Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the great Nobel physicist, Hans A. Bethe, is the subject of the lead article in the ``Science Times'' section of the New York Times. One cannot help but marvel at the life Dr. Bethe, a national treasure, has led. In 1935, he fled Nazi Germany, settling at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Within three years, he developed an equation to explain solar fusion which won him a Nobel prize in 1967. Hans Bethe led the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos; he was, one could say, present at the creation. He stood next to J. Robert Oppenheimer on July 16, 1945 in the New Mexico desert, a witness to the testing of the first atomic bomb. The scientists at the site knew that if the test worked it would end World War II, as it did within a month, and forever change the nature of warfare. At the moment of that explosion, a new era began. It changed us. Changed the world, and changed all those present. Maurice M. Shapiro, now chief scientist emeritus of the Laboratory for Cosmic Physics at the Naval Research Station, in Washington, recalled the scene in the New Mexico desert in an interview two years ago: At precisely 5:30 there was a blinding flash--brighter than many suns--and then a flaming fireball. Within seconds a churning multicolored column of gas and dust was rising. Then, within it, a narrower column of debris swirled upward, spreading out into an awesome mushroom-shaped apparition high in the atmosphere--Maurice M. Shapiro, ``Echoes of the Big Bang,'' New York Times, July 15, 1995. Next came ``an oppressive sense of foreboding.'' Oppenheimer described the event as follows: We waited until the blast had passed, walked out of the shelter and then it was extremely solemn. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multi-armed form and says, ``Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,'' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. Hans Bethe's role in shaping United States nuclear policy had only just begun. For the past fifty years, he has involved himself in thoughtful and constructive efforts to develop responsible policies to deal with this technology he played such a crucial role in creating. The article in today's New York Times, for instance, characterizes him as a ``prime mover behind the first East-West arms accord, the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which ended nuclear explosions in the atmosphere.'' And just a few months ago--on April 25--he wrote the President an historic letter which states: It seems that the time has come for our Nation to declare that it is not working, in any way, to develop further weapons of mass destruction of any kind. Mr. President, Dr. Bethe is one of our living treasures. It is entirely fitting that his many contributions to society are publicized and studied, and that his policy pronouncements are accorded the attention they so deserve, for as the author of the Times article, William J. Broad, states, Bethe's voice may be gentle, but his words are sharp. I hope that Dr. Bethe will soon complete work on his autobiography and share with us the breadth of his life experiences. I ask that the article in the New York Times, the letter from Dr. Bethe to the President, and the President's response be printed in the Record. The material follows: [From the New York Times] He Lit Nuclear Fire; Now He Would Douse It (By William J. Broad) ``For the things I do, it's accurate enough,'' Dr. Hans A. Bethe said as he rummaged through his briefcase and pulled out a slide rule, a relic from the days before computers took over tedious number-crunching for most scientists. It's battered case told of considerable use. What Dr. Bethe does at the age of 90, and has done for more than seven decades, is ponder such riddles of nature as how stars live and die. It is his passion. Once it won him a Nobel Prize in Physics and now it keeps him excited and in his office at Cornell University, where he arrived more than 60 years ago after fleeing Nazi Germany. A combination lock on a metal cabinet hints at what else he does, his sideline, as he puts it, an avocation of more than a half century that helped change history. The atomic bomb. Dr. Bethe knows how it lives--having overseen its birth during the World War II, having felt its blistering heat across miles of desert sand, having watched its progeny fill superpower arsenals--and now he is working hard to make it die. In April, he wrote a letter to President Clinton that some advocates of arms control regard as historic. As the most senior of the living scientists who begat the atomic age, Dr. Bethe called on the United States to declare that it would forgo all work to devise new kinds of weapons of mass destruction. But his dream, it turns out, is larger than that, much larger. In an interview last week, Dr. Bethe said that a concerted push by the world's nations and people might yet cut nuclear arsenals down from their current levels of thousands of arms to perhaps 100 in the East, 100 in the West and few in between. ``Then,'' added this survivor of Hitler and Mussolini, his voice gentle but words sharp, ``even if statesmen go crazy again, as they used to be, the use of these weapons will not destroy civilization.'' Eventually, perhaps late next century, Dr. Bethe said, the right social conditions may finally arise so that the bomb is no more, so that no nation on earth will want to wield the threat of nuclear annihilation. The nightmare will be over. He paused. ``That is my hope,'' he said. ``My fear is that we stay where we are,'' with each side keeping thousands of nuclear arms poised to fly at a moment's notice. ``And if we stay where we are, then additional countries will get nuclear weapons'' and the earth may yet blaze with thermonuclear fire, the kind that powers stars and destroys most everything in its path. Hans Albrecht Bethe (pronounced BAY-ta) was born on July 2, 1906, in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine. His father, a physiologist at the university there, was Protestant and his mother Jewish. Hans was their only child. Displaying an early genius for mathematics, he excelled in school and received a Ph.D. in physics in 1928 at the University of Munich, graduating summa cum laude. He fled Germany after Hitler came to power, going first to England and then to America, arriving at Cornell in 1935. While helping to found the field of atomic physics, he became fascinated by nature's extremes. In 1938 he penned the equations that explain how the Sun shines and how stars in the prime of life feed their nuclear fires. In 1967 he won a Nobel Prize for the discovery. From 1943 to 1945 he headed the theoretical division of Los Alamos, the top-secret laboratory in New Mexico where thousands of scientists and technicians, fearful that Hitler might do it first, labored day and night to unlock the atom's power. Dr. Bethe coaxed some of world's brightest and most idiosyncratic experts to success as they toiled behind rows of barbed wire. Their atomic bomb shook the New Mexican desert on July 16, 1945. The next month the American military dropped similar ones on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, Dr. Bethe devoted himself not only to nuclear science but to the social dangers posed by that knowledge, in particular to keeping the bomb from ever killing people again. He advised the Federal Government on matters of weapons and arms limitation, becoming a prime mover behind the first East-West arms accord, the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which ended nuclear explosions in the atmosphere and permitted them only beneath the earth. That stopped the rain of radioactive fallout that had raised the risk of cancer and birth defects among many people. But Dr. Bethe wanted more. He campaigned for a complete cessation to all testing, contrary to Pentagon planners and politicians intent on redoubling the size of the nation's nuclear arsenal. The development of new types of nuclear arms requires numerous test firings and, as flaws inevitably come to light, design improvements. The absence of explosive testing sharply increases the odds of failure and virtually rules out the possibility of perfecting new designs. In the 1980's, Dr. Bethe was on the losing side of the political war over nuclear-arms development as the Reagan Administration pressed ahead with dozens of underground explosions. One series aimed at perfecting a new generation of bombs that fired deadly beams. In the 1990's, he was on the winning side as President Clinton signed, and the United Nations endorsed, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Its goal is to halt the development of new weapons of mass destruction by imposing a global ban on nuclear detonations. A remaining trouble, as Dr. Bethe sees it, is that the United States over the decades has become so good at designing nuclear arms that it still might make progress despite the ban. Indeed, the Clinton Administration recently began a $4-billion-a-year program of bomb maintenance that is endowing the weapons laboratories with all kinds of new tools and test equipment, including a $2.2 billion laser the size of the Rose Bowl that is to ignite tiny thermonuclear explosions. Critics fear the custodians might get carried away, begetting new designs and perhaps even new classes of nuclear arms. So it was that Dr. Bethe wrote President Clinton in April, asking for a pledge of no new weapons. ``The time has come for our nation to declare that it is not working, in any way, to develop further weapons of mass destruction,'' he wrote. The United States ``needs no more,'' Dr. Bethe stressed. ``Further, it is our own splendid weapons laboratories that are, by far and without question, the most likely to succeed in such nuclear inventions. Since any new types of weapons would, in time, spread to others and present a threat to us, it is logical for us not to pioneer further in this field.'' In the interview, Dr. Bethe waxed philosophic about the odds that his personal appeal might engender new Federal policy. ``It's a big step for the President to say so, but it's a small step for me,'' he mused. ``Maybe the laboratories will feel that my letter was useful and maybe they'll even follow my advice. I think that's all one can expect.'' The issue is important, he added. If the community of nations comes to view the United States as a nuclear hypocrite, whether true or not, that perception could threaten to undermine the new treaty and its ratification around the world. Instead, Dr. Bethe said, the United States must be seen as striving to obey the letter of the law. Dr. Bethe's face comes alive as the topic turns to his current scientific research: how a single aging star can suddenly explode with the power and brilliance of an entire galaxy of 100 billion stars. It seems like pure poetry given the light he himself is now shedding in his final years. ``I want to understand just how the mechanism works,'' Dr. Bethe said, ``how you get a shock wave that propels most of the star outward, propels it at very high speed.'' Most days, he said, he spends about four hours studying the nature of the exploding stars, which are known as supernovas. Occasionally, he works up to six hours. Theoretic physics is a quintessential young man's field, where geniuses often peak at the age of 30, like athletes. Very few make significant contributions at 50. But at 90, Dr. Bethe, a living legend among his peers, is still going strong. ``Here's my latest paper,'' he said with a grin, displaying it proudly on his cluttered desk. ``It has been accepted by The Astrophysical Journal.'' The main point, he said, ``is that it's easy to get the supernova to expel the outside material,'' eliminating the problems theorists once encountered. Dr. Bethe is not interrupting his research to write memoirs. Instead, a biographer is at work. ``It's much easier to have a biographer,'' he remarked, ``and he writes much better than I do.'' The back of his office door, in an easy-to-view position, held a poster of the Matterhorn. For nearly a half century, a small town at the foot of the great Swiss mountain has been a vacation spot for Dr. Bethe and his wife, Rose Ewald, whom he met in Germany and married in 1939 while the two were newcomers to the United States. ``I couldn't live without her,'' he said. His hair askew, his eyes agleam, Dr. Bethe looked a bit like an aged wizard on the verge of disappearing in a puff of smoke. He seemed at ease with his many lives over many decades and appeared to have reconciled his early work on the bomb with his current push to eliminate it. For him, doing the right thing in different periods of history seemed to call for different kinds of actions. ``I am a very happy person,'' he said with a relaxed smile. ``I wouldn't want to change what I did during my life.''

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today I am joining Senator D'Amato, along with Senators Chafee, Breaux, Hatch and Graham, in introducing bipartisan legislation to improve the existing tax credit for providing employment in Puerto Rico. Economic conditions in Puerto Rico are cause for serious concern. Over half of the population lives below the poverty line. Puerto Rico's average annual per capita income of approximately $7,500 is less than one-third the national average. Its average unemployment rate is well over twice the national average of 4.8 percent for May 1997. In recent years, Congress has twice imposed significant tax increases on companies doing business in Puerto Rico, first in 1993 and again in 1996. While it is unclear to what extent those tax changes will result in employer relocation or lost jobs, they undoubtedly have increased the vulnerability of the economy of Puerto Rico. Exacerbating this economic uncertainty, the tax changes are being phased in at the same time that Puerto Rico faces increased economic competition from low- wage Caribbean countries and from Mexico. This legislation would respond to these serious problems by building on the temporary wage credit that is currently provided in the Internal Revenue Code. Employers generally would be eligible for a tax credit equal to 60 percent of wages and fringe benefit expenses for employees located in Puerto Rico. New as well as existing employers would be rewarded for providing local jobs. The credit would remain in effect until the attainment of specific economic goals in Puerto Rico, which would trigger an automatic phaseout of the credit. I believe this investment in the long-term economic health and well- being of Puerto Rico is imperative. It is our obligation to the people of Puerto Rico, who are U.S. citizens but not represented in the Senate, to take note and address the very serious plight of their economy.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today I am joining Senator D'Amato, along with Senators Chafee, Breaux, Hatch and Graham, in introducing bipartisan legislation to improve the existing tax credit for providing employment in Puerto Rico. Economic conditions in Puerto Rico are cause for serious concern. Over half of the population lives below the poverty line. Puerto Rico's average annual per capita income of approximately $7,500 is less than one-third the national average. Its average unemployment rate is well over twice the national average of 4.8 percent for May 1997. In recent years, Congress has twice imposed significant tax increases on companies doing business in Puerto Rico, first in 1993 and again in 1996. While it is unclear to what extent those tax changes will result in employer relocation or lost jobs, they undoubtedly have increased the vulnerability of the economy of Puerto Rico. Exacerbating this economic uncertainty, the tax changes are being phased in at the same time that Puerto Rico faces increased economic competition from low- wage Caribbean countries and from Mexico. This legislation would respond to these serious problems by building on the temporary wage credit that is currently provided in the Internal Revenue Code. Employers generally would be eligible for a tax credit equal to 60 percent of wages and fringe benefit expenses for employees located in Puerto Rico. New as well as existing employers would be rewarded for providing local jobs. The credit would remain in effect until the attainment of specific economic goals in Puerto Rico, which would trigger an automatic phaseout of the credit. I believe this investment in the long-term economic health and well- being of Puerto Rico is imperative. It is our obligation to the people of Puerto Rico, who are U.S. citizens but not represented in the Senate, to take note and address the very serious plight of their economy.