Joseph Lieberman

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to express my concern about the portion of this bill dealing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and particularly the Committee report. While I appreciate that Senators Domenici and Reid have made very significant changes to an earlier version of the report, I remain troubled. Let me say first that I am a supporter of nuclear energy. I believe it can be part of the solution to solving the world's energy, environment and global warming problems. But in order for there to be a future for this industry, it is critical for the public to maintain confidence in the industry--a confidence that must be supported by a strong, competent and effective Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I do not believe that the current NRC over-regulates, inspects too much, enforces too much or has adopted an overly restrictive body of regulations. I base this conclusion on the extensive oversight I conducted as chairman during the 103rd Congress of the Clean Air and Nuclear Regulation subcommittee of the Environment and Public Works Committee; the oversight work I have conducted during the last three years as a member of the Environment Committee, particularly growing out of my concern about the shutdown of Connecticut's nuclear power plants; and two extensive reports prepared for me by the General Accounting Office. In fact, I believe that as a result of new safety initiatives undertaken by NRC Chairman Jackson, such as: limiting inappropriate use of enforcement discretion; requiring utilities to verify whether they are operating in accordance with their design basis; undertaking a review of NRC oversight of changes made by utilities without prior NRC approval; improving the inspection process;, increased attention to use of quantitative performance indicators; and reforms of the senior management oversight process, the NRC has finally moved toward regaining some of the public confidence which is so important. Also critical to restoring this confidence has been Chairman Jackson's openness and responsiveness to the public, including whistleblowers. Many of these initiatives came in response to a very unfortunate situation in Connecticut, where the nuclear power plants were shut down and put on the NRC Watch List of most troubled plants. I appreciate that the Appropriations Committee believes that there should be an in-depth review of the NRC. As a member of the Senate Environment Committee with authorization oversight responsibilities, I have been urging the Committee to conduct hearings on the NRC since the start of the Congress. In particular, I have urged the Committee to hold a hearing to examine the issues raised in two General Accounting Office reports : one prepared for Senator Biden and me, Nuclear Regulation: Preventing Problem Plants Requires More Effective NRC Action, and one prepared for Congressman Dingell and me on whistleblower protections. The GAO raised serious concerns about instances in the past in which the NRC has neither taken aggressive enforcement action nor held nuclear plant licensees accountable for correcting their problems on a timely basis. The GAO criticized the NRC for problems in the inspection process, such as not including timetables for the completion of corrective action and for not evaluating the competency of the licensees' plant managers as part of the on-going inspection process. In addition, the GAO found that the senior management meeting, designed to focus attention on those plants with declining safety performance, was not serving its goal of being an early warning tool. To her credit, Chairman Jackson has responded to many of these GAO recommendations positively and swiftly. Nevertheless, oversight hearings are needed to evaluate the NRC's responses. Finally, although I appreciate that the Committee increased the NRC's funding levels from the subcommittee's approach and eliminated any directions to cut nuclear reactor safety, I am still concerned that the bill includes $17.3 million less in funding than the NRC's budget request. I think a more prudent approach would be to have a detailed discussion of the NRC's proposed initiatives in the authorizing Environment Committee to avoid any negative impact on the NRC's ability to maintain a strong, healthy regulatory program for nuclear power plants or to limit any new initiatives that the NRC believes are important. In the 103rd Congress, I was pleased that we were able to report an authorizing bill for the NRC, but unfortunately it did not become law. We need to move forward again with such a bill. tooele city wastewater treatment and reuse project

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Senator for his extraordinary graciousness, since we are in disagreement on this particular question. Let me summarize the remainder of my argument. We know from intelligence sources, some of which had been reported in the press and referred to by the Senator from Arizona, that in recent years, as best we can determine, a number of companies, institutes, and subdivisions within Russia have been involved in transactions, usually for business purposes, with Iran, which are of material technical assistance to Iran, to help in their ballistic missile development program. So, yes, this legislation will apply to Russia. We know this has been raised from the highest level of our Government--the Vice President, the National Security Adviser, and others, like Ambassador Frank Wisner and Mr. Gallucci, with the Russians to end this cooperation with Iran. Progress is being made. On January 22, which I believe is the exact date, former Prime Minister Chernomyrdin issued an Executive order in which he stated the intention of the government to begin to set some policies for trying to control this activity. Within the last week, although I don't believe we have seen the details of it in this country, the Russian Government has promulgated a detailed series of regulations to carry out Chernomyrdin's order of January of this year. So there is a good-faith effort being made at the governmental level. Yet, our intelligence sources--to speak as broadly as I must in these cases--tell us there is still evidence that there are entities within Russia that are continuing to cooperate with Iran in the development of ballistic missile capacity. That is why I think we have to go ahead with this legislation today. But why? I think it is very important to say that it is not directed at the Russian Government. In fact, unless there is clear evidence of complicity by the Russian Government in one of these transfers, sanctions will not go to the Russian Government. They will go to companies, institutes, or subdivisions. I hope our friends, in return--particularly the new government of Mr. Kiriyenko, the National Security Adviser--to give him a title he may not officially have--and the deputy defense minister, Mr. Kokoshin--will clearly understand that this is not directed at them. In fact, when we adopt the amendment to be offered by the Senator from Michigan, which will put the effective date of the gathering of relevant evidence to the date of the Chernomyrdin order in January, then, I think, we will have a law that basically says that America will sanction entities within Russia that are not complying with the clear policy of the Russian Government. In that sense, I think this is a very important measure, one that will contribute to our security, one that should not affect our bilateral relations with Russia, and one that could be the basis, I hope in fact, for us going forward to build a bilateral policy with Russia that understands that the strategic reality of the world has changed after the cold war, and that we are no longer in a situation of a bipolar world where each of the great powers, the Soviet Union and United States, are facing each other with intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, and that we are working well together to build down in our weapons through the nuclear weapons, START I and START II; but that each of us, Russia and the United States, faces threats from the proliferation of the possession of weapons of mass destruction and the world-changing capacity to deliver those weapons with ballistic missiles. So we ought to work together to try to limit the spread of that technology and the danger it will represent not only to the United States and their allies but to Russia and their allies. I thank my colleagues for their support of this bill and for giving me the opportunity to speak to it today. I hope that we will adopt it unanimously. I look forward to seeing its implementation and the increase in our security in one of those areas that we know will represent the greatest threat in the generation ahead. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article from the January 1998 Reader's Digest be printed in the Record.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thought we had more time available. I am glad to finish up within 5 minutes.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair and I thank my friend and colleague from Arizona not only for yielding but for his principal support of this legislation and for his outstanding statement. I rise to support the Iran Missile Proliferation Sanctions Act and to thank all of those in the Senate who have cosponsored it, principally the distinguished majority leader of the Senate for his strong leadership in this effort. It has been purposeful. It has been balanced. I think it has been quite realistic. I think we have before the Senate a measured response to a real problem. The real problem is the development by Iran of ballistic missile capacity, longer-range ballistic missile capacity, which, when combined with attempts within Iran to develop weapons of mass destruction, holds the potential to change the balance of power within the Middle East. It is destabilizing. It is threatening to our troops and forces on the waters within the Middle East region. It is threatening to our allies within the Arab world, moderate Arab nations. And it is threatening to our ally, Israel. That is in the short run. In the longer run, the development of longer-range ballistic missile capacity by Iran could threaten our allies in Europe in a wider circle around Iran and, eventually, of course, could threaten us directly here in the United States of America. We are dealing here with a very, very serious and concrete challenge to world order and America's national security. This measure has been introduced and principally led by the majority leader. I am privileged to have joined with him in that. It is cosponsored by more than 80 Members of the U.S. Senate--84 is the total, I believe. It is in that sense a profoundly bipartisan response to this genuine national security problem. I think one of the reasons this measure has gained the broad support that it has is not only because the problem is real, the threat to security from Iran having long-range ballistic missile capacity being real, but because the approach taken in the bill is targeted. I will go directly to the language of the bill. ``Sanctions shall be applied to every foreign person with respect to whom there is credible information indicating that person''--and of course ``person'' is given a broad definition of a natural person --``is an alien or a corporation, business, association, partnership, society, trust, or any other nongovernmental entity, organization, or group that is organized under the laws of a foreign country or has its presence, people, or place of business, in a foreign country or any foreign governmental entity operating as a business enterprise in any successor or subsidiary of any entity.'' So this applies to any entity that comes within that category, that first transferred items on the MTCR, the missile technology control regime annex, or items that the United States opposed for addition to that annex that contributed to Iran's efforts to acquire, develop, or produce ballistic missiles. We are talking here about entities that are helping Iran gain the capacity that I have described, as the Senator from Arizona and the Senate majority leader have all described, ``to develop ballistic missile capacity or provide technical assistance or facilities which the President deems to be of concern, because of their direct contribution to Iran's efforts.'' Again, to acquire or develop ballistic missiles or attempt to transfer such items or attempted to provide technical assistance or facilities. That is very direct. Apply sanctions to entities that have actually done something wrong, done something wrong in the judgment of the President of the United States as reported to Congress every year regarding any credible information that occurrences by these entities have transpired to help Iran gain the capacity that we do not want them to gain. That applies a series of sanctions in response to that evidence, and gives the President, incidentally, the authority to waive those sanctions if he either obtains additional information that diminishes the content of the original finding or the President determines that the waiver is required, is essential, to the national security of the United States. So, it is very targeted and not the broad based, ``don't do any business with this country or that country.'' But on a finding of credible evidence by the President of the United States that a person, a company, a governmental agency or institute has been assisting Iran in obtaining ballistic missile capacity, then these sanctions are applied and the President may use a waiver. What are the sanctions? I will describe them generally: stopping arms sales under the Arms Export Control Act to these entities; stopping the transfer or sale of dual-use items under the Export Administration Act; and the cessation of any U.S. grants or loans or other benefits to these entities. Why should we be helping companies or governmental agencies abroad that are contributing to the development of this Iranian ballistic missile capacity which will so threaten our security? So it is a very measured approach which, again, I think is at the heart of why this bill before us has over 80 percent of the Senators supporting it, a truly bipartisan measure. Mr. President, there are those who will say that things are changing in Iran. So why pass this legislation? Well, from the best that I can determine, there are the beginnings of some changes in Iran. The changes, certainly, have not gone far enough to alter the essential character of the center of that regime, which is still fundamentally hostile and threatening to the United States and threatening to our security. It is still the major sponsor, state sponsor of terrorism in the world which, to the best of our knowledge, has resulted in the deaths of many Americans and many citizens of other countries that are allies of America. Just the finding by the Argentinian security, law enforcement forces earlier this week announced--these are tough cases to investigate--they have traced two attacks, two bombings on Jewish institutions in Argentina directly back, by their judgment, just repeating what I have read in the newspapers, back to Iran. And so it goes. So the election of the new President, President Khatami, of Iran, who has been making statements that are more moderate, more open, both in terms of Iran's domestic policy and even international, who gave the important interview to CNN in which he suggested the possibility of opening informal contacts with the United States of America, he still made some statements that are extremely hostile and negative toward us and some of our allies. But, nonetheless, I take these to be encouraging signs. But what remains the fact, as best any of us can determine, is that the much more radical elements within the Iranian Government are still in control of the apparatus of that government-- the military, the intelligence, the foreign policy--and, in fact, there is no indication that any of the sponsorship of terrorism has stopped. In the meantime, the Senator from Arizona has suggested, as we have heard in classified briefings which cannot be discussed in detail here, the Iranians get ever closer to developing, in a headlong thrust, full force, full-throttle thrust, to developing long-range ballistic missiles. Maybe it is going to be hard to stop him from doing this. But the intention of this bill, it seems to me, is an exercise in common sense, the exercise of traditional principles of self-defense. This legislation will help us to delay the date on which Iran will achieve long-range ballistic missile capacity with which it can deliver weapons of mass destruction on those it chooses as enemies, as targets. Let's think