is placed at a competitive disadvantage. I am certain that if Members of the Senate were asked to raise their hand if they support abusive sweatshop conditions at foreign factories producing for the United States, not one hand would go up. Yet, as the media and watchdog groups have documented all too well, these conditions are prevalent in a number of our major trading partners. We have to put a stop to this. Sweatshop factories undermine the foreign workers who work in them, and they undermine U.S. workers who are asked to compete with them. The bill I am introducing is called the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act, and it is really very simple. First, the bill says that it is illegal to bring the product of sweatshop factories to this country. In this bill, a ``sweatshop factory'' is one where workers are abused in violation of that country's labor laws. Second, the bill allows U.S. retailers the right to sue their competitors for damages in U.S. court if their competitors are sourcing their merchandise from sweatshop factories. Let me give you an example of why such legislation is essential, involving the country of Jordan. Our trade negotiators signed the Jordan Free Trade Agreement in October of 2000. The agreement was negotiated under the Clinton administration, and it was supposed to be a model trade agreement. I give the Clinton administration credit for at least giving some thought to putting labor provisions in the trade deal with Jordan. But those labor provisions were not enforced, and the result has been the proliferation of sweatshops in Jordan. In May of last year, the New York Times described this trend. It turned out that when the agreement was signed in 1999, Jordan began to fly in so-called guest workers from countries like Bangladesh and China to make products in Jordan for sale at stores like Wal-Mart and Target. The conditions for these so-called guest workers in Jordan were slave-like. This is how the New York Times described it: ``Propelled by a free trade agreement with the United States, apparel manufacturing is booming in Jordan, its exports to America soaring twenty fold in the last five years. But some foreign workers in Jordanian factories that produce garments for Target, Wal-Mart and other retailers are complaining of dismal conditions--of 20-hour days, of not being paid for months and of being hit by supervisors and jailed when they complain.'' These were some of the other conditions documented at these factories. Workers were promised $120 a month but in some cases were hardly paid at all. One worker was paid only $50 for 5 months of work. And 40-hour shifts were common. Incredibly, the 40-hour shift apparently had replaced the 40-hour workweek. To its credit, Wal-Mart admitted to the New York Times that it had found ``serious problems with the conditions at several major Jordanian factories.'' But it should not have taken a New York Times investigation to uncover these abuses. Here is another instance of sweatshop conditions. In November 2006, BusinessWeek had a cover story on sweatshop abuses entitled ``Secrets, Lies, and Sweatshops.'' The article begins with the description of a Chinese company called the Ningbo Beifa Group. This company has made a lot of money as a top supplier of pens, mechanical pencils, and highlighters to Wal-Mart Stores and other major retailers. In 2005, Wal-Mart inspected this company's factories. It found that the company was paying its 3,000 workers less than China's minimum wage and violating overtime rules. So Wal-Mart asked the company to fix these serious problems. The Chinese company failed to do so. Wal-Mart then returned to the company, found the same problems, and told the company to shape up. Again, the Chinese company failed to do so and happily continued making pens and highlighters for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart returned a third time and gave the Chinese company its third warning. Once again, the Chinese company failed to treat its workers according to Chinese law. So finally, even Wal-Mart had had enough, and they issued a fourth warning--comply with the law or we will stop doing business with you. What did the Chinese company do? It turned to another Chinese company called the Shanghai Corporate Responsibility Management & Consulting Co. For a $5,000 fee, the company promised to send a consultant to take care of the Wal-Mart problem. The consultant provided advice on how to create fake but authentic- looking payroll records. The consultant also told the company that, on the day of the fourth Wal-Mart audit, they should give the day off to any workers with grievances, so that they would not tell any inconvenient stories. After following the consultant's advice, the Chinese factory passed the Wal-Mart audit--even though the Chinese company later admitted that it didn't change any of its practices. Now, I am not suggesting that Wal-Mart deliberately turned a blind eye in this case. And there are certainly documented cases of other companies selling sweatshop products in the United States. But I do think that companies that decide to import products for sale in this country should not be allowed to gain an unfair competitive advantage by deliberately sourcing from sweatshop factories. And the bill that I am introducing would address such abuses by banning the importation or sale of products made in factories under sweatshop conditions. For purposes of the bill, ``sweatshop conditions'' are gross violations of the labor, health, and safety laws of the country where the labor is performed. Enforcement would be divided between the Customs Service and the Federal Trade Commission. If the Federal Trade Commission determined that a factory was operating under sweatshop conditions, it would issue an order prohibiting the sale of products from that factory. Violations of those orders would then carry a civil penalty of up to $10,000 for each individual violation. The import ban deals only with goods that can be proven to have been made with sweatshop labor and is not a ban of products based on the country of origin. In order to comply with nondiscrimination provisions of the WTO, the sales ban would apply to both domestic and imported goods. The President could waive the application of this section to particular goods, but the Congress would also be able to pass a joint resolution rejecting a Presidential waiver. The legislation also creates a private right of action for U.S. retailers and their investors to bring a civil action against competitors who import or sell sweatshop goods. For each offense, plaintiffs can sue for damages of the higher of $10,000 or the actual value of the goods. They can also sue for injunctive relief, to prevent the further entry of these goods into the U.S. marketplace. This legislation is similar to S. 3485, a bill that I introduced late in the last Congress. I am happy that, in introducing the legislation in the 110th Congress, I am being joined by Senator Graham of South Carolina, who has agreed to lead the effort to advance it from the other side of the aisle. The legislation is also cosponsored by Senator Sherrod Brown, who last year introduced a companion piece of legislation in the House of Representatives. And I would also like to thank the other original cosponsors of the bill, Senators Byrd, Feingold, and Sanders. I believe that one of the messages the American people sent to Congress in the November elections is that they demand fair trade. The legislation I am introducing is a way for Congress to show that the message has been heard.