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to rise today in support of the nomination of James Harmon as President and Chairman of the Export- Import Bank of the United States. Mr. Harmon is a life-long resident of New York State. After he was born in New York City, his family moved to Mamaroneck where he was raised. After graduating from Brown University and then receiving his M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton Graduate School at the University of Pennsylvania, he returned to New York to launch his professional career. Currently, Mr. Harmon serves as senior chairman of Schroder Wertheim & Co., Inc., an international investment bank headquartered in New York City. Prior to his assumption of the senior chairmanship in 1996, Mr. Harmon was the chairman and chief executive officer of Schroder Wertheim where he oversaw the expansion of the firm's domestic and international investment banking activities. The merger of Schroder ple [UK] and Wertheim in 1985, initiated by Mr. Harmon, created a global investment bank with approximately 5,000 employees operating in 33 countries around the world. In addition, to his work at Schroder Wertheim, the finance background which Mr. Harmon would bring to the Export-Import Bank was honed during his tenure as a member of the Advisory Committee on International Capital Markets and former chairman of the nominating committee of the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange, Inc. Mr. Harmon's influence in New York City extends beyond banking. In 1994, along with former New York City Mayor David Dinkins, he founded the Barnard-Columbia University Center for Public Policy where he still serves as chairman of its advisory board. Mr. Harmon is also a member of the executive committee and board of directors of the New York City Partnership, the principal vehicle for private-sector activities which improve the city's economic and social health. I congratulate the distinguished nominee and wish him great good wishes and congratulations. I thank the President for bringing Mr. Harmon's nomination forward.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today the Senate joins the people of Israel as they celebrate the 30th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem. The Six-Day War began after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, spurred on by the Soviet Union, conspired with Syria, Jordan, and Iraq to have the people of Israel ``thrown into the sea.'' Nasser persuaded U.N. Secretary General U Thant to withdraw peacekeeping forces from the Gaza strip which for 10 years had acted as a buffer between Israel and Egypt. The Egyptians began amassing troops in the Sinai. Israel, surrounded by 250,000 Arab troops preparing for war, launched a devastating pre-preemptive strike on June 5. The war was a significant event in Israeli history and resulted in the reunification of Jerusalem, which before the war had been divided with all access to the Old City and its holy sites denied to Jews. I have been involved with this particular issue in some measure since my tenure as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations in 1975. By the early 1970's, a Soviet-led coalition wielded enormous power in the U.N. General Assembly and used it in an assault against the democracies of the world. In that regard, I cite an editorial in the New Republic which has said of the United Nations in that time that ``During the Cold War, the United Nations became a chamber of hypocrisy and proxy aggression.'' Those who had failed to destroy Israel on the field of battle joined those who wished to discredit all Western democratic governments in an unprecedented, sustained attack on the very right of a U.N. member state to exist within the family of nations. The efforts in the 1970's to delegitimize Israel came in many forms. None more insidious than the twin campaigns to declare Zionism to be a form of racism and to deny Israel's ties to Jerusalem. Those who ranted against the ``racist Tel Aviv regime'' were spewing two ugly lies. Both had at their heart a denial of Israel's right to exist. The first lie, the infamous Resolution 3379, was finally repealed on December 16, 1991, after the cold war had ended and as the Soviet Union was dissolving. The second we are still dealing with today. That Jerusalem is, and should remain Israel's undivided capital would seem an unremarkable statement, but for the insidious campaign--begun in the 1970's--to delegitimize Israel by denying her ties to Jerusalem. For far too long the United States acquiesced in this shameful lie by refusing to locate our embassy in Israel's capital city. As long as Israel's most important friend in the world refused to acknowledge that Israel's capital city is its own, we lent credibility and dangerous strength to the lie that Israel is somehow a misbegotten, illegitimate or transient state. This suggestion is all the more untenable when you consider that no other people on this planet have been identified as closely with any city as the people of Israel are with Jerusalem --a city which recently celebrated the 3000th anniversary of King David declaring it his capital. No Jewish religious ceremony is complete without mention of the Holy City. And twice a year, at the conclusion of the Passover Seder and the Day of Atonement services, all assembled repeat one of mankind's shortest and oldest prayers, ``Next Year in Jerusalem.'' Throughout the centuries Jews kept this pledge, often sacrificing their very lives to travel to, and live in, their holiest city. It should be noted that the first authoritative Turkish census of 1844 reported that Jews were by far the largest ethnic group in Jerusalem-- long before there was a West Jerusalem, or even any settlements outside the ancient walled city. When the modern State of Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, Jerusalem was the only logical choice for the new nation's capital, even if it was only a portion of Jerusalem--the Jordanian Arab Legion having occupied the eastern half of the city and expelled the Jewish population of the Old City. Jerusalem was sundered by barbed- wire and cinderblock and Israelis of all faiths and Jews of all citizenship were barred from even visiting the section under Jordanian occupation. The world was silent while the historic Jewish Quarter of the city was sacked and razed to the ground, synagogues and schools were destroyed, and 3,000 years of history were denied. This bizarre anomaly only ended on June 5, 1967, when Israel faced renewed aggression from Egypt and Syria, both then close friends of, and dependents of the Soviet Union. As hostilities commenced, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol sent a message to King Hussein of Jordan promising that, if Jordan refrained from entering the war, Israel would not take action against it. Jordan, however, attacked Israel that same day. Within the week, Israeli forces had captured all of Jerusalem, as well as other territories west of the Jordan River. The City of David was once again united, and has remained so since 1967. Under Israeli rule Jerusalem has flourished as it did not under Jordanian occupation, and the religious shrines of all faiths have been meticulously protected. Having made the odious link between Zionism and racism, the Soviet inspired coalition now set its sights on the heart of Israel: Jerusalem. The Seventh Conference of Heads of State of Government of Non-Aligned Countries, which convened in New Delhi, India, March 7 through 11, 1983, devoted several lengthy passages of its Final Declaration to excoriating Israel and its ally, the United States. Special attention was devoted to the question of Jerusalem's status. And not just East Jerusalem as had become the practice of such fora. I happened to be in New Delhi in the days before the summit began and was shown a draft of the Final Declaration. The draft passage of Israel read: ``Jerusalem is part of the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel should withdraw completely and unconditionally from it and restore it to Arab sovereignty.'' While surely this can be read as a provocative statement that all of Jerusalem is occupied Palestinian territory, when pressed on the point, my Indian hosts assured me that by Jerusalem they really only meant east Jerusalem, which is to say the Old City, or perhaps the Arab section. Hence, the significance of the revised final text of the declaration of some 101 nations. This is what the nonaligned declared in that session in 1983: West Jerusalem is part of the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel should withdraw completely and unconditionally from it and restore it to Arab sovereignty. West Jerusalem! The 101 nations of the Non-Aligned Movement declared that the Israeli Parliament and government buildings, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, the King David Hotel, the whole of the new city, did not belong to Israel. The State of Israel is not a nation. It has no capital, or so said the nonaligned. What was the response from Washington to such polemics? Not a word. In effect, our silence could have been interpreted as implying that we had no quarrel with those who state that Israel has no capital. And thus, that Israel is less than a sovereign nation. It was at this point that I brought the issue to the Senate floor. On October 31, 1983, I introduced S. 2031 which required the relocation of our Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Official documents published by the United States Government at the time, such as the State Department's ``Key Officers of Foreign Service Posts: Guide for Business Representatives,'' listed Jerusalem separate from Israel. The guide listed countries alphabetically, under each of which in subscript was enumerated the various diplomatic posts the United States Government maintained in that country. There was Ireland, with the one post in Dublin; then came Israel, with one diplomatic office listed, its address in Tel Aviv; then curiously several pages later, after Japan, there was listed a Consulate General in a country called Jerusalem. Then came Jordan and Kenya. That was how the ``Key Officers of Foreign Service Posts'' was organized until the end of 1994, when Secretary Christopher published the document with Jerusalem listed under the Israel heading. This is a welcome change. That simple refusal by the United States Government to associate our consulate in Jerusalem with the State of Israel carried much greater weight with the Non-Aligned countries than we realized. They would not have acted as they had done in 1983 if they did not think at some measure we were not in disagreement. Our documents have so implied. While my legislation did not pass in 1983, the drive to clarify the status of Jerusalem began to gain momentum in the Senate in 1990 when I submitted Senate Concurrent Resolution 106, which states simply: ``Jerusalem is and should remain the capital of the State of Israel.'' A simple declarative sentence which gained 85 cosponsors and was adopted unanimously by the Senate and by an overwhelming majority in the House. On November 8, 1995, the Dole-Moynihan Jerusalem Embassy Act became the law of the United States. The law states, as a matter of United States Government policy, that Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel, and should remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected as they are today. In the winter of 1981, I wrote an article in Commentary entitled ``Joining The Jackals'' in response to the Carter administration's disastrous support for a resolution challenging Israel's rights in Jerusalem. Sixteen years later, we find that the jackals are in retreat. Israelis and Palestinians are negotiating the details of their future. And the United States can make a simple but important contribution to this process by unequivocally recognizing Israel's chosen capital. The Senate has affirmed this simple proposition by unanimously adopting Senate Concurrent Resolution 21, on May 20, 1997, which commemorates the reunification of Jerusalem and states that: [The Senate] strongly believes that Jerusalem must remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected as they have been by Israel during the past 30 years; [and] Calls upon the President and Secretary of State to publicly affirm as a matter of United States policy that Jerusalem must remain and undivided capital of the state of Israel. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues for their strong support of this measure, and again wish to congratulate our friends in Israel on this important occasion.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to introduce a bill to authorize the placement of a statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi --Mahatma Gandhi--on Federal land across the street from the Indian embassy in Washington DC. The Government of India has offered a statue of Gandhi as a gift to the United States. In order to place it on Federal land, an act of Congress is required. This bill will fulfill just that purpose, and I thank the Senator from Florida [Mr. Mack] and the Senator from Maryland, [Mr. Sarbanes] for joining me in this endeavor. India is currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of its independence. Authorizing the placement of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, often called the father of the Indian nation, would serve as a fitting tribute to Indian democracy which has survived--in fact, thrived-- despite enormous challenges, and a symbol of the growing strength of the bonds between our two countries. It is particularly appropriate that a statue of Mahatma Gandhi be selected for this purpose. The effects of his non- violent actions and the philosophy which guided them were not limited to his country, nor his time. His influence in the United States was most notably felt in the civil rights movement, but has also infused all levels of our society. If I may invade ever so slightly the privacy of the President's luncheon table, in May 1994, Mr. Clinton had as his guest the distinguished Prime Minister of India, Mr. P.V. Narasimha Rao, who in his youth was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. In a graceful passage, Prime Minister Rao related how it came to pass that Mahatma Gandhi, caught up in the struggle for fair treatment to the Indian community in South Africa, and in consequence in jail, read Thoreau's essay on ``Civil Disobedience'' which confirmed his view that an honest man is duty-bound to violate unjust laws. He took this view home with him, and in the end the British raj gave way to an independent Republic of India. Then Martin Luther King, Jr., repatriated the idea and so began the great civil rights movement of this century. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has written of the singular influence Gandhi's message of nonviolent resistance had on him when he first learned of it while studying at Crozier Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He would later describe that influence in his first book, ``Stride Toward Freedom'': As I read I became deeply fascinated by [Gandhi's] philosophy of non-violent resistance . . . as I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see its potency in the area of social reform . . . prior to reading Gandhi, I had concluded that the love ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships . . . but after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was. . . . It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and non- violence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking for so many months . . . I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom . . . this principle became the guiding light of our movement. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation and Gandhi furnished the method. Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance was the guiding light of the American civil rights movement. As Dr. King wrote, ``Gandhi furnished the message.'' A statue of Gandhi, given as a gift from the Government of India, on a small plot of Federal land along Massachusetts Avenue, in front of the Indian Embassy, will stand not only as a tribute to the shared values of the two largest democracies in the world but will also pay tribute to the lasting influence of Gandhian thought on the United States. An influence that is so pervasive that when the President and the Prime Minister of India meet at the White House for lunch, a half-century after Gandhi's death, it is no surprise that he should be a topic of conversation.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to note that May 28 was a significant day in West Valley, NY, and in the field of nuclear waste disposal. In 1982 we authorized the West Valley demonstration project, in which we would learn to take liquid nuclear waste and mix it with glass. The process is called vitrification, and yields ten foot high glass logs that can be stored safely. After 14 years of preparation, research, and testing, vitrification began last July. On May 28th the 100th glass log was produced. The success of the vitrification process developed at West Valley and at the Savannah River in Georgia led the Department of Energy to select it as the preferred method of disposal for such wastes. This is an accomplishment that the many hundreds of people in western New York who worked on the project can be most proud of. They have another 110 logs to go at West Valley, but it is clear that the technology works. It can and will be replicated at other sites around the country, helping to solve one of our most vexing and serious waste disposal problems. Moreover, vitrification can be used to store other types of hazardous waste without fear of leaking. I congratulate all those at Westinghouse and the many agencies involved with the West Valley project for achieving this milestone.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the New York City borough once derided as ``the worst slum in America'' has been named an All-American City by the National Civic League. This achievement, announced last weekend by Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, is the result of a decade of hard work and careful planning. Improved economic conditions have spawned a renewal of spirit; a cultural and economic renaissance that gives hope for the future. In his 1997 State of the Borough Report, President Ferrer writes, ``Ten years ago, the Bronx was best known as the borough of window decals and trash-strewn vacant lots. Abandoned buildings. Illegal Medicaid mills. With its broken windows and broken dreams, the Borough of the Bronx stood as the international symbol of urban failure.'' What a difference a decade can make. The National Civic League Award confirms what the residents of the Bronx already knew; their community has undergone an unprecedented transformation. This metamorphosis is evidenced by strong economic growth, 522 new businesses, the preservation of the Old Bronx Borough Courthouse, improvements in transportation, 30,000 new housing units, new parks and recreational facilities, and a celebration of the cultural and ethnic diversity of the people of the Bronx. President Ferrer, New York City officials and community leaders deserve our praise and our admiration. Together, they have earned an honor for the Bronx that makes all New Yorkers proud. In so doing, they have provided hope to other communities throughout the world. I ask that news stories from the New York Times and the Daily News be printed in the Record. The material follows: [From the New York Times, June 9, 1997] The Bronx Is Named an All-America City The Bronx--once called ``the worst slum in America'' by former President Carter--is one of America's top communities, the National Civic League said, announcing its annual top 10 All-America Cities. Other winners were Fremont, Calif.; Hillside Neighborhood (Colorado Springs), Colo.; Aberdeen, Md.; St. Joseph, Mo.; Asheville, N.C.; Statesville, N.C.; Bismarck, N.D.; Aiken, S.C.; and Texas City, Tex. The 48-year-old competition, sponsored by the Allstate Foundation, judges cities based on citizen participation, collaborative approaches to problem-solving, diversity and education, among other criteria. Each winner receives a $10,000 grant. Genevieve Brooks, the Bronx's deputy borough president, said strong grass-roots efforts have helped stem crime, improve neighborhood blight and open access to primary health care for the poor. ``We are truly very excited that someone else sees the hard work that we have done,'' Ms. Brooks said.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to introduce a bill to authorize the placement of a statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi --Mahatma Gandhi--on Federal land across the street from the Indian embassy in Washington DC. The Government of India has offered a statue of Gandhi as a gift to the United States. In order to place it on Federal land, an act of Congress is required. This bill will fulfill just that purpose, and I thank the Senator from Florida [Mr. Mack] and the Senator from Maryland, [Mr. Sarbanes] for joining me in this endeavor. India is currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of its independence. Authorizing the placement of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, often called the father of the Indian nation, would serve as a fitting tribute to Indian democracy which has survived--in fact, thrived-- despite enormous challenges, and a symbol of the growing strength of the bonds between our two countries. It is particularly appropriate that a statue of Mahatma Gandhi be selected for this purpose. The effects of his non- violent actions and the philosophy which guided them were not limited to his country, nor his time. His influence in the United States was most notably felt in the civil rights movement, but has also infused all levels of our society. If I may invade ever so slightly the privacy of the President's luncheon table, in May 1994, Mr. Clinton had as his guest the distinguished Prime Minister of India, Mr. P.V. Narasimha Rao, who in his youth was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. In a graceful passage, Prime Minister Rao related how it came to pass that Mahatma Gandhi, caught up in the struggle for fair treatment to the Indian community in South Africa, and in consequence in jail, read Thoreau's essay on ``Civil Disobedience'' which confirmed his view that an honest man is duty-bound to violate unjust laws. He took this view home with him, and in the end the British raj gave way to an independent Republic of India. Then Martin Luther King, Jr., repatriated the idea and so began the great civil rights movement of this century. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has written of the singular influence Gandhi's message of nonviolent resistance had on him when he first learned of it while studying at Crozier Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He would later describe that influence in his first book, ``Stride Toward Freedom'': As I read I became deeply fascinated by [Gandhi's] philosophy of non-violent resistance . . . as I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi, my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see its potency in the area of social reform . . . prior to reading Gandhi, I had concluded that the love ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships . . . but after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was. . . . It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and non- violence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking for so many months . . . I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom . . . this principle became the guiding light of our movement. Christ furnished the spirit and motivation and Gandhi furnished the method. Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent resistance was the guiding light of the American civil rights movement. As Dr. King wrote, ``Gandhi furnished the message.'' A statue of Gandhi, given as a gift from the Government of India, on a small plot of Federal land along Massachusetts Avenue, in front of the Indian Embassy, will stand not only as a tribute to the shared values of the two largest democracies in the world but will also pay tribute to the lasting influence of Gandhian thought on the United States. An influence that is so pervasive that when the President and the Prime Minister of India meet at the White House for lunch, a half-century after Gandhi's death, it is no surprise that he should be a topic of conversation.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I wish to pay tribute to Roger G. Kennedy upon his retirement as director of the National Park Service and for a distinguished public service career as director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, vice president of the Ford Foundation, and special assistant, variously, to the U.S. Attorney General, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the Secretary of Labor. Mr. Kennedy will be honored at a grand celebration in New York's historic Battery Park tonight and I deeply regret that the press of Senate business prevents me from attending. Roger Kennedy is a man of enlightenment tastes. He has been a lawyer, a scholar, a writer, a public servant of the first rank, but his avocation has always been architectural history. In Orders From France, his masterpiece on architecture, Kennedy wrote brilliantly about the career of Joseph Jacques Ramee, the French architect who was trained at the court of Louis XVI and designed buildings all over Europe, but helped pave the way for American neoclassicism. In 1815, Ramee designed the magnificent campus of Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., one of the Nation's first liberal-arts colleges west of the Hudson River. Ramee's campus plan embodied a vision of education that entwined rationalism with the laws of nature--an ordered court opening to a romantically landscaped garden and the endless view to the west. Kennedy wrote that Ramee ``placed his buildings in the context of nature, but nature tamed, organized, made orderly, like the energies of students.'' A decade later the Union College campus, the first in the Nation to have a rotunda at its center, become the model for Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Latrobe to design the glorious University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Given Roger Kennedy's interest in Ramee, a man with both an architectural and educational vision, it is most fitting that we should honor him at Battery Park, the site of the Castle Clinton National Monument, one of the National Park Service's most important historical, cultural, and educational sites. The park is visited by over 3 million people a year who come to marvel at its spectacular views of New York's harbor, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, and drink of its rich history. For Battery Park's history fascinates. Fort Amsterdam was built by the Dutch on the site in 1626 and surrendered to the British in 1664, and subsequently renamed Fort George. In 1783, the British colors at Fort George were hauled down, marking the beginning of American rule. Fort George was subsequently demolished, its rubble added to the Manhattan shoreline. By 1811, a sturdy red sandstone fort--later named Castle Clinton--was erected. Castle Clinton served as everything but a military facility. It was first an entertainment center for concerts and theater. P.T. Barnum staged the American debut of Jenny Lind--the ``Swedish Nightingale''-- there in 1850. It then served as an immigration processing center, welcoming over 8 million immigrants from 1855 to 1889, prior to the opening of Ellis Island. In 1896, Castle Clinton reopened again as the first American aquarium, designed by the distinguished architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. Castle Clinton and its aquarium were then partially dismantled in the 1940's, costing New York one of its most treasured venues for cultural and educational enrichment. In 1946, Congress established the Castle Clinton National Monument to be administered by the National Park Service. In 1991, I incorporated into the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act an authorization of $2 million for the reconstruction of the Battery's seawall and promenade. I hoped those funds would serve as a catalyst to begin redeveloping Battery Park and implementing a master plan to address the Battery's needs for the 21st century. With his commitment to history and ``teaching the public through place,'' Roger Kennedy has helped spur that plan, working closely with the Conservancy for Historic Battery Park and its energetic and dedicated president, Warrie Price. I know that through his books, documentaries, and dedication to projects such as Battery Park, my friend Roger Kennedy shall continue to educate, inspire, and delight future students of American history, culture, and architecture. I wish him well at his gala tonight and for all the many years to come.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the Watertown Daily Times' Washington Bureau Chief Alan Emory marked a most felicitous occasion on Saturday. Alan has served the Watertown Daily Times and the people of New York State for a half a century. My colleague Senator D'Amato and I call him ``the Dean'' of the New York correspondents in our Nation's capital and, indeed, he is one of the Nation's most sagacious and indefatigable journalists. His capacity for balanced reporting was grounded in his upbringing. His father was a Democratic New York State Supreme Court judge, his mother a labor arbitrator for the Republican mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia. After Emory's childhood in New York City and Long Island and a fine education at Exeter, Harvard, and the Columbia School of Journalism, the young man headed north to seek his fortune. He landed a job at the Watertown Times in 1947 as its correspondent in Massena, a small city along the St. Lawrence Seaway. He steadily rose up the ranks to State editor, legislative correspondent, and editorial writer. In 1951, the newspaper opened a Washington bureau. He eagerly accepted the Johnson family's offer to become the bureau chief and has served the people of New York State in Washington ever since--46 years, a term almost twice as long as that of our State's longest serving Senator, Jacob Javits, who served for 24 years. Mr. Emory is one of the most prolific daily journalists in Washington. He writes up to six stories per day and two columns per week for the Sunday Commentary section. He also is the Washington columnist for the monthly magazine, The Empire State Report. He does all this with a standard of accuracy and insight that few can match. While the Washington Post in 1977 described Mr. Emory as being one of a vanishing breed of Washington correspondents for regional newspapers, he remains an example of journalistic excellence to young reporters. Mr. Emory has written more than just news stories. He also is one of the most gelastic lyricists ever to grace the Gridiron Club's talent pool. He has written music for Washington's most prestigious journalists' club ever since he joined it 21 years ago, and he produced many of its most amusing skits. He has also served the Gridiron Club in more serious ways--as its vice president for 1994, president for 1995, and current treasurer. Legislators and journalists are supposed to keep a healthy distance between them but I confess to a great personal affection for my old friend, Alan Emory. I congratulate him and his beloved wife, Nancy, as he celebrates 50 fine years with the Watertown Daily Times.