about it optimistically. Perhaps in that period of time, we will see a fruition of some of the obvious interests, obvious concerns of the people of Iran as expressed in the election of Mr. Khatami for a change. I hope so. The people of Iran have no inherent reason--let me put it another way, Mr. President. There is no inherent conflict of interest, strategic interest between the people of Iran and the people of the United States. Unfortunately, since the revolution that occurred in Iran in the late 1970s, we have been set on a confrontational course which threatens the stability of the region and the world and does nothing good for the people of Iran --a gifted people with a proud history. So I am hopeful about the changes that are possible within Iran, but, by any reasoned judgment, we have a long way to go yet. These missiles are being developed rapidly and they are going to be aimed at us and our allies. Therefore, this proposal still seems to me to be extremely important and, as I say, very measured and targeted. Mr. President, there are those who say, well, OK, you are right, there is a threat from Iran. But this measure is really targeted at Russia. Not only is there hope of change within Iran, but there is even, of course, more substantial change that has occurred, and the hope of change, within the Russian Government, particularly on this issue. So why provoke the Russians? It is the threat of these sanctions from Congress that matters, not the realization of it. Let me say first, Mr. President, that on the face of the bill, there is no mention of Russia. This is a piece of legislation that is targeted at any people, any entities, any government, anywhere on the globe that the President has reason to believe is contributing to Iran's development and acquisition of ballistic missile capacity. It could apply to, and might in the past have applied to, companies in allied countries of ours in Western Europe who, in one way or another, may have attempted to sell or sold items to the Iranians, which they have now used or are using in the development of a ballistic missile capacity, or even in the development of weapons of mass destruction. Certainly, some evidence suggests that there may be entities within the People's Republic of China who have transferred items, sold items to the Iranians that are used in the development of these threatening programs. North Korea, our relations with them are much more limited; nonetheless, that is another possibility. But it is true, to the best of our knowledge today and in recent years--

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise this afternoon to express my appreciation to Senators on both sides of the aisle, in particular my colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee, for all their work in crafting the new six-year transportation bill that is before us. A great deal of the credit must go to Senator Chafee and his staff, especially Jimmie Powell, for their tireless efforts in crafting a compromise bill that resolves a good number of contentious issues. Mr. President, this highway bill reaffirms many of the revolutionary principles established by ISTEA in 1991. Like ISTEA, it provides broad and substantial support for all modes of surface transportation, including transit. It funds important maintenance, safety, and air quality needs as well as the construction of new infrastructure. As the product of difficult House-Senate negotiations, this compromise bill does not include every policy that I would have liked. Yet the bill represents a sound and reasonable basis for strong transportation policy over the next six years, and I support it. Finally, let me clarify one provision in the bill. A provision I drafted provides funding for the development of a rail trail in Winsted and Winchester, Connecticut. This provision should be read to include the development of the trail in Torrington, Connecticut, as part of this project. The trail will provide residents with access to trails in Barkhamsted and Canton, Connecticut.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I regret to inform my colleagues in the Senate of the death on Sunday, May 17 of Rabbi Moshe Sherer, President of Agudath Israel of America, a vibrant organization of Orthodox Jews in our country. I was privileged to have known Rabbi Sherer for many years and to benefit from his wise counsel. He lived an extraordinarily righteous and productive life, and was a kindly but driving force in the unprecedented growth of his organization and its perspective within America. Rabbi Sherer was also a very successful bridgebuilder to other faith communities in his effort to spread the light of religious truth throughout our country. I shall miss Rabbi Sherer, and wish to extend to his wife, Deborah, and his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren my condolences and best wishes. Mr. President, I ask that the full text of two articles from the New York Times of May 19, 1998 be printed in the Record. The first describes Rabbi Sherer's remarkable life, and the second the effect of his death on the more than 20,000 people who came to his funeral in New York two days ago. The articles follow: [From the New York Times, May 19, 1998] Rabbi Moshe Sherer, 76, Who Contributed to Rise of Orthodoxy's Right Wing in U.S. (By Gustav Niebuhr) Rabbi Moshe Sherer, who built a relatively small Orthodox Jewish organization, Agudath Israel of America, into a politically and religiously influential force among American Jewish groups, died Sunday afternoon in Manhattan. He was 76 and lived in Brooklyn. He died after an illness of several months, a spokesman for the group said. Rabbi Sherer had served since 1963 as president of Agudath Israel of America, an educational and social service organization that also represents hundreds of Orthodox religious schools, or yeshivas in the United States and Canada. Through his work at Agudath Israel, Rabbi Sherer played a leading role in the rise of Orthodox Judaism's right wing, which has gained in influence and self-confidence since the 1960's, at the expense of Orthodoxy's more moderate wing. That shift seemed unlikely when Rabbi Sherer joined Agudath Israel as its executive vice president in 1941, when it was a small group with few employees. In an interview last year, he said some people warned him that Agudath Israel's rigorously traditional Orthodox approach had little future in America. But, he said, ``it's a growth stock today.'' Sociologists say that Orthodoxy's strict traditionalists have benefited from charismatic leadership, a high birthrate and anxiety among many Orthodox Jews over signs of moral turmoil in society. Today, Agudath Israel, with headquarters at 84 William St., Manhattan, has branches throughout the country and a Washington office that lobbies the government on religious issues. It belongs to the Agudath Israel World Organization, of which Rabbi Sherer was appointed chairman in 1980. In Israel, it is associated with the strictly Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party, a member of the governing coalition. Among Agudath Israel's earliest projects under Rabbi Sherer's leadership was sending food shipments to Jews in Nazi-dominated Eastern Europe and producing affidavits to help refugees immigrate to the United States. After World War II, the organization shipped food and religious articles to Jews in displaced persons camps and assisted those who wanted to immigrate. With Agudath Israel's constituency of religious schools, Rabbi Sherer served a world that prizes scholarship. Born in Brooklyn on June 8, 1921, he was educated at Torah Vodath, a Brooklyn yeshiva, and Ner Israel rabbinical college in Baltimore. He told associates that his main mentor was the late Rabbi Aharon Kotler, who founded a highly regarded yeshiva in Lakewood, N.J. Yet Rabbi Sherer was known as an organizer rather than an intellectual, with diplomatic and political skills that enabled him to forge coalitions within the decentralized and contentious world of Orthodox Judaism, and with other religious groups. ``He was able to take disparate groups, bring them together and get them to cooperate in the areas where they would agree,'' said Rabbi Nosson Scherman, general editor of Artscroll, a major publisher of Jewish texts. Rabbi Steven M. Dworken, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America, which represents about 1,000 Orthodox rabbis, said Rabbi Sherer ``was responsible in many, many ways for placing Agudath Israel on the map.'' As the most strictly observant of the Orthodox community became more visible and organized politicians took note. In January 1994, Rabbi Sherer delivered the invocation at the first inauguration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuilani of New York. Vice President Al Gore was the speaker at the organization's 76th annual dinner, held in New York the day Rabbi Sherer died. But the organization was also considered important earlier. When The New York Times described the growing influence of local religious groups in a 1974 article, it quoted Rabbi Sherer as saying about Agudath Israel, ``There is hardly a legislator from any Jewish neighborhood in the city who does not know how we stand on issues that concern us and how thorough we are about informing our constituents about positions the legislators take on these issues.'' Still, he did not have the visibility of some of his counterparts at other Jewish organizations. ``He wasn't a headline-maker.'' said Samuel C. Heilman, professor of Jewish studies and sociology at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Instead, Professor Heilman said, Rabbi Sherer worked quietly ``to keep the channels of communication open'' between Agudath Israel and other Jewish organizations. What helped is that Agudath Israel reached out to the entire Jewish community with its programs promoting Jewish identity and learning. Last September, for example, the organization sponsored a celebration for men who had completed a seven-year program of reading the entire Talmud, the Jewish civil and religious law, at the rate of a page a day. An estimated 70,000 people participated, filling Madison Square Garden and other arenas. Rabbi Sherer sometimes took positions at odds with non- Orthodox organizations. He supported aid by Federal and state governments to religious schools, a stand that placed his organization on the same side of that issue as the Roman Catholic Church but nettled some Jewish groups that supported a strict separation of church and state. Testifying before Congress on this issue in 1961, he said, ``Classical Judaism has, from the very inception of the Jewish people, placed religious education in sharp focus as the centrality of life itself.'' More recently, he helped lead an effort to counter attempts by Reform and Conservative Jews to gain official recognition of non-Orthodox rabbis in Israel. Last November, he announced that Agudath Israel would spend $2 million for newspaper advertisements to promote the view that within Israel, conversions and other rites should remain under Orthodox control. Agudath Israel's spokesman, Rabbi Avi Shafran, said Rabbi Sherer's stand stemmed from the conviction that ``the only unifying force for the Jewish people is the Jewish religious heritage.'' Rabbi Sherer is survived by his wife, the former Deborah Portman; two daughters, Rochel Langer of Monsey, N.Y., and Elky Goldschmidt of Brooklyn; a son, Rabbi Shimshon Sherer of Brooklyn, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. I thank my friend and colleague from Michigan, first, for his overall leadership in introducing the underlying bill, which I am pleased to be a cosponsor of, and, secondly, for being very thoughtful and accommodating in including the language he has described in this managers' amendment which would authorize demonstration projects for technical skills training for workers, including incumbent workers through local and regional consortia of private sector groups. Mr. President, this accomplishes two breakthroughs, I think. What it is aimed at, first, is to focus not only on folks who are out of work, but people who are in work but need training to hold their jobs and to upgrade themselves. The second is to stimulate companies to work together to train workers in a given area in which there is a regional or local shortage. I thank Senator Abraham and the other cosponsors of this amendment and the bill for the work they have done. Mr. President, I am one of many Senators who have cosponsored this bill, but I wish to recognize the singular achievements of my colleague, Senator Spencer Abraham, for introducing the bill and for advancing it so thoughtfully, so energetically, and so cooperatively. In one sense we are called upon to pass legislation to respond to a crisis, as so often seems the case. Just last week the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that the 65,000 person cap on H-1B visas for fiscal year 1998 had been reached. Unless we act, for the remaining five months of the fiscal year, American employers will be unable to hire the temporary foreign workers who help fill gaps in our very tight labor market for skilled professionals. With each successive year, the backlog would only grow. Skilled foreign professionals, many of them graduates of our finest universities, would be driven to jobs with our international economic competitors. But this crisis is different from other crises, for it reflects the good news that we are in the midst of a period of unprecedented economic growth. The national unemployment rate last month was only 4.3%. Even more remarkable, the unemployment rate for college graduates was only 1.7%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not keep statistics for the information technology sector, but most experts estimate that the unemployment rate there has sunk to well below 1%. Various studies are reporting hundreds of thousands of unfilled positions in the high tech sector. Last month representatives of major American corporations like IBM could be found on the beaches of Florida, recruiting college seniors on their Spring Break. In short, Americans looking for work are finding jobs like never before. But in certain sectors of the economy, and in certain parts of the country, there are not enough Americans able to fill all of the available jobs. The H-1B program allows employers to hire skilled foreign workers for six-year periods, provided that the employers pay them the same wages that other workers receive, and that the foreign workers are not employed in connection with a strike or a lock-out. All sorts of employers benefit from the H-1B program, from corporations to universities to non-profits, but at the moment it is the rapidly growing hi-tech companies that are most in need of additional skilled workers. But it is not just those companies that benefit from the H-1B program: in some senses, all Americans do. That is because the growth of the high tech sector has been a crucial element of our recent economic resurgence. It is vitally important that we keep the jobs associated with this vibrant industry here in the United States and that we keep this industry growing with the innovative ideas of the brightest people we can find. Unfortunately, at the present time our educational system is not producing enough graduates in the relevant fields of math, science, computers and engineering to keep up with demand. The long term solution to this problem is obviously to encourage more education and job training of American citizens in high- tech fields, and S. 1723 does speak to that need by providing $50 million in matching funds for educational scholarships as well as $10 million per year to train unemployed workers in new skills. But in the short term, we must act quickly to ensure that American information technology companies are not forced to slow their domestic operations or, worse, move their operations overseas in search of the skilled foreign workers who would come to the U.S. if given the chance, The skilled foreign workers employed under the H-1B program will keep their employers strong and growing so that they can hire even more American workers. Sentor Abraham made an important accommodation in Committee when he modified his bill so that the increase in H-1B visas would sunset after five years. During the first years of that period, the bill calls for a study by the National Academy of Sciences to examine the future training and education needs of American students to ensure that their skills are matched to the needs of the information technology sector. The study would also assess the need by the high-tech sector for foreign workers with specific skills, and would examine the effects of increasing