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I have been listening to my colleagues on this issue of the minimum wage and thinking about a time 70-some years ago that I read about when there was an initiative on the floor of the Congress dealing with the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted, was considered radical. They said it was going to injure business and there would be trouble in this country. That provision said, on behalf of America's workers, that employers ought to keep time records, ought to pay overtime for over a certain number of hours--the kinds of things you would expect. But once again, the sky was going to fall if this sort of thing was embraced. We have heard this every time we have had something on the floor of the Senate. My colleagues have talked about initiatives that are important. I think many of these initiatives are important. What about the initiative to help the people at the bottom rung of the economic ladder? It has been almost 10 years since the minimum wage has been increased. Yet it is unbelievable how difficult it is to pull it through this Chamber. The price for pulling it through the Chamber is to add additional tax breaks. There was a time when in this Chamber we considered tax breaks, saying to the biggest corporations in America that moved many of their jobs overseas: We want to give you the right--the only people in the country--to pay an income tax of 5\1/4\ percent. It will cost us $104 billion in lost revenue to our Treasury, in my calculation. That went through like greased lightning. Did you hear anybody say: If we are going to give a $104 billion tax break to the biggest companies, maybe we ought to help the people at the bottom of the economic ladder. Oh, no, nobody wanted to leverage that because nobody cared about that. As I have described before, it is like the lyrics of the Bob Willis and the Texas Playboys song; it is the same thing that plays out in every situation. The lyrics are, ``The little bee sucks the blossom and the big bee gets the honey.'' In this case, the big guy gets the money. It is always the case in these debates. What about a maximum wage? We hear about a minimum wage, and the people at the bottom who have not had a raise for 10 years. This notion that I have heard all week, which is that this is impacts just a bunch of teenagers, is just not true. This is not a bunch of teenagers. Well over 70 percent of the workers who will benefit from the minimum wage are adults; 60 percent are women; 6.4 million children will benefit because their parents are working for the minimum wage. For a third of them, that is their sole family income. So it is just not true to come to the floor and banter around and say it is just a bunch of teenagers working. But if we are so concerned about the people at the bottom getting too much, let me make this point to you: Wages and salaries, which is the compensation given to workers in this country, are at their lowest levels as a percentage of GDP since they started keeping score in 1947. They are the lowest since they started keeping score. Now, why is that the case? There is plenty of income in this country, but it is going to others. I mentioned the maximum wage. Is there a maximum wage? Did anybody rush to the Senate floor to express concern when we read in the paper one morning that the head of Exxon got a $400 million buyout, or $400 million in benefits, as he left his job? That is $150,000 a day in income. What is the minimum wage these days? It is about $40 a day. There is a lot of concern about that on the floor of the Senate. Maybe it will go to $50 a day for the folks at the bottom of the ladder in this economy of ours. Does anybody come over here and say: You know what, when I read that somebody gets $150,000 a day, I am concerned. No, it is just quiet; you can hear a pin drop in the Chamber about the issue of the maximum wages. It is unbelievable. The other day, $180 million was given to a person who was leaving a company because the company was displeased with his performance. I could spend a couple of hours here talking about those kinds of payouts. Nobody is talking about a maximum wage. I am not here talking about a maximum wage. Why so much concern about a minimum wage for the folks who work at the bottom in this country? I support expensing for small business investments in equipment and machinery, but why is this bill being held hostage for that sort of thing? I voted for that in other circumstances and will again. Why is it so hard to pull a minimum wage through this Chamber? It is really pretty bizarre. You know, I have watched people work in circumstances that are very difficult. We have a lot of people who work two and three jobs and work very hard. One day, I talked to a woman who was an unbelievable success story. She was working for very little money at the bottom of the ladder, cleaning toilets and the hallways of a very small college--a single mother with four kids, working right at the bottom. She thought: You know, somehow, some day, I want to graduate from this college. I was there when she did. I was a speaker at the commencement. She was 42 years old and had four kids. She was wearing a cap and a gown and a smile, and she did it because we cared enough for Pell grants and the kinds of things that can give someone hope. The fact is that people who work at the bottom of the economic ladder for minimum wage have been lost and forgotten, particularly here. They are the people who make the beds in the hotels in which we sleep. They are the people who serve the food at the fast food places we frequent. They are people who work hard. They want an opportunity and a chance. After 10 years, this bill isn't a major policy change; this is an obligation this Congress has had for years, which it has ignored. Now we bring it to the floor of the Senate, and we are told that the price for this is additional tax breaks. The only way you will help somebody at the bottom after 10 years is to give additional tax breaks. Go back and look at the tax breaks that have been given. I just mentioned one, by the way--a 5\1/4\ percent income tax rate. There is no one listening to this debate who is paying 5\1/4\ percent. Everyone is paying more than that. But the biggest corporations in America got to pay 5\1/4\ percent on income they earned overseas in plants where often they sent American jobs. They get to pay 5\1/4\ percent on income they earn there. That is the break they get. Nobody else gets that. That went through here very easily. Nobody is going to hold that hostage; my gosh, that benefits the folks at the top. Let me make one other point that I think is important. The very people who are opposed to a minimum wage--George Will says the minimum wage ought to be zero, by the way. That is all right for him because he is not earning the minimum wage. But the very people in this Chamber who are opposed to a minimum wage, if you go back and check the votes, are the ones who have voted for a tax incentive or tax break for the companies that ship their jobs overseas. That is easy to track, by