Joseph Lieberman

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am delighted to join with Senators Jeffords, Kennedy and over 30 of our colleagues as an original cosponsor of this important legislation, the Employment Non- Discrimination Act of 1999. By guaranteeing that American workers cannot lose their jobs simply because of their sexual orientation, this bill would extend the bedrock American values of fairness and equality to a group of our fellow citizens who too often have been denied the benefit of those most basic values. Our nation's foundational document, the Declaration of Independence, expressed a vision of our country as one premised upon the essential equality of all people and upon the recognition that our Creator endowed all of us with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Two hundred and twenty-three years ago, when that document was drafted, our laws fell far short of implementing the Declaration's ideal. But since that time, we have come ever closer, extending by law to more and more of our citizens--to African Americans, to women, to disabled Americans, to religious minorities and to others--a legally enforceable guarantee that, with respect to their ability to earn a living at least, they will be treated on their merits and not on characteristics unrelated to their ability to do their jobs. It is time to extend that guarantee to gay men and lesbians, who too often have been subject to incidents of discrimination and denied the most basic of rights: the right to obtain and maintain a job. A collection of one national survey and twenty city and state surveys found that as many as 44 percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual workers faced job discrimination in the workplace at some time in their careers. Other studies have reported even greater discrimination--as much as 68 percent of gay men and lesbians reporting employment discrimination. The fear in which these workers live was clear from a survey of gay men and lesbians in Philadelphia. Over three-quarters told those conducting the survey that they sometimes or always hide their orientation at work out of fear of discrimination. The toll this discrimination takes extends far beyond its effect on those individuals who must live in fear and without full employment opportunities. It also takes an unacceptable toll on America's definition of itself as a land of equality and opportunity, as a place where we judge each other on our merits, and as a country that teaches its children that anyone can succeed here as long as they are willing to do their job and work hard. This bill provides for equality and fairness--that and no more. It says only what we already have said for women, for people of color and for others: that you are entitled to have your ability to earn a living depend only on your ability to do the job and nothing else. In fact, the bill would even do somewhat less than it does for women and people of color, because it would not give gay men and women all of the protections we currently provide to other groups protected under our civil rights laws. Mr. President, this bill would bring our nation one large step closer to realizing the vision that Thomas Jefferson so eloquently expressed 223 years ago when he wrote that all of us have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this important legislation.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to join my distinguished colleague from New Jersey, Senator Torricelli, and my colleague from Connecticut, Senator Dodd, to introduce legislation that would amend title 4 of the United States Code to prohibit the imposition of discriminatory commuter taxes by political subdivisions of States. On May 26, 1999, New York Governor George Pataki signed into law a repeal of the commuter tax for people who work in New York City but live outside of the five boroughs. This repeal only applies to residents of New York state; it does not include the 330,000 people from New Jersey and Connecticut who work in New York City. In 1966, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor John Lindsay initiated the commuter tax. To the present day, New York City has enforced the 0.45% tax on commuters' income much like a payroll tax. Estimates show that this tax generates $360 million a year in revenue that helps to supports services such as police and fire protection and emergency medical care. New York state residents contribute $210 million a year in commuter tax revenue, while New Jersey and Connecticut residents account for the remaining $150 million in tax revenue. The commuter tax repeal eliminates more than $200 million from New York City's annual tax revenue. New York State's unilateral, partial repeal of the commuter tax only for its residents is an unfortunate development after 33 years of assessing the tax on all commuters who work in New York City. This is an unprecedented action on the part of a legislative body and state executive to repeal a tax on its residents but maintain it for non- residents. The imposition of taxes only on out-of-state commuters could violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Limited repeal discriminates against out-of-state commuters and inhibits interstate commerce and travel. Approximately 86,000 of my constituents work in New York City, contributing an estimated $100 million in commuter tax revenue; 244,000 New Jersey constituents account for an estimated $50 million in tax revenue that goes to New York City. According to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the taxable income of Connecticut commuters is lower than non-commuters because of this tax that commuters pay to New York. The commuter tax essentially draws away millions of dollars in tax revenue from Connecticut and gives them to New York City to subsidize services and other public works. This Connecticut and New Jersey subsidy to New York City is unacceptable. If a commuter tax is imposed all commuters--whether they are from Newark, New Rochelle, or New Haven--are equally responsible to bear it. There is no reason that our commuter constituents should be paying for New York City services while New York state residents are not. Senator Torricelli and I are joined by others who have taken action to force a repeal of the law passed by the New York state legislature. Two attorneys, Richard Swanson and Thomas Igoe, filed a complaint in Manhattan Supreme Court that seeks class-action status for other commuters from New Jersey and Connecticut. Swanson from New Jersey and Igoe from Connecticut are colleagues at the Manhattan law firm of Thelen, Reid & Priest. Moreover, Governor Rowland of Connecticut and Governor Whitman of New Jersey plan to challenge the constitutionality of the commuter tax repeal bill in federal courts. New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani also intends to file a lawsuit against the state, although his claim stands on different grounds than the ones brought forth by Governors Whitman and Rowland. The partial commuter tax repeal bill that Governor Pataki signed includes a provision that says that the tax will be repealed for all commuters if a partial repeal is found unconstitutional in federal courts. Even if the lawsuits succeed in their legal challenges, we still need legislation that will prevent state governments from discriminating against nonresidents and imposing unfair commuter taxes in the future.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to join my distinguished colleague from New Jersey, Senator Torricelli, and my colleague from Connecticut, Senator Dodd, to introduce legislation that would amend title 4 of the United States Code to prohibit the imposition of discriminatory commuter taxes by political subdivisions of States. On May 26, 1999, New York Governor George Pataki signed into law a repeal of the commuter tax for people who work in New York City but live outside of the five boroughs. This repeal only applies to residents of New York state; it does not include the 330,000 people from New Jersey and Connecticut who work in New York City. In 1966, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor John Lindsay initiated the commuter tax. To the present day, New York City has enforced the 0.45% tax on commuters' income much like a payroll tax. Estimates show that this tax generates $360 million a year in revenue that helps to supports services such as police and fire protection and emergency medical care. New York state residents contribute $210 million a year in commuter tax revenue, while New Jersey and Connecticut residents account for the remaining $150 million in tax revenue. The commuter tax repeal eliminates more than $200 million from New York City's annual tax revenue. New York State's unilateral, partial repeal of the commuter tax only for its residents is an unfortunate development after 33 years of assessing the tax on all commuters who work in New York City. This is an unprecedented action on the part of a legislative body and state executive to repeal a tax on its residents but maintain it for non- residents. The imposition of taxes only on out-of-state commuters could violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Limited repeal discriminates against out-of-state commuters and inhibits interstate commerce and travel. Approximately 86,000 of my constituents work in New York City, contributing an estimated $100 million in commuter tax revenue; 244,000 New Jersey constituents account for an estimated $50 million in tax revenue that goes to New York City. According to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, the taxable income of Connecticut commuters is lower than non-commuters because of this tax that commuters pay to New York. The commuter tax essentially draws away millions of dollars in tax revenue from Connecticut and gives them to New York City to subsidize services and other public works. This Connecticut and New Jersey subsidy to New York City is unacceptable. If a commuter tax is imposed all commuters--whether they are from Newark, New Rochelle, or New Haven--are equally responsible to bear it. There is no reason that our commuter constituents should be paying for New York City services while New York state residents are not. Senator Torricelli and I are joined by others who have taken action to force a repeal of the law passed by the New York state legislature. Two attorneys, Richard Swanson and Thomas Igoe, filed a complaint in Manhattan Supreme Court that seeks class-action status for other commuters from New Jersey and Connecticut. Swanson from New Jersey and Igoe from Connecticut are colleagues at the Manhattan law firm of Thelen, Reid & Priest. Moreover, Governor Rowland of Connecticut and Governor Whitman of New Jersey plan to challenge the constitutionality of the commuter tax repeal bill in federal courts. New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani also intends to file a lawsuit against the state, although his claim stands on different grounds than the ones brought forth by Governors Whitman and Rowland. The partial commuter tax repeal bill that Governor Pataki signed includes a provision that says that the tax will be repealed for all commuters if a partial repeal is found unconstitutional in federal courts. Even if the lawsuits succeed in their legal challenges, we still need legislation that will prevent state governments from discriminating against nonresidents and imposing unfair commuter taxes in the future.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank my friend from New Jersey. I have access to the time allotted to the Senator from New Hampshire.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. If it fits the Senator's schedule. I don't expect to take but 10 minutes.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I want to say just a few words on the jarring statistics from that report and column for my colleagues. Of African American children born in 1996, 70 percent were born to unmarried mothers. At least 80 percent, according to the report, can expect to spend a significant part of their childhood apart from their fathers. We can take some comfort and encouragement from the fact that the teen pregnancy rate has dropped in the last few years. But the numbers cited in Mr. Kelly's column and in the report are nonetheless profoundly unsettling, especially given what we know about the impact of fatherlessness, and indicate we are in the midst of what Kelly aptly terms a ``national calamity.'' It is a calamity. Of course, it is not limited to the African American community. On any given night, 4 out of 10 children in this country are sleeping in homes without fathers. At the end of this column, Michael Kelly asks: How could this happen in a Nation like ours? And he wonders if anyone is paying attention. Well, the fact is that people are beginning to pay attention, although it tends to be more people at the grassroots level who are actively seeking solutions neighborhood by neighborhood. The best known of these groups is called the National Fatherhood Initiative. I think it has made tremendous progress in recent years in raising awareness of father absence and its impact on our society and in mobilizing a national effort to promote responsible fatherhood. Along with a group of allies, the National Fatherhood Initiative has been establishing educational programs in hundreds of cities and towns across America. It has pulled together bipartisan task forces in the Senate, the House, and among the Nation's Governors and mayors. It has worked with us to explore public policies that encourage and support the efforts of fathers to become more involved in the lives of their children. Last Monday, the National Fatherhood Initiative held its annual national fatherhood summit here in Washington. At that summit, Gen. Colin Powell, and an impressive and wide-ranging group of experts and advocates, talked in depth about the father absence crisis in our cities and towns and brainstormed about what we can do to turn this troubling situation around. There are limits to what we in Government can do to meet this challenge and advance the cause of responsible fatherhood because, after all, it is hard to change people's attitudes and behaviors and values through legislation. But that doesn't mean we are powerless, nor does it mean we can afford not to try to lessen the impact of a problem that is literally eating away at our country. In recent times, we have had a great commonality of concern expressed in the ideological breadth of the fatherhood promotion effort both here in the Senate and our task force, but underscored by statements that the President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services have made on this subject in recent years. Indeed, I think President Clinton most succinctly expressed the importance of this problem when he said: The single biggest social problem in our society may be the growing absence of fathers from their children's homes because it contributes to so many other social problems. So there are some things we can and should be trying to do. I am pleased to note our colleagues, Senators Bayh, Domenici, and others have been working to develop a legislative proposal, which I think contains some very constructive and creative approaches in which the Federal Government would support financially, with resources, some of these very promising grassroots father-promotion efforts, and also encourage and enact the removal of some of the legal and policy barriers that deter men from an active presence in their children's lives. Another thing I think we can do to help is to use the platform we have on the Senate floor--this people's forum --to elevate this problem on the national agenda. That is why Senator Gregg and I have come to the floor today. I am particularly grateful for the cosponsorship of the Senator from New Hampshire, because he is the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families. We are joined by a very broad and bipartisan group of cosponsors which includes Senators Bayh, Brownback, Mack, Dodd, Domenici, Jeffords, Allard, Cochran, Landrieu, Bunning, Robb, Dorgan, Daschle, and Akaka. I thank them all for joining in the introduction of this special resolution this morning, which is to honor Father's Day coming this Sunday, but also to raise our discussion of the problem of absent fathers in our hopes for the promotion of responsible fatherhood. Senator Gregg indicated this resolution would declare this Sunday's holiday as National Fathers Return Day and call on dads around the country to use this day, particularly if they are absent, to reconnect and rededicate themselves to their children's lives, to understand and have the self-confidence to appreciate how powerful a contribution they can make to the well-being of the children that they have helped to create, and to start by spending this Fathers' Day returning for part of the day to their children and expressing to their children the love they have for them and their willingness to support them. The statement we hope to make this morning in this resolution obviously will not change the hearts and minds of distant or disengaged fathers, but those of us who are sponsoring the resolution hope it will help to spur a larger national conversation about the importance of fatherhood and help remind those absent fathers of their responsibilities, yes, but also of the opportunity they have to change the life of their child, about the importance of their fatherhood, and also help remind these absent fathers of the value of their involvement. We ask our colleagues to join us in supporting this resolution, and adopting it perhaps today but certainly before this week is out to make as strong a statement as possible and to move us one step closer to the day when every American child has the opportunity to have a truly happy Father's Day because he or she will be spending it with their father. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, for most of us, Father's Day, which of course is this coming Sunday, is a special day of love, family, appreciation, a customary time for giving ties and, if you will allow me, for renewing ties of a different sort. But for a staggering number of American children, there will be no ties of either kind to celebrate this Sunday. The sad reality is that an estimated 25 million children-- more than 1 out of 3--live absent their biological father, and 17 million kids live without a father of any kind. About 40 percent of the children living in fatherless households have not seen their dads in at least a year; and 50 percent of children who don't live with their fathers have never stepped foot in their father's home. This growing crisis of father absence in America is taking a terrible toll on these children who are being denied the love, guidance, discipline, emotional nourishment, and daily support that fathers can provide. As dads disappear, the American family is becoming significantly weaker and less capable of fulfilling its fundamental responsibility of nurturing and socializing children and conveying values to them. In turn, the risks to the health and well-being of America's children are becoming significantly higher. Children growing up without fathers, research shows, are far more likely to live in poverty, to fail in school, to experience behavioral and emotional problems, to develop drug and alcohol problems, to be victims of physical abuse and neglect and, tragically, to commit suicide. It is, of course, not just those children individually who are suffering but our society as a whole. Many mothers and fathers are so busy today that they are less involved in their children's lives than in the past. But this absence is particularly consequential when it comes to fathers, for they play such a critical role in socializing and providing boundaries to children, particularly to boys. The devastating consequences of father absence for communities--and particularly urban communities--has been broadly documented in a report released just this week by the Institute For American Values and the Morehouse Research Institute. The report was titled ``Turning the Corner on Father Absence in Black America.'' It was discussed in a powerful column by Michael Kelly, which appeared in Wednesday's Washington Post. I ask unanimous consent that the entirety of Mr. Kelly's column be printed in the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to join my distinguished colleague and friend, the chairman of the Commerce Committee, Senator McCain, and my colleague from North Dakota, Senator Conrad, in introducing legislation that we believe will move us another step forward in ameliorating the culture of violence surrounding our children, and in helping parents protect their kids from harm. This is a problem that has been much on our minds in the wake of the school massacre in Littleton and the other tragic shootings that preceded it, a series of events which has continued to reverberate through the national consciousness, which has in particular heightened our awareness as a nation to the violent images and messages bombarding our children, and which has in turn spurred a renewed debate about the entertainment media's contributing role in the epidemic of youth violence we are experiencing across the nation, not just in suburban schools but on the streets and in homes in every community. We made an initial attempt to respond to this problem through the juvenile justice bill that the Senate recently passed, and I believe it was a good start. Senator McCain and I joined Senators Brownback and Hatch in cosponsoring a bipartisan amendment that would, among other things, authorize an investigation of the entertainment industry's marketing practices to determine the extent to which they are targeting the sale of ultraviolent, adult-rated products directly to kids. This amendment, which was approved unanimously, would also facilitate the development of stronger codes of conduct for the various entertainment media and thereby encourage them to accept greater responsibility for the products they distribute. The bill we are introducing today, the 21st Century Media Responsibility Act, would build on that initial response and significantly improve our efforts in the future to limit children's success to inappropriate and potentially harmful products. Specifically, it calls for the creation of a uniform labeling system for violent entertainment media products, to provide parents with clear, easy-to-understand warnings about the amount and degree of violence contained in the movies, music, television shows, and video games that are being mass-marketed today. Beyond that, it would require the businesses where these products are sold or distributed--the movie theaters, record and software stores, and rental outlets--to strictly enforce these new ratings, and thus prohibit children from buying or renting material that is meant for adults and may pose a risk to kids. This proposal is premised in many respects on our concerted efforts to keep cigarettes out of the hands of minors, and with good reason. As with tobacco, decades of research have shown definitively that media violence can be seriously harmful to children, that heavy, sustained exposure to violent images, particularly those that glamorize murder and mayhem and that fail to show any consequences, tends to desensitize young viewers and increase the potential they will become violent themselves. As with tobacco, and its mascot Joe Camel, we are beginning to see substantial evidence indicating that the entertainment industry is not satisfied with mass marketing mass murder, but that it is actually targeting products to children that the producers themselves admit are not appropriate for minors. And as with tobacco, we are seeking to change the behavior of a multi-billion dollar industry that too often seems locked in deep denial, that has shown little inclination to acknowledge there is a problem with its products, let alone work with us to find reasonable solutions to reduce the threat of media violence to children. Of course, there are differences between the tobacco and entertainment industries and the products they make. Cigarettes are filled with physical substances that have been proven to cause cancer in longtime smokers. Violent entertainment products have a less visible and physical effect on longtime viewers and listeners, and, more significantly, they are forms of speech that enjoy protection under the First Amendment. It is because of our devotion to the First Amendment that Senator McCain and I, along with many other concerned critics, have been reluctant to call for government restrictions on the content of movies, music, television and video games. All along, we have urged entertainment industry leaders to police themselves, to draw lines and set higher standards, to balance their right to free expression with their responsibilities to the larger community to which they belong. We repeated these pleas with a new sense of urgency in the days following the shooting at Columbine High School, asking the most influential media voices to attend the White House summit meeting the President convened and to engage in open dialogue about what all of us can do to reduce the likelihood of another Littleton. And there has been a smattering of encouraging responses emanating from the entertainment media. For example, the Interactive Digital Software Association, which represents the video game manufacturers, has acknowledged that the grotesque and perverse violence used in some advertisements crosses the line, and it is reexamining its marketing code to respond to some of the concerns we have raised. Disney for its part announced that it would no longer house violent coin-operated video games in its amusement parks. The National Association of Theater Owners pledged to tighten the enforcement of its policies restricting the access of children to R-rated movies. And several prominent screenwriters, speaking at a recent forum sponsored by the Writers Guild of America, raised concerns about the level of violence in today's movies and called on the industry to rethink its fascination with murder and mayhem. But overall the silence from the men and women who make the decisions that shape our culture has been deafening, their denials extremely disappointing. Not one CEO from the major entertainment conglomerates-- Sony, Disney, Seagram, Time Warner, Viacom, and Fox--accepted the President's invitation to attend the White House summit meeting. And since then, not one has made a statement accepting some responsibility for the culture of violence surrounding our children, or indicating their willingness to address their part of the lethal mix that is turning kids into killers. What we have heard, from Seagram's Edgar Bronfman and Time Warner's Gerald Levin and Viacom's Sumner Redstone, are more shrill denials and diversions, along with attacks on those of us in Congress who are concerned about what they are doing to our country and our kids. This is the responsibility vacuum in which we are operating, and this is the vacuum we are trying to fill with the legislation we are introducing today. Ideally, our bill would be unnecessary. Ideally, the various segments of the entertainment industry would agree to adopt and implement a set of common-sense, uniform standards that would provide for clear and concise labeling of media products, that would prohibit the marketing and sales of adult-rated products to children, and that would hold producers or retail outlets that violate the code accountable for their irresponsibility. But there is no sign that is going to happen any time soon, which is why we feel compelled to go forward with this proposal today. We are not advocating censorship, or placing restrictions on the kind of entertainment products that can be made and sold commercially. What we are doing through this bill is treating violent media like tobacco and other products that pose risks to children, requiring producers to provide explicit warnings to parents about potentially harmful content, and requiring retailers to take reasonable steps to limit the availability of adult-rated products with high doses of violence to audiences for which they are designed. That is why we have chosen to amend the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, to accentuate the fact that we are not regulating artistic expression but the marketing and distribution of commercial products, and that we are not criminalizing speech, but demanding truth in labeling and enforcement. If a video game company is telling parents a game is not appropriate for children under 17, then parents should have a realistic expectation that this game will not be marketed or sold to that audience. Unfortunately, that is often not the case these days, and we would correct that by authorizing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and punish retailers and rental outlets and movie theaters that in effect deceive parents about the products they are selling or renting to their kids. Specifically, it would authorize the FTC to levy fines of up to $10,000 per violation of the act's provisions prohibiting the sale or rental of adult-rated products to children. This bill does not just respond to concerns of today, but anticipates the media landscape of tomorrow. According to most experts, as technologies converge over the next few years, more and more of our entertainment is going to be delivered through a single wire into the home over the Internet. In this radically different universe, it only makes sense to modernize the ratings concept to fit the new contours of the Information Age, and develop a standard labeling system for the video, audio, and interactive games we will consume through a common portal. Our legislation will move us in that direction and prod the entertainment industry to help parents meet the new challenges of this new era, and hopefully usher in a new ethic of media responsibility, a goal that is reflected in the bill's title. In closing, Mr. President, I want to make clear that I do not consider this legislation to be ``the'' answer to the threat of media violence or the solution to repairing our culture. It won't singlehandedly stop media standards from falling, or substitute for industry self-restraint. No one bill or combination of laws could replace the exercise of corporate citizenship, particularly given our respect for the First Amendment. We must continue to push the entertainment industry to embrace its responsibilities. But this bill is a common-sense, forward looking response that will in fact help reduce the harmful influences reaching our children and thereby reduce the risk of youth violence. That makes it more than worthwhile, and I ask my colleagues to join us in supporting it.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to join my distinguished colleague and friend, the chairman of the Commerce Committee, Senator McCain, and my colleague from North Dakota, Senator Conrad, in introducing legislation that we believe will move us another step forward in ameliorating the culture of violence surrounding our children, and in helping parents protect their kids from harm. This is a problem that has been much on our minds in the wake of the school massacre in Littleton and the other tragic shootings that preceded it, a series of events which has continued to reverberate through the national consciousness, which has in particular heightened our awareness as a nation to the violent images and messages bombarding our children, and which has in turn spurred a renewed debate about the entertainment media's contributing role in the epidemic of youth violence we are experiencing across the nation, not just in suburban schools but on the streets and in homes in every community. We made an initial attempt to respond to this problem through the juvenile justice bill that the Senate recently passed, and I believe it was a good start. Senator McCain and I joined Senators Brownback and Hatch in cosponsoring a bipartisan amendment that would, among other things, authorize an investigation of the entertainment industry's marketing practices to determine the extent to which they are targeting the sale of ultraviolent, adult-rated products directly to kids. This amendment, which was approved unanimously, would also facilitate the development of stronger codes of conduct for the various entertainment media and thereby encourage them to accept greater responsibility for the products they distribute. The bill we are introducing today, the 21st Century Media Responsibility Act, would build on that initial response and significantly improve our efforts in the future to limit children's success to inappropriate and potentially harmful products. Specifically, it calls for the creation of a uniform labeling system for violent entertainment media products, to provide parents with clear, easy-to-understand warnings about the amount and degree of violence contained in the movies, music, television shows, and video games that are being mass-marketed today. Beyond that, it would require the businesses where these products are sold or distributed--the movie theaters, record and software stores, and rental outlets--to strictly enforce these new ratings, and thus prohibit children from buying or renting material that is meant for adults and may pose a risk to kids. This proposal is premised in many respects on our concerted efforts to keep cigarettes out of the hands of minors, and with good reason. As with tobacco, decades of research have shown definitively that media violence can be seriously harmful to children, that heavy, sustained exposure to violent images, particularly those that glamorize murder and mayhem and that fail to show any consequences, tends to desensitize young viewers and increase the potential they will become violent themselves. As with tobacco, and its mascot Joe Camel, we are beginning to see substantial evidence indicating that the entertainment industry is not satisfied with mass marketing mass murder, but that it is actually targeting products to children that the producers themselves admit are not appropriate for minors. And as with tobacco, we are seeking to change the behavior of a multi-billion dollar industry that too often seems locked in deep denial, that has shown little inclination to acknowledge there is a problem with its products, let alone work with us to find reasonable solutions to reduce the threat of media violence to children. Of course, there are differences between the tobacco and entertainment industries and the products they make. Cigarettes are filled with physical substances that have been proven to cause cancer in longtime smokers. Violent entertainment products have a less visible and physical effect on longtime viewers and listeners, and, more significantly, they are forms of speech that enjoy protection under the First Amendment. It is because of our devotion to the First Amendment that Senator McCain and I, along with many other concerned critics, have been reluctant to call for government restrictions on the content of movies, music, television and video games. All along, we have urged entertainment industry leaders to police themselves, to draw lines and set higher standards, to balance their right to free expression with their responsibilities to the larger community to which they belong. We repeated these pleas with a new sense of urgency in the days following the shooting at Columbine High School, asking the most influential media voices to attend the White House summit meeting the President convened and to engage in open dialogue about what all of us can do to reduce the likelihood of another Littleton. And there has been a smattering of encouraging responses emanating from the entertainment media. For example, the Interactive Digital Software Association, which represents the video game manufacturers, has acknowledged that the grotesque and perverse violence used in some advertisements crosses the line, and it is reexamining its marketing code to respond to some of the concerns we have raised. Disney for its part