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I spoke on Tuesday of this week about recent findings on the technological dimension of the year 2000 computer problem. I rise today to warn of the yet unseen political dimension of the problem. Newsweek's June 2d cover story, ``The Day the World Shuts Down,'' offered a telling scenario in which Vice President Gore, while campaigning for President in 2000, spends all of his time trying to justify why he hadn't addressed this issue. To wit: ``imagine Al Gore's spending the entire election campaign explaining why he didn't foresee the crisis.'' Vice President Gore is not alone here. Imagine 4 to 500 Congressmen doing the same. Come 2000, each of us will be held accountable if we have failed to deal effectively with the ``Y2K'' problem. Not a single Member of Congress right now, excepting those who can successfully pass the blame, will be absolved. Both parties will face a wholesale clearing of the decks. The deluge of blame will occur in the legal community, as well. Newsweek cited a conservative estimate of 1 trillion dollars worth of litigation resulting from this crisis--more than three times the yearly cost of all civil litigation in the United States. Make no mistake, almost all experts agree there will be no ``silver bullet'' fix. Correcting this problem is labor intensive and very time consuming. Millions of lines of computer code have to be reviewed and changed--in many computer languages so outdated they are foreign to younger programmers. And as Newsweek stated, the bug ``affects everything from ATM's to weapons systems. Virtually every government, State, and municipality, as well as every large, midsize, and small business in the world, is going to deal with this--in fact, if they haven't started already its just about too late.'' If American families are overtaxed by the IRS, improperly charged by their creditors, denied Social Security benefits, and faced with a constantly malfunctioning civil infrastructure, the blame will fall squarely on the shoulders of their Representatives in Washington. As Samuel Johnson observed, the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind. This prospect--the political repercussions--could finally get us up and running. We are not now. I have a first day bill, S. 22, creating a joint commission to take on the task as a national emergency. It is just that. No movement on my bill thus far. At this rate be ready to be out of a job in 2001.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to note the solemn anniversary of the massacre of Chinese students and prodemocracy activists in Tiananmen Square, and to honor the memory of the men and women who were so cruelly murdered by the totalitarian regime of the People's Republic of China. No one who witnessed the events will soon forget the images of students and others rallying around the Goddess of Democracy statue, modeled on Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World in New York harbor. The Chinese Government has long argued that democracy is inimical to Asian values and that Americans' insistence on human rights is a form of cultural imperialism. The students in Tiananmen Square provided the most compelling refutation of such tripe. Our hope that we were witnessing the dawn of a new era in China was dashed when, on June 4, 1989, the so-called People's Liberation Army moved into Tiananmen to thwart the aspirations of the Chinese people. The photograph of one lone Chinese individual--Wang Weilin--confronting a column of 18 PLA tanks is both a tribute to the courage of the Chinese people and a fitting emblem for a regime that believes it can crush ideas with 120 millimeter guns and hold back the tide of history with bayonets. I am sorry to say that since 1989, China has continued to silence dissent. So much so that the State Department reported this year that by 1996, ``all public dissent against the party and government was effectively silenced by intimidation, exile, the imposition of prison terms, administrative detention, or house arrest. No dissidents were known to be active at year's end.'' On this occasion, let us honor the memory of those who were slain and reiterate our solidarity with Chinese dissidents imprisoned by their government.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, of necessity, I was at the Finance Committee hearing on trade negotiating authority this morning, and so was unable to be on the floor to pay tribute--as so many others have done--to our esteemed colleague, Senator Thurmond, who now holds the record for Senate longevity. But I would like to pay such tribute now. Just about 1 year ago--June 13, 1996, to be precise--my daughter Maura and I traveled to the White House for a state dinner in honor of Ireland's president, Mary Robinson, and her husband Nicholas. We stopped at the northwest gate, to be scrutinized by White House security officials. An earnest young man in a uniform peered into our Jeep, studied my face, consulted a clipboard, and then said smartly, ``Good evening, Senator Thurmond!'' A fine compliment, to be mistaken for a man more robust, more vigorous, more irrepressible than individuals half his age or mine! I will leave to others the task of highlighting our beloved colleague's absolutely extraordinary private and public lives, which span the 20th century. A few things come to mind which bear mentioning, however. He learned his populist brand of politics from ``Pitchfork Ben'' Tillman--a man born 150 years ago--whose Senate seat he now occupies. And yet he was just re-elected for the eighth time, again with little difficulty. Senator Thurmond embodies the political and social transformation of the South. As a 40-year-old, he volunteered for active duty during World War II and landed at Normandy with the 82d Airborne Division. Immediately after the war, he was elected governor of South Carolina. While governor, in 1948, he ran for president as a States' Rights Democrat and garnered 39 electoral votes. He was elected to the Senate in 1954 as a write-in candidate, the first person ever elected to major office by this method. But true to a campaign pledge he made, he resigned in 1956 and stood for re-election. In 1964, he left the Democratic Party and became a Goldwater Republican, presaging--or, perhaps, ushering in--GOP gains in the South that continue to this day. He has served as a delegate to six Democratic and eight Republican National Conventions--a distinction I doubt anyone else shares. Suffice it to say that if Strom Thurmond did not exist, it might be necessary for us to invent him. Senator Thurmond has endured the loss of his first wife, the loss of his daughter. But through it all, he has been indomitable. Always optimistic. Unfailingly courteous, the epitome of a Southern gentleman--despite living in our current age, when good manners seem to elude us so readily. I hope he has a sense of the respect and affection we have for him. When I think of our colleague, I think of the wonderful poem, ``Ulysses'', by Alfred Lord Tennyson--one of the great English poets, who, I might add, died a mere decade before Senator Thurmond was born, and I would like to close my tribute with an excerpt from the poem: I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honour'd of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! As tho' to breathe were life! No one ever could accuse Senator Thurmond of ``rusting unburnish'd''!

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on my recent trip to Israel, I read an illustrative article in the Financial Times of London. It seems financial experts in England have come to a conclusion many financial institutions in the United States have failed, thus far, to reach. Namely, that it is too late to solve the year 2000 computer problem completely, and that it is hopeless to rely on a ``silver bullet'' to solve the problem. Instead, officials in the United Kingdom have concluded that the world economy faces a very time-consuming, labor- intensive project--the scope of which is unparalleled in modern history. Upon my return to the United States, I found that Newsweek had just published an important article that will increase awareness, I hope, to the point of action. Thus, I remind my colleagues of my bill (S. 22) to set up a commission responsible for ensuring that all executive agencies are compliant by 2000. I hope my colleagues recognize--as the British have begun to do--what we now face and what we must do to ensure the proper functioning not only of our Government, but of the economy. I ask that the Newsweek cover story, ``The Day the World Shuts Down'' and the Financial Times of London's story, ``Millenium Bomb Ticks Away'' be printed in the Record. The material follows: The Day the World Shuts Down Drink deep from your champagne glasses as the ball drops in Times Square to usher in the year 2000. Whether you imbibe or not, the hangover may begin immediately. The power may go out. Or the credit card you pull out to pay for dinner may no longer be valid. If you try an ATM to get cash, that may not work, either. Or the elevator that took you up to the party ballroom may be stuck on the ground floor. Or the parking garage you drove into earlier in the evening may charge you more than your yearly salary. Or your car might not start. Or the traffic lights might be on the blink. Or, when you get home, the phones may not work. The mail may show up, but your magazine subscriptions will have stopped, your government check may not arrive, your insurance policies may have expired. Or you may be out of a job. When you show up for work after the holiday, the factory or office building might be locked up, with a handwritten sign taped to the wall: out of business due to computer error. Could it really happen? Could the most anticipated New Year's Eve party in our lifetimes really usher in a digital nightmare when our wired-up-the-wazoo civilization grinds to a halt? Incredibly, according to computer experts, corporate information officers, congressional leaders and basically anyone who's given the matter a fair hearing, the answer is yes, yes, 2,000 times yes! Yes--unless we successfully complete the most ambitious and costly technology project in history, one where the payoff comes not in amassing riches or extending Web access, but securing raw survival. What's the problem? It's called, variously, the Year 2000 Problem, Y2K or the Millennium Bug. It represents the ultimate indignity: the world laid low by two lousy digits. The trouble is rooted in a seemingly trivial space-saving programming trick--dropping the first two numbers of the date, abbreviating, say, the year 1951 to ``51.'' This digital relic from the days when every byte of computer storage was precious was supposed to have been long gone by now, but the practice became standard. While any idiot familiar with the situation could figure out that the world's computers were on a collision course with the millennium, no one wanted to be the one to bring it up to management. And, really, which executive would welcome a message from nerddom that a few million bucks would be required to fix some obscure problem that wouldn't show up for several years? So only now, as the centurial countdown begins, are we learning that the digit-dropping trick has changed from clever to catastrophic. Because virtually all the mainframe computers that keep the world humming are riddled with software that refuses to recognize that when 1999 runs out, the year 2000 follows. When that date arrives, the computers are going to get very confused. (PCs aren't as affected; sidebar.) So that seemingly innocuous trick now affects everything from ATMs to weapons systems. Virtually every government, state and municipality, as well as every large, midsize and small business in the world, is going to have to deal with this--in fact, if they haven't started already it's just about too late. Fixing the problem requires painstaking work. The bill for all this? Gartner Group estimates it could go as high as $600 billion. That amount could easily fund a year's worth of all U.S. educational costs, preschool through grad school. It's Bill Gates times 30! That tab doesn't include the litigation that will inevitably follow the system failures. ``You can make some very reasonable extrapolations about litigation that take you over $1 trillion, and those are very conservative estimates,'' says Dean Morehous, a San Francisco lawyer. (Conservative or not, this is more than three times the yearly cost of all civil litigation in the United States.) Come on, you say. Two measly digits? Can't we just unleash some sort of robo-program on all that computer code and clean it up? Well, no. Forget about a silver bullet. It seems that in most mainframe programs, the date appears more often than ``M*A*S*H'' reruns on television--about once every 50 lines of code. Typically, it's hard to find those particular lines, because the original programs, often written in the ancient COBOL computer language, are quirky and undocumented. After all that analysis, you have to figure out how to rewrite the lines to correctly process the date. Only then comes the most time-consuming step: testing the rewritten program. It's a torturous process, but an absolutely necessary one. Because if we don''t swat the millennium Bug, we'll have troubles everywhere. Electricity. When the Hawaiian Electric utility in Honolulu ran tests on its system to see if it would be affected by the Y2K Bug, ``basically, it just stopped working,'' says systems analyst Wendell Ito. If the problem had gone unaddressed, not only would some customers have potentially lost power, but others could have got their juice at a higher frequency, in which case, ``the clocks would go faster, and some things could blow up,'' explains Ito. (Hawaiian Electric revamped the software and now claims to be ready for the year 2000.) Another concern is nuclear power; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that the Bug might affect ``security control, radiation monitoring . . . and accumulated burn-up programs [which involve calculations to estimate the hazard posed by radioactive fuel].'' Communications. ``If no one dealt with the year 2000 Bug, the [phone] network would not operate properly,'' says Eric Sumner Jr., a Lucent chief technology officer. He's not talking about dial tones, but things like billing (watch out for 100-year charges). Certain commercial operations that run phone systems by computer could also go silent if the software isn't fixed. Medicine. Besides the expected mess in billing systems, insurance claims and patient records, hospitals and doctors have to worry about embedded chips--microprocessors inside all sorts of devices that sometimes have date-sensitive controls. The year 2000 won't make pacemakers stop dead, but it could affect the data readouts it reports to physicians. Weapons. Newsweek has obtained an internal Pentagon study listing the Y2K impact on weapons and battlefield technologies. In their current state, ``a year 2000 problem exists'' in several key military technologies and they will require upgrading or adjustments. One intelligence system reverts to the year 1900, another reboots to 1969. The