globalization. By the time the increase in visas is set to expire, Congress will have had an excellent opportunity to re-examine the H-1B program in light of additional information and new economic conditions, and hopefully there will be many more skilled American workers to fill these jobs. A progressive new idea included in the bill is the authorization of demonstration projects for technical skills training for workers, including incumbent workers, by local and regional consortia of private sector groups. This is a very important addition to the bill, and I want to thank Senator Abraham for including it. Two ideas behind the demonstration projects' authorization language in this bill can be particularly important. First, training our workforce with the skills needed for today's industry must include the training of incumbent workers. Training is now a lifelong process and should not be withheld from people because they already have a job. The Workforce Investment Partnership Act addressed this issue by eliminating the income requirement for some of the Labor Department's adult training programs. We need to turn Labor Department programs into programs that industry wants to partner with, and a large part of that metamorphosis must include incumbent worker training. The second important element of these demonstration projects is stimulating companies to work together. We need to change the institutional mind set of American companies so that they will collaborate with each other on training skilled workers for their industry. Many small and medium-sized companies cannot afford to run training programs by themselves. Some of the larger corporations have substantially cut their training programs because skilled workers move quickly from one job to another in today's labor market. Yet, all these companies may be competing in a region for the same pool of skilled labor. It only makes sense for these employers to join together to train workers in these skills. It makes sense for the government to be the coalescing force in bringing these groups together to fill the regional community's needs. We hope that these demonstration projects will show industry how successful such regional skills alliances can be. I thank Senator Abraham and the other co-sponsors of the American Competitiveness Act for the time they have put into this bill, and I thank my colleagues Senators Kennedy and Feinstein for their very constructive efforts as well. All of us are interested in what is best for the American economy, and what is best for American workers. I am supporting the American Competitiveness Act because I am convinced that the bill will strengthen economic opportunities for all Americans while we respond to the daunting but exciting challenges of this new high-tech age. Mr. President, I want to again compliment my colleague Senator Abraham for sponsoring S. 1723, the American Competitiveness Bill, which I joined as a cosponsor because I believe we need to address the issue of worker shortages in our high-tech industries. S. 1723 provides a short-term solution for the worker shortage by raising the cap for H1-B visas, thereby keeping the jobs here in the United States instead of forcing U.S. companies to move the jobs overseas. It also provides for the longer term solution of educating and training our workforce so that American workers can fill the jobs generated by this very fast growing segment of our economy. One provision in S. 1723, as adopted in the Manager's Amendment, specifically allows for demonstration programs to provide technical skills training for workers, including incumbent workers, by consortia of private industry councils. As the lead sponsor of this provision in the manager's Amendment I want in these remarks to particularly address the intent and meaning of the provision. These demonstration projects include two elements that I believe are essential to help us prepare our workforce with the skills they need for today's fast-paced economy and help update our training programs for the needs of the 21st Century. These are, first, including incumbent workers in training programs and, second, stimulating collaboration between companies to train a pool of skilled workers. Employees now need to update their skills continually to remain competitive. The realty is that we have a global economy and there is, more and more, a global workforce. If companies cannot find skilled workers in the United States, they will find them in another country. Realistically, we must include workers who have jobs now in training programs to upgrade and update their skills so they can qualify for the changing needs of industry, instead of waiting until they lose their job or become dislocated workers from a declining industry. The demonstration projects described in the Manager's Amendment to S. 1723 would allow the Secretary of Labor to award grants to consortia, made up of a number of companies in the same region, educational institutions, labor organizations, state and local governments, and private industry councils established under section 102 of the Job Training Partnership Act, or successor entities. These consortia would develop training programs for technical skills needed by a number of companies in that region. Only with industry leading the skills training can we be sure that workers are being trained for jobs that actually exist. That is why the provision in this bill as amended by the Manager's Amendment creates an industry-driven training program. Why does this new provision indicate the federal government needs to be involved? Because industry does not normally cooperate in training workers. Small companies, and 90% of firms in the United States are small businesses, don't have the resources to invest in lengthy training. Larger companies used to provide training programs, but in the high-tech field, workers move quickly from one job to another chasing higher salaries. Many companies are reticent to invest in long- term training for employees that may quickly move on. Cooperation within an industry provides a solution to this program. This program is intended to specifically allow participation by small and medium-sized companies. The new provision in the manager's Amendment to S. 1723 would enable this approach. The government's role under this new provision would be to provide the catalyst to bring the companies together to cooperate on training. The federal funds that would be available under this new provision should be matched by funds from the consortium. The Secretary of Labor would have the discretion to undertake this implementation approach. Of course, available federal funds are meant only to start the process-- federal funding would end over time after which the consortia would continue the cooperative training programs alone. In the last few years, a small number of regional and industry-based training alliances in the United States have emerged, usually in partnership with state and local governments and technical colleges, that exemplify the type of program on which this provision in the Manager's Amendment is modeled. In Rhode Island, with help from the state's Human Resource Investment Council, plastics firms developed a skills alliance. The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, metal- working firms in conjunction with the AFL-CIO, set up a teaching factory to train workers. Without some kind of support, such as created by the new provision in this bill, to create alliances, small- and medium-sized firms just don't have the time or resources to collaborate on training. In fact, almost all the existing regional skills alliances report that they would not have been able to get off the ground without an independent, staff entity to operate the alliance. Widespread and timely deployment of these kinds of partnerships is simply not likely to happen without the incentives established by a federal initiative, which would be created by this provision. This provision can help create successful models and templates that others can replicate across the nation. I am very appreciative that Senator Abraham has included the technical skills training provision in the manager's amendment to S. 1723.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to introduce, along with Senators Bingaman and Santorum, the National Defense Science and Technology Investment Act of 1998. I have been concerned for some time now that our investments in defense R&D are not commensurate with the opportunity that new technology developments afford. I recognize, Mr. President, that relative to the procurement budget, defense R&D has fared well in recent years. While the ratio of R&D funding relative to procurement was an appropriate benchmark during the Cold War, I would argue that it is a misleading indicator in the current environment. We find ourselves in a comparatively peaceful historical interlude in which we face no peer military competitors. How likely is it that this set of circumstances will last? We don't know the answer to that question. The future is uncertain and, if history is our guide, will be considerably more dangerous than today. At the same time, the ongoing technology revolution is creating revolutionary new capabilities that will change the nature of warfare itself. These new capabilities would enable our forces to engage an enemy in a coordinated fashion across an entire theater of operations and thereby rapidly and totally dominate the battlespace. By aggressively exploiting the new capabilities that technology has to offer, the U.S. can assure its decisive military superiority over any potential adversary, even with numerically smaller forces than are fielded today. Our ability to realize this vision of the future, however, depends on the research and development we conduct today. All of the assessments, both internal and external, of our nation's defense posture concur that we must transform our force structure through greatly accelerated rates of technology insertion. The transformed military force envisioned in, for example, General Shalikashvili's Joint Vision 2010 requires a much higher level of research, development, prototyping, and testing than we are engaged in today. Our current defense R&D budgets simply don't support the accelerated rates of technology insertion and integration that these assessments imply. Mr. President, I realize that our military has many needs today that compete for scarce defense dollars. But we cannot mortgage our future security to short-term demands. Increased funding for our nation's defense R&D enterprise is essential if we are to realize the vision of a transformed force structure that takes advantage of the new opportunities that the high-tech revolution has to offer. The National Defense Science and Technology Investment Act of 1998 would put us on the path of higher defense R&D budgets by outlining a plan for real increases of 16% over ten years. This is a modest proposal, Mr. President, and one that holds the promise of very significant future returns. I urge my colleagues to join Senator Bingaman, Santorum, and me and support this important piece of legislation.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to introduce, along with Senators Bingaman and Santorum, the National Defense Science and Technology Investment Act of 1998. I have been concerned for some time now that our investments in defense R&D are not commensurate with the opportunity that new technology developments afford. I recognize, Mr. President, that relative to the procurement budget, defense R&D has fared well in recent years. While the ratio of R&D funding relative to procurement was an appropriate benchmark during the Cold War, I would argue that it is a misleading indicator in the current environment. We find ourselves in a comparatively peaceful historical interlude in which we face no peer military competitors. How likely is it that this set of circumstances will last? We don't know the answer to that question. The future is uncertain and, if history is our guide, will be considerably more dangerous than today. At the same time, the ongoing technology revolution is creating revolutionary new capabilities that will change the nature of warfare itself. These new capabilities would enable our forces to engage an enemy in a coordinated fashion across an entire theater of operations and thereby rapidly and totally dominate the battlespace. By aggressively exploiting the new capabilities that technology has to offer, the U.S. can assure its decisive military superiority over any potential adversary, even with numerically smaller forces than are fielded today. Our ability to realize this vision of the future, however, depends on the research and development we conduct today. All of the assessments, both internal and external, of our nation's defense posture concur that we must transform our force structure through greatly accelerated rates of technology insertion. The transformed military force envisioned in, for example, General Shalikashvili's Joint Vision 2010 requires a much higher level of research, development, prototyping, and testing than we are engaged in today. Our current defense R&D budgets simply don't support the accelerated rates of technology insertion and integration that these assessments imply. Mr. President, I realize that our military has many needs today that compete for scarce defense dollars. But we cannot mortgage our future security to short-term demands. Increased funding for our nation's defense R&D enterprise is essential if we are to realize the vision of a transformed force structure that takes advantage of the new opportunities that the high-tech revolution has to offer. The National Defense Science and Technology Investment Act of 1998 would put us on the path of higher defense R&D budgets by outlining a plan for real increases of 16% over ten years. This is a modest proposal, Mr. President, and one that holds the promise of very significant future returns. I urge my colleagues to join Senator Bingaman, Santorum, and me and support this important piece of legislation.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the fiscal year 1999 defense authorization bill. I do want to add my own voice to those who have offered thanks and praise to the leadership of our committee, the distinguished chairman, the Senator from South Carolina, the Senator from Michigan, who have worked together as chairman and ranking member to do exactly what Senator Coats said earlier, which is to build a strong, bipartisan--in many ways, nonpartisan--effort to meet the defense national security needs of our country. We used to say, and sometimes we are still able to, that partisanship stops at the Nation's borders, at the water's edge, when we enter foreign policy, defense policy. It could also be said in good measure that partisanship stops when we enter the rooms of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I thank the leadership of this committee for making that possible. I want to pay particular tribute to Senator Thurmond, who is an American institution, a figure that looms large in our history, who, as we all know from personal service with him, manages to do what they used to say only about wine, which is that he gets better as he adds years. He is not only informed and experienced and committed; the truth is, he is a great patriot. In so many ways that will never be visible, his leadership has strengthened the security of the United States of America in the world. It has been a great honor to get to know him at this stage of his career, to work with him, particularly on the Armed Services Committee, to thank him on this historic occasion as he manages the last of these armed services bills through the Senate. The nation is in his debt, deep debt. I think all of us who have served with him are very proud that we have. This is a person who, in the hurly-burly and sometimes mean-spirited world of politics, never seems to have anything but a positive word to say--certainly, toward his colleagues. In addition to all of the substance that I have talked about, that notion of spirit is one that I deeply appreciate. Mr. President, while we are talking about members of the committee, I do want to thank Senator Coats, the Senator from Indiana, for the remarkable statement he has just made--eloquent, thoughtful, informed. He has made a tremendous contribution on this committee. It has been a real pleasure to work with him on a host of issues. In our case, it almost seems that I don't have to say ``across party lines,'' because we never thought about that; we were focused on common interests. We got interested in this business of the military transformation when we were both invited, on the same day, to