announced that it would no longer house violent coin-operated video games in its amusement parks. The National Association of Theater Owners pledged to tighten the enforcement of its policies restricting the access of children to R-rated movies. And several prominent screenwriters, speaking at a recent forum sponsored by the Writers Guild of America, raised concerns about the level of violence in today's movies and called on the industry to rethink its fascination with murder and mayhem. But overall the silence from the men and women who make the decisions that shape our culture has been deafening, their denials extremely disappointing. Not one CEO from the major entertainment conglomerates-- Sony, Disney, Seagram, Time Warner, Viacom, and Fox--accepted the President's invitation to attend the White House summit meeting. And since then, not one has made a statement accepting some responsibility for the culture of violence surrounding our children, or indicating their willingness to address their part of the lethal mix that is turning kids into killers. What we have heard, from Seagram's Edgar Bronfman and Time Warner's Gerald Levin and Viacom's Sumner Redstone, are more shrill denials and diversions, along with attacks on those of us in Congress who are concerned about what they are doing to our country and our kids. This is the responsibility vacuum in which we are operating, and this is the vacuum we are trying to fill with the legislation we are introducing today. Ideally, our bill would be unnecessary. Ideally, the various segments of the entertainment industry would agree to adopt and implement a set of common-sense, uniform standards that would provide for clear and concise labeling of media products, that would prohibit the marketing and sales of adult-rated products to children, and that would hold producers or retail outlets that violate the code accountable for their irresponsibility. But there is no sign that is going to happen any time soon, which is why we feel compelled to go forward with this proposal today. We are not advocating censorship, or placing restrictions on the kind of entertainment products that can be made and sold commercially. What we are doing through this bill is treating violent media like tobacco and other products that pose risks to children, requiring producers to provide explicit warnings to parents about potentially harmful content, and requiring retailers to take reasonable steps to limit the availability of adult-rated products with high doses of violence to audiences for which they are designed. That is why we have chosen to amend the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act, to accentuate the fact that we are not regulating artistic expression but the marketing and distribution of commercial products, and that we are not criminalizing speech, but demanding truth in labeling and enforcement. If a video game company is telling parents a game is not appropriate for children under 17, then parents should have a realistic expectation that this game will not be marketed or sold to that audience. Unfortunately, that is often not the case these days, and we would correct that by authorizing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and punish retailers and rental outlets and movie theaters that in effect deceive parents about the products they are selling or renting to their kids. Specifically, it would authorize the FTC to levy fines of up to $10,000 per violation of the act's provisions prohibiting the sale or rental of adult-rated products to children. This bill does not just respond to concerns of today, but anticipates the media landscape of tomorrow. According to most experts, as technologies converge over the next few years, more and more of our entertainment is going to be delivered through a single wire into the home over the Internet. In this radically different universe, it only makes sense to modernize the ratings concept to fit the new contours of the Information Age, and develop a standard labeling system for the video, audio, and interactive games we will consume through a common portal. Our legislation will move us in that direction and prod the entertainment industry to help parents meet the new challenges of this new era, and hopefully usher in a new ethic of media responsibility, a goal that is reflected in the bill's title. In closing, Mr. President, I want to make clear that I do not consider this legislation to be ``the'' answer to the threat of media violence or the solution to repairing our culture. It won't singlehandedly stop media standards from falling, or substitute for industry self-restraint. No one bill or combination of laws could replace the exercise of corporate citizenship, particularly given our respect for the First Amendment. We must continue to push the entertainment industry to embrace its responsibilities. But this bill is a common-sense, forward looking response that will in fact help reduce the harmful influences reaching our children and thereby reduce the risk of youth violence. That makes it more than worthwhile, and I ask my colleagues to join us in supporting it.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I see an opportunity here to make a few general comments about the bill as we await the next procedural step. With the Chair's permission, I will proceed with that, which is to say to add my strong support to the underlying bill. Mr. President, Congress really needs to act to address the probable explosion of litigation over the Y2K problem. It needs to act quickly. This is a problem that has an activating date. It is nothing that will wait for Congress to act. It will be self-starting, self-arriving. Therefore, we must act in preparation for it. Obviously we are now familiar, if we had not been before this extended debate, with the problem caused by the Y2K bug. Although no one can predict with certainty what will happen at the turning of the year into the new century and the new millennium, there is little doubt that there will be Y2K-caused failures, possibly on a large scale, and that those failures could bring both minor inconveniences and significant disruptions in our lives. This could pose a serious problem for our economy, and if there are widespread failures, it will surely be in all of our interests for American businesses to focus on how they can continue providing the goods and services we all rely on in the face of those disruptions rather than fretting over and financing defense of lawsuits. Perhaps just as important as the challenge to our economy, the Y2K problem will present a unique challenge to our court system, unique because of the possible volume of litigation throughout the country that will likely result and because that litigation will commence within a span of a few months, potentially flooding the courts with cases and inundating American companies with lawsuits at precisely the time they need to devote their resources to fixing the problem. So I think it is appropriate for Congress to act now to ensure that our legal system is prepared to deal fairly, efficiently, and effectively with the Y2K problem, to make sure those problems that can be solved short of litigation will be solved that way, to make sure that companies that should be held liable for their actions will be held liable, but to also make sure that the Y2K problem does not just become an opportunity for a few enterprising individuals to profit from what is ultimately frivolous litigation, unfairly wasting the resources of companies that have done nothing wrong, companies large and small, or diverting the resources of companies that should be devoting themselves to keeping our economy going to fixing the problem. To that end, I was privileged to work with the leadership of the Commerce Committee and the sponsors of this legislation, particularly Senators McCain, Wyden and Dodd, to try to craft a more targeted response to this Y2K problem. Like many others here, I was actually uncomfortable with the scope, the breadth, and the contents of the initial draft of this legislation because I thought it went beyond dealing with our concerns about the Y2K potential litigation explosion and became a general effort to adopt tort reform. I took those concerns to the bill's sponsors, as others did. Together I found them to be responsive and we worked out those concerns. I am very grateful to them for that. With the addition of the amendments offered by Senators Dodd, Wyden and others, we have a package now before us that I think we can really be proud of and with which we can be comfortable because it is one that will help us fairly manage the Y2K litigation while protecting legal rights and due process. Provisions like the one requiring notice before filing a lawsuit will help save the resources of our court system while giving parties the opportunity to work out their problems before incurring the costs of litigation and the hardening of positions the filing of a lawsuit often brings. The requirement that defects be material for a class action to be brought will allow recovery for those defects that are of consequence while keeping those with no real injury from using the court system to extort settlements out of companies that have done them no real harm. And the provision in this bill keeping plaintiffs with contractual relationships with defendants from seeking, through tort actions, damages that their contracts do not allow them to get, will make sure that settled business expectations, as expressed in duly negotiated and executed contracts, are honored and that plaintiffs get precisely but not more than the damages they are entitled to under those contracts. I also think it is important for everyone to recognize that the bill we have before us today is not the bill that was originally introduced, not even the bill that was reported out of the Commerce Committee. Because of the cooperative efforts of Senators McCain, Dodd, Wyden, Gorton, and so many others who are interested in seeing this legislation move forward, this bill has been significantly tailored to meet the urgent problems we may face. I will conclude by saying that this legislation will not protect wrongdoers or deprive those deserving of compensation. What it will do is make sure that what we have in place is a fair and effective way to resolve Y2K disputes, one that will help make sure we do not compound any problems caused by the Y2K bug, even larger problems caused by unnecessary litigation. This is good legislation, and I am optimistic that it will soon pass the Senate and that we will, thereby, have dealt with a problem which otherwise would be much larger than it should be. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor. Mr. KERREY addressed the Chair.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to discuss several provisions within the FY2000 Defense Authorization Act. These provisions can be found in Title II, Subtitle D, Sections 231-239 within the FY2000 Defense Authorization Act. The provisions are intended to stimulate intense technical innovation within our military research and development (R&D) enterprise and hence lay the foundation for revolutionary changes in future warfare concepts. Before giving an extended introduction to these defense innovation provisions, I would like to thank Senator Roberts and Senator Bingaman and the staff who have worked on this subtitle--particularly Pamela Farrell, Peter Levine, John Jennings, Frederick Downey, Merrilea Mayo, and William Bonvillian--for their hard and thoughtful work on this legislation. The technical superiority of our military is something we have come to take for granted, yet it is founded in an R&D system that has seen little change since the cold war era. These defense innovation provisions attempt to reposition our R&D system so that it can keep up with the pace of technological change in the very different world we are in today. It is my belief that the explosive advances in technology may provide the basis for not just a ``revolution in military affairs,'' but a complete paradigm shift. With advanced communication and information systems, it may become possible to fight a war without concentrating forces, making force organizations impossible to kill. With advances in robotics and miniaturization, it may become possible to fight a ground war with far fewer people. With advances in nuclear power, hydrolysis, and hydrogen storage, it may be possible to create virtually unlimited sources of on-site power. These opportunities are complemented by numerous challenges, also brought forth by technology: urban warfare, space warfare, electronic/information warfare, chemical, nuclear, and biological warfare, and warfare relying on underground storage centers and facilities. As the variety of opportunities and threats continues to climb, and as increasing numbers of nations emerge into the high tech arena, I believe the military arms race of the past will be replaced by a military technology race. Instead of simply accumulating ever greater numbers of conventional armaments against a well- established foe, as we did in the Cold War era, we will have to concentrate on producing fewer, but ever more rapidly evolving, and ever more specialized weapons systems to counter specific asymmetric threats. To meet these new challenges, we need to transform our R&D enterprise from its antiquated Cold War structure to a fast-moving, well- integrated R&D machine that can seize the leading edge of techno- warfare. For this reason Senator Roberts, Senator Bingaman and I have inserted provisions within Title II, Subtitle D of the FY2000 Defense Authorization Act whose purpose is to stimulate a much greater and faster degree of technical innovation within the military. The defense innovation provisions address three goals--establishing a new vision for military R&D, changing the structure of the military R&D enterprise, and correcting the driving forces for R&D in our current system. For the first task, establishing a new vision, Section 231 of the FY2000 Defense Authorization Act requires DoD to determine the most dangerous adversarial threats we will likely face two to three decades from now, and what technologies will be needed on our part to prevail against those threats. Given that it takes 20-30 years to translate basic science to fielded application, our R&D vision needs to be founded on a set of required operational capabilities that is equally distant in time, and far beyond the 5 year vision of our current Program Objective Memorandums (POM's). We need not strive for perfect clairvoyance in this exercise; however, we should be able to create an open conceptual architecture which successfully frames the many potential future opportunities and threats. Once the far future threats and hence far future operational capabilities are outlined, Section 231 asks DOD to give Congress a roadmap of future systems hardware and technologies our services will have to deploy within two to three decades to assure US military dominance in that time frame. From the first roadmap, we are requesting DOD derive a second roadmap--the R&D path that DOD, in cooperation with the private sector, will have to follow to obtain these new defense technologies and systems. To add depth and perspective to the results, I encourage the Secretary of Defense to utilize an independent review panel of outside experts in these exercises, to complement the work done by in-house personnel. The broader our vision, the more likely it is to be inclusive of whatever surprises the actual future may bring. A second goal of the defense innovation provisions, Subtitle D, is to lay the groundwork for a new organizational structure for R&D. Unless we fix the innovation structure, we will be unable to deliver to DOD the rapid technological advances it will need to secure and maintain world dominance. To meet the challenges of the upcoming decades, the Defense Science Board has recommended that at least one third of the technologies pursued by DoD be ones that offer 5 to 10 fold improvements in military capabilities. However, the current structure, which was founded on Cold War realities, will require large organizational change to enable it to pursue revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, technology goals. The segregated and insulated components of the military R&D system will need to be seamlessly interwoven, and the system as a whole will need to be much more flexible in its interactions with the outside world. We can learn from the success of the commercial sector, which takes advantage of temporary alliances between competitors and peers to develop technologies at a breathtaking pace. The defense innovation provisions ask DoD to formulate a modern blueprint for the structure, of not only its laboratories, but of the extended set of policies, institutions, and organizations which together make up its entire innovation system. As noted earlier, the Defense Science Board has called for the military R&D system to increase its focus on revolutionary new technologies. The overarching goal of the new structural plan requested by Section 233 is to deliver the conceptual architecture for an innovation system that is capable of routinely providing such revolutionary advances. Section 239 requests an analysis by the Defense Science Board of overlaps and gaps within the current system. Section 233 asks the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition to develop the plan for the future innovation system, one which ensures that joint technologies, technologies developed in other government laboratories, and technologies developed in the private sector can readily flow into and across the military R&D labs and the broader innovation structure as a whole. Section 233 emphasizes the need to develop better processes for identifying private sector technologies of military value, and military technologies of commercial value. Once identified, there also need to be efficient processes in place for transfer of those technologies, so that the military may reap the respective military and