the way, because we have had four votes on that--to shut down that pernicious, unbelievable tax break. We say to a company: Shut your manufacturing plant down, fire your workers, move your production to China, and we will give you a big fat tax break. We have tried to get rid of that four times, and four times we have failed. The same colleagues who are so concerned about helping people at the bottom with a very reasonable adjustment in the minimum wage after 10 years are the very same people who said: We want to continue a tax break to ship American jobs overseas. I am just telling you that everybody has a right to their opinion, and I will respect it. But I certainly have a right to say I believe it is wrong. I believe it is bad policy for this country. This economic engine works best when everybody works. There is no social program in this country as important as a good job that pays well. We all understand that. We also understand there are a lot of jobs in this country with substantial downward pressure on income because of this so-called globalization by which the largest enterprises can go find the lowest paid workers anywhere in the world and move their jobs, putting downward pressure on American workers' income. We know what is happening in the workplace. Let me end as I started, by saying that salaries and wages, which is the income workers in this country get, are at their lowest percentage of our economy since they started keeping score in 1947. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to interpret that. If the interpretation of that doesn't persuade one that we have an obligation to do something for the people working at the bottom of the economic ladder for the minimum wage, then I don't know what would persuade them. Finally, this is not about teenagers. No matter how often you say it, that does not make it true. This is not about teenagers. Over 70 percent of the people on the minimum wage are adults, many of them with children, 60 percent of them women, a third of them working as their only job and their only income for their family. Those are the facts. There is one other fact that is certain. There is no one in this Chamber--no one in this Chamber--who puts on a dark suit in the morning and goes to work for a minimum wage. No one in this Chamber understands the requirement to work for a minimum wage at two or three jobs to try to keep your family going. But there are a lot of people in this country who do understand, and they wake up every morning hoping and praying that somehow they will get a fair break and get a fair wage. Productivity is going up in this country, and we are blessed by that. But the income for workers who have become more productive has lagged way behind. And I wonder why. I guess we know the answer. This country is a better country if we understand that the share of wealth and the share of income in this country ought to go to those who deserve it. And if American workers are much, much, much more productive--and they have been--then they also deserve a fair share of this country's income. That has always been the case. In the last century, the kinds of things we have done to make this a better place in which to work--safe workplace, child labor, minimum wage, the right to organize, and a range of issues--have strengthened this country and made this a better country. This legislation that we are considering today is also legislation that will strengthen this country and do the right thing. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I have been listening to this debate. I am curious and somewhat disappointed that we have not been able to move to a conclusion. This is, after all, a vote on the minimum wage. It has been nearly 10 long years since the minimum wage has been increased, and my hope is that we have a number of amendments, debate, and be able to move this legislation forward. It now seems obvious to me this is not a priority for some. In 1916, a man named James Fyler died of lead poisoning. That is a different way of saying he was shot 54 times. He was shot 54 times because he believed people who went underground in this country to mine for coal should be paid a fair wage and work in a safe workplace. He lost his life for that. We fought for a century for the rights of workers in this country--for the right to organize, to work in a safe workplace, for child labor laws--a whole series of things that have made life better for workers. Some are at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Some in this Chamber have said those are just teenagers. That is not true. Some teenagers certainly do work at the minimum wage. But well over 70 percent of those working at minimum wage are adults; 60 percent of them are women, and for one-third of them, it is the sole income for their families. Many are working two and three jobs trying to make ends meet. They make the beds in the hotels and motels. They work at the counter of the convenience store when you stop to get gas, or get some candy or something at the convenience store. They are the people we see every day. They are working at the minimum wage that has been the same for 10 long years. I said this morning that it is puzzling to me how quickly and easily legislation moves through this Chamber when it supports the big interests. If it is a $104 billion benefit to allow big companies to repatriate income they have made abroad by, in many cases, moving their jobs abroad and being able to bring their income back and pay a 5\1/4\ percent income rate--yes, this Congress did that. We said bring that income back and you get to pay a 5\1/4\ percent income tax rate. How many Americans would like to pay 5\1/4\ percent on their income taxes? Nobody gets to do that. Some of the biggest enterprises in this country--names everybody would recognize--were told by this Congress a couple years ago that you can bring all that money back and pay 5\1/4\ percent income taxes. Yes, you moved your jobs overseas and decided to get rid of your American workers, close your American plants, and hire foreign workers; but when you bring your income back, we will tax you at just 5\1/4\ percent. What a deal, bargain basement tax rates. That went through the Congress like greased lightning. Do you think anybody was blocking that? Well, Fritz Hollings, who used to sit back here, was trying to, and I was. The fact is it moved through here as quick as anything you have ever seen because it represented the big interests. Now all of a sudden people who work at the minimum wage have their issue on the floor of the Senate. Is the hallway clogged with people demanding a vote on the minimum wage out there? Is anybody in the hallway in the front of this building representing people who work on the minimum wage? No, I am afraid not. Is this Congress moving as quickly on behalf of the little guy as it is for the big guy? I am afraid that is not the case. I mentioned this morning the lyrics in Bob Wills' and the Texas Playboys' song some 70 years ago. It plays out all the time, yes, here in the Chamber of the Senate: ``The little guy picks the cotton and the big guy gets the money; the little bee sucks the blossom and the big bee gets the honey.'' One wonders whether on this issue, as simple as it is, if maybe we can get to a vote, for Members of the Senate to stand up and