a day-long seminar that a think tank in town was holding on national security. We spoke at different times during the day. We had not talked to each other about the fact that we were on the same program, and we both essentially gave the same speech about the challenges facing our military--that in a world where we have faced a remarkable range of challenges, post-cold war revolution, technology, and fiscal resources constraint we had to begin to think about how to stay with it and produce the most cost- effective defense we could. From that coincidence, we began to work together on some of the elements of this authorization bill that Senator Coats has spoken of and which I will get back to in a moment. I wanted to thank him, while he was on the floor, for his tremendous contributions, and in a personal way, thank him for the partnership that we have had, which has also become a friendship. I hate to see him leave; I am going to miss him, and the Senate will miss him. I know that wherever he is, by his nature, he will be involved in public service. I wish him Godspeed in that work. Mr. President, I rise to support the bill before us because I believe it is a very responsible bill. It is a bill that adequately provides for our Armed Forces, which is our constitutional responsibility, fully in accord with our duty of raising Armed Forces to protect our Nation. After all, it is one of the primary responsibilities that motivates people to form governments, and I think this bill continues to carry out that responsibility, uphold that duty in a way that is measured and as best we could do under the circumstances. It has never been easy to make the choices that are necessary to make when one deals with national security. I would say, having been honored to be part of this process on the committee, that it has been even harder than normal this time, because we have been working with very severe fiscal constraints. Senator Coats made the important point--one that I think is little appreciated here in Congress and, more broadly, around the country-- that as we have worked very hard to bring our Federal Government books into balance, the real contributor to that balance in reduced spending has been the defense side of the budget. That is the fact. Sometimes people look at the amount of money we are authorizing and appropriating for national security and say, ``You folks don't understand that the cold war is over.'' Believe me, we understand, and the programs have been constricted, have been in some ways squeezed, and even strangled occasionally to live within the constraints, to give what we have been asked to give to help in this great effort that is now successfully achieved--to balance our budget. Lets talk specifically. By my reckoning, this is the 14th straight year in which our defense authorization and the spending to follow has declined in real dollars. We are spending a smaller percentage of our gross domestic product on defense today than at any time since prior to the beginning of the Second World War. I know the cold war is over, but the reality is that the world not only remains an unsettled and dangerous place--as we have seen in the last few days with the nuclear explosions in India--but that our military, in many ways, is operating at a more intense and faster up-tempo than it did during the cold war. And the limitation on funding that we have imposed on ourselves has made it difficult to do all that we need to do, has made it difficult to provide for our personnel as we want to provide for them, and has put us in a position to push them at a very intense level, leading some to leave. As is well known, Mr. President, the Air Force particularly is seeing a significant departure of pilots. They have invested a lot of money in training, pushing them at a very hard pace, and more and more of them are just reaching the conclusion that, well, I love my country, I love to serve, I have been trained to do this, I love being a pilot for the U.S. military, but my family can only take so much; it is time to leave and get a much higher-paying job in commercial airlines and have more time with my family. So this steady constriction of our spending on the military has had an affect on us. This budget is 1.1 percent below the rate of inflation. The budget that we put before you, the authorization bill, S. 2057, is 1.1 percent below the rate of inflation. That means more pressure to get more out of what is being provided. It is having an affect. Let me describe one area I am particularly interested in, because I have had the privilege of serving as the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee of Armed Services on Acquisition and Technology. It is a pleasure to serve with the Senator from Pennsylvania, Mr. Santorum, who has done a superb job as chairman of the subcommittee. There are no partisan differences here. We both agree that there is a dangerous trend in our investment in science and technology. It has often been said, but it bears repeating, that we are some distance from the great victory we achieved in Desert Storm and the Gulf war. The remarkable technologically and sophisticated weapons system that so dominated the enemy in that war didn't just spring out of nowhere a year or two before the war; they are the result of investments in science and technology that occurred in the 1970s, which came to maturation in the 1980s, which produced the systems and the equipment that we used so successfully in the early 1990s in Operation Desert Storm. The Department of Defense's science and technology budget has three basic elements: basic research, applied research, and advanced technology development. The total science and technology budget, comprised of these components just mentioned, has declined from $9.5 billion in fiscal year 1993 to $7.7 billion last year, and to somewhat over $7.1 billion this year. These are the investments we are making in the brilliant ideas that lead to the remarkable weapons systems that we are going to need in the future to defend ourselves. No business would do this. Today, in fact, private business, understanding how important innovation and knowledge are, are investing more and more. The best businesses constantly reinvest in basic research technology and creative development. This is an alarming trend, and I point it out on the floor here this morning with the hope that we will see it, come to understand, and turn it around. I am encouraged to believe that my colleague from New Mexico, Senator Bingaman, will, at some point, be offering an amendment to this bill, if not a freestanding bill, which would set some higher standards and goals for increasing our support of the science and technology aspect of the defense budget. Incidentally, Mr. President, there is a bright story to be told here. The investments we make in defense technologies have produced enormous benefits for civilian and commercial technology, and for our world, our economy. Most people, if you ask them what the most exciting technological development of recent years is, would say personal computers, the Internet--the unprecedented ability we have to communicate with each other and the people around the world to gain knowledge rapidly. The Internet is the result of investments that the Defense Department--DARPA, the research agency--made years ago for its own original military uses. Then it spun off and become the Internet. You could mention one after another of the remarkable developments that make our lives more exciting and make it easier to be educated but in effect make us safer but healthier. They came from science and technology budgets of the DOD. We cut that. We are again down from $9.5 billion in 1993 to almost $7.2 billion in 1999, the next fiscal year. That is a problem. We are all going to pay for it. Mr. President, overall when we look at the various factors that create the environment for security and international security, when we look at the effect that these technological changes are having in creating what the experts call a revolution in military affairs, we can do things we could never do before. Commanders are able to see the entire battlefield before them in real time, not only on the battlefield. We have the ability now to send a picture of real time back to somebody at a base, or even at the Pentagon thousands of miles away from the battlefield, to see what is happening and sight the enemy. We have the ability to strike an enemy from standoff positions, exposing our own personnel to no danger, with remarkable accuracy. And it is changing constantly. So we have the revolution in military affairs. We have the global changes that are occurring: The end of the cold war; breakouts in some places of nationalistic and ethnic rivalries; and the spread of technology so that nations that are less wealthy than we are can focus their energy into, unfortunately, lower priced means of not only defense but offense--weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, and nuclear; the means to deliver those weapons with the unprecedented ability from standoff positions and with great accuracy. Ballistic missiles: I voted yesterday for cloture on the measure introduced by the Senator from Mississippi, Senator Cochran, and the Senator from Hawaii, Senator Inouye, on the policy of creating a national missile defense and stating that clearly here in the Senate. I didn't agree with every provision of the bill. To me, it is an urgent national problem that deserved our debate. When we got to it, I was going to prepare some amendments. I hope eventually we do get to it and we can have an agreement across not only the aisles here but between the Congress and the administration to state clearly that the development of a national missile defense is a national priority and here is the way we ought to go at it. Incidentally, when we go at it, we ought to begin to negotiate it with our friends in Russia about how it affects the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, not to do it by way of surprise or antagonism. But the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was negotiated and signed more than a quarter of a century ago. The world is a very different place. In many ways, the strategic interests of Russia and the United States are comparable certainly on this ground: Common concerns about being affected by the spread of technology and ballistic missiles delivering weapons of mass destruction. So put that together--revolution of military affairs, global changes--and add to that the fiscal restraints that I have described, and you have a tough situation, one that falls on us here in Congress and on those who serve our Nation in uniform and as civilian leaders in the Pentagon, to not accept the status quo, to stick with it. Everything is changing. You can't succeed and stay static, stay the way you have been doing. You have to keep moving. You have to keep looking for better ways for doing what you are doing. You have to keep looking for efficiencies and finding ways to save money so you can use that money to invest in other areas that help you with your future defense. There is a great company headquartered in the State of Connecticut. Awhile back, I was reading in one of our newspapers that they were about to achieve record profits in a quarter, that they were going to go well over a couple of billion dollars on an annual basis, I believe, in profits. What is the story? The CEO of the company is calling in all of the division heads and pushing them for how they are going to find new efficiencies in the company--What are the market opportunities of the future? What are their competitors going to be doing?--knowing that, as great as things are now, unless they keep asking those questions, they are not going to stay on top 5 years from now or 10 years from now. That is exactly the way I think we have to approach our national security. We are the strongest nation in the world; unrivaled. Yet the world is changing. We have to keep focusing on those changes. General Shalikashvili a while ago, when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed us and warned us about what we call--as Senator Coats mentioned today--``asymmetric warfare.'' Yes, we are the superpower, but a much lesser power, much less wealthy, less technically developed, smaller military can focus its investment of funds into an area where they see some vulnerability in us, asymmetric, and strike at that vulnerability--perhaps our capacity to forward deploy our troops, perhaps using weapons of mass destruction, chemical warfare; or, noting how dependent we are now on space-based assets for navigation, for surveillance, targeting, for communications, perhaps to try to develop systems that would focus on that dependence and try to incapacitate some of those systems, hurting us in a conflict. So we have to look at that wide range of threats and protecting our assets in space, developing our ability to defend against weapons of mass destruction delivered by ballistic missiles. That is why we have to continue to find within a budget that is going to be constrained--I don't see in the near future, certainly barring the kind of international crisis that none of us wants, hope and pray never occurs, a great public support, a support here in Congress, for the kinds of increases in our military spending that we truly need. So we are going to have to squeeze more out of the rock. That means tough questions. It means, in my opinion, that we are going to have to go back and do another look at our infrastructure. It is controversial; I understand. But all of the statistics tell us that we have more infrastructure than we need, that we have reduced our personnel and other expenditures much more than we have reduced the spending we are doing on our bases. We have to come back to that and acknowledge that maybe we have to find a better way to do it, but somehow we have to do it because we need that money. As I say, we have to continue the work we have done on acquisition reform as a way to find more funds for these programs that we need to support. It is in this context that I come to two amendments that are in this bill, in which I think we have, as a committee and hopefully now as a full Senate, stepped up to our responsibility to oversee the transformation of our military to the future course that will not only protect our security better in the 21st century but will do it in a more cost-effective fashion. There are two provisions in this bill that I think are very important for our execution of this oversight responsibility. I want to speak about them. The first supports the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our current chairman, General Shelton--doing a superb job--in his decision to establish a joint experimentation process. The second requires on a regular basis a Quadrennial Defense Review and a National Defense Panel assessment be done every 4 years--the experience we have been through in the last couple of years not to be a one-time experience but it continue on. Let me talk about the first. And, again, I see this not only as a move to jointness, not only as a way to better take advantage of the revolution of military affairs, but to be more efficient. We have developed a force service. They are remarkable centers of excellence and purpose, patriotism, but no one would want to diminish the unique contributions each one of them makes; and yet there are redundancies and we have to find ways while preserving the uniqueness of each service--and the special edge that some of that competition among them brings--to also bring them together more in joint requirements, joint experimentation because our premise is--and the experts tell us this, the National Defense Panel told us this--that more and more war fighting of the future will be joint war fighting. During the 1980s it became clear that we needed to change the way our military was organized, with more joint planning, more joint conduct of military operations. The Congress of the United States in that period of time stepped up to the responsibility when, frankly, the Pentagon would not and responded with the Goldwater-Nichols act, which I would say that most everybody today in Congress and outside says was right and necessary. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the unprecedented explosion of technological advances that could fundamentally redefine military threats and military capabilities in the future, once again, have generated the need this bill responds to to examine the suitability of our defense policies, our strategy, and our force structure to meet future American defense requirements. Several assessments have been done but the rapid pace of change, I think, outstripped the ability of these assessments to give us durable and continuing relevant answers. General Shalikashvili, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reacted to this changing environment and published Joint Vision 2010 in May of 1996 as a basis for the transformation of our military capabilities. I think this was a brilliant and far-sighted document which embraced the improved intelligence and command and control available in the information age, and also developed the operational concepts of dominant maneuver, precision engagement, full-dimensional protection, and focused logistics to achieve the objective of the widest spectrum, full spectrum dominance in war fighting--a very important step forward. We in Congress have also been concerned about the shortcomings in defense policies and programs derived from some of the earlier assessments. In 1996, we passed the Military Force Structure Review Act. That act required the Secretary of Defense to complete in 1997 a Quadrennial Defense Review of our programs to include a comprehensive examination of our defense strategy, force structure, force modernization plans, infrastructure, and other elements of the defense program and policies with a view toward determining and expressing the defense strategy of the United States and establishing a revised defense program through the year 2005. That Military Force Structure Review Act of 1996 also established a National Defense Panel, a team B, a group of outside experts, many of them with active military experience, to assess the Quadrennial Defense Review and to conduct their own independent, nonpartisan review of the strategy force structure and funding required to meet anticipated threats to our security through the year 2010 and beyond--an attempt to force the process to do what our colleagues in the private sector do, try to look out beyond the horizon, make some reasoned and informed judgments as best we could about what threats we face, what competition we face, and then come back and decide where should we be investing, how should we be restructuring and reorganizing to be in the best possible position to meet those threats of the future. I appreciate the bipartisan, unanimous support that was given to that Military Force Structure Review Act of 1996, and I believe it resulted in two reports that have had a very important effect on our military and how we view our future needs. The QDR, as it is called, the Quadrenniel Defense Review, completed by the Secretary in May 1997, defined the defense strategy in terms of shape, respond and prepare now--three cardinal principles. The QDR placed greater emphasis on the need to prepare now for an uncertain future by exploiting the revolution in technology and transforming our forces toward Joint Vision 2010. It concluded that our future force will be different in character than our current force. Then came the National Defense Panel. Its report, published in December of 1997, concluded that ``the Department of Defense should accord the highest priority to executing a transformation strategy for the U.S. military starting now.'' Let me just repeat those words. A transformation strategy, broad, bold transformation strategy to the next era of threat and opportunity, offense and defense, and the final words ``starting now.'' It is timely. It is important. It recommended the establishment of a joint forces command with responsibility as the joint force integrator and provider, a center of activity to meld the services together in some joint experimentation, investments, requirements, training. Also, the NDP recommended that this joint forces command have the responsibility and budget for driving the transformation process of U.S. forces, including the conduct of joint experimentation. If we are not experimenting together, how are we going to really be prepared for the joint war fighting that the experts tell us will dominate the future? Admiral Owens, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said to us on many occasions to look around and note that we don't have joint bases, and that is something to think about. That may be one. Both of these assessments, the QDR and the NDP, provide Congress with a compelling argument that the future security environment and the military challenges we will face will be fundamentally different from today's. They also reinforce the fundamental principle, the underpinning of the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, the so-called Goldwater-Nichols act, and that fundamental principle was that warfare in all its varieties will be joint warfare requiring the execution of joint operational concepts. As a result of these two assessments, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Shelton, and the Senate Armed Services Committee certainly have concluded that a process of joint experimentation is required to integrate advances in technology with changes in the organizational structure of the Armed Forces and the development of joint operational concepts which will be effective against the wide range of anticipated threats, and will not just be effective, but will be cost effective because they will achieve efficiencies of scale; they will eliminate redundancies; they will pool resources for maximum results. It is necessary to identify and assess independent areas of joint warfare which will be key to transforming the conduct of future U.S. military operations. To do this, U.S. Armed Forces must innovatively investigate and test technologies, forces and joint operational concepts in simulation, war game and virtual settings, as well as in field environments under realistic conditions against the full range of future challenges. The Department of Defense, I am pleased to note, is committed to conducting aggressive experimentation as a key component of its transformation strategy. Service experimentation and the resultant competition of ideas is vital in this pursuit. To complement the ongoing service experimentation, it is essential that an energetic and innovative organization be established within the military and empowered to design and conduct this process of joint experimentation to develop and validate new joint warfighting concepts aimed at transforming the Armed Forces of the United States to meet the anticipated threats of the 21st century. Mr. President, in this regard I refer my colleagues to title XII of this defense authorization bill, S. 2057, which sets this out in the form of a sense of the Senate, in a quite detailed form and, in my opinion, quite progressively, as a result of very constructive discussion among the Senate Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I think we have a blueprint here which expresses the transformation that our military is now undergoing, led by the Secretary and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and sets down a mark that is an expression of the policy desires of the Congress in this regard, that we not only appreciate that the military move in this direction; dispatching our constitutional responsibility, we urge them to do just that. And we require, here, a series of reports to tell us how they are doing. The joint experimentation provision in the bill, title XII, is our statement of support to General Shelton, as he designs and executes his plans for joint experimentation, to select a command, the Atlantic Command, presumably, to carry out this important responsibility. Title XII does not dictate either the method that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs should choose nor the outcomes that he should arrive at. It is a sense of the Congress. It helps establish a framework for us to explore the options for our future security in the hard light of tests on the ground, the only place where these arguments can begin to be settled objectively and where these theories can be tested realistically. And this provision in title XII offers a mechanism for us to get a report about the process, about the results, that is detailed enough for us to provide the kind of oversight we should and must provide if we are going to make the right decisions about our national security in the coming years. Finally, the provision that requires a quadrennial defense review and national defense plan to be conducted every 4 years is equally important. The assessments that were conducted and the debate they have engendered within the Congress, within the inner community of active defense thinkers, and hopefully increasingly within the country, has been very useful. But the valid criticism by some, of both of these studies, and the conflicting ideas that they have raised make it obvious that a one-time assessment is not going to provide us all the answers we need. We also know that the world is not going to stop changing, and just as that CEO of that large private company headquartered in Connecticut that I described who, at the moment of greatest historic success, was pressing his managers to review where they were, look forward, decide what they had to do so they would stay on top, 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now--the repetition of these two reports, the QDR and the Inside the Pentagon Review, and the NDP, a nonpartisan, independent review, offer that same hope of constant reevaluation, sometimes provocation, and hopefully, some good, solid ideas. That kind of formal review of our national security posture every 4 years will permit the needed look at where we have been and what course corrections we need to make without the disruption of too frequent interference, with the certainty that we will not slide into destructive or unproductive or irrelevant paths because we simply haven't stopped to look at what we are doing and where it is taking us. Mr. President, I thank the Chair, I thank my colleagues. Bottom line, this is a balanced bill, the best I think this committee could offer the Senate, Congress, and the Nation, to protect our national security in a time of restraint on resources that is greater than I think is really in our national interest. But we have done the best we could. Again, I thank the leadership of the committee for the purposive, cooperative and informed way they have led us through the exercise that has produced this bill. I yield the floor. If there is no one else on the floor seeking recognition, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to say a few brief words of support for the bill we are now considering, the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act of 1998. I was an original co-sponsor of this important legislation. Through its passage, we in Congress can continue to send the strong message to the nation's securities markets and the country's investors that we first articulated in 1995 with the enactment of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act: we will not let frivolous lawsuits disrupt our nation's securities markets, devalue our citizens' investments or cut off the free flow of information we all need to make reasoned and well-informed investment decisions. I was a proud supporter of the 1995 Act, which restored some rationality and common sense to the laws regulating federal securities litigation. That bill set specific standards for federal private class actions alleging securities fraud, so that those deserving of compensation received it, while those seeking only to profit from the filing of an abusive suit did not. Unfortunately, in the wake of that Act, some enterprising plaintiffs' attorneys have turned to State courts to file abusive suits. Through these State court actions, plaintiffs' attorneys have effectively circumvented the reforms the 1995 Act put in place, reforms we in Congress overwhelmingly embraced in the 1995 Act. Were the regulation of nationally traded securities a matter of purely local concern, I might agree with those who see nothing wrong with this phenomenon--who argue that each State should be free to set for itself the laws governing actions in its courts. But we clearly are not dealing here with something of only local concern. To the contrary, the securities governed by this bill--and it is important to emphasize this point--are by definition trading on national exchanges. As we all know, securities traded on national exchanges are bought and sold by investors in every State, and those investors rely on information distributed on a national basis. It simply makes no sense to open those who make statements about national securities on a national basis to class actions brought under 50 separate State regulatory regimes--not if we want efficient and well-functioning securities markets, that is. In short, not only is a uniform standard appropriate in this case; it provides perhaps the quintessential example of something that should be subject to one set of standards nationwide. For this reason, it is not surprising that this bill has the support, not only of a significant portion of the Congress, but also of both the SEC and the Administration. As someone involved for many years in efforts to reform our nation's litigation system, I can say with confidence that the fact that both the SEC and the Administration support this bill speaks volumes to the merits of this bill. Let me close, Mr. President, by thanking the principal sponsors of this bill, particularly Senators Dodd, D'Amato, Gramm and Domenici. They have worked hard to accommodate all legitimate concerns raised about this bill, working particularly closely with both the SEC and the Administration, and making significant changes to the bill as it moved to the floor. I join with them in urging my colleagues to pass this important legislation today.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to pay a well- deserved tribute to my dear friend Marilyn Cohen on her retirement after thirteen years as the Chairman of the Democratic Town Committee of West Hartford, Connecticut. On May 28, 1998, Marilyn will be the honored guest at the annual Harry Kleinman dinner, where Democrats from West Hartford and throughout Connecticut will have the opportunity to show their appreciation for a job well done. Marilyn has always been a hands-on Chairman; a tireless and dedicated leader who earned the respect and admiration of her entire community. By any measure Marilyn Cohen has been the most successful Town Chairman in the history of West Hartford. During her tenure, Democrats have enjoyed an unmatched period of success and the high degree of satisfaction of citizens with the town's administrative services serves as the best testament to Marilyn's skill as a political leader. Many of those individuals counseled and supported by Marilyn have found success both in and beyond West Hartford, and I am proud to be a member of that group. Marilyn served as Political Director during my first campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1988. I know for a fact that without her unwavering support and finely-tuned political acumen, I would not be a member of this esteemed Chamber today. Marilyn may be retiring from her position on the Town Committee, but she will never retire from this lifestyle that she loves so much. Currently, she is serving as Political Coordinator for Barbara Kennelly, the Democratic candidate for Governor of the State of Connecticut, and will no doubt provide the same high level of direction and support that has been her hallmark for so many years. I am proud to stand before my colleagues today to thank Marilyn for all that she has done and wish her continued success in the coming years.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to join those in this Chamber and around the globe who have spiritually linked arms to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel. I am particularly happy to see that the people of my own hometown of Stamford, Connecticut have seen fit to join in the international chorus of voices commemorating this milestone. After the horrors of the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel represented a significant turning point. The world community denounced an endemic hatred that had led to the decimation of a people and in doing so, set the stage for the renaissance of a culture that had been without a home for nearly two thousand years. The time of tribulation had passed and Jews were, at long last, reunited with their ancestral homeland. Israel and the Old City of Jerusalem represent both the current state of humanity and the heights to which we can aspire. We have been taught that long ago, Israel was a gift to Abraham and his descendants, a token of thanks for his faithfulness. Since that time, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have each governed this land and each religion has developed a spiritual stake in the land. These religions have lived in neighboring and even overlapping communities for half a century, yet peace and security have remained elusive. We have recently begun to see the first opportunities for a lasting peace. When this opportunity is fully realized, Israel will truly stand as both symbol and reality that the forces that bind us together are far greater than the forces that seek to divide us. The Jewish Community Center in Stamford will be holding its celebration on May 17, 1998. I am happy to join them and the millions of others who have lifted their voices in commemoration of this very important landmark.