economic gains. Also in Section 233, the Under Secretary is requested to deliver a solution to the major structural gap which currently exists between the R&D pipeline and the acquisition pipeline. Development of the best technologies in the world will not help our future military posture if those technologies are never adopted, or even seen, by the acquisition arms of our services. Finally, to better merge the strategic and technological threads within the military's decision making process, Section 233 in the FY2000 Defense Authorization Act requests a DoD plan for modifying the ongoing education of its future military leadership (i.e., its uniformed officers) so they may better understand the technological opportunities and threats they face. The laboratories themselves could and should play a crucial role in our future military. Ideally, the military laboratories are the place where the minds of the brightest scientists meet the demands of the most experienced warfighters. Out of this intense dialogue would then come a clearer understanding of future warfare possibilities, as well as the technological breakthroughs critical to changing the face of warfare as we know it. For various reasons, however, that vision is in danger of becoming lost. One specific problem is DoD's rigid personnel system and the corresponding lack of performance-based compensation, which is causing the labs to rapidly hemorrhage talent to the more competitive and less bureaucratic private sector. To address these issues, a defense innovation provision within the FY2000 Defense Authorization Act--specifically, Section 237--repeals several of the labs' restrictive personnel regulations. The intent of this Section is to drastically reduce hiring times and eliminate artificial salary constraints to the point where defense laboratories can hire new talent in a time frame and at a salary level that is similar to that offered by the private and university sectors. Currently, the two processes are not even close to competitive: the military R&D labs take several months to over a year to extend an offer, with the result that the laboratories, over and over again, lose the hiring race to private sector interests which can hire top-notch talent in one or two weeks. As noted by the Defense Science Board report, the salaries which can be offered by the laboratories are also about 50 percent lower (for higher grade new hires), compared to the salaries those same new hires could obtain in the private sector. It is significant that the hiring time problem, as well as the high grade caps problem, were universally cited by laboratory managers as the key obstacles in upgrading their laboratory talent. In addition to improving the quality of the laboratories' effort by attracting and retaining highly qualified personnel, the defense innovation provisions ask the Secretary of Defense to improve the quality of work itself by developing a system of modern business performance metrics which can be implemented within and across all military laboratories (Section 239(b)). Such metrics can help ensure that the best work and the best talent are identified, so that they may be rewarded, nurtured and used accordingly. As a word of caution, the ultimate impact of science and technology innovation is very hard to measure, especially in the early stages. Overly mechanical assessments inevitably do much more harm than good. Nevertheless, advanced technology companies have been making great strides in better assessing (and assisting) their innovation efforts, and DOD is encouraged to work with industry R&D leaders in implementing this section. Examples of metrics which may be useful for DOD labs include measurement of lab quality through formal annual peer reviews of its divisions, measurement of technical relevance through required customer approval/ evaluation of R&D projects both before and after they are undertaken, and measurement of organizational relevance through annual board meetings of senior military with the heads of the R&D laboratories. The first of these metrics can help capture and bring attention to promising work in its earliest stages, while the last two can help bridge the gap between later stage innovation and new products. The need for structural reform within the laboratories is a pressing one. The above-mentioned reforms are intended to be jump started with a pilot program, found in Section 236 of the Defense Authorization Provisions. This pilot program may address any of the issues mentioned above but is particularly focused on the problem of attracting and retaining the best possible talent for the laboratories. To be more competitive with working conditions in the commercial sector, this pilot program may include such innovations as pay for performance, starting bonuses (e.g., in the form of equipment start-up funds) for attracting key scientists, ability to alter reduction in force (RIF) retention rules to favor high performers, broadbanding of pay grades, simplified employee classification, educational programs which allow employees to receive advanced degrees while still employed, modification of priority placement procedures, and creation of employee participation and reward programs. To attract the best possible outside talent for collaborations with the laboratories, Section 236 also encourages expansion of exchange programs at both the personal and institutional level. Programs for exchanges within DoD, with the private sector, and with academic institutions are all encouraged. Examples of such programs include the sponsorship of talented students through college or graduate school in exchange for later work commitments to the laboratories, expansion of the federated laboratory concept, increased exchanges between the defense laboratories and the war colleges, training programs, and extension of IPA authority to hire commercial sector employees. The Defense Science Board has strongly recommended that the laboratories emulate DARPA in its mix of temporary and permanent workers in order to be able to quickly bring in relevant talent when needs shift. Section 236(a)(2) creates this option and can be used in conjunction with other provisions in Subtitle D. A new structure and a new vision are all well and good, but if there is no motivation for the new structure to proceed towards the new vision, nothing is gained. Consequently, the third goal of the defense innovation provisions is to correct current forces which tend to drive DoD away from technical innovation. Three of these driving forces are described below. The first ``counter-innovation'' driving force is the lack of a well- defined customer within the military for far future military technologies. Ideally, this customer would be at the Joint Chiefs level, so that broadly sweeping strategies which capitalize on novel technologies can be rapidly incorporated into our existing military structure, doctrine, and systems. Unfortunately, there is little connection at present between that level and the service laboratories. Section 239(b) should be used to improve this situation. Furthermore, as part of the legislation's mandated study on improving the structure of our R&D system (Section 233), we also request the Under Secretary of Defense to address the issue of a suitable internal customer for truly long range R&D. For maximum impact and credibility, this customer-- whether it be a person, position, or organization--should be a bona fide paying customer who has responsibility not just for the long range technology itself, but for the unconventional military options such technology provides. The lack of an internal customer for long range R&D is one driving force pulling the military away from technical innovation. The second is the vacuum-like force created by the absence of an intimate connection between the R&D customers and producers within the later stages of R&D. Specifically, there is an insufficient connection between the program managers who sponsor product development and the R&D workforce performing later stage R&D. In contrast, the industrial experience has shown that if the customer, researchers, and designers share in all product development decisions from the very initial stages of concept design, the degree of innovation is much higher, the product acceptance rate is much higher, and, ultimately, the pace of technological change is dramatically accelerated. Section 233(b)(5) directs the Under Secretary of Defense to identify how new technologies can be rapidly transi- tioned from late stage R&D to product development and prepare an appropriate plan for doing so. One sub-issue within this larger problem is this need to create a DoD customer--DoD researcher--DoD designer interaction that is early enough and robust enough to ensure that maturing innovations can be drawn into product lines on a time scale similar to that experienced in the commercial sector. This sub-issue should be addressed in the Under Secretary's plan under Section 233(b)(5). The third force which drives the military away from technological innovation is the lack of a customer outside the military for innovative military technologies. Were such a customer present, it might partially make up for the lack of the other two drivers in terms of motivating innovation. Currently, the most important external customer for military R&D is the industrial half of the military- industrial complex. However, the structure of our procurement regulations give virtually identical profit margins to these companies no matter how difficult the technical path or how many risks are undertaken in the process of producing a military system. Therefore, the continued production of legacy systems is guaranteed to be profitable, while gambling with innovative new systems is not. Essentially, our procurement regulations are a direct disincentive to innovation, giving the defense industry a strong vested interest in adhering to incremental change. The resulting lobbying by industry, aimed squarely at preserving the ``state-of-yesterday's-art,'' then significantly slows the rate at which the military can innovate. Accordingly, one of the defense innovation provisions, specifically Section 234, Subtitle D, Title II of the FY 2000 Defense Authorization Act, calls for DoD to change its profit margins for acquisitions in order to alter the innovation incentives for industry. Given substantially higher profit levels for the development of innovative systems, than for the continued production of legacy systems, industry could become much more receptive to the idea of cultivating innovation in fielded hardware. Substantive, consistent economic rewards are critical to incentivizing companies to take the necessary and serious technological risks required to produce the innovations DOD must have. In closing, I thank my colleagues Senators Roberts and Bingaman for joining me in develoing a set of stimulating and thought-provoking defense innovation provisions within Subtitle D, Title II of the FY2000 Defense Authorization bill. These provisions should launch us towards a new vision, a new structure, and a new set of driving forces for military R&D. In the past 48 years, DoD has funded the pre-award research of 58 percent of this country's Nobel laureates in Chemistry, and 43 percent of this country's Nobel laureates in Physics. This is a phenomenal base on which to build. However, the Cold War structure and rationale for our R&D enterprise needs to be shed so that leading edge techno-warfare can emerge. The time to do this is now, because, in many senses, the future is already here. The military systems of 2020 and 2030 will be founded on the science of the year 2000.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise in support of the FY 2000 defense authorization bill. As the challenges facing us today demonstrate, the effectiveness of our military, and its readiness to act immediately to protect our national interests, must always be a priority concern for Congress. The $288.8 billion proposed in this bill is a 2 percent real increase over last year's budget and is the first real increase in topline defense funding since FY 1985, the middle of the Reagan administration. After fourteen years of declining, or flat defense spending, we increased authorization for readiness programs by $1.1 billion, we increased authorizations for procurement by $2.9 billion, and we increased authorizations for reasearch and development by $1.5 billion. I firmly believe this bill makes an important statement at a critical time, affirming our commitment to having the best trained, best equipped, and most effective military in the world, both today and tomorrow. Under the excellent leadership of our colleagues, Senator John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the ranking Democrat, Senator Carl Levin, we stepped up to our responsibility to provide what our soldiers, sailors, and airmen need today, and we took some very important steps to move toward the military that will protect our nation in the next century. The past 14 years of inadequate defense spending has taken a toll on the readiness of our force today. We simply were not able to keep our training and maintenance at the levels that our role as a superpower demands. The struggle to do so, and the increasing need to use our forces to meet the many challenges of the post cold war world has taken its toll not just on equipment, but on our people in uniform. Simply put, the morale of our forces is suffering. This past year, we not only sought out and listened to our nation's top military leaders as they outlined the problems facing our military, but in this bill we addressed the most critical of those problems, including falling recruitment and retention in critical skill areas; aging equipment that costs more to keep operating at acceptable levels of reliability; a need for more support services for a force with a high percentage of married personnel. So I am pleased and proud that we reversed the 14 years of declining defense dollars and added the money to readiness and procurement to fix the most urgent near-term readiness problems. But many of these problems are not simple to address, and simply adding money to budget lines will not fix them any more than adding money to welfare programs fixed the underlying welfare problem in America. Adding money was necessary, but it won't be enough. How we spend the money we spend is as important as how much money we spend. We will have to be sure that we are alert to how well the provisions we have included here are working to have a positive effect on those critical problems we must solve. This will be more difficult than it has been in the past. We are now in an era of fundamental change for our security and our military. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the unprecedented explosion in technology are now redefining what it is we are asking our military to do, the threats that it must overcome to do what we ask of it, and the capabilities that our military will bring to bear to successfully accomplish its mission. This body has been in the forefront of demanding rigorous assessments about our needs and our potential. We directed, in the Military Force Structure Review Act of 1996, the Secretary of Defense to complete a comprehensive assessment of the defense strategy, force structure, force modernization plans, infrastructure, and other elements of the defense policies and programs with a view toward determining and expressing the defense strategy of the United States and establishing a revised program. This assessment, completed by the Secretary of Defense in 1997, declared that our future force will be different in character than our current force, and placed great emphasis on the need to prepare now for an uncertain future by exploiting the revolution in technology and transforming the force toward that envisioned in Joint Vision 2010. The independent National Defense Panel report published in December 1997 concluded ``the Department of Defense should accord the highest priority to executing a transformation strategy for the U.S. military, starting now.'' These assessments, and others that have come to our attention, have reinforced the wisdom of Congress in passing in 1986, over the Pentagon's strenuous objections, the Goldwater-Nichols act and have provided us here with a compelling argument that the future security environment will be different and that environment requires new capabilities. In last year's defense authorization bill we sent a strong signal to the Pentagon that we must begin to build the fundamentally different military by including a provision strongly supporting Joint Experimentation to objectively examine our future needs and how we can best fulfill them. This year, once again, Congress is stepping up to the responsibility to ensure our future security. By establishing this year the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee, Senator Warner addressed the growing consensus that transformation of our military to deal with the uncertain future we face is one of our most important objectives and that promoting innovation is among our greatest challenges. Under the leadership of the subcommittee chairman, Senator Roberts and the Ranking Member, Senator Bingaman, we focused on the critical threats facing our nation and the emerging capabilities to deal with these threats. I would like to highlight what I think are important legislative provisions that this new subcommittee placed in this bill that further both transformation and innovation. An ongoing initiative of transformation supported by this bill is joint experimentation. The committee recognized the program's progress in developing joint service warfighting requirements, doctrinal improvements, and in promoting the values and benefits of joint operations for future wars and contingency operations. We need to continue to identify and assess interdependent areas of joint warfare which will be key in transforming the conduct of future U.S. military operations, and expanding projected joint experimentation activities