answer the question: Whose side are you on? Maybe we can get enough to stand up to say I am on the side of the people who are working for a living, working hard, working two and three jobs at minimum wage, without an adjustment to that minimum wage in nearly 10 years, during which time the value of the purchasing power of that minimum wage has dramatically eroded. One wonders whether we can get a majority of the Senate, or 60 Senators, to stand up and say let's do this. It could not be done that way, so it was brought to the floor with tax breaks for business. Look, I am a big supporter of big business. They represent an engine of opportunity for this country and create jobs. I support businesses. Almost all of the things in this bill, such as expensing--I have been involved, as have other colleagues, in trying to provide more expensing opportunities for businesses. I have voted for that many times, and will again. But it doesn't belong on this bill. As a price, apparently, for bringing this bill to the floor, it has to have tax breaks for businesses. Even with that, we cannot get it passed; even with that, we are sitting here day after day waiting to see whether the Senate will decide to increase the minimum wage for those folks working at the bottom of the economic ladder. Well, Mr. President, it is an interesting thing to watch--this process of legislating. Everybody talks about watching sausage being made and watching legislative processes in work, and I understand it is difficult, not easy. I understand these issues are, in many cases, controversial. But this ought to be the first baby step in the direction of fairness for these workers. We, after all, live in a time now of what is called the ``global economy,'' where there is downward pressure on income for American workers. Former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Blinder said, with respect to the pressure on American workers, that there are 42 million to 56 million American jobs that are tradeable and, therefore, outsourceable. We have lost 3 million jobs to overseas factories, where you can hire somebody for 33 cents an hour, and he said there are 42 million to 56 million more. This is not somebody who is radical. This is a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He said not all of those jobs will leave our country, but those that remain will have downward pressure on income because they are competing with people in China, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, who work for 30 cents or 40 cents an hour. There are 250 million workers who are kids age 5 to 14. Our workers are told to compete with that. You cannot. There is downward pressure on income of people in this country. This bill deals with one part of that--the workers at the bottom of the economic ladder, those who get up in the morning and are trying to get their kids ready for school, and trying to figure out how to put gas in the tank of the car to drive to work; and they work 8 hours and they earn a little over $40. I said this morning, what about a maximum wage? We have trouble getting a minimum wage through the Congress. George Will, that columnist who writes in the Washington Post, says the minimum wage ought to be zero. Of course, it never would affect him, so it is easy for him to write that it ought to be zero. He would like to take us back, I assume, just as we had great debate when the Fair Labor Standards Act was created and people said that is socialism, but it was standing up for workers, requiring employers to keep track of hours of work, overtime, and provide basic protections for workers. So some people think the minimum wage ought to be zero. Well, what about a maximum wage? I am not suggesting there ought to be a maximum wage, but has anybody come to the floor to express outrage when you read that the CEO leaving Exxon Corporation was making $150,000 a day? Yes, that is right--a wage or income of a CEO of a corporation was $150,000 a day. Think of that. Did anybody come and complain about that? No, we just have columnists and colleagues complaining about somebody who might earn a few bucks an hour. Sixty percent of them are women, as I said, with children; 6 million children live in families supported by the minimum wage. So the question, I guess, that I ask at the moment is not whether we support small business--I certainly do, and I will in the rest of this Congress support the kinds of things that will be helpful to small businesses, which are engines of growth and opportunity. That is not the question. The question is, are we going to increase the minimum wage at this point? It appears there is this unbelievable snail's pace in the Senate. Glaciers move faster than this Chamber sometimes. Nobody ever accused the Senate of speeding, but this is something quite different. I am hoping that very soon--I know the folks who have been managing this bill join this hope--we can decide we have had enough amendments about things that have nothing to do with anything about the workers at the bottom of the ladder. And maybe we can get a vote to say as a Chamber, as the House has done without extraneous matters attached to it, that we stand for workers who have been working at the bottom of the economic ladder and have not had an adjustment in 10 years; that we stand for them and believe it is important to have this adjustment. We believe it will be good for our country. I hope that happens sooner rather than later. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today I'm joined by Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin in re-introducing legislation that we believe will help the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) combat offshore tax haven abuses and ensure that U.S. multinational companies pay the U.S. taxes that they rightfully owe. Every year, tens of millions of taxpayers work through piles of complicated IRS instructions and complex forms to prepare and file their tax returns to fulfill their taxpaying responsibility. Some tax experts have estimated that taxpayers spend over $100 billion and more than 6 billion hours trying to comply with their Federal tax obligation. That's why every American has a right to be angry when they hear repeated press accounts of corporate taxpayers that are shirking their tax obligations by actively shifting their profits to foreign tax havens or using other inappropriate tax avoidance techniques. The bill that we are re-introducing today is a simple and straightforward way to try to tackle the offshore tax haven problem. It is virtually identical to our bill in the 109th Congress, S. 779, but we have granted potentially impacted companies an extra year to comply with its provisions. We have known for many years that some very profitable U.S. multinational businesses are using offshore tax havens to avoid paying their fair share of U.S. taxes. But in the face of these reports, the Congress and the administration have shown little interest in stopping this hemorrhaging of tax revenues. In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that the tax haven problem is getting much worse and may be costing the U.S. Treasury tens of billions of dollars every year. Although the Congress did pass legislation a few years ago, which I supported, that addresses a narrow problem of a couple dozen corporate expatriates