Daniel Moynihan

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I intend to propose an amendment that will enable us to improve our welfare system rather than dismantle it. Under my amendment, Aid to Families With Dependent Children will remain a Federal entitlement program. [[Page S7226]] The amendment I propose will, over 7 years, restore $55 billion to income security programs, including Aid to Families With Dependent Children, Supplemental Security Income and Unemployment Insurance under the jurisdiction of the Finance Committee. My amendment is deficit neutral. It is financed by using part of the fiscal dividend that will accrue to the Federal Government if we balance the budget. The budget resolution reported out by the Senate Budget Committee reserves the fiscal dividend for tax cuts. I fail to understand how we can justify tax cuts at the same time that we are, for example: withdrawing the Federal guarantee of support for dependent children; reducing government programs like Medicare and Medicaid by over 15 percent; and threatening an end to vital public services through the elimination of subsidies for AMTRAK. As I stated on introducing the Family Support Act of 1995 last Thursday: It is beyond belief that in the middle of the Great Depression in the 1930's, we provided for children a minimum benefit to keep them alive, and in the middle of a successful 1990's with a 7 trillion dollar economy we're going to take that away. Senators who have been following the subject of welfare policy will recognize the bill I introduced last week as a successor to the Family Support Act of 1988, which was adopted in this Chamber just this side of 7 years ago, on September 29, 1988, by a vote of 96 to 1. When President Ronald Reagan signed the bill in the Rose Garden on October 13, he thanked those who, as he said, shared the credit for ``this landmark legislation'', including Senator Dole, Senator Packwood, and Senator Bentsen, as well as Representatives Rostenkowski, Hank Brown, Michel, Frenzel, and Downey. These members of Congress will be remembered, President Reagan said; for accomplishing what many have attempted, but no one has achieved in several decades: a meaningful redirection of our welfare system. It will seem unimaginable to us today, but the Family Support Act was not a partisan political measure. Together Republicans and Democrats passed a bill that was based largely on what we had learned during the 1980's about how to get welfare recipients into work. A number of States had used the flexibility we gave them in 1981 to do this, and there had been careful evaluation of their efforts. The Family Support Act of 1988 recognized a mutual obligation. The Government would provide training and child care, and help the parent find a job. But the parent had an obligation to do what was required. The proposal that is envisaged in this budget resolution is vastly different. It gives up entirely on a national commitment. We have a problem in this country that we share with most of the rest of the western world, and that is the problem of the breakdown in family structure. As recently as 1960 the percentage of children born to single parents was about 5 percent. A manageable problem. It is now about 33 percent. The same trend is happening in Canada. The out-of- wedlock birth rate in the United Kingdom and France exceeds 30 percent, very close to ours. And we do not know what to do about it. Dr. Lawrence Mead, professor at New York University, now visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, testified before the Finance Committee on March 9 of this year. He asked: Can the forces behind growing welfare be stemmed? Conservative analysts say that unwed pregnancy is the greatest evil in welfare, the cause not only of dependency but other social ills. On all sides, people call for a ``family policy'' that would solve this problem. But we have no such policy. The great fact is that neither policymakers nor researchers have found any incentive, benefit, or other intervention that can do much to cut the unwed pregnancy rate. What we do know is that the program we enacted in 1988, the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training [JOBS] Program, can have a modest, but important effect. Dr. Mead told the committee that: A tough JOBS program appears to be one reason why Wisconsin has reduced its welfare rolls, despite generous welfare benefits. Very likely, JOBS has operated to restrain welfare growth nationwide. Lawrence Townsend, Director of the Department of Public Social Services of Riverside County, CA, who runs what is recognized as one of the most successful JOBS programs in the country, spoke to the Finance Committee on March 20: * * * of the importance of the existence of a Federally mandated, properly focused, and adequately funded JOBS program. If designed properly, the JOBS program can be one of the best vehicles for assisting those who are AFDC-dependent to successfully traverse the road to self sufficiency. The Family Support Act of 1995 builds on what we know. Evaluation confirms that the JOBS program works. As a result of evaluation we are learning how programs can perform better, by increasing participation requirements, and placing more emphasis on actual work. States need more flexibility to test new policies. My bill allows States to set their own rules for assets and to design their own rules for eligibility for the Unemployed Parent program--welfare benefits for 2-parent families. It says that a decision on a waiver will be made within 90 days. And we can fulfill our obligations to our Nation's children and still balance the budget in a reasonable timeframe if we eschew tax cuts. Faced with a huge budget deficits I have consistently opposed tax cuts in any shape or form. As I indicated 10 days ago on ``Meet the Press'': I dropped (the President's) tax cut plan the moment I heard about it. I oppose the tax cuts advocated in the Contract for America. The Contract for America's tax proposals were incorporated into the House budget resolution--a resolution that would eliminate