this year will be a strong base for future efforts. To this end the committee approved provisions that built on its previous support for Joint Experimentation by adding $10 million to accelerate the establishment of the organization responsible for joint experimentation, and to accelerate the conduct of the initial joint experiments. The committee also modified the reporting requirements of the commander responsible for joint experimentation to send a strong signal that we expect him to make important and difficult recommendations about future requirements for forces, organizations, and doctrine and that we expect the Secretary of Defense fully inform us about what action he takes as a result of these recommendations. The bill also includes very important provisions to stimulate a greater degree of technical innovation faster within the military. It is my belief that the explosive advances in technology provide the basis for not just a ``revolution in military affairs,'' but ultimately a complete paradigm shift. The opportunities provided by technology give us the promise of achieving an order of magnitude increase in military capability over that which we have today. The U.S. military of 2020 and 2030 will be based on the science we begin to develop in the year 2000. But to take advantage of this promise and defend ourselves against its use against us by future adversaries, we need to transform our R&D enterprise from its antiquated cold war structure to a fast-moving, better-integrated structure and a process that can seize the leading edge of techno- warfare. The Defense Innovation provisions in this bill establish a new vision for military R&D that is based more on how we want to fight in the future, and begin to change the structure of the military R&D enterprise to achieve that objective through better integration and less inefficiency. To help establish a new vision, the provisions require the Secretary of Defense to determine the most dangerous adversarial threats we will likely face two to three decades from now and what technologies will be needed on our part to prevail against those threats, and merge the strategic and technological decision-making processes. To help lay the groundwork for a new organizational structure for R&D, the Department of Defense is to develop a plan which ensures the crossflow of technologies into and across R&D labs, and close the gap between the R&D pipeline and the acquisition pipeline, to ensure the customer is involved in the entire R&D process. Our R&D structure needs to be revamped now so that leading edge techno-warfare can emerge. Along the same lines as innovation, this bill has provisions that ensure we continue to step up to our responsibility to oversee the transformation of our military to the future force that will protect our security in the 21st century. We need a permanent requirement that the Secretary of Defense conduct a Quadrennial Defense Review at the beginning of each new administration to determine and express the defense strategy of our nation, and establish a revised defense plan for the next 10 to 20 years. Complementing the QDR will be a National Defense Panel that would conduct an assessment of the defense strategy, force structure, force modernization plans, infrastructure, budget plan, and other elements of the defense program and policies established under the previous quadrennial defense review. Based on our previous experiences with the QDR and NDP, and the debate they raised, it is obvious that any one time assessment is not going to provide all the answers we need. Periodic assessments as prescribed by this legislation will continue to provide Congress with a compelling forecast of the future security environment and the military challenges we will face. The requirement for the provisions I have mentioned is paramount. The need for renewed emphasis on innovation and transformation has never been more apparent to me than after my time this year as the Ranking Member on the AirLand Subcommittee. That committee, under the excellent leadership of Senator Rick Santorum, examined many modernization issues affecting the Army and the Air Force. Some of the findings were disturbing, and reinforce the fact that despite the widespread and growing consensus that transformation is essential to our military, our budgets continue to look much as they have for a decade, focused on today's force at the expense of tomorrow. I would like to discuss some of the disturbing findings, and some of the important provisions we included in the bill to begin to address these concerns. We found that some responsible voices are concerned that the United States Army is facing a condition of deteriorating strategic relevance. The Army force structure is essentially still a cold war force structure built around very heavy weapons systems. The Army modernization program is based on incremental improvements to this force and is largely unfunded due to hard choices made in the past. This has resulted in inefficient programs and extended program timelines. Consequently we have a force that looks essentially the same today as it did yesterday, and that doesn't have enough money to maintain an increasingly expensive current force and invest in the Army After Next which is the future. Kosovo is an example of the future the Army will surely face; operations that are increasingly urbanized, with growing deployment and access problems, and the need for lighter weight, self-deployable systems becomes compelling. We reviewed the Army's modernization plan to understand the relationship between the current service modernization program and projected land force challenges. The Army's modernization plans do not appear adequately address these issues. So we have required the Army to take a renewed look at its modernization plans generally, and its armor and aviation modernization programs specifically, to address these challenges and to provide us with modernization plans that are complete and that will be fully funded in future budgets. We direct this analysis include the operational capabilities that are necessary for the Army to prevail against the future land force challenges, including asymetrical threats, and the key capabilities and characteristics of of the future Army systems needed to achieve these operational capabilities. We are especially concerned about the ability of the Army to maintain the current fleet of helicopters that is rapidly aging and we have included a provision to require them to provide a complete and funded program that would upgrade, modernize, or retire the entire range of aircraft currently in the fleet, or provide an alternative that is sufficient and affordable. Similarly, the Army's armor modernization plan seems to be inadequate to modernize the current armor force while designing the tank of the future, and leads me to believe that the Army must reassess armor system plans and provide us with the most appropriate path to accelerate the development of the future combat vehicle. The Air Force has fewer apparent modernization problems than the Army, but I wonder if their modernization plan is on the right track. Our hearings strongly suggest that the Department of Defense needs to answer several questions about our tactical air requirements, not the least of which is the characteristics, mix, and numbers of aircraft best suited for future conflicts. Kosovo is an example of how important the right mix of platforms and weapons really is to success on the battlefields of the future. We are embarked on three new TAC air programs which may report increasing costs coming dangerously close to the cost caps we have established, and in the case of the F-22 we must be alert to the danger that we will delay critical testing in order to not exceed the caps. And in the out years, the combined costs of these programs will consume a very large share of the overall procurement budget. We must make sure that we are not sacrificing other leading- edge capabilities, like unmanned aerial vehicles, information technology, or space technology. The specific aircraft programs will require close scrutiny as will the strategy for their use as we attempt to decide on the right course in future authorization bills. We must overcome our cold war mentality and further examine and direct our trek into the 21st century. The provisions in this bill concerning innovation and transformation lay the foundation for the required changes in our defense mind set that will become mandatory as we face far different conflicts in the future--and, as we see on CNN everyday, much of that future is already here. In closing, I express my appreciation to the committee for agreeing to include in the bill a provision to extend and expand the highly successful Troops to Teachers program, which I joined Senators McCain and Robb in sponsoring. As my colleagues may know, this program was initially authorized by Congress several years ago to help transition retiring and downsized military personnel into jobs where they could continue their commitment to public service and bring their valuable skills to bear for the benefit of America's students. To date Troops to Teachers has placed more than 3,000 retired or downsized service members in public schools in 48 different states, providing participants with assistance in obtaining the proper certification or licensing and matching them up with prospective employers. In return, these new teachers bring to the classroom what educators say our schools need most: mature and disciplined role models, most of them male and many of them minorities, well-trained in math and science and high tech fields, highly motivated, and highly capable of working in challenging environments. The legislation we introduced earlier in the year, and which the President has endorsed, aims to build on this success by encouraging more military retirees to move into teaching. It would do so by offering those departing troops new incentives to enter the teaching profession, particularly for those who are willing to serve in areas with large concentrations of at-risk children and severe shortages of qualified teaching candidates. Even with the new incentives we are creating, which we hope will recruit as many as 3,000 new teachers each year, we recognize that Troops to Teachers will still only make a modest dent in solving the national teacher shortage. The Department of Education estimates that America's public schools will need to hire more than two million new teachers over the next decade. But we are confident that, with an extremely modest investment, we will make a substantial contribution to our common goals of not just filling classroom slots, but doing so in way that raises teaching standards and helping our children realize their potential. I can't think of a better source of teaching candidates than the pool of smart, disciplined and dedicated men and women who retire from the military every year. What's more, with this bill, we may well galvanize support for a recruitment method that, as Education Secretary Richard Riley has suggested, could serve as a model for bringing many more bright, talented people from different professions to serve in our public schools. This really is an ingenious idea, helping us to harness a unique national resource to meet a pressing national need, and I think we would be well served as country to build on it. In putting together this bill, once again hard choices had to be made. We closely examined and analyzed the critical defense issues, and we ended up with are effective and affordable defense authorization bill which meets the growing readiness and retention challenges facing our armed forces, and augments our investment in the research, development, and procurement of the weapon systems necessary to maintain our military superiority well into the 21st Century. This bill compensates our most valuable resource, our service men and women, plus lays the groundwork for a sensible and executable programs for our military. I urge all of my colleagues to support this legislation and send an unequivocal message of support to our troops and their families.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I wanted to indicate to the Senate why I was unavoidably absent, as was recorded in yesterday's Record, at the time of the vote on amendment 384 to S. 1059. I was in Connecticut yesterday. Because of serious thunderstorm and wind conditions my flight from Connecticut to Washington was delayed for several hours, causing me to miss the vote on the amendment. As yesterday's Record indicates, had I been able to return to vote, I would have voted for the amendment, which passed 90 to 0.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President I rise today to pay a well- deserved tribute to Ruth A. Geller, MSW on the occasion of her retirement from the Connecticut Mental Health Center after 25 years of service as a psychiatric social worker supervisor. Ruth has demonstrated exceptional compassion, dedication, and professionalism in caring for the severely, chronically mentally impaired of Connecticut. As a mentor and teacher, Ruth has trained a generation of mental health professionals with the same devotion she has brought to her clinical work. As a result, Ruth has instilled in them the ability to become respectful, empathetic mental health providers. I am proud to stand before the Senate to congratulate Ruth Geller upon her retirement and thank her for an outstanding career which has enhanced the lives of so many. I wish her continued success in the years ahead.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to formally congratulate Westport Volunteer Emergency Services on its 20th Anniversary. The fine men and women who founded, operate, and support this organization have distinguished themselves as one the pillars on which the principles of community service rest. The EMS team has truly been an asset to the town of Westport and has had a profound impact on the individuals and families who have benefited from its experience and training. Its quick service and professional response has made it one of the state's most well- respected EMS corps. We have all been taught that we have an obligation to help our neighbors in need, but this organization has truly taken this credo to heart and has earned commendation for the lives it has saved, the families it has assisted, and the time it has contributed to improving the entire community. I give special congratulations to the 23 original members and staff of WVEMS who are still active today. They should be very proud of the positive impact of this organization, and I am certain that they appreciate more than anyone the growth and development of this outstanding EMS corps. Westport EMS provides immediate, front-line assistance that is so valuable to our neighbors in needs and does so on a volunteer basis. Its efforts have made a difference to children and adults alike over these last two decades and done more than its part to improve the Town of Westport. I an confident that Westport Volunteer Emergency Medical Services will continue its sterling record of service far into the future.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to bring to the attention of Senators the retirement of Major General David W. Gay, Adjutant General of the Connecticut National Guard, after a military career that has spanned more than 40 years. The recipient of many military awards and honors, including the Army Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit Award, and the National Guard Bureau's Eagle Award, General Gay has been a valuable friend to me and all the people of Connecticut. His experience and dedication have helped make the Connecticut National Guard the exemplary organization that it is today. General Gay's contributions to the state go far beyond his command of both the Army and Air National Guard. His record of community service equals his record of military service and his participation in such activities as the Nutmeg State Games and the Character Counts State Advisory Board demonstrate his love for the community he calls home. Even in retirement, General Gay will continue to work for the people of Connecticut as the state's Year 2000 Coordinator. I am happy to extend my thanks to General Gay for his years of distinguished service and offer my best wishes in his retirement.