that reincorporated overseas, that legislation did nothing to deal with the problem of U.S. companies that are setting up tax haven subsidiaries offshore to avoid their taxpaying responsibilities in this country. Around the time of the debate on corporate inversions, a New York Times article got it right when it suggested that ``instead of moving headquarters offshore, many companies are simply placing patents on drugs, ownership of corporate logos, techniques for manufacturing processes and other intangible assets in tax havens . . . The companies then charge their subsidiaries in higher-tax locales, including the U.S., for the use of these intellectual properties. This allows the companies to take profits in these havens and pay far less in taxes.'' How pervasive is the tax haven subsidiary problem? A couple of years ago, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, issued a report that Senator Levin and I requested that gives some insight to the potential magnitude of this tax avoidance activity. The GAO found that 59 out of the 100 largest publicly-traded Federal contractors in 2001--with tens of billions of dollars of Federal contracts in 2001-- had established hundreds of subsidiaries located in offshore tax havens. According to the GAO, Exxon-Mobil Corporation, the 21st largest publicly traded Federal contractor in 2001, has some 11 tax-haven subsidiaries in the Bahamas. The same report revealed that the Halliburton Company has 17 tax-haven subsidiaries, including 13 in the Cayman Islands, a country that has never imposed a corporate income tax, as well as 2 in Liechtenstein and 2 in Panama. And the now infamous Enron Corporation had 1,300 different foreign entities, including some 441 located in the Cayman Islands. But the poster child for offshore tax haven abuses, in my opinion, is a five-story building located in the Cayman Islands that thousands of companies call home. According to a very good investigative report published by David Evans with Bloomberg News in the summer of 2004, there is a building named the Ugland House in Grand Cayman that is used as the address of 12,748 companies. In fact, nearly half of the money U.S. companies earned overseas is accounted for in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. A former Joint Committee on Taxation economist released a study that looked at the amount of profits that U.S. companies are shifting to offshore tax havens. He found that U.S. multinational companies had moved hundreds of billions of dollars in profits to tax havens for years 1999-2002, the latest years for which IRS data was available. The legislation we are re-introducing today would help put a stop to these tax avoidance schemes. Specifically, our legislation denies tax benefits, namely tax deferral, to U.S. multinational companies that set up controlled foreign corporations in tax haven countries. This tracks the same general approach in legislation passed by the Congress and enacted into law that was designed to curb the problem of corporate inversions. Our bill builds upon the good work of Senators Baucus and Grassley and other members of the Senate Finance Committee by extending similar tax policy changes to cover the case of U.S. companies and their tax haven subsidiaries. Specifically, our legislation would treat U.S. controlled foreign subsidiaries that are set up in tax haven countries--but are not engaged in a real and active business--as domestic companies for U.S. tax purposes. In other words, we would simply treat these companies as if they never left the United States, which is essentially the case in these tax avoidance motivated transactions. The bill's list of specific tax haven countries subjected to the new rule is based upon the previous work by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. However, our legislation does give the Secretary of the Treasury the ability to add or remove a foreign country from this list in appropriate cases. We also give businesses plenty of time, two additional years through December 31, 2008, to restructure their tax haven operations if they so choose. As mentioned, our legislation effectively ends the deferral tax benefit for U.S. companies that shift income to offshore inactive tax haven subsidiaries. This means, for example, that any efforts by a U.S. company to move profits to the subsidiary through transfer pricing schemes will not work because the income earned by the subsidiary would still be immediately taxable by the United States. Likewise, any efforts to move otherwise active income earned by a U.S. company in a high-tax foreign country to a tax haven would cause the income to be immediately taxable by the United States. Under this bill, companies that try to move intangible assets--and the income they produce--to tax havens would be unsuccessful because that income would still be immediately taxable by the United States. The Joint Tax Committee says our legislation that will help close this tax shelter game will prevent these companies from draining some $15 billion in revenues from the U.S. Treasury over the next decade. Let me be very clear about one thing. This legislation will not adversely impact U.S. companies with controlled foreign subsidiaries that are located in tax havens and doing legitimate and substantial business. The legislation expressly exempts a U.S.-controlled foreign subsidiary from its tax rule changes when all of its income is derived from the active conduct of a trade or business within a listed tax haven country. In 2002, then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti told Congress that ``nothing undermines confidence in the tax system more than the impression that the average honest taxpayer has to pay his or her taxes while more wealthy or unscrupulous taxpayers are allowed to get away with not paying.'' He is absolutely right. It's grossly unfair to ask our Main Street businesses to operate at a competitive disadvantage to large multinational businesses simply because our tax authorities are unable to grapple with the growing offshore tax avoidance problem. It is also outrageous that tens of millions of working families who pay their taxes on time every year are shouldering the tax burden of large profitable U.S. multinational companies that use tax haven subsidiaries. In conclusion, it is my hope that the White House and Congress in a new spirit of bipartisanship will help in our effort to get this needed tax law change enacted into law. I urge my colleagues to support this effort by cosponsoring this legislation.