the Federal guarantee on AFDC for dependent children while providing funding for a 7-year $354 billion tax cut. And I am opposed to the tax cuts implicit in the budget resolution now before the Senate. You may make the tax cuts appear costless by stipulating that tax reduction will be financed with the so-called fiscal dividend--estimated by CBO to be about $170 billion. But why should the fiscal dividend be reserved for tax cuts? Who can have a greater claim on our conscience than poor children. I am simply asking the Senate to adjust less than one-half of 1 percent of total spending provided for in the budget resolution in favor of impoverished children. Have we really come to the point, at the close of the 20th century, when that is too much to ask? In a series of speeches in February of this year I opposed the constitutional amendment to balance the budget. I stated then, and still believe, that we can and will balance the budget without a constitutional requirement. I noted the progress that had already been made as a result of a $500 billion deficit reduction program enacted in 1993--enacted I might add without one Republican vote in either the Senate or the House. As a result of deficit reduction measures enacted in 1993, the deficit has declined for three straight years--from $290 billion in fiscal year 1992 to an estimated $175 billion for the current fiscal year. Let us proceed with good cheer knowing that we can get a balanced budget without ending an entitlement for dependent children. Medicare/Medicaid cuts

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, this morning's Washington Post carried a fine editorial describing the long and distinguished public career of the Honorable Les Aspin, the former Secretary of Defense and our former colleague. The editorial observed that Secretary Aspin ``was above all a man engaged in the most important, high-stakes issues of his time.'' Having read this excellent account of Les Aspin's three decades of service to his country, I do not know what more I could say about my friend. I would accordingly ask that the editorial from today's Washington Post be printed in the Record, and I urge every Senator to read it. The editorial follows: [From the Washington Post, May 23, 1995] Les Aspin We are trying to recall a moment in the past several decades when someone or other--or this political group or that party wing or the other lobby--wasn't mad at Les Aspin. And we come up empty. That is because the former defense secretary and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who died of a stroke at the age of 56 on Sunday, was above all a man engaged in the most important, high-stakes issues of his time. From his days as a college academic star and then a Defense Department whiz kid, as an internal government Vietnam War critic, a teacher and, for 22 years, a member of Congress from Wisconsin, Les Aspin never [[Page S7259]] lost either his capacity to master the most complicated issues of public policy or his frankly kid-like, ebullient enthusiasm for trying to resolve them. He was also a politician, and generally a pretty successful one. Some of the problems Mr. Aspin had, especially on the Hill, were the all but inevitable lot of anyone trying to navigate the shoals of military defense policy in a (then) majority Democratic Party that was bitterly and irreconcilably divided between hawks and doves; unsurprisingly, his maneuverings as chairman of Armed Services frequently infuriated one or the other side, especially in the unending struggle over developing weapons systems. His own inclinations evolved from the more dovish to the more hawkish over the years. As Bill Clinton's first defense secretary, Mr. Aspin had the equally challenging job of trying to reconcile Pentagon thinking with Democratic Party thinking in the matter of Mr. Clinton's proposals for altering the status of gays in the military. His most notable accomplishment as secretary was the review of Pentagon budgeting and procurement procedures that he worked up in his 11 months there. His most notable public stand was that taken--rightly, in our view--in support of President Bush's policy on Kuwait at a time when so many other Democratic Party leaders in Congress were in doubt or in flight. Mr. Aspin was humiliated by being pushed out of the Defense Department by Mr. Clinton and the other rivalrous members of Mr. Clinton's national security team. But the thing about the former defense secretary was that he couldn't stay humiliated or give vent to personal bitterness over such things. He came back to serve as head of the Clinton advisory group reviewing national intelligence. The faults for which Mr. Aspin was allegedly fired--imprecision, inability to manage the huge defense establishment and slowness in coming to clear-cut action decisions--were presumably real. Such defects would certainly go with the general makeup of the man: intellectually restless, always turning the thing over and over in his mind, more given to trying to imagine and grasp all the aspects of a problem than to measuring or indexing them. We can understand how this came to grief for Mr. Aspin in the Clinton administration. But you need only read the recently published confessional book by Mr. Aspin's predecessor and onetime employer, Robert McNamara, to understand, as well, that an opposite, superefficient turn of mind is not exactly the key to defense policy salvation. Maybe Les Aspin was the wrong man for his months in the Clinton Cabinet. The same cannot in any respect be said of his roughly three decades of productive public service.