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am proud to join Senator Abraham in submitting this resolution recognizing the need--indeed the obligation--for our nation to show greater tolerance towards Americans of Muslim faith. Tolerance for people of all faiths was among the founding principles of our nation. Since the early 17th Century, when the Puritans fled to America seeking the religious freedom that was denied them in England, our nation has cherished religious pluralism and ingrained in its people the value of allowing every person to worship according to the dictates of his or her own conscience. When the Framers drafted the Constitution, they saw this principle as so important, so sacrosanct, that they enshrined religious freedom not once, but twice, in the Bill of Rights' very first Amendment. Perhaps because of this constitutional mandate, or perhaps because of the resulting tolerance the First Amendment has engendered in our society, our nation has in the more than 200 years since it began become a haven for those seeking both refuge from religious persecution and a society accepting and nurturing of a pluralism in religious beliefs. Indeed, like millions of their coreligionists, my own grandparents came to the United States from Central and Eastern Europe early this century, in part to escape the discrimination they suffered on account of their Jewish faith and heritage. They and those of us who descended from them ultimately found an acceptance in this country that is virtually unparalleled in history. As a result of this country's continued willingness to welcome people of different faiths like my grandparents, both we and American society have been enriched. Unfortunately, the traditional American values of religious tolerance and acceptance thus far too often have been denied to a more recent group of arrivals and their descendants. Despite the tremendous contributions Muslim Americans are making to American society, and despite the fact that Islam shares a common origin--and common values-- with America's two other predominant monotheistic religions, Americans of Islamic faith have been subjected to harassment and discrimination solely on account of their religion and heritage. This must end. It is time for us to reaffirm our commitment to religious pluralism and tolerance. It is time for us to loudly proclaim that a diversity of religious beliefs and traditions enriches rather than diminishes our society because religion--including Islam--is a great source of values and good deeds in our democracy. It is time for us to extend to our Muslim citizens in practice the promise of our nation's ideals: tolerance of and gratitude for their religious beliefs. I hope the resolution we are submitting today puts us one step closer to achieving that ideal.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I would like to say a few words about the Workforce Investment Partnership Act of 1997 that we are voting on today in the Senate. The Workforce Investment Partnership Act will reform vocational education, adult education and job training programs, provide more accountability within these programs, and improve delivery to our citizens. Education and training are two of the most important investments a government can make in its citizens. It is as important as ensuring the physical health of its citizens because education and training, and the robustness of a nation's industry, are primary determinants of the economic health of the country. Education and training also determine individuals' ability to reach personal goals. Providing people with quality education and training moves people off the welfare rolls, increases upward mobility, increases incomes, and provides our industry with a more skilled workforce. We are in the enviable situation now of having only 4.7 percent unemployment in the United States. The high-tech industry tells us it has as many as 190,000 unfilled jobs. There are jobs available. The challenge is to match the worker's skill with industry needs. There are two challenges to providing workers with the necessary skills. The first is to make sure our children coming out of school have the basic skills they need for today's workforce, and then, to realize that learning, education and training are lifelong pursuits and do not stop once you join the workforce. It is clear we need to do more in both these areas. A good education should be our long term goal. But, as my esteemed colleague Mr. Kennedy mentioned last week, right now we have over three million young men and women between the ages of 16 and 24 in this country who did not complete high school and are not enrolled in school. After interviewing a diverse group of employers and college professors, Public Agenda found profound dissatisfaction with the way public schools are preparing students. More than 60% of employers and three quarters of professors said they believe that a high school diploma is no guarantee a student has learned the basics, and nearly 7 out of 10 employers said the high school graduates they see are not ready to succeed in the workplace. These young people will need remedial education and training in order to join the workforce. But young people are not the only ones who need help. The program in S. 1186 focus on the unemployed, dislocated, disadvantaged and seriously underemployed whose industry may be downsizing, whose employer may be moving offshore, who lack a sufficient education, who are coming off of welfare, or who haven't kept pace with technological skills needed for today's rapidly changing workplace. To remain competitive in today's workforce, workers must be more flexible in terms of changing careers and upgrading their skills. S. 1186 recognizes the importance of lifelong learning and enables people to receive the education and training they need at any point in their life. This bill provides the ties between education and job readiness. It does this by consolidating dozens of narrowly focused programs and replacing the present fragmented system with an integrated workforce system. It integrates adult education and literacy instruction with occupational skill training and professional development. It integrates vocational and academic studies. Importantly, this legislation brings the business community into the process by creating industry-led policy making boards that develop strategies for a comprehensive workforce investment system in each State. Involving business is essential to ensuring that training programs are based on local employment needs and conditions. Another innovation of The Workforce Investment Partnership Act is that it establishes ``individual training accounts'' to give job- seekers more choice in selecting the type of education and training programs they want. The bill also encourages the creation of ``One-Stop Customer Service'' centers which provide a central resource for all job seekers, not just those that qualify for Labor Department programs, to get information on training and employment opportunities available in the local area. In Connecticut, we have already seen the benefits of implementing some of these changes. We are starting to implement the One-Stop Customer Service centers. We have streamlined JTPA and TANF, the welfare-to-work program. We have moved the job component of TANF from the Department of Social Services to the Labor Department where the jobs are--where it belongs. The Workforce Investment Partnership Act is one piece of the solution to improving our nation's workforce. We still need to improve our educational system, attract more students into the maths and sciences, and make lifelong learning and skill upgrades a part of everyone's life. America is beginning to move in this direction. President Clinton introduced the Hope Scholarship that will encourage lifelong learning. Some states and industries are beginning to cooperate to create worker training programs that serve regional industry clusters; Senator Sarbanes introduced, and I am proud to be cosponsoring, S. 2021 to stimulate this cooperation among companies to develop regional skills alliances that provide training for jobs that are waiting in the participating companies. More companies are working closely with local community colleges and universities to match academic programs with workforce needs. We need to support all these different pieces because they fit together to provide our citizens with the tools they need to not just keep up but to move ahead and realize their goals. I applaud the work of Senator DeWine, Senator Jeffords, Senator Kennedy, Senator Wellstone, and their staffs in drafting the Workforce Investment Partnership Act and I appreciate all the hard work that went into it. I support this worthy legislation.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. The final loss from imposing an arbitrary 3-year pause where none is necessary because no action is required will be on us, on the United States, on our credibility, on what we stand for, on the principles that the rest of the world now, most of it, want to emulate and aspire to. If we say to these other nations of Central and Eastern Europe, ``Forget about it, we are more worried about Russia, we are more worried about a renaissance of imperialist Russia, we are more worried about affecting the feelings of people who may be aggressive than we are about honoring your dream and effort to achieve freedom and democracy and security,'' then we will have abandoned our principles, our first principles as a country. When we do that, we lose our strength, because ultimately those principles underlie the power of America in the world community. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to defeat these two amendments and to put ourselves on the right side of history. I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor. Exhibit 1 [From the New York Times, April 26, 1998] With Promises, Promises, NATO Moves the East (By Jane Perlez) In the United States, the question of whether to expand NATO eastward has been debated only in fits and starts, and then most passionately on the issues of how the Russians feel about it and whether it might cost too much. But another question figures in the debate too: What effect has the lure of NATO membership had on the way the proposed new members--Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic--govern themselves and behave toward their neighbors after nearly half a century under Communism? No one of these questions alone will decide the debate, which the Senate is scheduled to resume on Monday. Opponents of the Clinton Administration's proposal to expand NATO will doubtless emphasize the questions of money, Russia, and how many other new members this precedent will open the door to. Still, it is on the question of how the prospective members are behaving that some of the hardest evidence is in, and it adds up to this: agreement on a goal While all three have a way to go on meeting Western standards of democratic rule and stable market economies, no issue has dominated the internal political behavior of the three Central European countries as much as the aspiration to belong to the Western security alliance. In all three prospective new members, former Communists and anti-Communists alike have agreed on NATO membership as a national goal, and as a result all have tried with varying degrees of sincerity to meet the alliance's broad requirements of democratic rule and free enterprise. In other words, the promise of inclusion in NATO has helped the cause of moderate government during a tough period of economic and political transition. And there is little doubt, analysts say, that trying to lay the political groundwork to satisfy NATO has left Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic better positioned for sustained economic growth. Such growth, in turn, could also help these countries join the European Union--another goal they share, and one they are pursuing in negotiations that opened in Brussels last month and that promise to be tough. One lesson clearly taken to heart by Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary was the elimination of Slovakia from the list of potential NATO members after its Prime Minister, Vladimir Meciar, became increasingly authoritarian. Similarly, the European Union has cited Slovakia's lack of democratic progress as a reason for its inclusion from the first round of the economic union's eastward expansion. The new American Ambassador to Poland, Daniel Fried, who helped formulate the arguments for expanding NATO when he worked at the National Security Council before coming to Warsaw last fall, likes to point to the way the three countries have behaved toward each other. ``When Poland and Hungary became more confident of their NATO membership,'' he said, ``they increased their outreach to their neighbors-- Hungary to Romania, and Poland to Lithuania.'' A decade ago, when the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe was evaporating, one worry for NATO was that old national resentments would resurface in the form of border disputes and mistreatment of minorities, creating instability in the region. So when NATO decided it might enlarge, it made it clear that aspirants to membership had to avoid that kind of thing. Now Hungary and Romania have signed a treaty guaranteeing each other's borders and respecting the right of the large Hungarian minority in Romania. And tense relations between Poland and Lithuania have improved to the point that they have created a joint peacekeeping battalion. Another benchmark set down by NATO, and in particular by the Pentagon, was that the military in new members had to be subordinate to civilian control. This was a prickly subject in Poland, where former President Lech Walesa wanted to keep broad authority in the hands of his generals. Only since the defeat of Mr. Walesa in elections in 1995 and the adoption of a new Constitution calling for subordination of the general staff to the Minister of Defense has the strong political influence of the Polish military brass diminished. Changes in the Brass Last year, to the relief of the Pentagon, President Kwasniewski fired Gen. Tadeusz Wilecki, a Walesa appointee, who had shown open contempt for the civilians at the defense ministry. Now Henry Szumski, a younger general who has United Nations field experience, is at the top, and Janusz Onyszkiewicz, an ardent proponent of civilian control of the military, is defense minister. NATO specialists say they are satisfied that the Polish military is on the right track, but another challenge remains: to clear out many of the Communist-era holdovers in the military intelligence service. In another example of changing attitudes, the Hungarian Government passed over Soviet-trained generals for the post of chief of the general staff and reached down to the third level of the military hierarchy for Lieut. Gen. Ferenc Vegh, and English-speaking graduate of the United States Army War College. Now 7 of the top 10 generals in Hungary are Western trained. Last month, the Czechs appointed a new chief of the general staff, Jiri Sedivy, 45, who stands out for his experience as a battalion commander in Bosnia and for his choice of military heroes: Eisenhower, Patton and Schwarzkopf. Along with elevating military officers who think like those in the West, the three countries have been encouraged by NATO to get serious about parliamentary oversight committees. On this point, they still have a long way to go; the defense committee in the lower house of Poland's Parliament has no staff, and the enthusiastic members of Hungary's parliamentary defense committee have little background in military affairs. No one would argue that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are mature democracies with classic capitalist economies. Progress toward the rule of law and the protection of minority rights is far from perfect. In all three countries, the judicial systems are fragile and financial corruption widespread. There are still huge disparities in terms of wealth between the European Union and its prospective new eastern members. But Marek Matraszek, the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations, a political consulting firm that has worked on NATO related issues, believes that without the prospect of membership in NATO, Poland might easily have fallen under the sway of nationalist and populist politicians. Now it seems reasonable to believe that Poland, a land with 40 million people and a bounding economy growing at six percent a year, may reach its goal of being a middle-size Western European power within the next decade. ``The promise of NATO has defused destabilizing forces from the left and right.'' Mr. Matraszek said. ``If NATO had not been offered, Poland could have been in a disastrous situation, externally and internally.'' Ms. MIKULSKI addressed the Chair.