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today I am pleased to introduce with Senator McCain and other senators the Indian Child Protection and Family, Violence Prevention Act Amendments of 2007. The bill we introduce today is virtually identical to legislation which the Senate adopted last year to amend and reauthorize the Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act of 1990. The primary goals of that Act were to reduce the incidence of child abuse, and mandate the reporting and tracking of child abuse in Indian Country. The Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act Amendments would authorize a study to identify impediments to the reduction of child abuse in Indian Country, as well as require data collection and annual reporting to Congress concerning child abuse in Indian Country; provide additional safeguards for the privacy of information about a child by local law enforcement and child protective services; provide for more involvement by the FBI and the Attorney General in documenting incidents of child abuse on Indian reservations; and authorize the Indian Health Service to use telemedicine in connection with examinations of abused Indian children. The bill would also authorize background investigations for employees and volunteers who work with Indian children, amend the Major Crimes Act to criminalize acts of child abuse and neglect in Indian Country, and authorize several treatment programs for Indian children who have been victimized. I particularly appreciate that this reauthorization legislation addresses a related issue about which I have deep concern--the epidemic of youth suicide in many reservation communities. Indian Country has higher rates of youth suicide, as well as of child abuse, than other American population groups. Often, children who attempt suicide have been abused by a family or community member. This bill would authorize professionals trained in behavioral health, including suicide prevention and treatment, to be included on the staff of regional Indian Child Resource and Family Services Centers authorized under the Act. I am hopeful that the Senate will act quickly this session to authorize the additional protections for Native American children that would be provided by the Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act Amendments of 2007. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today I'm joined by Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin in re-introducing legislation that we believe will help the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) combat offshore tax haven abuses and ensure that U.S. multinational companies pay the U.S. taxes that they rightfully owe. Every year, tens of millions of taxpayers work through piles of complicated IRS instructions and complex forms to prepare and file their tax returns to fulfill their taxpaying responsibility. Some tax experts have estimated that taxpayers spend over $100 billion and more than 6 billion hours trying to comply with their Federal tax obligation. That's why every American has a right to be angry when they hear repeated press accounts of corporate taxpayers that are shirking their tax obligations by actively shifting their profits to foreign tax havens or using other inappropriate tax avoidance techniques. The bill that we are re-introducing today is a simple and straightforward way to try to tackle the offshore tax haven problem. It is virtually identical to our bill in the 109th Congress, S. 779, but we have granted potentially impacted companies an extra year to comply with its provisions. We have known for many years that some very profitable U.S. multinational businesses are using offshore tax havens to avoid paying their fair share of U.S. taxes. But in the face of these reports, the Congress and the administration have shown little interest in stopping this hemorrhaging of tax revenues. In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that the tax haven problem is getting much worse and may be costing the U.S. Treasury tens of billions of dollars every year. Although the Congress did pass legislation a few years ago, which I supported, that addresses a narrow problem of a couple dozen corporate expatriates that reincorporated overseas, that legislation did nothing to deal with the problem of U.S. companies that are setting up tax haven subsidiaries offshore to avoid their taxpaying responsibilities in this country. Around the time of the debate on corporate inversions, a New York Times article got it right when it suggested that ``instead of moving headquarters offshore, many companies are simply placing patents on drugs, ownership of corporate logos, techniques for manufacturing processes and other intangible assets in tax havens . . . The companies then charge their subsidiaries in higher-tax locales, including the U.S., for the use of these intellectual properties. This allows the companies to take profits in these havens and pay far less in taxes.'' How pervasive is the tax haven subsidiary problem? A couple of years ago, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, issued a report that Senator Levin and I requested that gives some insight to the potential magnitude of this tax avoidance activity. The GAO found that 59 out of the 100 largest publicly-traded Federal contractors in 2001--with tens of billions of dollars of Federal contracts in 2001-- had established hundreds of subsidiaries located in offshore tax havens. According to the GAO, Exxon-Mobil Corporation, the 21st largest publicly traded Federal contractor in 2001, has some 11 tax-haven subsidiaries in the Bahamas. The same report revealed that the Halliburton Company has 17 tax-haven subsidiaries, including 13 in the Cayman Islands, a country that has never imposed a corporate income tax, as well as 2 in Liechtenstein and 2 in Panama. And the now infamous Enron Corporation had 1,300 different foreign entities, including some 441 located in the Cayman Islands. But the poster child for offshore tax haven abuses, in my opinion, is a five-story building located in the Cayman Islands that thousands of companies call home. According to a very good investigative report published by David Evans with Bloomberg News in the summer of 2004, there is a building named the Ugland House in Grand Cayman that is used as the address of 12,748 companies. In fact, nearly half of the money U.S. companies earned overseas is accounted for in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. A former Joint Committee on Taxation economist released a study that looked at the amount of profits that U.S. companies are shifting to offshore tax havens. He found that U.S. multinational companies had moved hundreds of billions of dollars in profits to tax havens for years 1999-2002, the latest years for which IRS data was available. The legislation we are re-introducing today would help put a stop to these tax avoidance schemes. Specifically, our legislation denies tax benefits, namely tax deferral, to U.S. multinational companies that set up controlled foreign corporations in tax haven countries. This tracks the same general approach in legislation passed by the Congress and enacted into law that was designed to curb the problem of corporate inversions. Our bill builds upon the good work of Senators Baucus and Grassley and other members of the Senate Finance Committee by extending similar tax policy changes to cover the case of U.S. companies and their tax haven subsidiaries. Specifically, our legislation would treat U.S. controlled foreign subsidiaries that are set up in tax haven countries--but are not engaged in a real and active business--as domestic companies for U.S. tax purposes. In other words, we would simply treat these companies as if they never left the United States, which is essentially the case in these tax avoidance motivated transactions. The bill's list of specific tax haven countries subjected to the new rule is based upon the previous work by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. However, our legislation does give the Secretary of the Treasury the ability to add or remove a foreign