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the current issue of Time magazine includes a beautifully written article by Tammerliin Drummond describing the plight of more than 200 Haitian refugee children being kept at a place called Camp Nine at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. The children escaped Haiti on rafts nearly a year ago, and many of them are orphans. News has reached Guantanamo that the Cuban refugees living there will soon be admitted to the United States, yet there is no end in sight for the interned Haitian children. A report in the Washington Post over the weekend indicates efforts are being made to help the Haitian children, but under current United States policy, they are ineligible for ``humanitarian parole'' to enter the United States because democratic government has been restored in Haiti. The children will be returned to Haiti if relatives can be located there; 60 children have been repatriated thus far. Sadly, however, some of those children have ended up not with relatives, but living in the streets of Haiti. I commend Tammy Drummond for calling attention to the awful conditions these children are enduring in Cuba. It is not easy for a reporter to gain access to the Haitian children at Camp Nine, but Tammy Drummond did it and we are in her debt. I hope her compelling account will be read widely in the executive branch, and that the children will be released from the camp as soon as possible. I ask that Tammerliin Drummond's article from the May 22, 1995, issue of Time magazine be printed in the Record. The article follows: [From Time Magazine, May 22, 1995] Suffer the Children--Haitian Orphans Are Stranded in Guantanamo (By Tammerliin Drummond) At Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuban refugees cavort happily on the beach in a scene reminiscent of a Club Med. They have good reason to celebrate: soon they will be flying off to freedom in the U.S. Meanwhile, less than a mile away, more than 200 Haitian children lounge listlessly under drab green tents, seeking refuge from the harsh midday sun. Camp Nine, their home since last June, is a desolate patch of cactus- filled desert where the only sign of life is an occasional banana rat or iguana. A fence encircles the camp, which is guarded by American soldiers. The children, many of them orphans, have languished in this dusty purgatory for nearly a year. Despite the efforts of immigrants' rights groups, only a few of the Haitian minors--who range in age from infants to teenagers, including some who are pregnant--have been allowed to enter the U.S. ``When I heard that the U.S. was going to let 15,000 Cubans into the country and leave 450 Haitians in Guantanamo, I felt like someone had stuck me with a knife,'' says a 17-year-old boy. ``This is a very cruel situation.'' (U.S. military officials will not allow the children to be quoted by name.) When Attorney General Janet Reno announced the new Cuban policy on May 3, dozens of furious Haitian teens first tried to organize a hunger strike with the younger children, then went on a rampage, pelting soldiers with rocks and setting tents on fire. No one was seriously injured in the melee, but a handful of soldiers and children ended up with cuts and bruises. Earlier this year some of the children attempted suicide by drinking bleach. Marleine Bastien, a Miami social worker, counseled a desperate 16-year-old boy who tried to hang himself from a tree branch in February. He survived only because the branch snapped under his weight. ``Many of these children have expressed suicidal ideas,'' says Bastien. ``Are we going to have to wait for a fatality before something is done?'' During the rafter crisis last summer, more than 20,000 Haitians and 30,000 Cubans were intercepted at sea and delivered to hastily erected camps in Guarntamamo. Among the refugees were 321 unaccompanied Cuban children, all of whom have since have been paroled to the U.S. But of the 356 unaccompanied Haitian children who ended up a Gitmo, only 22 have been admitted to the U.S., because they needed medical attention or had a parent already in the States. Since the island has officially returned to democratic rule, immigration officials say, Haitians don't qualify for humanitarian parole. Some of these children were orphaned in Haiti, and set to sea alone or with friends; others saw their parents drown. Because of the violence the deprivation they have experienced, many of the kids are terrified of going back to Haiti. Yet the official U.S. policy for these children is to locate relatives in Haiti and send the kids to them. So far, 60 Haitian children have been returned. But last week Florida Rural Legal Services released a report condemning the repatriations. ``The claim that what is being done is in the best interest of the children is a farce,'' said Niels Frenzen, a public-interest lawyer who helped track down some of the returnees and found that many were homeless or living in squalor with strangers. ``There is only one humane solution to this problem. Close down the camp and accept the generosity of the families and agencies willing to care for these young people, just as we have done for Cuban children.'' According to Florida Legal Services, all but 40 of the Haitian children have U.S. sponsors lined up. ``We told the State Department months ago that we had foster parents to sponsor these children,'' said Deacon Chris Baumann, spokesman of the U.S. Catholic Conference. Yet the children's advocates report that even in cases where they have located U.S. relatives, the State Department has refused to grant them entry. Helene Charles, a 36-year-old Haitian living in Fort Lauderdale, says she has been trying for months to obtain a visa for her 14-year-old son Kissene. She left him behind in Haiti with her mother, but she became ill and could no longer care for him. Kissene got on a raft with some friends, who got word to his mother that he was at Guantanamo. U.S. authorities will say only that all cases are under review. ``You can't just move them lock, stock and barrel to the United States and separate them from their families forevermore,'' said a State Department official. ``You have to find out where each child's family is and go and look for the family.'' That can be a long, difficult process, says the State Department, which hopes most of the children will be released from the camp by early July. ``We just want to get out as fast as possible and go elsewhere,'' says a 17-year-old boy who has a cousin in the U.S. ``We are not criminals, but we are living in a prison.''