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, in the wake of the tragic shooting in Littleton, we as a nation, as individuals, are focusing in on an unsettling fact: No matter how good times are economically in America, something seems to have gone wrong in our country, something that is whetting the taste for blood and death in our children, turning too many of them into killers in our schools, in the suburbs, on the urban street corners, and in the homes of every kind of community throughout our country. As I have listened to this discussion at home in Connecticut, and as I have listened to it here on the floor of the Senate, in the committees and caucus rooms of this Capitol, I think what is important is that we are all recognizing and accepting that this is an extremely complicated problem without a single cause, fueled by an amorphous mix of factors. A child is not, if I may say, a natural born killer. A child, unfortunately, is affected by a variety of circumstances that make him into a killer, from the disengagement of parents, from the makeup of the child himself, to the disconnection and alienation that many children feel from their families, their peers, their communities, to the weakening of our moral and community safety nets. This is a mix that has been made more deadly in our time by the easy access many children have to guns. Most of what we know for sure, as we consider the complexity of the problem, is, unfortunately, in the statistics, there is a Littleton every day. An average of 13 children die from gunshot wounds every 24 hours in America--some self-inflicted and more from murder. The fact is that no civilized country in the world comes close to matching this level of homicide and suicide, let alone the massacres we have seen committed in public places. The more we look at this problem, the more we understand--many of us--that the environment in which we are raising our children, with all of the death and destruction and dismemberment and degradation that we expose them to in the entertainment media, with the wealth of perverse messages we send them romanticizing and in many ways sanitizing violence--all of that has an effect. All of that draws a connection between the culture and the killing, between the viciousness pouring out of our children and piling up throughout our society. I know there are skeptics and naysayers who, despite the reams of evidence and scientific and anecdotal information gleaned from Littleton, Jonesboro, Paducah, and elsewhere--despite all that our intuition tells us about the omnipresence of electronic media and the pull on our society, despite all of this--cling to the notion that the culture of violence is harmless, that the relentless assault of virtual murder and mayhem on our children is having no effect, and that it can't be true. There has always been violence in our country, these skeptics rationalize. There has always been violence in the culture. So the answers must lie elsewhere. But the answer lies within each of us, and within each of the groups and industries we are referring to here. The truth is, we have always had alienated, disaffected, and in some cases mentally troubled children. We have always had the cruel taunting of adolescents, the cliques in schools, and in many parts of the country we have also always had guns within easy reach of children. And yet, never before in the history of our country have we seen this level of violence among our children. Something entirely different, chillingly different, is happening, and we have to find out what it is and do something about it. We could spend weeks discussing this question. In fact, in another amendment several of us will be proposing a year-long commission to look at the problems underneath the problems. Clearly, some of it has to do with the fact that many of the traditional transmitters of values we have long relied on to shape the moral sense of our children--family, community, faith, and school--have been weakened in recent years, and more and more what is filling that value vacuum is the enormously alluring and powerful, influential entertainment media which too often has become a standard shredder instead of a standard setter. So how do we in this society that so values freedom of expression urge and push the entertainment industry to self-control, to self- regulate, to acknowledge not that they are causing this problem but that they are contributing to a crisis that is killing too many of our children? It is not easy. I think in this amendment we have found a way to begin to do it with an industry code of conduct exempting those in the entertainment industry from the fear of antitrust prosecutions so that they can work together to develop a code of conduct which will protect them from what some of them claim to be: With the currently existing competitive pressure downward, if the other company produces an ultra- violent movie and makes money, we have got to do it. Of course, nobody has to do anything. Lines should be drawn about what people won't do to make an extra dollar or two or an extra 10 million dollars or two. This amendment enables the companies to get together to do just that, and also to enforce the rating system that they themselves put on. We don't want to be censors. Let the industries themselves rate their products, as they do now. But then let them agree not to market products that they have rated as inappropriate, as harmful to children. Let them agree that when they rate a movie as unsuitable for kids under 17, there ought to be some responsibility in the theater owner not to let children under 17 into that movie, just the way there was responsibility on the owner of a bar not to serve liquor to a minor. Mr. President, last week I submitted evidence to the Commerce Committee, which I think is strongly suggestive of the fact that two major entertainment industries--the movies and the video games--are rating products as bad for our children and then, as my colleagues have shown here on the floor, directly marketing those products to our children, contributing to the culture of violence that is embracing, surrounding, suffocating, and too often motivating our kids. This amendment rightfully calls on the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to conduct an investigation of the marketing practices of the video game, music, and motion picture industries to determine if they engage in deceptive marketing practices by targeting minors for the acquisition of material they themselves have deemed unsuitable for such minors. I am afraid to say that Joe Camel has not gone away. He seems too often to have gone into the entertainment business. Consider the anecdotal evidence from the movie industry, which indicates that violent films rated for adults only are being marketed to children. Over the last few years we have seen the rise of a new class of teen-targeted films--referred to by some as ``teensploitation'' movies--which has engaged producers and directors in a conspicuous contest to see who can be more violent, more sexually provocative, and generally more perverse to attract youth audiences. A perfect example of this trend is ``Very Bad Things,'' a supposed comedy about a bachelor party gone wrong, which finds fun in the dismembering of a stripper and the successive mutilation of the partygoers. The latest entry is ``Idle Hands,'' which was released just last week. It is promoted as ``sick and twisted laugh riot,'' and it's not hard to see where this description comes from--according to reviews, the film features a severed hand that fondles a girl before strangling her, a knitting needle that is driven through a policeman's ear, and a decapitation by circular saw blade, all apparently played for laughs. What these movies have in common, beyond their violent and offensive content, is that they are rated ``R,'' meaning that they are not meant for children under 17. Yet according to several recent news media reports, most producers and studio executives assume that underage kids can and will get in. ``Well, let's hope so,'' says Roger Kumble, the director of ``Cruel Intentions,'' the teen remake of ``Dangerous Liaisons'' which is by all accounts far more salacious than the original. This sentiment was affirmed by Don Mancini, the writer of all four R-rated ``Child's Play'' horror films, who acknowledged that young teens were the target for his most recent release, ``Bride of Chucky,'' and other similarly bloody slasher films. ``They have grown up watching these movies on home video,'' he said. ``Now that there are new ones coming out, these kids are tantalized.'' To apparently help lure in young audiences, these teensploitation movies are heavily advertised on MTV and network series that teens watch regularly, such as ``Dawson's Creek'' and ``Buffy the Vampire Slayer,'' and are stocked with actors from these teen-favored TV shows. This pattern succeeded with the teen slasher movies ``Scream'' and ``I Know What You Did Last Summer,'' and it continues with the current ``Cruel Intentions''--the director said casting Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy fame was like ``dangling the carrot'' in front of young teens. This dangling is apparently working--according to a recent Gallup poll, half of American teens say they have seen an ``R''-rated movie in the last month, including 42 percent of those aged 13-15. The video and PC and arcade gamemakers are less candid about targeting their marketing to teens than the moviemakers, but the evidence is there just the same. Action figures based on bloodthirsty characters from ``Resident Evil 2,'' ``Duke Nukem,'' and ``Mortal Kombat''--three heavily-violent titles that are rated ``M'' for 17-and-up--are being sold at Toys-R-Us and similar toy stores. Those same toy stores, which cater largely to children, typically carry those games and many of ``M''-rated titles filled with guns and gore. Equally disturbing is the advertising that publishers place in the various glossy game-player magazines. These magazines are widely read by young gamers, and they are filled with perverse and antisocial messages. Here are just a few: ``Carmageddon'' boasts it is ``as easy as killing babies with axes''; ``Point Blanks'' claims it is ``more fun than shooting your neighbor's cat''; ``Die by the Sword'' instructs, ``Escape. Dismember. Massacre.''; and ``Cardinal Syn'' features a severed, bloodied head on top of a spear, with the tag line, ``Happiness is a Warm Cranium.'' A good indication these messages are reaching their target audience came from a survey done by the national Institute on Media and the Family last winter, which found that while only five percent of parents were familiar with the game ``Duke Nukem,'' 80 percent of junior high students knew of it. Taken together, the evidence here is enough to demonstrate that there is a troubling trend in the entertainment industry, one that it needs to stop now. The marketing of these ever-more vicious and violent products is making a mockery of the various rating systems, telling parents that these products are inappropriate for children but we're going to sell them anyway, and reminding us of similar behavior by the tobacco industry. More than that, it is unethical and unacceptable, and should stop now. We presented this evidence at a hearing before the Commerce Committee earlier this month, and the response from Hollywood was a deafening silence. There was no acknowledgment that this is going on, or even that it presents a problem. Their unwillingness to discuss this problem leaves us no chance to act. That is why Senator Hatch and I, along with Senator Brownback, are calling for an investigation into the marketing practices of the movie, music and video game industries, to determine to what extent they are targeting ultraviolent, adult-rated products to children. Finally, in this amendment we call for an NIH study on violent entertainment. NIH is directed to conduct a study of the effect of violence in video games and music, building on the studies that have been done which conclusively show that violence in movies and television affects the behavior of children and makes them more violent. This study would be a companion piece to the directive the President issued on Monday at the summit. He called on the Surgeon General to do a broad-based study of the causes of youth violence in our country, including the effect the entertainment industry is having on the violent behavior of our children. This amendment is one of several that will be introduced today. None of them individually will solve this problem. This is all a matter which in some ways is the history of human civilization and the extent to which we can improve the prospect that we will express our better natures and not our worst natures. As humans, we are far from perfect. Parents try to raise children and develop their better nature. Too often today those parents feel as if they are in fundamental and in some ways critical competition with the entertainment industry to raise their kids. All we are doing in these amendments and these statements is to appeal to the entertainment industry to exercise some responsibility: Help America raise our children so that society will be safer than I fear it is as a result of the violent material included in too many entertainment products. I hope--and I say this with some confidence based on the bipartisan reach of the cosponsors of this amendment--Senators Brownback, Hatch, McCain, Kohl, and myself at least--that this amendment will be passed across party lines with an overwhelming majority of colleagues of the Senate voting in favor of it. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I rise to support the amendment. I am privileged to be a cosponsor of the amendment with the Senator from Kansas, Mr. Brownback, and with the Senator from Utah, Chairman Hatch. This amendment incorporates several proposals which many of us have been working on together across party lines in this Chamber to try to tone down one of the influences that we are convinced is contributing to the outbreak and crisis of youth violence in our country. Two other colleagues whom I have been privileged to work with are Senator McCain of Arizona and Senator Kohl of Wisconsin. At this time I ask unanimous consent that Senators McCain and Kohl be added as original cosponsors of this amendment.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, three weeks after the tragic shooting in Littleton, Colorado, we as a national community are still struggling to make sense of this horrific event and the other school massacres that preceded it. We are still searching for reasons why some of our children are slaughtering each other, and why there is generally so much violence surrounding our young people, not just in classrooms and schoolyards but on streetcorners and in homes across the country. In this discussion, we have heard many factors cited as possible causes, but few definitive conclusions or little consensus on exactly what or who is responsible for this alarming trend. In fact, one of the only things that most Americans seem to agree on is that this is an extremely complicated problem, and that there is not any one answer. They are right. The search for common ground and common solutions began in earnest yesterday with the summit meeting the President convened at the White House. At that meeting the President opened a much-needed dialogue with the entertainment and gun industries, yielding some important commitments from the gun makers, but little if anything from the entertainment industry. The President also laid out a promising plan for translating this conversation into action, calling for a national campaign to change the pervading culture of violence, to mobilize a sustained response to this threat from every segment of our society, much as we have done in the fight against teen pregnancy. We are here today to introduce legislation that we believe can make an important contribution to this national campaign, something that will help us better understand as we prepare to act. Our proposal would create a select national commission on youth violence, whose mandate would be to deliberately and dispassionately examine the many possible root causes of this crisis of youth violence, to help us understand why so many kids are turning into killers, and to help us reach consensus on how to curtail this recurring nightmare. This commission would be composed of a wide array of experts in the fields of law enforcement, school administration, teaching and counseling, parenting and family studies, and child and adolescent psychology, as well as Cabinet members and national religious leaders, to thoroughly study the different dimensions of this problem. After deliberating for a year, the commission would be directed to report its conclusions to the President and Congress and recommend a series of tangible steps we could take to reduce the level of youth violence and prevent other families and communities from feeling the searing pain and grief that has visited the people of Littleton for the last three weeks. Our proposal is not intended to forestall or preempt a more immediate response to what happened in Littleton. To the contrary, we each believe there are several steps that the Congress and different groups and industries could and should take now that would help us reduce not just the risk of another school massacre, but the daily death toll of youth violence across America. Several of us here, for example, have and will continue to push the entertainment industry to stop glorifying and romanticizing violence, and in particular to stop marketing murder and mayhem directly to kids. But we also believe that this extraordinary problem is not something that we can solve overnight, or with any single piece of legislation. A commission is no guarantee that we will find all the answers and bridge all the divisions, but we believe it provides as good a hope as any for thoughtfully doing so, and for making this national campaign a success. In the coming days, we will offer this proposal as an amendment to the juvenile justice bill. We will also be putting forward a companion amendment calling for a Surgeon General's report on the public health aspects of the youth violence epidemic, with a particular focus on the contributing effects of entertainment media violence on children. This proposal, which the President endorsed at Monday's summit, is intended to inform the commission's work and hopefully raise public awareness of the enormous role the entertainment culture plays in shaping the world our sons and daughters inhabit. I ask unanimous consent that the text of this bill be printed into the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, three weeks after the tragic shooting in Littleton, Colorado, we as a national community are still struggling to make sense of this horrific event and the other school massacres that preceded it. We are still searching for reasons why some of our children are slaughtering each other, and why there is generally so much violence surrounding our young people, not just in classrooms and schoolyards but on streetcorners and in homes across the country. In this discussion, we have heard many factors cited as possible causes, but few definitive conclusions or little consensus on exactly what or who is responsible for this alarming trend. In fact, one of the only things that most Americans seem to agree on is that this is an extremely complicated problem, and that there is not any one answer. They are right. The search for common ground and common solutions began in earnest yesterday with the summit meeting the President convened at the White House. At that meeting the President opened a much-needed dialogue with the