country from this list in appropriate cases. We also give businesses plenty of time, two additional years through December 31, 2008, to restructure their tax haven operations if they so choose. As mentioned, our legislation effectively ends the deferral tax benefit for U.S. companies that shift income to offshore inactive tax haven subsidiaries. This means, for example, that any efforts by a U.S. company to move profits to the subsidiary through transfer pricing schemes will not work because the income earned by the subsidiary would still be immediately taxable by the United States. Likewise, any efforts to move otherwise active income earned by a U.S. company in a high-tax foreign country to a tax haven would cause the income to be immediately taxable by the United States. Under this bill, companies that try to move intangible assets--and the income they produce--to tax havens would be unsuccessful because that income would still be immediately taxable by the United States. The Joint Tax Committee says our legislation that will help close this tax shelter game will prevent these companies from draining some $15 billion in revenues from the U.S. Treasury over the next decade. Let me be very clear about one thing. This legislation will not adversely impact U.S. companies with controlled foreign subsidiaries that are located in tax havens and doing legitimate and substantial business. The legislation expressly exempts a U.S.-controlled foreign subsidiary from its tax rule changes when all of its income is derived from the active conduct of a trade or business within a listed tax haven country. In 2002, then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti told Congress that ``nothing undermines confidence in the tax system more than the impression that the average honest taxpayer has to pay his or her taxes while more wealthy or unscrupulous taxpayers are allowed to get away with not paying.'' He is absolutely right. It's grossly unfair to ask our Main Street businesses to operate at a competitive disadvantage to large multinational businesses simply because our tax authorities are unable to grapple with the growing offshore tax avoidance problem. It is also outrageous that tens of millions of working families who pay their taxes on time every year are shouldering the tax burden of large profitable U.S. multinational companies that use tax haven subsidiaries. In conclusion, it is my hope that the White House and Congress in a new spirit of bipartisanship will help in our effort to get this needed tax law change enacted into law. I urge my colleagues to support this effort by cosponsoring this legislation.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today I am pleased to introduce with Senator McCain and other senators the Indian Child Protection and Family, Violence Prevention Act Amendments of 2007. The bill we introduce today is virtually identical to legislation which the Senate adopted last year to amend and reauthorize the Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act of 1990. The primary goals of that Act were to reduce the incidence of child abuse, and mandate the reporting and tracking of child abuse in Indian Country. The Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act Amendments would authorize a study to identify impediments to the reduction of child abuse in Indian Country, as well as require data collection and annual reporting to Congress concerning child abuse in Indian Country; provide additional safeguards for the privacy of information about a child by local law enforcement and child protective services; provide for more involvement by the FBI and the Attorney General in documenting incidents of child abuse on Indian reservations; and authorize the Indian Health Service to use telemedicine in connection with examinations of abused Indian children. The bill would also authorize background investigations for employees and volunteers who work with Indian children, amend the Major Crimes Act to criminalize acts of child abuse and neglect in Indian Country, and authorize several treatment programs for Indian children who have been victimized. I particularly appreciate that this reauthorization legislation addresses a related issue about which I have deep concern--the epidemic of youth suicide in many reservation communities. Indian Country has higher rates of youth suicide, as well as of child abuse, than other American population groups. Often, children who attempt suicide have been abused by a family or community member. This bill would authorize professionals trained in behavioral health, including suicide prevention and treatment, to be included on the staff of regional Indian Child Resource and Family Services Centers authorized under the Act. I am hopeful that the Senate will act quickly this session to authorize the additional protections for Native American children that would be provided by the Indian Child Protection and Family Violence Prevention Act Amendments of 2007. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my distinguished colleague from Arizona is speaking about a very important issue and one that we certainly will have a discussion about and a debate about in this Congress in the coming days, and that is as it should be. We are a democracy with divided branches of Government, separation of powers. We have a President, a legislative branch, a judicial branch, and there is a role here for the legislative branch. My colleague suggested this was a circumstance where some were simply willing to criticize the President but offer no plan of their own. Then he subsequently said the resolution that some of my colleagues will offer in the Senate will advocate a different course of action. That is a plan, I guess, isn't it? If one advocates a different course of action than the President is advocating, it seems to me that is a plan. I don't disagree with much of what those who have a different view would say about these issues. Most of us want peace in Iraq. We want the Iraqis to control their own destiny. We want the Iraqi troops to be sufficiently trained so they can provide their own security. We all share that goal. We all want our country to succeed in the missions. Let me make one very important point. My colleague alluded to it in a way different than I would respond to it. During the debate on the floor of the Senate I don't think there will be a single Senator who stands up and in any way says he wants us to withdraw support for American troops. Speaking for myself--and I think for most other Senators, perhaps every other Senator--I think Members who serve in this Congress believe it is critically important to support our troops. When we send men and women in our uniform to go to war, we are obligated, it seems to me, to do everything to support them in their mission. So this debate is not about whether we will support those troops whom we have asked to go to war in behalf of our country; we certainly will do that. The debate will be about the President's plan for a surge in troops or a deepening involvement in Iraq. It is a worthy debate for us to have because I think this is obviously a conflict that has gone on a long while, longer now than the Second World War. We have had a lot of discussion with the military leaders in the field about training Iraqi troops to provide for their