report confidently states that as far as nuclear devices like Trident missiles are concerned, ``there are no major obstacles which will prevent them from being totally Year 2000 compliant by Jan. 1999.'' Money. Banks and other financial institutions generally will go bonkers if they don't fix the year 2000 problem. The Senate Banking Committee is even worried that vertiginous computers might automatically erase the last 99 years worth of bank records. Some Y2K consultants are advising consumers to make sure they don't enter the 1999 holiday without obtaining hard-copy evidence of their assets. According to Jack Webb of HONOR Technologies, Inc., ATMs won't work without fixes. Food. In Britain computers at the Marks & Spencer company have already mistakenly ordered the destruction of tons of corned beef, believing they were more than 100 years old. Air-Traffic Control. ``We're still in the assessment stage, determining how big the problem is,'' says Dennis DeGaetano of the Federal Aviation Administration. One possible danger is computer lockup: while planes well keep moving at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2000, the screens monitoring them, if not upgraded, might lock. Or the computers might know where the planes were, but mix them up with flights recorded at the same time on a previous day. (``You can bet we're going to fix it,'' says DeGaetano.) Factories. Ford Motor Co. reports that if the Bug isn't fixed, its buildings could literally shut down--the factories have security systems linked to the year. ``Obviously, if you don't fix it, your business will stop in the year 2000,'' says Ford's David Principato. Even if a manufacturing company aggressively solves its own problem, though, it might be flummoxed by a supplier who delivers widgets in the wrong century. Just About Everything Else. Larry Martin, CEO of Data Dimensions, warns that if not adjusted, ``on Jan. 1, 2000, a lot of elevators could be dropping to the bottom of buildings,'' heading to the basement for inspections they believe are overdue. Similarly, automobiles have as many as 100 chips; if they are calendar-challenged, experts say, forget about driving. Computerized sprinkler systems could initiate icy midwinter drenchings. Like leaves rustling before a tornado, there have already been harbingers of a bureaucratic meltdown. At a state prison, a computer glitch misread the release date of prisoners and freed them prematurely. In Kansas, a 104-year- old woman was given a notice to enter kindergarten. Visa has had to recall some credit cards with expiration dates three years hence--the machines reading them thought they had expired in the McKinley administration. The $600 billion question is whether we'll fix the Bug in time. The good news is that the computer industry is finally responding to the challenge. For months now, squardrons of digital Jeremiahs have been addressing tech conferences with tales of impending apocalypse. The most sought-after is Peter de Jager, a bearded Canadian who scares the pants off audiences on a near-daily basis. ``If we shout from the rooftops, they accuse us of hype,'' he complains. ``But if we whisper in an alley, no one will listen.'' Last week in Boston de Jager demonstrated the rooftop approach: ``If you're not changing code by November of this year,'' he warned, ``you will not get this thing done on time--it's that simple. We still don't get it.'' But we're starting to. Most major corporations now have year 2000 task forces, with full-time workers funded by multimillion-dollar budgets, to fix a problem that their bosses finally understand. They're aided by an army of consultants and specialized companies. Some, like Data Dimensions, offer full Y2K service, providing tools, programmers and guidance. Others, like Peitus, sell special software to help find offending code and, sometimes, even convert it. (The final, most arduous stage, testing, still defies automation.) These firms are the new darlings of Wall Street. But buyer beware--consultants are coming out of the woodwork to exploit the desperation of late-coming companies. Someone might promise a phalanx of brilliant programmers to fix the Bug, but ``for all you know, it could be 10 people in a garage doing it by hand,'' says Ted Swoyer, a Peritus exec. Still, the creation of a Y2K-fixing infrastructure is encouraging. It's not uncommon to find gung-ho efforts like the one at Merrill Lynch: an 80-person Y2K division working in shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It'll cost the company $200 million, a sum that could hire Michael Eisner and fire Mike Ovitz. ``Our return on investment is zero,'' says senior VP Howard Sorgen. ``This will just enable us to stay in business.'' So maybe we're not in for a full-scale disaster. Let us assume--oh God let it be true--that those in charge of life- sustaining applications and services will keep their promises to fix what needs fixing. The costs and liabilities of not doing so are too huge not to. (On the other hand, when did you last see a huge software project that met its deadline and worked perfectly? Just asking.) Still, there will almost certainly be severe dislocations because of the mind-boggling enormity of the problem. Even the most diligent companies don't have total confidence they can fix everything. Consider BankBoston, the 15th largest commercial bank in the United States. Early in 1995, the company realized that ``it was a problem that could bring an institution to its knees,'' says David Iacino, who heads the bank's Team 2000. To stop a meltdown, BankBoston has to probe 60 million lines of code. the harder BankBoston works at solving the problem--it now has 40 people working full time on it--the more complicated it seems. ``Every day, when we see something new we haven't thought about, we get additional angst,'' said Iacino. Of the 200 BankBoston applications that need revamping, only a handful have been completed so far. BankBoston is now separating the essential work from the noncritical, and if the Bug causes less dire problems, like the heavy vault doors swinging open on New Year's Eve, it'll just cope: ``Vaults are physical things,'' says Iacino. ``If push comes to shove, we can put a guard in front.'' Now, if BankBoston, which started early and has been driving hard, is already thinking triage, what is going to happen to institutions that are still negotiating in the face of a nonnegotiable deadline? The Gartner Group is estimating that half of all businesses are going to fall short. ``There's still a large number of folks out there who haven't started,'' says Matt Hotle, Gartner's research director. As businesses finally come to terms with the inevitable, it's going to be panic time. In about a year, expect most of the commercial world to be totally obsessed with the Bug. ``Pretty soon we have to just flat stop doing other work,'' says Leo Verheul of California's Department of Motor Vehicles. But no amount of money or resources will postpone the year 2000. It will arrive on time, even if all too many computers fail to recognize its presence. ``It's staggering to start doing mind games on what percentage of companies will go out of business,'' says Gartner's Hotle. ``What is the impact to the economy of 1 percent going out of business?'' Or maybe more: Y2K expert Capers Jones predicts that more than 5 percent of all businesses will go bust. This would throw hundreds of thousands of people into the unemployment lines--applying for checks that may or may not come, depending on whether the government has successfully solved its Y2K problem. What is the U.S. government doing? Not enough. ``It's ironic that this administration that prides itself on being so high tech is not really facing up to the potential disaster that is down the road a little bit,'' says Sen. Fred Thompson. If Y2K indeed becomes a calamity, it may well be the vice president who suffers--imagine Al Gore's spending the entire election campaign explaining why he didn't foresee the crisis. (Gore declined to speak to Newsweek on Y2K problem). Here's the recipe for a federal breakdown: not enough time and not enough money. While the Office of Management and Budget claims the problem can be fixed for $2.3 billion, most experts think it will take $30 billion. Rep. Stephen Horn held hearings last year to see if the federal agencies were taking steps ``to prevent a possible computer disaster,'' and was flabbergasted at the lack of preparedness. His committee assigned each department a letter grade. A few, notably Social Security, were given A's. (The SSA has been working on the problem for eight years and now has it 65 percent licked; at that rate it will almost make the deadline.) Those with no plan in place--NASA, the Veterans Administration--got D's. Special dishonor was given to places where inaction could be critical, yet complacency still ruled, like the departments of Labor, Energy and Transportation. State governments are also up against the 2000 wall. California, for instance, finished its inventory last December and found that more than half of its 2,600 computer systems required fixes. Of those, 450 systems are considered ``mission critical,'' says the state's chief information officer John Thomas Flynn. These include computers that control toll bridges, traffic lights, lottery payments, prisoner releases, welfare checks, tax collection and the handling of toxic chemicals. As bad as it seems in the United States, the rest of the world is lagging far behind in fixing the problem. Britain has recently awakened to the crisis--a survey late last year showed that 90 percent of board directors knew of it--but the head of Britain's Taskforce 2000, Robin Guenier, worries that only a fraction really understand what's required. ``I'm not saying we're doomed, but if we are not doing better in six months, I really will be worried,'' he says. He expects the cost to top $50 billion. On the Continent, things are much worse; most of the information-processing energy is devoted to the Euro-currency, and observers fear that when countries like Germany and France finally tackle 2000, it might be too late. Russia seems complacent. Recently Mikhail Gorbachev met with Representative Horn in Washington, expressing concern about how far behind Russia is in dealing with the Bug; Gorbachev raised its possible impact on the country's nuclear safeguards. The list can go on, and on and on. ``It's like an iceberg,'' says Leon Kappelman, an academic and Y2K consultant. ``I would certainly be uncomfortable if Wall Street were to close for a few days, but I can live with that. But what if the water system starts sending water out before it's safe? Or a chemical plant goes nuts? Anybody who tells you `Oh, it's OK' without knowing that it's been tested is in denial.'' It's tough out there on the front lines of Y2K. And in less than a thousand days, it might be tough everywhere. ``There are two kinds of people,'' says Nigel Martin-Jones of Data Dimensions. ``Those who aren't working on it and aren't worried, and those who are working on it and are terrified.'' Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, as we were voting on various matters this morning, leading to passage of the concurrent resolution on the budget for the fiscal year 1998, which I voted against, I found myself musing of the very different time just 4 years ago when a starkly divided Senate passed a far more stentorian measure than that before us today. In an interval between votes, I wrote to the members of the Finance Committee of that time: As we close out this embarrassing budget season, cutting taxes, increasing some spending, promising a balanced budget somewhere in the next century, it might restore a measure of self respect to recollect a not distant time when we knew better and did differently. 1993. Democrats had won the Presidency and held the Congress. The world was tranquil enough, but our finances were seemingly a wreck. In the twelve previous years the debt had quadrupled and there was no money for anything. On another occasion we can discuss how this came about: I am concerned here with what we did. The Finance Committee (with some help from others) put together and passed, in committee, on the floor, the largest package of tax increases and spending cuts in history. Our purpose was direct and avowed. To show we could govern. The more conservative our critics, the more apocalyptic the pronouncements. Ruin all round was surely at hand. In the event, we succeeded beyond imagining. The latest Monthly Treasury Statement shows a booming economy throwing off unexampled revenue. (Recall, a fortnight ago the Congressional Budget Office discovered an additional $225 billion in anticipated revenues for the next five years. Fortuitous, perhaps, but not fake.) A nice detail? Last month the Treasury paid off $65 billion in debt, the largest repayment ever. It was all done by the narrowest of margins. Bob Kerrey at the very last moment--he had wanted an even sterner measure. But we did do it. I would like to think it will not now be undone. This is not yet clear. The contrast between the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 and this legislation is illuminated by an important article that appeared in yesterday's Wall Street Journal under this headline: Tax on Wealthy Is Boosting U.S. Revenue Treasury Says 1993 Increase Is Helping Cut the Deficit The article, by Michael M. Phillips, reports that the cataclysmic predictions of so many Republicans about the economic effects of the 1993 legislation have not been borne out. To the contrary, as a result of the 1993 act, the deficit as a percentage of GDP is at its lowest level in a quarter century, and the expansion is in its 74th month, with full unemployment and little or no inflation. The Treasury is awash with revenue. As Mr. Phillips writes: The inflow provides persuasive, if not conclusive, evidence in the continuing debate over the economic impact of the 1993 tax increases, which raised marginal income-tax rates to 35% from 31% on taxable incomes between $140,000 and $250,000, and to 39.6% on incomes above $250,000. Which leads to another important point, about which I will again quote the Wall Street Journal: The recent flood of revenue pouring into Treasury coffers-- enough to push the federal budget to a record $93.94 billion surplus for the month of April--appears to have come mostly from the nation's biggest earners, indicating that the controversial tax increase may indeed be taking from the rich. How do we know this? Because the unexpectedly high revenue inflows have come from taxes other than those withheld by employers. These ``non-withheld'' taxes are mainly paid by wealthier taxpayers, who owe taxes on other income such as stock options, bonuses, and the like. In April, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement, the Treasury took in $110.8 billion in nonwithheld revenues, almost twice what it received in 1992, before enactment of the 1993 legislation. It fell to the Finance Committee to assemble the package of spending cuts and, yes, tax increases that would pass the Senate. It was not easy. In the end, we put the bill through without a single Republican vote. One Republican Senator declared on this floor: We are buying a one way ticket to a recession * * * When all is said and done, people will pay more taxes, the economy will create fewer jobs, Government will spend more money, and the American people will be worse off. It was not pleasant. But we were clear. On June 23, 1993, as the Senate debate on the bill was coming to a close, I put it this way: Why do we have to do it, Mr. President? Because after 12 years of mounting deficits and devastatingly increased debt, we are sending a message to the financial markets of the United States and of the world, which now have as much effect on our affairs in a manner never before known because of the debt we have incurred, that we are going to