entertainment and gun industries, yielding some important commitments from the gun makers, but little if anything from the entertainment industry. The President also laid out a promising plan for translating this conversation into action, calling for a national campaign to change the pervading culture of violence, to mobilize a sustained response to this threat from every segment of our society, much as we have done in the fight against teen pregnancy. We are here today to introduce legislation that we believe can make an important contribution to this national campaign, something that will help us better understand as we prepare to act. Our proposal would create a select national commission on youth violence, whose mandate would be to deliberately and dispassionately examine the many possible root causes of this crisis of youth violence, to help us understand why so many kids are turning into killers, and to help us reach consensus on how to curtail this recurring nightmare. This commission would be composed of a wide array of experts in the fields of law enforcement, school administration, teaching and counseling, parenting and family studies, and child and adolescent psychology, as well as Cabinet members and national religious leaders, to thoroughly study the different dimensions of this problem. After deliberating for a year, the commission would be directed to report its conclusions to the President and Congress and recommend a series of tangible steps we could take to reduce the level of youth violence and prevent other families and communities from feeling the searing pain and grief that has visited the people of Littleton for the last three weeks. Our proposal is not intended to forestall or preempt a more immediate response to what happened in Littleton. To the contrary, we each believe there are several steps that the Congress and different groups and industries could and should take now that would help us reduce not just the risk of another school massacre, but the daily death toll of youth violence across America. Several of us here, for example, have and will continue to push the entertainment industry to stop glorifying and romanticizing violence, and in particular to stop marketing murder and mayhem directly to kids. But we also believe that this extraordinary problem is not something that we can solve overnight, or with any single piece of legislation. A commission is no guarantee that we will find all the answers and bridge all the divisions, but we believe it provides as good a hope as any for thoughtfully doing so, and for making this national campaign a success. In the coming days, we will offer this proposal as an amendment to the juvenile justice bill. We will also be putting forward a companion amendment calling for a Surgeon General's report on the public health aspects of the youth violence epidemic, with a particular focus on the contributing effects of entertainment media violence on children. This proposal, which the President endorsed at Monday's summit, is intended to inform the commission's work and hopefully raise public awareness of the enormous role the entertainment culture plays in shaping the world our sons and daughters inhabit. I ask unanimous consent that the text of this bill be printed into the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senators Domenici and Bingaman today in supporting the Private Sector Research and Development Investment Act of 1999. This bill recognizes that we are moving toward a New Economy and supports the engine of that New Economy. Let me explain. In this decade, we have returned to our nation's historic growth rate of 3% plus growth. We haven't seen this in 30 years, but now we are back there again. We know what the last few years of growth feel like-- America is starting to feel like an opportunity society again. We are moving toward some fundamental changes in our economic structure, toward a knowledge-based economy and further away from a resource-based economy. Key to these high growth rates has been overall productivity gains that are back in the 2% range, which has enabled the United States to experience real growth and real growth in incomes without significant inflation. A significant part of our productivity gains have come from gains in manufacturing productivity, which has approached 4% in each of the past three years. These manufacturing gains come directly from innovation, and in recent years these are largely driven by innovation in information technology--one of the most amazing results of R&D in this century from the invention of the transistor over 50 years ago to the development of the Internet today. And it looks like we are starting to get noticeable productivity gains in our services sector as well, also driven by information technology. The digital revolution is affecting every sector of our economy. As Andy Grove, Chairman of Intel, said, ``In five years, there will be no Internet companies. Every company will be an Internet company,'' or it won't be in business. Some analysts look at the stock market today and compare it to the 1600's Dutch tulip bulbs investment bubble, maybe the largest bubble of all time, and its subsequent crash. The difference is that tulip bulbs did not fundamentally alter the means of communication and increase productivity as the Internet does. Pharmaceuticals and health care is another area in which our country's investment in R&D has catapulted us above our competitors. A recent study from the Department of Commerce found that the United States is decades ahead of other countries in the pharmaceutical and health related industries directly because of our investment in R&D. In the past 50 years, researchers from U.S. pharmaceutical companies have discovered and developed breakthrough treatments for asthma, heart disease, osteoporosis, HIV/AIDS, stroke, ulcers, and glaucoma. And they have developed vaccines against previously common causes of infant death including polio, rubella, influenza B and whooping cough. Why is the U.S. pharmaceutical industry the number one global innovator in medicine? According to Raymond Gilmartin, Chairman, President and CEO of Merck & Co., because ``The U.S. pharmaceutical industry leads the world in its commitment to research. . .'' There have been at least a dozen major economic studies, including those of Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow, which conclude that technological progress accounts for 50%, and lately considerable more, of our total growth and has twice the impact on economic growth as labor or capital. For the long term health of our economy, we need to invest now in activities that will have a future payoff in innovation and productivity. A one percent increase in our nation's investment in research results in a productivity increase of 0.23%. We need to ensure our future by creating the institutions and incentives to increase R&D investment in the United States. This Act will replace our current, dysfunctional system of on-again, off-again R&D tax credits with a tax credit that is reliably permanent. In the global economy we will have to not only out-perform our competitors, but out-innovate them. Giving our industry the tools to support their own innovation is a timely act. This Act meets the goals of some groups who favor simply making the credit permanent and increasing the alternative credit by one percent, as does the bill introduced by my esteemed colleague Senator Hatch. I am a cosponsor of Senator Hatch's bill. I believe we need to make the R&D credit permanent. But I feel strongly that we need further changes to the Act to increase its effectiveness, make it more accessible to small and start up businesses, update the credit to account for changes we are seeing in industry and, importantly, to complement the relationship between Federal and private sector research. The bill that Senators Domenici, Bingaman, Frist, Snowe, and myself are introducing makes these important changes, as well as making the R&D tax credit permanent. Industry research is largely dependent on the basic research undertaken by the Federal government. Because industry itself does not perform basic research--84% of industry research is concentrated on product development, the final stage of R&D--the private sector must draw on government-funded research to develop ideas for new market products. Of all papers cited in U.S. industry patents, 73% are from government and non-profit funded research. This marriage of basic Federal research and applied private research is essential. Yet, as a percent of GDP, Federal investment in R&D has been nearly halved over the last 30 years. We are living off of the fruits of basic research from the mid-1960s. In addition, the national labs and universities are facing a brain drain by the private sector as engineers and scientists are in high demand and increasingly in short supply. The private sector recognizes the importance of work accomplished through Federal funding and knows this is a problem that needs to be addressed. This bill encourages collaboration between private sector research and national labs and universities and offers a financial incentive to use the national labs and universities. Specifically, the Act encourages industry to use the federally funded programs by qualifying 100% of contract research accomplished at universities, national labs, and small businesses. It also enables basic research at Federally Funded R&D Centers to count toward the basic research credit. By expanding the credit to research done in consortia, the Act also recognizes that research today is more often done in collaboration than in isolation. The fastest method of moving research into the marketplace is often through small, startup companies. The Act updates the tax credit rules to accommodate the special R&D cycles faced by these companies. By supporting the small but crucial R&D efforts of new technology-based firms, the Act nurtures the very companies who contribute disproportionately to our national productivity and employment growth. The Act also updates our view of R&D. For the alternative credit, it calculates R&D expenditures with respect to a rolling baseline, rather than a fixed 1980's baseline that is increasingly remote and outdated as time passes. Mr. President, I believe there has been a growing awareness among Senators over the past couple of years that technology has been one of the driving forces behind our fantastic economic growth in this country. Despite that we are finally out of the red on the budget and finally in the black, we know that continued control and restraint must be exercised on the budget and we will have to make difficult choices about what programs to fund and what tax cuts to make. But now that we know that technological progress is responsible for 50% or more of economic growth, I think we owe it to ourselves to encourage such progress whenever possible. It is an investment in our future which we cannot do without.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senators Domenici and Bingaman today in supporting the Private Sector Research and Development Investment Act of 1999. This bill recognizes that we are moving toward a New Economy and supports the engine of that New Economy. Let me explain. In this decade, we have returned to our nation's historic growth rate of 3% plus growth. We haven't seen this in 30 years, but now we are back there again. We know what the last few years of growth feel like-- America is starting to feel like an opportunity society again. We are moving toward some fundamental changes in our economic structure, toward a knowledge-based economy and further away from a resource-based economy. Key to these high growth rates has been overall productivity gains that are back in the 2% range, which has enabled the United States to experience real growth and real growth in incomes without significant inflation. A significant part of our productivity gains have come from gains in manufacturing productivity, which has approached 4% in each of the past three years. These manufacturing gains come directly from innovation, and in recent years these are largely driven by innovation in information technology--one of the most amazing results of R&D in this century from the invention of the transistor over 50 years ago to the development of the Internet today. And it looks like we are starting to get noticeable productivity gains in our services sector as well, also driven by information technology. The digital revolution is affecting every sector of our economy. As Andy Grove, Chairman of Intel, said, ``In five years, there will be no Internet companies. Every company will be an Internet company,'' or it won't be in business. Some analysts look at the stock market today and compare it to the 1600's Dutch tulip bulbs investment bubble, maybe the largest bubble of all time, and its subsequent crash. The difference is that tulip bulbs did not fundamentally alter the means of communication and increase productivity as the Internet does. Pharmaceuticals and health care is another area in which our country's investment in R&D has catapulted us above our competitors. A recent study from the Department of Commerce found that the United States is decades ahead of other countries in the pharmaceutical and health related industries directly because of our investment in R&D. In the past 50 years, researchers from U.S. pharmaceutical companies have discovered and developed breakthrough treatments for asthma, heart disease, osteoporosis, HIV/AIDS, stroke, ulcers, and glaucoma. And they have developed vaccines against previously common causes of infant death including polio, rubella, influenza B and whooping cough. Why is the U.S. pharmaceutical industry the number one global innovator in medicine? According to Raymond Gilmartin, Chairman, President and CEO of Merck & Co., because ``The U.S. pharmaceutical industry leads the world in its commitment to research. . .'' There have been at least a dozen major economic studies, including those of Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow, which conclude that technological progress accounts for 50%, and lately considerable more, of our total growth and has twice the impact on economic growth as labor or capital. For the long term health of our economy, we need to invest now in activities that will have a future payoff in innovation and productivity. A one percent increase in our nation's investment in research results in a productivity increase of 0.23%. We need to ensure our future by creating the institutions and incentives to increase R&D investment in the United States. This Act will replace our current, dysfunctional system of on-again, off-again R&D tax credits with a tax credit that is reliably permanent. In the global economy we will have to not only out-perform our competitors, but out-innovate them. Giving our industry the tools to support their own innovation is a timely act. This Act meets the goals of some groups who favor simply making the credit permanent and increasing the alternative credit by one percent, as does the bill introduced by my esteemed colleague Senator Hatch. I am a cosponsor of Senator Hatch's bill. I believe we need to make the R&D credit permanent. But I feel strongly that we need further changes to the Act to increase its effectiveness, make it more accessible to small and start up businesses, update the credit to account for changes we are seeing in industry and, importantly, to complement the relationship between Federal and private sector research. The bill that Senators Domenici, Bingaman, Frist, Snowe, and myself are introducing makes these important changes, as well as making the R&D tax credit permanent. Industry research is largely dependent on the basic research undertaken by the Federal government. Because industry itself does not perform basic research--84% of industry research is concentrated on product development, the final stage of R&D--the private sector must draw on government-funded research to develop ideas for new market products. Of all papers cited in U.S. industry patents, 73% are from government and non-profit funded research. This marriage of basic Federal research and applied private research is essential. Yet, as a percent of GDP, Federal investment in R&D has been nearly halved over the last 30 years. We are living off of the fruits of basic research from the mid-1960s. In addition, the national labs and universities are facing a brain drain by the private sector as engineers and scientists are in high demand and increasingly in short supply. The private sector recognizes the importance of work accomplished through Federal funding and knows this is a problem that needs to be addressed. This bill encourages collaboration between private sector research and national labs and universities and offers a financial incentive to use the national labs and universities. Specifically, the Act encourages industry to use the federally funded programs by qualifying 100% of contract research accomplished at universities, national labs, and small businesses. It also enables basic research at Federally Funded R&D Centers to count toward the basic research credit. By expanding the credit to research done in consortia, the Act also recognizes that research today is more often done in collaboration than in isolation. The fastest method of moving research into the marketplace is often through small, startup companies. The Act updates the tax credit rules to accommodate the special R&D cycles faced by these companies. By supporting the small but crucial R&D efforts of new technology-based firms, the Act nurtures the very companies who contribute disproportionately to our national productivity and employment growth. The Act also updates our view of R&D. For the alternative credit, it calculates R&D expenditures with respect to a rolling baseline, rather than a fixed 1980's baseline that is increasingly remote and outdated as time passes. Mr. President, I believe there has been a growing awareness among Senators over the past couple of years that technology has been one of the driving forces behind our fantastic economic growth in this country. Despite that we are finally out of the red on the budget and finally in the black, we know that continued control and restraint must be exercised on the budget and we will have to make difficult choices about what programs to fund and what tax cuts to make. But now that we know that technological progress is responsible for 50% or more of economic growth, I think we owe it to ourselves to encourage such progress whenever possible. It is an investment in our future which we cannot do without.