own security. Let's review what has happened in Iraq. Saddam Hussein ran Iraq. We now know he was a butcher. We knew it then; we know it now. There are hundreds of thousands of skeletons in mass graves, of the victims murdered by Saddam Hussein. But Saddam Hussein doesn't exist anymore. He was executed. He has been buried. There is a new constitution in Iraq, voted for by the Iraqi people. There is a new government in Iraq selected by the Iraqi people. This country belongs to Iraq, not to us. It is their country, not ours. The security for their country is their responsibility, not ours. The question for all of us is: When will the Iraqi people decide they are able to provide for their own security? My colleague says it is a matter of being patient with training the Iraqi troops. Perhaps today there is going to be a young man or woman who is going to enlist in the Marines and the Army and they will go to training. It won't be very many months before they are fully trained and maybe committed to the battlefield--6 months, 7 months, 8 months. The question is: How long does it take to train an Iraqi army and Iraqi security forces to provide security for their own country? Years? Can they be trained, as American troops are trained, in months rather than years? The answer, at least in the last several years, seems to have been no. It is very important for us to debate this question of our deepening involvement in Iraq. We all know what is going on there. It is sectarian violence, Shia on Sunni, Sunni on Shia. Seventy-five more people were killed today in Shia neighborhoods, multiple bombings, we are told by the news today, 160 wounded. The day before, dozens of Iraqis were killed, and 25 American troops were killed in numerous attacks. Our hearts break for all of them, particularly the American troops, but also for everyone who is losing their life in this conflict. Suicide car bombers, simultaneous car bombings, beheaded bodies floating in the Tigris River, bodies with holes drilled in the heads and knees with electric drills, tortured, tortured bodies swinging from lampposts in Iraq, we read. It is a cycle of grim violence, unlike any most of us have ever seen. It is unbelievable. Let me tell you what General Abizaid, who is in charge of CENTCOM, said about 6 weeks ago. He came to the Congress--and this relates to what my colleague had said and the debate we will have. General Abizaid said this: I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the Corps commander, General Dempsey . . . and I said, in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to the ability to achieve success in Iraq? And they said no. This isn't an approximation of what the top general said; it is exactly what he told the Congress: I met with all of my top generals, and I asked them the question, if we were to bring in more troops now, does it add to our ability to achieve success? They said no. That's what General Abizaid said. Let me describe to you what General Abizaid said following that comment. Again, this is 2 months ago in testimony before the Senate: The reason is because we want the Iraqis to do more. It's easy for the Iraqis to rely upon us to do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future. Less than 2 months ago, the top general said his top commanders in Iraq all said no to bringing in more troops. Why? Because it will say to the Iraqis: We will do the job. We will do what we would expect you to do. As we talk about deepening the American involvement in Iraq and the issue of how many troops we are going to have in that battlefield, let me turn to another issue. If we have 20,000-plus troops to send to Iraq, what about Afghanistan? Our military is, as all of us know, fairly overstretched. We are calling up guardsmen and reservists and some of them second deployments, some of them third deployments all across this country. But in Afghanistan, which was the home of al-Qaida, where the Taliban ruled and where we went first to route the Taliban and create a democracy in Afghanistan, the Taliban, by all accounts, are now taking hold once again and creating an even greater threat. They are fighting hard to destabilize the Government of Afghanistan. That was our first battle, to go into Afghanistan and kick the Taliban out. We need more troops in Afghanistan now, not less, and yet my understanding is the President's plan would divert troops we have in Afghanistan to go to Iraq. Let me read something that Mr. John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence said last week. He testified before the Select Committee on Intelligence, and here is what he said: Al Qaeda is the terrorist organization that poses the greatest threat to U.S. interests, including to the homeland. Al-Qaida is what poses the greatest threat to our interests, including our homeland. Then he went on to say this. This is again John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence. Al Qaeda continues to plot attacks against our homeland and other targets with the objective of inflicting mass casualties. And they continue to maintain active connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders' secure hideout in Pakistan. Let me reemphasize: And they continue to maintain active connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders' secure hideout in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, northern Africa, and Europe. What does that mean? Osama bin Laden, do we know him? Yes. He is the person who ordered--claimed and boasted--he ordered the attacks against this country, killing thousands of innocent Americans. He still lives, apparently, in a secure hideout, according to the top intelligence chief in this country, in Pakistan. It seems to me the elimination of the leadership of al-Qaida, the organization that attacked this country, that murdered thousands of innocent Americans, ought to be the primary interest of this country. That is why moving away from Afghanistan and the related activities that ought to exist in Pakistan to deal with what are called ``secure hideouts,'' the secure hideout from which al-Qaida operates, that ought to be job No. 1 for this country. I don't understand. My colleague Senator Conrad and I offered an amendment to the Defense appropriations bill last year on this subject. Does anybody hear anybody talking about Osama bin Laden anymore? Or perhaps better described ``Osama been forgotten'' these days? Nobody wants to talk about it. Finally, last week the Director of our intelligence in this country said al-Qaida is the most significant threat to this country. The most significant terrorist threat to this country is al-Qaida, and it operates from a secure hideout in Pakistan. If that is true, what are we doing, deciding to find 20,000 troops by pulling some of them out of Afghanistan and moving them to Iraq? If those troops are available, they ought to be dedicated to dealing with al-Qaida and bringing to justice those who committed the attacks against this country. I will have more to say about that at some point, but I did want to make note of what the Director of Intelligence said last week that seems to be almost ignored in this debate about Iraq. I am going to be talking as well this week about the minimum wage. We will have an aggressive discussion about that. That is going to be the pending issue of the day.