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. That article makes very clear that the goal of access to NATO, in this case of the article in particular regard to the three countries we are considering today-- Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic--has moved those countries. The promise of inclusion in NATO has helped the cause of moderate government, the reporter says, during a tough period of economic and political transition. I quote Marek Matraszek, Warsaw director of the CEC Government Relations, a political consulting firm, who says: The promise of NATO has defused destabilizing forces from the left and right.* * * If NATO had not been offered, Poland could have been in a disastrous situation, externally and internally. If we now slam the door closed on the dreams of every other nation in Central and Eastern Europe to join this family of freedom, this military alliance, I fear that we will set back the onward march of freedom and a market economy for which we fought the cold war. Second, it will reduce the ability of NATO and the dream and goal of NATO membership to resolve conflicts that now exist among various nations in Central and Eastern Europe. The Hungarians and the Romanians, because of their desire to join NATO, settled age-old problems. Poland and Lithuania began talks about concerns they had for the same reason, to put themselves in the same position. The nations in that region have not lost sight of the reaction of NATO to the movement within Slovakia toward a less open, less free government--which is to say that Slovakia has dropped down in the chain of those who are being considered for NATO membership. Finally, a third consequence of imposing this pause. Mr. President, I note you moving toward the gavel, and I ask simply for an additional minute, if I may, from the time of the Senator from Delaware.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. If I may, I would like to take the liberty of speaking both on the previous amendment, which would have required these three nations to obtain membership in the European Union before ultimately becoming members of NATO, and this amendment as well. I think they both spring from a common core, certainly have a common effect, and the effect would be to move the goalposts, to change the rules of the NATO accession game as defined in article X of the NATO treaty, to frustrate the hopes of the people of these three nations and the other nations of Central and Eastern Europe who lived for four decades under the tyranny of Soviet communism, to say to them now that they want to voluntarily assume their place in the NATO community and more broadly in the community of free nations that we are not ready. OK, there was plenty of time in the late forties after the Second World War for Stalin and others to carve up Europe and take you in involuntarily, but now that the cold war is over, no, we didn't learn the lesson. We are going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. We are going to snatch the defeat of principle and security, freedom and democracy from the jaws of our victory in the cold war. The first amendment says to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, you have come this far, we have a whole procedure that we have developed. You have democratized your country. Go back a little bit. You had the courage to rise up against a powerful central government which subjugated you, which did not give you political freedom or religious freedom or economic opportunity, and you have achieved your independence and your freedom. You are developing a market economy and democracy and have met all the standards that have traditionally been associated with access to NATO under article X--oh, no, now you have to go to the European Union and be accepted there. As I said the other day, on the first day of this debate, to ask these nations to now obtain membership in the European Union before they do in NATO is not only unfair--in the sense that it moves the goalposts, it changes the rules of the game, it applies to them a standard not applied to other NATO members, four of whom are not now members of the European Union--but it puts them in a very, very difficult position. It says to them that all the effort they made is not going to be justified, and it has an effect that is extremely unfair and inequitable. It puts the cart before the horse. It says that commerce should precede the principles of freedom and security, when those principles are what the cold war was all about. It puts the cart of commerce before the sturdy horses of democracy and security. It puts the cart of the European Union before the horses of NATO. And that is not the order that is appropriate. That is why I oppose that first amendment and hope my colleagues will as well. Of course, both of these amendments, including this one now that asks for a 3-year moratorium, I think spring--as some of the proponents of the amendment have said--from a concern about the effect on Russia. Our Secretary of State printed an op-ed piece in the New York Times Wednesday, April 29, yesterday--Madeleine Albright. It is a brilliant piece, eloquent, right to the point. Headline: ``Stop Worrying About Russia.'' The most fundamental argument the critics have put forward is that the admission of even a single new ally from Central Europe will harm our relations with Russia. Secretary Albright says: My first response is to wonder why some people cannot discuss the future of Central Europe without immediately changing the subject to Russia. Central Europe has more than 20 countries, and 200 million people, with its own history, its own problems and its own contributions to make to our alliance. Most of these countries do not even border Russia. But their security is and always has been vital to the future of Europe as a whole. Mr. President, I heard my friend and colleague from New Jersey say something I find very unsettling, arguing for the pause, arguing for the earlier amendment about European Union membership first; wondering whether we were true to our pledge, as part of NATO accession under article V, to defend member states. We wouldn't make the pledge if we were not sincere about it. Of course we are prepared to defend these nations if necessary. I found the references to Chamberlain in the 1930s particularly--I say this respectfully--inappropriate. If there was any sincerity behind the pledge that Chamberlain made in 1939 to defend Poland from the Nazis, as was stated, the history of the 1940s might well have been different. The lessons are clear. The best way to secure peace is to remain strong. And that is what this is all about, access to NATO, a military alliance in defense of a principle. The Senator from New Jersey said imperial Russia has never been defeated. Who is talking about imperial Russia? We, who are supporting the extension of NATO, believe there is a new Russia. We don't see an imperial Russia. We believe that these new countries, adding 200,000 troops to NATO forces, will help us meet common threats from ethnic division, international conflict, in some of the emerging democracies. We have seen it in Bosnia. We see it in Kosovo today. And it will help us meet the common threats of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, ballistic missiles, coming particularly from the south of the NATO region but perhaps from elsewhere. Let me go to this amendment requiring a pause, a 3-year pause. The Senator from Virginia says we ought to let some future President decide this. There is a process under article X. There is nothing inevitable about it. We are not on automatic pilot. No other nation is automatically going to be admitted to NATO. There is a process. NATO members will consider it, presidents--administrations will decide, and then always the Senate will have the option of ratifying or not ratifying accession of anyone else to this great treaty in defense of a principle. So why the pause? Presumably to reassure Russia again. But what are the effects of that? The effects of that are destructive in three regards. First, on the other nations of Central Europe who may dream of membership in NATO, and, on the basis of which dreams, they are acting in exactly the way we would have them act to develop their democracies and market economies. Again, I refer to the New York Times, this time Sunday, April 26. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that there be printed in the Record after my remarks an article by Jane Perlez.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I yield myself 10 minutes from the time controlled by the Senator from Delaware.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to rise in support as an original cosponsor of my colleague Senator Sarbanes' bill, the Technology Skills Partnership Act of 1998. I am delighted that Senator Sarbanes has taken the initiative in developing this innovative approach to help solve one of the biggest problems this country is facing--an insufficiently skilled workforce. This bill has the bold but achievable goal of trying to change the mindset of U.S. companies in this country in favor of collaborating on training skilled workers for their industry. We are facing a shortage of skilled workers in this country. Estimates are as high as 190,000 unfilled jobs in the information technology industry alone. But it isn't just the high-tech industry that needs workers with high-tech skills. All industries now need workers with computer literacy, including what we might consider ``lower-tech'' manufacturing and services such as auto repair shops. In the long-term, we need to improve our students' education in the math and sciences and attract more students into these areas. Universities need to attract more college students into scientific, engineering, and technical fields. Ultimately, a large part of the responsibility will lie with industry to attract workers into these careers by creating attractive career paths and financial rewards that can compete for the best students. In the short term, high-tech industry would like to raise H1-B visa caps. But we need to do something more than let foreign workers fill the gap in high-tech workers that now exists. We need to train our workforce with skills that fit industry's needs today. Industry must be a large part of the solution. Only with industry leading the skills training can we be sure that workers are being trained for jobs that actually exist. That is why this bill creates an industry-drive training program. Why does the federal government need to be involved? Because industry does not normally cooperate in training workers. Small companies, and 90% of firms in the United States are small businesses, don't have the resources to invest in lengthy training. Larger companies used to provide training programs, but in the high-tech field, workers move quickly from one job to another chasing higher salaries. Many companies are reticent to invest in long-term training for employees that may quickly move on. Cooperation within an industry provides a solution to this problem. The government's role in this bill would be to provide the catalyst to bring the companies together to cooperate on training. The federal funds are matched dollar for dollar by, first, funds from the state and, second, funds from a consortium of 10 or more companies. The federal funds are meant only to start the process--federal funding ends after three years--and then the states and industry continue the cooperative training programs alone. Let me give you an example from my home state: Connecticut. A recent report prepared by Connecticut's Industry Cluster Advisory Board found that: . . . the demand for skilled manufacturing workers far exceeds the number of students graduating from manufacturing programs.'' There is a ``negative perception of manufacturing as a career choice.'' People ``still think of manufacturing as a dirty, low-paying environment with no hope for advancement. Today, manufacturing is clean, and typically a computer-based environment which pays an average annual wage in the $30,000 range or more with appropriate skills and training.'' The report continues: Substantial investment in training is necessary for companies to compete in this new environment. However, since most precision manufacturing companies are small businesses-- of the 750 in the Hartford region only 7.4% have more than 100 employees--companies that are dependent upon their skilled workers for success are not prepared to support worker training. The report says further: While Connecticut has a wealth of public technical training resources, these traditional programs cannot meet the current demand fast enough and do not have a direct link from training to employment. By stimulating industry-led training, we can guarantee a direct link from training to employment that is missing is traditional public sector training programs. In addition, most public sector training programs are focused on unemployed, dislocated, or disadvantaged workers. This program is open to all workers, including incumbent workers who want to improve their skills and increase their opportunities for higher wages and advancement. Further, this program is specifically created to allow participation by small and medium- sized companies. In the last few years, a small number of regional and industry-based training alliances in the United States have emerged, usually in partnership with state and local governments and technical colleges. In Rhode Island, with help from the state's Human Resource Investment Council, plastics firms developed a skills alliance. The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, metal-working firms in conjunction with the AFL-CIO, set up a teaching factory to train workers. While some partnerships have emerged around the country, there are documented difficulties in fostering this kind of collective action without some federal backing. Without some kind of support to create alliances, small- and medium-sized firms just don't have the time or resources to collaborate with anybody on training. In fact, almost all the existing regional skills alliances report that they would not have been able to get off the ground without an independent, staffed entity to operate the alliance. Widespread and timely deployment of these kinds of partnerships is simply not likely to happen without the incentives established by a federal initiative. This can help create successful models and templates that others can replicate across the nation. I am proud to support the Technology Skills Partnership Act of 1998 and urge my colleagues to join me in taking this step toward an immediate, short-term solution to the shortage of skilled workers in our country.