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I have been privileged to join with the Senator from Arizona, the Senator from Delaware and others, in cosponsoring this resolution. So I have listened with considerable personal interest as one after another of our colleagues have expressed their points of view. I joined with Senator McCain and Senator Biden and the others in cosponsoring this resolution as a way to express my personal support, and hopefully on a bipartisan basis--and the cosponsors of this resolution are a broad and bipartisan group--to give the Senate an opportunity to express our support for the objectives that NATO has adopted in entering the conflict in the Balkans and that the United States and this administration have, of course, subscribed to. Let me read what those objectives are: That the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, (Serbia and Montenegro) . . . withdraw its military, paramilitary and security forces from the province of Kosovo, [that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] allow the return of ethnic Albanian refugees to their homes, and [that Serbia] permit the establishment of a NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo. In light of all the blood that has been spilled, in light of the horrific scenes that we have all not just heard about, not just heard rumored, not heard speculated about, but seen with our own eyes on television, heard the eye-witness reports on television; of all the horrors that we have been forced to witness again that have occurred in Kosovo--when we think of all of those objectives of the NATO campaign, the NATO effort, the NATO war in the Balkans, they are extremely reasonable and extremely just. So I joined with my colleagues in offering this resolution as a way to restate clearly and simply what our objectives are here and to say that we want to support the President of the United States. We want to support the President of the United States in the decision he has made to join with our allies in NATO to carry out this cause. We want to say by this resolution, so strongly do we believe in this cause, that we are prepared to give this President, as the resolution says, authorization ``to use all necessary force and other means, in concert with the United States allies, to accomplish United States and NATO objectives,'' that I have just described. To me, it is an opportunity, broad-based, simple, fair, direct, not just to stand together on a bipartisan basis in this Senate, but to stand together in support of the policy that this administration has adopted in support of our NATO allies and, in doing so, to send a message to the enemy, to Mr. Milosevic--who we are reliably informed began this invasion of Kosovo, this massacre, this massive expulsion, as others have said before me tonight and earlier today, based on the ethnic history, identity and religion of the people being expelled--to say to Mr. Milosevic, who, again, we are reliably informed, began his evil deeds in Kosovo with the hope and the belief that the NATO allies would soon break their cohesiveness, would not hold in the face of this onslaught and his clever diplomatic moves, he was wrong. The NATO allies were here just a week ago. They spoke with unity. They strengthened their ranks. They came together. They agreed to intensify the effort against Milosevic and they have done so in the ensuing week. Those of us who have brought this resolution before the Senate have done so with the hope that we might also make clear to Milosevic that the other belief he had, that he could divide the American people and their Representatives here in Congress, was false. It was in vain. It was folly. That is the spirit in which this resolution was offered. I have listened to my colleagues speak, and, as others who have spoken before me, it seems clear to me the motion to table this resolution will be agreed to tomorrow. I have heard three or four different reasons given for that. I would say the majority of reasons are procedural, and I understand those. They are not substantive. They do not go to the heart of the policy that we, the sponsors of this resolution, have intended to convey. Some of my colleagues have said the resolution is not needed; it is premature. What NATO is doing now is carrying out the aerial bombardment of Serbia and military sites in Kosovo. The Senate has already authorized that, to our great credit, on a bipartisan basis. Almost 60 percent of the Senate voted almost a month ago, as the air campaign began, to authorize and support, if you will, the President and NATO in that effort--that valiant effort, that effort that has been conducted by the men and women in uniform for all the NATO countries and for ourselves. I am proud to cite the tremendous courage and skill with which our military personnel have carried out that effort. The Senate distinguished itself in support of that effort. Unfortunately, the House did not do so last week and sent a mixed signal. But I understand some of my colleagues have said tonight the Senate has already spoken on the military effort that is part of this battle against Milosevic, so we need not speak now in more width or depth. What others have said--the second reason I can hear--is that the President is not asking for this authorization. In fact, since we introduced this resolution, S.J. Res. 20, the President has indicated both at meetings in the White House with a broad, bipartisan group of Senators, and publicly, if it came to a point, which he hopes and believes we will not reach--and of course we all hope we will not reach--when it became clear, tragically, that the Milosevic leadership in Serbia was remaining what I would describe as insanely intransigent in the face of a devastating air campaign against that country--which some experts say, analysts say has already set back the Serbian economy a decade, some say even more--if Milosevic remained intransigent, the President has said, and he was forced to reconsider the statement he has made that he does not believe we need to employ ground forces there, that he would come to Congress and ask for our consent. So I understand some of our colleagues have said, therefore, that this resolution is premature. There are others, and I hope and believe, as I will say a little bit later on, that they are in the minority here, who do not support this effort at all, who want to see us negotiate a settlement or, worse, negotiate a settlement with a regime that has blood on its hands, that has violated the values that we hold dear, the humanitarian values, as we have all seen. We know what is happening. This is a regime in Belgrade that has carried out aggression, that has aimed at destabilizing Europe; a regime that, over the last decade, successively has invaded Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and now Kosovo. This is a regime that, evidence leads us to conclude, by its policies has brought about the death of hundreds of thousands of people. That is what this is about: Destabilization, aggression, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Europe at the end of this century, challenging the premise that brought about the creation of NATO 50 years ago, which was not just to defend against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, but was to uphold the principles for which the then recently completed Second World War was fought, which were freedom, human dignity, democracy. Sometimes, as I watch the slaughter continuing, the expulsions continuing in Kosovo, as I think of the history of Serbia and Milosevic for these last 10 years, I just say to myself: Have we not learned the lessons of this century, of the last 60 years of this century? Why did we fight the Second World War and the cold war if not to establish the principle that it was in America's security interest and, of course, even more intensely and intimately in the security interest and the principal interest of our allies in Europe not to allow tyranny, brutality, communism to exist in Europe? It threatened the stability of that great region with which we have historic ties, with which we have extraordinary economic ties, which contains the heart of our alliance, the strength of the partners we would turn to, not just when in crisis in Europe, but when in crisis anywhere in the world, as we did in the gulf war. Whom did we ask to stand by our fight, to fight by our side? Our allies in Europe, first and most significantly. Will we allow this century to end having fought the Second World War, made vivid in the Spielberg movie, ``Saving Private Ryan''--did those Americans fight that extraordinary fight with that unbelievable courage, lose their lives, so that a dictator, bent on the same kind of aggression and ethnic genocide at the end of the century, would be allowed to work his evil will in Europe? Did we spend billions of dollars and stand face to face with Communist tyranny for the long years of the cold war, did President Reagan lead us to the great final victories in the cold war, so less than a decade later we would allow a Communist--what is Milosevic? He is an unreconstructed Communist dictator--that we would allow a Communist dictator to work his will in the heart of Europe and in the backyard of NATO, that we would stand by and do nothing? I hope not. I take issue respectfully on the merits, as I see them, with those who oppose this resolution because they do not think we should be involved. But I understand those who say, as my colleague from Illinois said a moment ago, that the Senate is not ready to make the statement contained in this resolution. As a cosponsor of this resolution, as one who worked with Senator McCain, Senator Biden, and others to fashion this resolution, I have already made the statement, I have already come to the conclusion, so I will stand with all of my colleagues who have cosponsored this resolution and whom I heard speak up to now on this debate, who say they will oppose the motion to table. We are ready to vote, and we will vote tomorrow morning against the tabling of this resolution. We will vote against the tabling of the resolution with the confidence that if the President is wrong and the air campaign does not bring this war to an end, not on any weakened terms, but on the terms we clearly state in this resolution--the Serbs out, the Kosovars back in to live in peace, and an international peacekeeping force there--then we will return. Those who have said that they are not prepared now to vote for this resolution, those who have said this is merely a procedural vote--and I understand that--those who are essentially voting to table not because they are against, as I hear them speak, the substance of this resolution----

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Senator. I am confident if that day comes--and, of course, I hope it does not come. But if we are not able to achieve the victory we must have here, that NATO must have to remain credible, the United States must have to remain credible, that we must achieve so that all the bullies, the thugs and the dictators, wherever they may be--in Asia, the Middle East or anywhere else--will not see an opportunity to take advantage of us, if we return at that point to the Senate and ask for support for the next necessary means to achieve our objectives, I am confident that on that day a bipartisan majority in the Senate will not walk away from the field of battle with the enemy having achieved the victory, will not yield to the forces of ethnic cleansing and ethnic slaughter and ethnic expulsion but will stand together, united across party lines, to support our soldiers in uniform, yes, indeed, our NATO allies, of course, to support the principles upon which this country was founded, which are at stake in Kosovo today, and to support the administration in the full conduct of this effort. This is one of those defining moments. Tomorrow's vote is not the defining moment. Tomorrow's vote is, if you will, an early round in the debate in which a majority of Members are not prepared to vote for this resolution. If necessary, I am convinced on another day that they will, and I am convinced that that is very much in the national security interest and in the national moral interest of the United States of America. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I would like to add my strong support to the bill we are currently considering, the Y2K Act. Although I plan to join my colleagues on this side of the aisle in voting against cloture, I don't want anyone to construe that vote as an indication that I have any doubts about the need for, and the wisdom of, this legislation. Congress needs to act to address the probable explosion of litigation over the Y2K problem, and it needs to act now. We are all familiar with the problem caused by the Y2K bug. Although no one can predict with certainty what will happen next year, there is little doubt that there will be computer program failures, possibly on a large scale, and that those failures could bring both minor inconveniences and significant disruptions in our lives. This could pose a serious challenge to our economy, and if there are wide spread failures, American businesses will need to focus on how they can continue providing the goods and services we all rely on in the face of disruptions. Just as importantly, the Y2K problem will present a unique challenge to our court system--unique because of the likely massive volume of litigation that will result and because of the fact that that litigation will commence within a span of a few months, potentially flooding the courts with cases and inundating American companies with lawsuits at the precise time they need to devote their resources to fixing the problem. I think it is appropriate for Congress to act now to ensure that our legal system is prepared to deal efficiently, fairly and effectively with the Y2K problem--to make sure that those problems that can be solved short of litigation will be, to make sure that companies that should be held liable for their actions will be held liable, but to also make sure that the Y2K problem does not just become an opportunity for a few enterprising individuals to profit from frivolous litigation, unfairly wasting the resources of companies that have done nothing wrong or diverting the resources of companies that should be devoting themselves to fixing the problem. To that end, I have worked extensively with the sponsors of this legislation--with Senators McCain, Gorton, Wyden, Dodd, Hatch, Feinstein and others--to try to craft targeted legislation that will address the Y2K problem. Like many others here, I was uncomfortable with the breadth of the initial draft of this legislation. I took those concerns to the bill's sponsors, and together, we worked out my concerns. I thank them for that. With the addition of the amendment just agreed to by Senators Dodd, McCain and others, I think we have a package of which we all can be proud, one which will help us fairly manage Y2K litigation. Provisions like the one requiring notice before filing a lawsuit will help save the resources of our court system while giving parties the opportunity to work out their problems before incurring the cost of litigation and the hardening of positions the filing of a lawsuit often brings. The requirement that defects be material for a class action to be brought will allow recovery for those defects that are of consequence while keeping those with no real injury from using the court system to extort settlements out of companies that have done them no real harm. And the provision keeping plaintiffs with contractual relationships with defendants from seeking through tort actions damages that their contracts don't allow them to get will make sure that settled business expectations are honored and that plaintiffs get precisely--but not more than--the damages they are entitled to. I think it is critical for everyone to recognize that the bill we have before us today is not the bill that Senator McCain first introduced or that was reported out of the Commerce Committee. Because of the efforts of the many of us interested in seeing legislation move, the bill has been significantly narrowed. For example, a number of the provisions changing substantive state tort law have been dropped. Provisions offering a new ``reasonable efforts'' defense have been dropped. The punitive damages section has been altered. And, instead of a complete elimination of joint liability, we now have a bill that holds those who committed intentional fraud fully jointly liable, that offers full compensation to plaintiffs with small net worths and that allows partial joint liability against a defendant when its co- defendants are judgment proof--precisely what most of us voted for in the context of securities litigation reform. I understand that there are those who still have concerns about some of the remaining provisions in the bill. To them and to the bill's supporters, I offer what has become a cliche around here, but has done so because it is truly a wise piece of advice: let us not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Y2K liability reform is necessary--in fact critical--legislation that we must enact. Those of us supporting the legislation must be open to reasonable changes necessary to make the bill move, and those with legitimate concerns about the bill need to work with us to help address them. I hope we can all work together to get this done. Cloture Motion