stop it. We made the tough choices in 1993, and they have paid off handsomely in economic and fiscal dividends. Now compare 1993 with what we are doing today. By failing to address the overstatement of the cost of living by the Consumer Price Index, this budget misses a historic opportunity. An accurate cost-of-living index, as recommended by the Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index appointed by the Finance Committee--the Boskin Commission-- would have saved $1 trillion in 12 years, freeing us from the protracted fiscal crisis of the last two decades. Had we seized the opportunity, we could now be taking on big issues, such as the future of Medicare and Social Security. Instead, the all-consuming quest to reach balance--if only for a moment--in the year 2002 has reduced this to a series of small debates over often derisory sums. This budget also fails to address the demographic problems facing our two biggest Federal entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare. These are the serious issues in Federal budgeting, yet this resolution postpones the day when Congress must, inevitably, confront them. Even so, it should be recorded that a correction of 1.1 percentage points in the measurement of the cost of living would in an instant have kept Social Security in actuarial balance until the year 2052. This resolution unwisely calls for net tax cuts of $250 billion over 10 years. Coupled with this budget's failure to address long-term entitlement spending, these tax cuts will lead us right back to giant deficits in the outyears. Preliminary estimates, which are just beginning to come in, indicate that in the second 10 years, 2008-2017, the proposed tax cuts could lose in excess of half of $1 trillion. Even if one believes, as some do in good faith, that tax cuts are necessary and appropriate at this point, the particular tax cuts agreed to by the White House and the Republican leadership will make for poor tax policy. It is beyond any serious dispute that the proposed reductions in the rate of tax on capital gains will disproportionately go to the very wealthiest taxpayers. Likewise the estate tax relief called for in this budget will benefit a tiny fraction--less than 1.5 percent--of estates. And the proposed tax cuts for education, most thoughtful observers agree, could be better spent in ways that would demonstrably help students and their families, such as making permanent the provisions for employer-provided educational assistance. Nor does this budget follow the spirit of the 1993 legislation in the area of deficit reduction. The provisions of the 1993 act were initially estimated to reduce the deficit by $500 billion over 5 years; in fact it reduced the deficit by nearly twice that amount. The deficit reduction in the budget before us is questionable; its balance in the year 2002 will be momentary at best. And it makes only feeble, shortsighted choices in tax and entitlement policy. In sum, Mr. President, I voted ``no'' because this budget is an unworthy successor to the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which was perhaps the most consequential legislation of this decade. I ask unanimous consent that the article from the Wall Street Journal of May 22, 1997, be included in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. On April 22, 1997, I introduced S. 625, the Auto Choice Reform Act of 1997, along with Senators Joe Lieberman, Mitch McConnell, Slade Gorton, and Rod Grams. S. 625 is designed to reform the Nation's auto-insurance system by giving motorists a low-cost alternative for bodily injury coverage that provides quicker, more comprehensive recovery of economic losses. The Auto Choice Reform Act would remove many incentives for fraud, which is endemic to the current auto-insurance system. On Wednesday, May 21, 1997, for instance the Nassau County District Attorney's office arrested 20 people involved in a massive insurance fraud scam. Those arrested by operation backbone included lawyers, chiropractors, and a doctor. Our bill would eliminate many of the incentives that promote this kind of abuse. I ask that the Newsday article, ``Real Charges: Fake Injuries Lead to 20 Arrests in Insurance Scams,'' be printed in the Record. The article follows: [From Newsday, Thursday, May 22, 1997] Real Charges (By Pete Bowles) After prepping a ``patient'' for four minutes on how to fake injuries during a medical exam--including a demonstration on moaning ``ooh and aah''--Hempstead chiropractor Martin Drasin said his client was ready for an award-winning performance, according to a videotape made by an undercover investigator. ``I know how they are going to try to trick you up,'' Drasin told the agent, who carried a hidden video recorder. Drasin advised the man on what to do when asked to move his legs up and down at the exam. ``Give an ooh and an aah and say, `I can't do that,' '' he said, and added: ``Move slow. You'll get the Oscar here.'' Drasin, 42, whose video performance was played by Nassau District Attorney Denis Dillon at a news conference, was among 20 people--including 12 chiropractors, four attorneys and an orthopedist--charged yesterday with submitting fraudulent claims for automobile no-fault insurance, disability and workers' compensation insurance. Dillon said the 20 were nabbed during a two-year investigation called Operation Backbone, in which law- enforcement agents posing as accident victims sought legal and medical assistance from attorneys and chiropractors. The targets had been selected by insurance companies who suspected skullduggery. All the meetings were recorded, Dillon said. Playing the part of accident victims were undercover operatives from the DA's office, the Nassau County Police Department, the National Insurance Crime Bureau and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. All but one of the suspects were arrested yesterday on a variety of charges, including insurance fraud, grand larceny, scheming to defraud and falsifying business records. Freeport attorney Alvin Dorfman, 62, a former Democratic committeeman who challenged Dillon for the Democratic designation for district attorney in 1974, was said to be in Israel on vacation and is expected to surrender next week for arraignment in U.S. District Court in Uniondale. He was charged with mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud. ``Both my clients maintain they are completely innocent,'' said Dorfman's attorney, Stephen Scaring, who also represents Garden City attorney Gerard McLoughlin, 49, who was charged with insurance fraud and attempted grand larceny. ``We are somewhat shocked that this kind of undercover operation would occur, and we are confident that the tapes themselves will likely establish the innocence of each of these defendants.'' Seventeen defendants pleaded innocent in First District Court in Hempstead and were released. They face up to 7 years in prison if convicted. Two others, Dorfman's legal assistant, Mariela Brito, 33, and Woodbury chiropractor Jonathan Tepper, were arraigned in federal court in Uniondale on mail fraud and conspiracy charges and ordered held on $50,000 bond each. They face up to 5 years' imprisonment if convicted. Calls left at the offices of the 20 were not returned. At a news conference with local and federal law-enforcement officials, Dillon said the medical providers billed insurance companies for services not rendered and gave undercover agents letters stating they were disabled and unable to work because of injuries suffered in accidents. He said the accidents were on ``paper only'' and were filed with police as a ruse. In some instances, Dillon said, the agents received chiropractic treatment fewer than 12 times but the chiropractors billed insurance companies for more than 100 visits. He charged that chiropractor George Mitzman, 41, of Westbury, treated one agent 11 times and billed the insurance company for 150 visits. Another defendant, chiropractor Michael Roth, 29, with offices in Bellmore and Syosset, treated an agent once but billed for 90 visits, Dillon said. Dillon said the four attorneys assisted the purported accident victims in fabricating phony lost-wages claims, while in fact the victims said they were working, and submitted falsified documents supporting the claims. He said the attorneys also referred victims to medical providers to obtain disability letters and advised them how to exaggerate injuries. In one case cited by Dillon, Hempstead attorney Mitchell Rachlin, 47, was charged with collecting more than $626,000 from his insurance carrier for a phony disability claim he filed in 1990 for injuries he sustained in an accident. Rachlin, who claimed to be totally disabled, was shown on a videotape walking around his law office as he advised an undercover agent on how to file a claim for lost wages for a traffic accident. On another videotape played by Dillon, Dr. Martin Lehman, 64, a Wantagh orthopedist, is shown meeting with an undercover operative who tells Lehman she was working despite being injured in an accident. ``You are not working as far as insurance is concerned,'' Lehman is heard telling the woman. Without performing a physical examination, Lehman gave the woman a disability form, Dillon said. Also charged were: chiropractors Robert Moore, 43, and Jay Levine, 44, with offices in Franklin Square, and their receptionist, Maureen MacPherson, 30; Rockville Centre chiropractor Joseph Huseman III, 39; Franklin Square attorney Scott Garil, 29; North Bellmore chiropractor Susan Schulman, 36; Plainview chiropractor Christopher Haas, 32; Oceanside chiropractor Jeffrey Finkelstein, 41; Lynbrook chiropractor Steven Angel, 40; Port Washington, chiropractor Charles Schnier, 45; and Robert Cannon, 59, of Massapequa, a medical- supply distributor.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join once again with the distinguished Chairman of the Finance Committee, Senator Roth, to reintroduce legislation that will, we believe, help to dispel the fog that sometimes shrouds our discussions of trade policy. This bill would, simply and directly, replace the term ``most favored nation'' with the phrase ``normal trade relations''--a more accurate, less muddled phrase that better describes this fundamental principle of trade policy. The concept is well established. It has been traced by historians to the 13th century. More particularly, to a clause in the treaty of November 8, 1226, in which the Emperor Frederick II conceded to the city of Marseilles the privileges previously granted to the citizens of Pisa and of Genoa. Not greater privileges, but merely the same as had been extended to others. The term itself--``most favored nation''--dates to the end of the 17th century. And has been nearly as long a cornerstone of American trade policy. Since the 18th century, our trade policy has been grounded on the principle of nondiscrimination: the vast majority of our trading partners receive treatment equal to the treatment we give every other trading partner. In no sense can this fairly be characterized as most favored treatment; rather it is the treatment that we normally accord our trading partners. And yet we continue to use that 17th century term in treaties and agreements, in executive orders and in trade laws, a term that, even at the beginning, was a misnomer. There is, Mr. President, no single most favored nation. There never really was. As noted in a 1919 report to the Congress by the United States Tariff Commission, known today as the United States International Trade Commission: It is neither the purpose nor the effect of the most- favored-nation clause to establish a ``most favored nation''; on the contrary its use implies the intention that the maximum of advantages which either of the parties to a treaty has extended or shall extend to any third State--for the moment the ``most-favored''--shall be given or be made accessible to the other party. That is, the most favored nation is not the nation with which we are negotiating, but rather a third nation altogether that happens to benefit at the moment from lower tariffs or other preferences with respect to some particular product. The most-favored-nation principle means merely that we will grant to our negotiating partner the same terms that we have given to that third country, for the moment more favored. Little wonder, then, that the term has created confusion. And yet we must continue to discuss the concept for the simple reason that there exists still, in U.S. law, a very unfavorable tariff--the Smoot-Hawley tariff (stemming from the 1930 act of the same name). This was the last tariff schedule enacted line-by-line by the Congress and it produced the highest tariff rates, overall, in our history. It is still on the books, though it applies only to a handful of countries. In response to the disaster that followed enactment of the Smoot- Hawley tariff, which, at the time applied to all of our trading partners, Congress authorized the Roosevelt administration to negotiate a series of trade agreements aimed at reducing tariffs worldwide. These efforts culminated in a series of trade agreements with individual countries, and ultimately paved the way for a series of broad multilateral negotiations under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that reduced American tariffs, just as they slashed tariffs worldwide. These much lower tariff rates are the tariffs that we call our most-favored-nation tariff rates and they apply, in fact, to the vast majority of countries. They are thus the norm, and not in any way more favorable tariffs. They are, indeed, not the lowest tariff rates that the United States applies. We have free-trade arrangements with Canada, Israel, and Mexico that call for the complete elimination of tariffs. We have eliminated tariffs on certain imports from developing countries under the Generalized System of Preferences, from Caribbean nations under the Caribbean Basin Initiative and from Andean countries under the Andean Trade Preferences Act. The tariff rates under these regimes are, in all cases, lower than what we now call our most-favored-nation tariff rates. Hence the confusion, and hence the need to find a more apt phrase. Mr. President, this legislation will be familiar to most of my colleagues. The identical bill was introduced in the 104th Congress with the cosponsorship of the entire Finance Committee and it passed the Senate by unanimous consent. I expect that we will be able to repeat that victory in the 105th Congress, and I hope that we can do so promptly. Let me underscore that this legislation in no way alters the bedrock principles of equal treatment or nondiscrimination. It merely drops an outdated term in favor of one that ought to help make our trade policy more comprehensible to the American public.