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to rise in support as an original cosponsor of my colleague Senator Sarbanes' bill, the Technology Skills Partnership Act of 1998. I am delighted that Senator Sarbanes has taken the initiative in developing this innovative approach to help solve one of the biggest problems this country is facing--an insufficiently skilled workforce. This bill has the bold but achievable goal of trying to change the mindset of U.S. companies in this country in favor of collaborating on training skilled workers for their industry. We are facing a shortage of skilled workers in this country. Estimates are as high as 190,000 unfilled jobs in the information technology industry alone. But it isn't just the high-tech industry that needs workers with high-tech skills. All industries now need workers with computer literacy, including what we might consider ``lower-tech'' manufacturing and services such as auto repair shops. In the long-term, we need to improve our students' education in the math and sciences and attract more students into these areas. Universities need to attract more college students into scientific, engineering, and technical fields. Ultimately, a large part of the responsibility will lie with industry to attract workers into these careers by creating attractive career paths and financial rewards that can compete for the best students. In the short term, high-tech industry would like to raise H1-B visa caps. But we need to do something more than let foreign workers fill the gap in high-tech workers that now exists. We need to train our workforce with skills that fit industry's needs today. Industry must be a large part of the solution. Only with industry leading the skills training can we be sure that workers are being trained for jobs that actually exist. That is why this bill creates an industry-drive training program. Why does the federal government need to be involved? Because industry does not normally cooperate in training workers. Small companies, and 90% of firms in the United States are small businesses, don't have the resources to invest in lengthy training. Larger companies used to provide training programs, but in the high-tech field, workers move quickly from one job to another chasing higher salaries. Many companies are reticent to invest in long-term training for employees that may quickly move on. Cooperation within an industry provides a solution to this problem. The government's role in this bill would be to provide the catalyst to bring the companies together to cooperate on training. The federal funds are matched dollar for dollar by, first, funds from the state and, second, funds from a consortium of 10 or more companies. The federal funds are meant only to start the process--federal funding ends after three years--and then the states and industry continue the cooperative training programs alone. Let me give you an example from my home state: Connecticut. A recent report prepared by Connecticut's Industry Cluster Advisory Board found that: . . . the demand for skilled manufacturing workers far exceeds the number of students graduating from manufacturing programs.'' There is a ``negative perception of manufacturing as a career choice.'' People ``still think of manufacturing as a dirty, low-paying environment with no hope for advancement. Today, manufacturing is clean, and typically a computer-based environment which pays an average annual wage in the $30,000 range or more with appropriate skills and training.'' The report continues: Substantial investment in training is necessary for companies to compete in this new environment. However, since most precision manufacturing companies are small businesses-- of the 750 in the Hartford region only 7.4% have more than 100 employees--companies that are dependent upon their skilled workers for success are not prepared to support worker training. The report says further: While Connecticut has a wealth of public technical training resources, these traditional programs cannot meet the current demand fast enough and do not have a direct link from training to employment. By stimulating industry-led training, we can guarantee a direct link from training to employment that is missing is traditional public sector training programs. In addition, most public sector training programs are focused on unemployed, dislocated, or disadvantaged workers. This program is open to all workers, including incumbent workers who want to improve their skills and increase their opportunities for higher wages and advancement. Further, this program is specifically created to allow participation by small and medium- sized companies. In the last few years, a small number of regional and industry-based training alliances in the United States have emerged, usually in partnership with state and local governments and technical colleges. In Rhode Island, with help from the state's Human Resource Investment Council, plastics firms developed a skills alliance. The Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, metal-working firms in conjunction with the AFL-CIO, set up a teaching factory to train workers. While some partnerships have emerged around the country, there are documented difficulties in fostering this kind of collective action without some federal backing. Without some kind of support to create alliances, small- and medium-sized firms just don't have the time or resources to collaborate with anybody on training. In fact, almost all the existing regional skills alliances report that they would not have been able to get off the ground without an independent, staffed entity to operate the alliance. Widespread and timely deployment of these kinds of partnerships is simply not likely to happen without the incentives established by a federal initiative. This can help create successful models and templates that others can replicate across the nation. I am proud to support the Technology Skills Partnership Act of 1998 and urge my colleagues to join me in taking this step toward an immediate, short-term solution to the shortage of skilled workers in our country.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am a strong supporter of the treaty before us to expand NATO. I also strongly support the agreement that emerged from Kyoto, as well as the President's position that the agreement is not ripe for submittal to the Senate at this time. There is no precedent for forcing the President to submit a treaty on a timeframe established by the United States Senate before the President believes it is appropriate. But that is what this amendment seeks to do. Adopting this amendment would have been a terrible precedent for conducting our foreign policy and I believe would have stopped the treaty now pending before us.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I was opposed to the amendment offered by Senator Inhofe. Quite frankly, I believe the consequences if this amendment passed would have been extremely deleterious to our foreign policy. Mr. President, everyone should recognize that his amendment is nothing more than a thinly-veiled threat to delay NATO enlargement and to ensure that we won't have NATO enlargement for a significant period of time. It is very clear that President Clinton can't and won't submit the Kyoto Protocol for Senate ratification until the conditions he has set are met--meaningful participation by developing countries. The Administration is not in a position of saying now when that milestone will be achieve, but it probably won't be soon. So a vote for this amendment is a vote to stop NATO expansion. But even if you oppose NATO expansion, you should oppose this amendment because the approach it takes is without precedent and would have a significant impact on how the country conducts foreign policy. Let me say also that I was a member of the Senate observer group to the Kyoto conference last December. There has never been a more complicated, difficult international negotiation attempted. I believe that the conference was a historic success: more than 160 countries recognized that the common threat of climate change was more important than each nation's separate anxiety about the immediate impact of an agreement. The Conference was also a historic success because American proposals won the day. We called for much more real and realistic targets and timetables. We proposed flexibility through a trading program to use the power of the market to achieve lower compliance costs for business. We offered a joint implementation system that would allow American firms to build clean power plants or preserve forests in developing countries in exchange for emission reduction credits that could be used or sold later. Our negotiators won on each of these battles--and they were very hard fought battles. But the President has clearly said that the Kyoto protocol is not ready to be submitted to the Senate. The President has made clear that the protocol will not be ready for submission until we have succeeded in achieving the meaningful participation of developing counties. At Kyoto, a down payment was made in the form of a ``clean development mechanism'' which embraces the U.S. backed concept of joint implementation with credit. This will allow companies in the developed world to invest in projects in countries in the developing world for the benefit of both parties. But developing countries will clearly need to do more in order to meaningfully participate in combating global warming, and in order of the President to submit the protocol for the consideration of the Senate. Secretary Albright recently announced a full court diplomatic effort to achieve this goal. Mr. President, as far as I can determine, there is no precedent in our history for doing essentially what this amendment seeks to do, force the President to transmit a treaty to the Senate before the President deems it appropriate to do so. This amendment is a high- handed attempt by Congress to undermine the President's constitutional power. Mr. President, I asked the American Law Division of the CRS to look at a related issue: whether there are any time limitations within which the President must submit a treaty after it has been negotiated and signed. Let me quote from that report: ``As a general proposition, there do not appear to be any time constraints on the transmittal of treaties to the Senate for its advice and consent. The spare language of the Constitution provides simply that `(the President) shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur. . . .' Under this structure, it is the President who negotiates and ultimately ratifies treaties, provided the Senate gives its advice and consent. But the constitutional language does not set time limits on any aspect of the process of treaty-making.'' The report goes on to note that ``nor does statutory law appear to impose any time constraints on the submission of treaties.'' Mr. President, the memo goes on to discuss numerous cases in which treaties have not been submitted to the Senate for ratification for a long time after they were negotiated and signed. For example, the United States signed the ``International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination'' on September 28, 1966. Nearly 12 years passed after the United States signature before it was submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent on February 23, 1978. Let me read here from the memorandum's review of the Legislative Calendar for the 104th Congress: Final Edition of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations which discloses a number of examples of significant delay is transmittal of treaties. A review of the Legislative Calendar for the 104th Congress: Final Edition of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations discloses a number of additional instances of significant delays in transmittal. A bilateral treaty between the U.S. and Haiti ``Concerning the Reciprocal Encouragement and Protection of Investment'' was signed on December 13, 1983, but not submitted to the Senate until March 25, 1986. A treaty on ``Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters'' between the U.S. and Nigeria, signed on September 13, 1989, was not transmitted until April 1, 1992. A ``Revised Protocol Amending the Convention Between the United States and Canada With Respect to Taxes on Income and on Capital,'' originally signed on September 28, 1980, and then amended in 1983 and 1984, was finally submitted to the Senate on April 24, 1995. An extradition treaty with Belgium was signed on April 27, 1987, but not submitted until June 12, 1995; and one with Switzerland was signed on November 14, 1990, but not transmitted until June 12, 1995. The ``International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants'' was originally negotiated in 1961, amended in 1972, 1978, and 1991, and finally signed by the U.S. in 1991, but was not submitted to the Senate until September 5, 1995. Finally, the ``Convention on the International Maritime Organization,'' originally signed on March 6, 1948, was transmitted to the Senate on October 1, 1996. All of these examples illustrate the absence of any legally binding time constraints on the President's transmittal of treaties to the Senate. I hope the foregoing is responsive to your request. If we may be of additional assistance, please call on us.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I want to respond briefly to two points. One is on the question of the involvement of the American defense industry in this debate. The Senator from Iowa cited a news article indicating that a group called the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, headed by a gentleman involved in the defense industry--honestly, I don't know the facts about that committee at all, but I have seen some advertisements they have placed. But what I want to do is suggest--and I know the Senator from Iowa didn't mean to say this in quoting the article--that the support for NATO enlargement is quite broad. It is enormous. It goes well beyond this one organization headed by this one man. There are a host of military and veterans' organizations that I think support this because they have learned the lessons. They feel enlarging NATO is one of the rewards, if you will, for their service over the long years of the cold war. It was one of the goals they aspired to--to free the captive nations and let them become part of the community of freedom-loving nations. AMVETS supports NATO enlargement, as do the American Legion Association, U.S. Army Jewish War Veterans, Marine Corps League, National Guard Association, Reserve Officers Association, Veterans of Foreign Wars Association, and, in addition, a host of civic policy and political organizations, including, interestingly, the Council of State Governments, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, a host of State legislative bodies, including my own State senate in Connecticut that spoke on behalf of enlargement; A true rainbow coalition of ethnic organizations, American ethnic organizations, many of whom have members who have family ties to the people who have suffered for almost five decades, four decades anyway, under Soviet Communist domination, are now thrilled that their family and friends can enjoy the blessings of liberty and want to affirm that opportunity by membership in NATO; Many business and labor organizations, including the AFL-CIO, support the enlargement of NATO. So this is a very broad-based organizational effort, much beyond one group; A remarkable number of high-level officials have signed a statement of support of NATO enlargement; former Vice Presidents Quayle and Mondale; former Secretaries of State Baker, Christopher, Eagleburger, Haig, Rodgers, Shultz, Kissinger, and Vance. I believe that is every living former Secretary of State; Former National Security Advisers Allen, Brzezinski, Lake, McFarland, and Powell; Former Secretaries of Defense Carlucci, Cheney, Clifford, Perry, and Rumsfeld. It is a remarkable, broad coalition, much beyond one person whose affiliation may be the defense industry and an organization that I presume is much larger than that. The second and final point that I want to make is I want to draw on something that the Senator from Oregon said, and it helps me to make a point about what I believe to be one of the unintended, certainly undesirable, consequences if we should adopt the Harkin amendment, which I hope we will not. The Senator from Oregon has occasionally held town meetings in Oregon. He has asked about NATO enlargement. Do we want to send your sons? How will you respond to the question of why would you send your sons to defend Budapest or Warsaw or Prague? One of the effects of enlarging NATO is in effect quite the opposite, which is to bring the military forces, 200,000 strong, into the common effort to defend NATO and its member states from security threats to it and them. That involves a scenario that I suggested earlier that may occur in the Middle East around Iraq and other trouble spots around the world. What I am confident of is there will be an enthusiasm and a steadfastness to participate among these three new members that we don't always find, frankly, among the other members who have been with us from the beginning. The question could almost be turned. That is, expanding NATO holds the prospect that Hungarian soldiers, Czech soldiers, and Polish soldiers will be sent to trouble spots in the world and not require American soldiers to be sent, certainly not in the same numbers. I believe that one of the consequences of this amendment putting an arbitrary 25 percent cap on American involvement here will be to make it impossible for us to draw down supplies and equipment to offer assistance to those soldiers of these three countries when they share our burden and place less of a burden on our military and on those who wear the American uniform. I thank the Chair. I yield the floor. Mr. GORTON addressed the Chair.