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of S. 747. The intent of this bill is to modify section 36(b)(1) of the Arms Export and Control Act to require congressional oversight and scrutiny of all arms sales to the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia until such time as the Secretary of the State certifies and reports to Congress that the unpaid claims of American companies described in the June 30, 1993, report by the Secretary of Defense pursuant to section 9140(c) of the Department of Defense Appropriation Act, 1993 (Public Law 102-396; 106 Stat 1939), including the additional claims noticed by the Department of Commerce on page 2 of the report, have been resolved satisfactorily. My interest in S. 747 relates in part to a New York company, Gibbs & Hill, Inc. Gibbs & Hill was founded in 1911, and has the privilege of being the oldest power and transportation engineering firm in the United States. One of its most notable projects was the electrification of the Northeast corridor rail line between New York and Washington, DC. The first electric locomotive to run on these tracks was the George Gibbs I. In 1978, Gibbs & Hill went to Saudi Arabia to provide its engineering expertise to the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu in connection with the design and construction of the Yanbu Industrial City. Gibbs & Hill was hired by the Royal Commission to design the desalination and related facilities, which are a major component of this industrial complex. The Royal Commission required significant additional services of Gibbs & Hill, equaling more than 200 man-years of effort. After requiring Gibbs & Hill to perform the work, committing to compensate Gibbs & Hill for the added services, and benefiting from the work performed, the Royal Commission refused to pay. Gibbs & Hill's attempts to seek redress through the kingdom's court system was useless, as the court merely upheld the wrongful acts of another agency of the kingdom. The default landed Gibbs & Hill in the special claims process established following congressional hearings in May 1992, and furthered by section 9140(c) of the fiscal year 1993 Department of Defense Appropriations Act. The $43.4 million claim of Gibbs & Hill is the last remaining unpaid claim awaiting resolution by the Saudi Government through the special claims process. Despite repeated commitments to our Government by the Saudi Government to resolve the claim favorably for the company, Gibbs & Hill has not been paid. Gibbs & Hill has waited more than 14 years to have this debt paid, including 2 years since receiving explicit commitments from the Saudi Embassy that it would spare no efforts in resolving the claim fairly and promptly. Today, the Yanbu Industrial City is pointed to as an example of the kingdom's technological advancement. Yet this advancement was obtained at the expense of Gibbs & Hill. The kingdom had an obligation to honor its commitments to Gibbs & Hill, as it still does today. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting S. 747.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. The Senator yields the floor to the Presiding Officer, rather than to another Senator, is that correct?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, before addressing the matter that brings me to the floor, may I congratulate the Senator from Minnesota for the very forceful and, I hope, prophetic statement. The concerns that he has raised are real. They have been addressed without large consequence in this Chamber for some 15 years now, as I can attest. And I for one, and I think many others, welcome the energy and conviction, the commitment of the freshman class, as he chooses to describe it, that came to the Senate in January. I look forward to working with him in the years ahead--months ahead--weeks ahead, to be specific. (The remarks of Mr. Moynihan pertaining to the introduction of legislation are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'') Mr. DORGAN addressed the Chair.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. But I see that my colleague has risen, and I look forward to his remarks.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, if I may make an inquiry.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I will most assuredly help the Senator do that, and we want to balance the budget for the children of America, too, and we have it here and we are going to pay for it. If the distinguished chairman could just let me point out, in the midst of the Depression of the 1930's, we could provide for dependent children as a Federal responsibility. In the 1990's, when we have a $7 trillion economy, it has been proposed to take that away. Look at what we have done to our children. The average benefit, in 1995 dollars, two decades ago was $650. It is down to $350. That is not the social policy the chairman of the Budget Committee is associated with and not the one with which I think this Senate should wish itself to be associated. I thank my friend.