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join once again with the distinguished Chairman of the Finance Committee, Senator Roth, to reintroduce legislation that will, we believe, help to dispel the fog that sometimes shrouds our discussions of trade policy. This bill would, simply and directly, replace the term ``most favored nation'' with the phrase ``normal trade relations''--a more accurate, less muddled phrase that better describes this fundamental principle of trade policy. The concept is well established. It has been traced by historians to the 13th century. More particularly, to a clause in the treaty of November 8, 1226, in which the Emperor Frederick II conceded to the city of Marseilles the privileges previously granted to the citizens of Pisa and of Genoa. Not greater privileges, but merely the same as had been extended to others. The term itself--``most favored nation''--dates to the end of the 17th century. And has been nearly as long a cornerstone of American trade policy. Since the 18th century, our trade policy has been grounded on the principle of nondiscrimination: the vast majority of our trading partners receive treatment equal to the treatment we give every other trading partner. In no sense can this fairly be characterized as most favored treatment; rather it is the treatment that we normally accord our trading partners. And yet we continue to use that 17th century term in treaties and agreements, in executive orders and in trade laws, a term that, even at the beginning, was a misnomer. There is, Mr. President, no single most favored nation. There never really was. As noted in a 1919 report to the Congress by the United States Tariff Commission, known today as the United States International Trade Commission: It is neither the purpose nor the effect of the most- favored-nation clause to establish a ``most favored nation''; on the contrary its use implies the intention that the maximum of advantages which either of the parties to a treaty has extended or shall extend to any third State--for the moment the ``most-favored''--shall be given or be made accessible to the other party. That is, the most favored nation is not the nation with which we are negotiating, but rather a third nation altogether that happens to benefit at the moment from lower tariffs or other preferences with respect to some particular product. The most-favored-nation principle means merely that we will grant to our negotiating partner the same terms that we have given to that third country, for the moment more favored. Little wonder, then, that the term has created confusion. And yet we must continue to discuss the concept for the simple reason that there exists still, in U.S. law, a very unfavorable tariff--the Smoot-Hawley tariff (stemming from the 1930 act of the same name). This was the last tariff schedule enacted line-by-line by the Congress and it produced the highest tariff rates, overall, in our history. It is still on the books, though it applies only to a handful of countries. In response to the disaster that followed enactment of the Smoot- Hawley tariff, which, at the time applied to all of our trading partners, Congress authorized the Roosevelt administration to negotiate a series of trade agreements aimed at reducing tariffs worldwide. These efforts culminated in a series of trade agreements with individual countries, and ultimately paved the way for a series of broad multilateral negotiations under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that reduced American tariffs, just as they slashed tariffs worldwide. These much lower tariff rates are the tariffs that we call our most-favored-nation tariff rates and they apply, in fact, to the vast majority of countries. They are thus the norm, and not in any way more favorable tariffs. They are, indeed, not the lowest tariff rates that the United States applies. We have free-trade arrangements with Canada, Israel, and Mexico that call for the complete elimination of tariffs. We have eliminated tariffs on certain imports from developing countries under the Generalized System of Preferences, from Caribbean nations under the Caribbean Basin Initiative and from Andean countries under the Andean Trade Preferences Act. The tariff rates under these regimes are, in all cases, lower than what we now call our most-favored-nation tariff rates. Hence the confusion, and hence the need to find a more apt phrase. Mr. President, this legislation will be familiar to most of my colleagues. The identical bill was introduced in the 104th Congress with the cosponsorship of the entire Finance Committee and it passed the Senate by unanimous consent. I expect that we will be able to repeat that victory in the 105th Congress, and I hope that we can do so promptly. Let me underscore that this legislation in no way alters the bedrock principles of equal treatment or nondiscrimination. It merely drops an outdated term in favor of one that ought to help make our trade policy more comprehensible to the American public.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I rise today to bring to the attention of my colleagues the publication of ``The Courage to Stand Alone,'' the letters of Wei Jingsheng, a fearless and outspoken dissident currently imprisoned by the People's Republic of China. For two decades Wei Jingsheng has been a leader in the struggle for democracy in China, as well as a passionate advocate of human rights for the people of Tibet. Among the many crimes for which Wei has spent the last 18 years in prison, perhaps none is so onerous to his persecutors as his presumption to hold the totalitarian regime of the People's Republic of China to its own standard of law. As Andrew J. Nathan writes in his Foreword: Wei's powerful statement of self-defense [at his 1979 trial] exposes how little difference there is between the new legal system and the old absence of a legal system. The prosecutors and judges search for a crime and find none, but they obey orders. They sentence Wei to fifteen years. The outside world is outraged, but most Chinese at the time are wiser. They see Wei as the victim of his own naivete. He failed to appreciate the unwritten limits to free speech and legal reform. He committed the greatest offense in a dictatorship: taking words at face value. The Courage to Stand Alone serves as a testament of resistance to the totalitarian phenomenon so brilliantly dissected in our century by the likes of Hannah Arendt and George Orwell. Wei's letters stand as the literary equivalent of the famous photograph of the lone Chinese individual confronting a column of tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In his letter of June 15, 1991 Wei writes: It is precisely because human rights are independent of the will of the government, and even independent of the will of all mankind, that people fight for the realization and expansion of human rights as a natural and unprovoked matter of course. They gradually come to the realization that the more widespread and reliable the protection of human rights is, the more their own human rights are protected. Just as man's understanding of objective truths and objective laws is a gradual process, man's understanding and comprehension of human rights is a gradual process. Just as man's grasp and utilization of objective laws is a progressive process, man's protection of the theory and practice of human rights is a progressive process. Wei Jingsheng--by his words and conduct--has done much to advance our understanding of human rights in China and throughout the world. I commend ``The Courage to Stand Alone'' to all Senators, and I look forward to the day when Wei Jingsheng will again be free to stand together with other Chinese dissidents who struggle to bring a measure of democracy to their ancient and long-suffering homeland.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to record and to celebrate Robert D. Novak's 40 years of Washington journalism, as he himself records this morning in a Washington Post column ``What a Change 40 Years Makes.'' Forty years in journalism, as he writes, ``an association with Congress that continues today.'' An association of rare civility and, too often alas, of deadly accuracy. His access, energy, good spirits, and rage for the truth are equaled only by his lifelong friend and partner Rowland Evans. Top Drawer and Front Page, there has never been the like of them, and I choose to think never will be, for there are some national treasures that truly are unique. Senators will note Mr. Novak's observation that ``The capital city of 1957 was at once shabbier and far better governed than today's glittering but pothole-scarred Washington.'' A concise way to make the point that as American Government has reached for beyond its grasp on so many social issues, it has accepted an appalling decline in the fundaments of good government, such as street paving. He notes that in 1957 Congress itself ``was vastly less imperial. Admission to the Capitol and office buildings was open, without the need for photo ID cards and security checks.'' One might add our buildings were not surrounded by concrete barriers and guardposts. One could even go so far as to note that one could even drive down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. That thoroughfare having now been blocked off. Albeit, ever alert to the need for austerity it has, in its eastern reaches at 15th Street, been turned into a parking lot complete with parking meters. I came to Washington in 1961 with the Kennedy administration. Bob Novak was a force for government openness even then. Irresistible as a friend and devastating as an analyst. Why only last week he revealed to an unwary world that the proposal for a more accurate cost of living adjustment in Federal finances was the ``culmination of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's masterful campaign to perpetuate big government * * * '' No matter, just so long as his concern over big Government serves to perpetuate Bob Novak. Let us agree for at least a half century. Let hope, as indeed we may, that his beloved Geraldine will see to this. He fought for his nation as a lieutenant during the Korean war and has been fighting for it ever since. Mr. President, I ask that Mr. Novak's column from today's Washington Post be printed in the Record. The column follows: [From the Washington Post, May 12, 1997] What a Change 40 Years Makes (By Robert D. Novak) On May 13, 1957, I reported to the Associated Press bureau in Washington as a reporter transferred from Indianapolis. I was immediately dispatched to Capitol Hill for Midwestern regional coverage. Within a week, I was detailed to help report the uproarious hearings of the Senate Rackets Committee, which was engaged in a bipartisan assault on Jimmy Hoffa. That put me in personal contact with John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Edward Bennett Williams and Pierre Salinger--heady stuff for a 26-year-old. So began my 40 years in Washington and association with Congress that continues today. The transformation of the city and the institution over four decades has been breathtaking. The capital city of 1957 was at once shabbier and far better governed than today's glittering but pothole-scarred Washington. Neither chic restaurants nor huge lawyer-lobbyist firms had yet appeared (Bob Strauss's arrival was years in the future). The city was a little more Southern and far less New Yorkish than today. The smell of money was not yet redolent. Nobody came to Washington then seeking the equivalent of a 1997 seven-figure income, but they sure do today. Congress was not yet consumed with fund raising and was vastly less imperial. Admission to the Capitol and office buildings was open, without the need for photo ID cards and security checks. Members of Congress had not yet adopted Japanese-style boutonnieres, and few employed a press secretary. Nearly all readily responded to telephone calls from a low-level AP reporter without an aide asking what he wanted. Accessibility stemmed in part from many fewer staffers on Capitol Hill--4,500 then, compared with 16,000 now (filling three additional big office buildings). In 1957, $117 million was appropriated to run Congress, but only $67 million ($386 million adjusted for inflation) was spent. That compares with $2.2 billion in 1997. With fewer staffers, lawmakers did much of their own work. At night on his portable typewriter, Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen wrote summaries of every bill reported by every Senate committee. Unlike today, floor leaders--including the imperious Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson--actually spent hours on the floor. Floor debate was spirited--sometimes mean-spirited. It was the summer of 1957 when Democratic Sen. Robert S. Kerr called Republican Sen. Homer Capehart, to his face, ``a rancid tub of ignorance.'' But issues were not polarized along party lines, with a bipartisan conservative coalition often in control. Both congressional parties shared the conviction that the less government the better--an attitude assailed as ``extreme'' today. ``Ike Fights to Save Budget,'' said an eight-column front- page Post headline my first week in Washington, referring to a nationally televised plea by President Dwight D. Eisenhower for public support against congressional budget-cutting. Eisenhower the previous November had become the first Republican president reelected since 1900 and promptly faced the Democratic-controlled Congress seeking to reduce his $71.8 billion budget substantially--about $449.9 billion in 1997 money (less than one-third of President Clinton's $1.7 trillion budget). The government then was taxing 17.8 percent and spending 17 percent of gross domestic product; the comparable figures for 1997 are 19.2 percent and 20.8 percent. In 1957, it ran a budget surplus at 0.8 percent of GDP, compared with today's hoped-for deficit of 1.8 percent. The government had not grown since New Deal days and would not until Lyndon Johnson's Great Society eight years in the future. In 1957, regulation was but a glimmer of what it would become. There was no Education Department, no Energy Department, no Environmental Protection Agency, no Legal Services Corp., no National Endowment for the Arts, no Corporation for Public Broadcasting, no Women, Infants and Children food program. Nor, except for factions on the left in both parties, was there demand for all this. Libertarians such as Charles Murray would like to peel back to 1957, but it is hard to find any member of Congress who agrees. Rather, Republicans now acquiesce in Clinton's insistence on still greater expansion of government. Americans unquestionably are less free than they were in 1957. Whether, on balance, they in return have been blessed with a better life is doubtful.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, on Monday of last week, Murray Kempton died. With his passing, we mark the end of a legend in New York, and in American journalism. Kempton was the kindest man and toughest reporter we have known in our time. A certain incandescent sweetness now departs. Yet his memory and, yes, his legacy remain. The Daily News' columnist Sidney Zion captured Kempton's unique ability and thus legacy when Zion wrote: ``Kempton used his power to condemn, but loved his right to absolve. And when he absolved the sinner, he owned the territory.'' This was Kempton's singular power. With characteristic flair, Kempton would challenge corruption with voracity. Then instead of reveling in victory, would show compassion for the humans beneath the deeds and absolve the sins of some of the greatest losers in New York's history. Carmine DeSapio, Alger Hiss, Carmine Persico, Roy Cohn. Such was the power of the words which Kempton wielded. When the reformers in the City had finally overcome DeSapio, one of the great Tammany bosses, Kempton wrote, as only he could: ``The age of Pericles had begun because we were rid of Carmine DeSapio. One had to walk carefully to avoid being stabbed by the lilies bursting in the pavements. I wish the reformers luck--with less Christian sincerity than Carmine DeSapio does. I will be a long time forgiving them on this one.'' Kempton felt sympathy and respect even for the rogue. He stood up for the loser whether it was Carmine DeSapio, a deposed dictator, or a shunned local New Yorker. J. Edgar Hoover once called Mr. Kempton a snake and a rat. From one who was once referred to by Mr. Hoover as a skunk, I take pride in knowing that my work was seen in the same light as Kempton's. But I fear no one else has what the Washington Post called, ``[Kempton's] skeptical sympathy'' required to continue his work. The Age of Kempton is over. Budding writers would do well to re-read and emulate his work; public figures continue to thank and rue the day Kempton chose them to be subject of his column; and for we who knew him, only sorrow bursts through the cracks in our hearts today. I ask that the following articles about Murray Kempton be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks. [From the New York Post, May 9, 1997] Kempton's Funeral Is a Lesson in Simplicity (By Christopher Francescani) Even in death, Murray Kempton's disarming humility ruled the day. There were no eulogies at the legendary columnist's simple Upper West Side funeral yesterday, although hundreds of the city's greatest literary, political and newspaper voices were on hand. There were no limousines, although Kempton was considered royalty among the city's press corps. And there were no gaudy floral tributes, only small bursts of potted cherry blossoms, Casablanca lilies and white azaleas perched unassumingly on the altar. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, who sounded off for decades on every aspect of the city he loved, was remembered--and remembered well. ``The funeral was pure Murray,'' Post columnist Jack Newfield said. ``His manner, his grace, his kindliness, his humility beyond self-effacement. He was the benchmark.'' Kempton, 79, whose gentle elegance and amusing eccentricities won him the respect of virtually all of his ``fellow workers,'' died Monday at a Manhattan nursing home. In a note written in 1989, entitled, ``My Funeral,'' he'd requested a brief ceremony with no eulogies. His body was cremated earlier this week. ``He chose a simple ceremony in the classic Anglican manner, which focuses on God's love and the equality of all persons in the face of death,'' said the Rev. Gaylord Hitchcock of the Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch. ``His [funeral] runs against the grain of most American funerals, where the Mass turns into a celebration of the person.'' Kempton, known among his colleagues as much for his intricate sentence structure as for riding his three-speed bicycle to news events--jazz humming through his headphones-- spent most of his 55-year career at the New York Post and Newsday. The Baltimore-born scribe, who once ran copy for H.L. Mencken, won a Pulitzer for commentary in 1985. The pews of the tiny Gothic-style church where Kempton worshiped for decades were filled to capacity 30 minutes before the ceremony began. William F. Buckley Jr. and Mayor Giuliani pressed their way through the crowd. Writer Nora Ephron sat pensively in a rear pew as the church bell rang out 79 times, once for each year of Kempton's life. Columnist Jimmy Breslin, Post editor Ken Chandler, Daily News editor Pete Hamill, writers Kurt Vonnegut, Phillip Roth and Calvin Trillin, and cartoonist Jules Feiffer were there-- as were former Mayor David Dinkins, Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger and hosts of other dignitaries. Off to the side of the altar, a choir clad in black sung hymns softly in Latin. Some of Kempton's favorite passages from the Bible took the place of speeches. Instead, eulogies were whispered between pews and among the crowd of mourners outside the chapel. ``He was the last great gentleman poet,'' said Post columinist Liz Smith. Writer David Halberstam said, ``I'll miss meeting him on the street, and having the choice of talking about the Knicks, the mayor, the Clintons, anything. He was great fun on every subject.'' ``He was the soul of kindness,'' said WCBS Radio reporter Irene Cornell. New York Post managing editor Marc Kalech edited Kempton's copy in the late 1970s, when the columnist worked at The Post. ``Editing Kempton was like editing Shakespeare,'' Kalech said. ``You'd read it, you'd struggle to understand it, and then you wouldn't touch it.'' But perhaps the greatest tribute to one of New York's greatest columnists came from someone who never met Kempton. ``I'm just a reader,'' explained Ray Belsky, a retired health-care consultant who sat alone in the back of the church. ``He touched me with his integrity. There was a courtliness about everything he wrote. Even when he wrote about common men, and common problems, he gave them the dignity they deserved. ``I never met him. I just admired him and I read him . . . every day.''

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I am pleased that the Senate has agreed to Senator Hollings' amendment to allow the Bureau of the Census to plan for sampling in the 2000 census. In that year the Bureau proposes to count each census tract by mail and then by sending out enumerators until they have responses for 90 percent of the addresses. The Bureau proposes to then use sampling to count the remaining 10 percent of addresses in each tract, based on what they know of the 90 percent. This would provide a more accurate census than we get by repeatedly sending enumerators to hard-to-count locations and would save $500 million or more in personnel costs. The census plan is supported by the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council, which was directed by Congress in 1992 to study ways to achieve the most accurate population count possible. The NRC report finds that the Bureau should: make a good faith effort to count everyone, but then truncate physical enumeration after a reasonable effort to reach nonrespondents. The number and character of the remaining nonrespondents should then be estimated through sampling. The supplemental appropriations bill would prohibit the Bureau from planning for a census that includes sampling, and would even prevent the Bureau from planning to send out the long form, from which we get crucial and legally required information about education, employment, immigration, housing, and many other areas of American life. The long form gives us a detailed picture of the populace that we cannot do without. Mr. President, the taking of a census goes back centuries. I quote from the King James version of the Bible, chapter two of Luke: ``And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed [or enrolled, according to the footnote] . . . And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city.'' The early censuses were taken to enable the ruler or ruling government to tax or raise an army. The first census for more sociological reasons was taken in Nuremberg in 1449. So it was not a new idea to the Founding Fathers when they wrote it into the Constitution to facilitate fair taxation and accurate apportionment of the House of Representatives, the latter of which was the foundation of the Great Compromise that has served us well ever since. The Constitution says in Article I, Section 2: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons. The actual enumeration shall be made within three years of the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall direct by law. Opponents of sampling often say that the Constitution calls for an ``actual enumeration'', and this requires an actual headcount rather than any statistical inference about those we know we miss every time. However, numerous lower court rulings have found that it is permissible under the Constitution to use sampling. When the New York case was decided last year, the Supreme Court found that the decision by the Secretary of Commerce not to adjust the 1990 census for the undercount was a reasonable choice in areas where technical experts disagree, and within the discretion granted to the Federal Government. The opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist stated that ``We do not decide whether the Constitution might prohibit Congress from conducting the type of statistical adjustment considered here.'' So it appears to be left to the executive and legislative branches to decide how best to count the populace. I note that we have not taken an actual enumeration the way the Founding Fathers envisioned since 1960, after which enumerators going to every door were replaced with mail-in responses. The Constitution provides for a postal system, but did not direct that the census be taken by mail. Yet we do it that way. Why not sample if that is a further improvement? Sampling would go far toward correcting one of the most serious flaws in the census, the undercount. Statistical work in the 1940's demonstrated that we can estimate how many people the census misses. The estimate for 1940 was 5.4 percent of the population. After decreasing steadily to 1.2 percent in 1980, the 1990 undercount increased to 1.8 percent, or more than 4 million people. More significantly, the undercount is not distributed evenly. The differential undercount, as it is known, of minorities was 4.4 percent for blacks, 5.0 percent for Hispanics, 2.3 percent for Asian-Pacific Islanders, and 4.5 percent for Native Americans, compared with 1.2 percent for non-Hispanic whites. The difference between the black and nonblack undercount was the largest since 1940. By disproportionately missing minorities, we deprive them of equal representation in Congress and of proportionate funding from Federal programs based on population. The Census Bureau estimates that the total undercount will reach 1.9 percent in 2000 if the 1990 methods are used instead of sampling. Mr. President, I have some history with the undercount issue. In 1966 when I became director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at MIT and Harvard, I asked Prof. David Heer to work with me in planning a conference to publicize the nonwhite undercount in the 1960 census and to foster concern about the problems of obtaining a full enumeration, especially of the urban poor. I ask unanimous consent that my forward to the report from that conference be printed in the Record, for it is, save for some small numerical changes, disturbingly still relevant. Sampling is the key to the problem and we must proceed with it.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, as I am sure many of my colleagues are aware, this week--May 4-May 10--is Arson Awareness Week. All over the Nation, people are coming together to combat arson and take back their communities. One such place where this has been happening is Utica, a city of about 70,000 people in upstate New York. Utica is a pilot city in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's [FEMA] Partnership for Arson Awareness and Prevention. FEMA Director James Lee Witt is heading up the National Arson Prevention Initiative [NAPI], a combined effort of FEMA and the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and the Treasury. President Clinton asked Director Witt to create the NAPI in response to the many church fires which recently occurred in the South. In March, Utica Mayor Edward Hanna and Oneida County Executive Ralph Eannace formed a local arson prevention coalition and have been working with FEMA officials. Throughout this week and in the future, the people of Utica will band together to take back their city from scourge of arson fires which it has recently seen. On Tuesday, students at the Martin Luther King School heard a public education program on arson from officers of the Utica Fire Department and the New York State Office of Fire Prevention. On Wednesday, risk assessments were conducted at senior citizen's centers, and on Friday, the Utica National Insurance Co's. are presenting a fire prevention grant to residents of the neighborhood near the intersections of South and Steuben Streets. On Saturday, Director Witt will cap off the week with a visit to Utica. The day's activities will include boarding up abandoned structures to make them less susceptible to arson and conducting fire drills at several churches in the morning and having a parade and arson prevention rally in the afternoon. I would like to thank Director Witt for making Utica a pilot city in this program and for visiting Utica. Working together, the people of Utica will reclaim their city from arson. Mr. President, I ask that an article by Director Witt on Arson Awareness Week be printed in the Record. The article follows: What Are You Doing To Target Arson in Your Community? Washington.--In the wake of the church fires last summer, the President asked me to lead a National Arson Prevention Initiative. He wanted to focus the efforts and the resources of the Federal government on supporting community-based activities to prevent arson. The initiative the President implemented was national in scope--not regional, and not focused on houses of worship exclusively. This effort represents the commitment by numerous Federal agencies, governments at all levels, the private sector, and the voluntary community to greatly reduce the 750 fatalities and over $2 billion in losses caused by arson in this country every year. National Arson Awareness Week, which begins Sunday (May 4) and runs through Saturday, May 10th, is the culmination of this initiative. In a very real sense, it marks the first anniversary of an unprecedented crusade to combat a national problem that far too often maims and kills and can destroy the fabric of our communities. The theme of this week is ``Target Arson,'' and each community should ask themselves what they are doing in the fight against arson. Arson is preventable. What is disturbing is that one out of every four fires is intentionally set. That means that someone--a fellow human being--consciously decides for whatever reason to destroy a home, a car, a house of worship, or a business. And in that moment they have attacked the lives, the livelihoods, and the spirit of a community. Arson is a national problem, but it is fundamentally a local problem. This war--like most wars--must be won in the trenches. Local fire and police departments are well-trained and ready to mount heroic efforts. But when the doors of the fire station go up to respond, you have already lost the battle to prevent that fire from happening. In the end, the real responsibility for stopping arson lies with the community--with students, teachers, business leaders, parents, the clergy, and civic organizations. Arson does affect everyone--and every taxpayer should be vitally concerned about arson's destructive and deadly toll. Think of the cost of rolling out fire trucks to deal with a toilet paper fire at a school. Consider that teenagers account for more than 55 percent of all deliberately set blazes, and if you include youth 20 years and younger that figure climbs to 61.2 percent. Then think of the cost of teachers and students killed or scarred for the rest of their lives and a smoldering school that must be rebuilt. Think again of the houses and businesses that disappear from the tax rolls because of arson, and the services that suffer in a community as the result. Imagine what it's like to pull up outside your church or house of worship, and realize that it disappeared in flames the night before. As we observe National Arson Awareness Week, three communities--Charlotte, NC; Macon, GA; and Utica, NY--will be launching grassroots arson prevention coalitions that could well become models for other American cities. These are communities that took firm hold of their arson problems and have put together a partnership from across their community to prevent future arson fires. These communities will step forward as model arson prevention partnerships with a flurry of week-long activity, that includes boarding up abandoned buildings, cleaning up litter and debris from vacant properties, conducting arson prevention training programs in schools and community centers, and promoting arson awareness through public education campaigns and neighborhood watch rallies. Dozens of other cities across the country will also be hosting National Arson Awareness Week events. The most effective way of combating any problem, including arson, it to prevent it from happening. That takes more than federal agencies and federal dollars. It takes you and your family and your friends. It takes your entire community. So ask yourself this week--what you are doing to ``target arson'' in your community? Then get involved--organize a neighborhood watch, assess arson risks in your community, participate in prevention training programs, call your local fire department or call the National Arson Prevention Clearinghouse at 1-888-603-3100 for some arson prevention ideas. Remember fire stops with you.