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I am happy to yield for a question.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Thank you, Mr. President. So we launched this program. Having been involved with this subject for 30 years and more, may I say one recognizes in the State governments enormous creativity. There is scarcely a day or week that you do not read of some new program in one State or another. I believe it was Monday evening on one of the evening news programs, it was NBC. It was Lisa Myers interviewing persons in Connecticut including the Governor where a very bold set of ideas has been developed around the principles of the Family Support Act of 1988. You are in here, it is a temporary arrangement, we are going to help you get out of this. We realized what obstacles we had inadvertently put in place to becoming free of welfare. In 1965 we enacted Medicare and Medicaid. So then a welfare mother had health care for her children, full, free health care. The minute she left welfare she lost it. Many mothers are going to think twice about that, particularly if a child has a health condition that is chronic and requires care. It would be unfair to the child to deprive him or her of that care. We said we will give you a year on Medicaid after you leave the rolls, as the term was. We will give a year of child care. We will help you along in this. States are innovating all the time. Up in Connecticut they are saying, ``Remember. You only have''--as I believe it was--``21 months. In the meantime any job you get you keep it.'' That is the kind of waiver which we anticipated in the legislation, bipartisan and unanimous legislation, and the Clinton administration and Secretary Shalala have been very good about getting these things up and out, but not fast enough, a problem addressed by the legislation I introduce today. We say a waiver decision will be handed down in 90 days. The presumption is the States know what they are doing, and we want them to try it. This morning the front page of the Washington Post has a story, ``Virginia Suburbs To Test Allen Welfare Plan. Area Has Eleven Months to Adopt Changes, Find Thousands Work.'' Work. ``Life Works If You Work.'' We are not afraid of that. We wanted that. We encouraged that. That is what the legislation did. Governor Allen, a Republican Governor. The article says: That means one of the country's boldest welfare plans will unfold in the back yard of its top leaders, virtually guaranteeing the attention of Congress and the White House as they shape national policy. ``Virginia is again making history,'' said Allen, a Republican. ``It is the most sweeping and, I think, the most compassionate welfare reform plan anywhere in the nation.'' This is taking place under the Family Support Act of 1988. And it is being paid for by the Federal matching funds and the guaranteed matching support for children. There is something very important there that might easily have been missed in that statement. I will say it again. Governor Allen says, ``Virginia is again making history. It is the most sweeping and, I think, the most compassionate welfare reform plan anywhere in the nation.'' A welfare reform designed to say to people you have got to go to work, you have a set time where you have to get yourself together, and we will help you to get on your way. Years ago no one would have described such an effort as compassionate. Indeed, I have been through these matters and I can say to you the slightest suggestion that work might be appropriate for welfare recipients was decried as punitive, and those who suggested it said, ``No, no, no. There is no such intention.'' Now, openly, Governors will say, if you care about your fellow citizens, you have to help them get out of the debilitating and unfair situation. And that is what we do. That is what we can do more of. The bill I introduce today will provide an additional $8 billion over 5 years with every penny paid for, every penny provided through closing tax loopholes, refining the Supplementary Security Income program. I had a hand in the proposals under President Nixon that led to SSI as we called it. It was intended to deal with the problem of adults who could not work, the permanent, totally disabled, and such like. We close loopholes such as that egregious practice we have come upon of American citizens renouncing their citizenship in order to avoid their taxes. There will be no more of that. The chairman of the Finance Committee, Mr. Packwood, and I agreed as of the day this issue was brought up you cannot do it anymore. This bill will provide funds for that purpose and other such matters. We are not adding a penny to the deficit. I would not dare, particularly with that most formidable and knowledgeable chairman of the Budget Committee in the Chamber. We pay for this provision for women and children to help them pay for themselves.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise for the purpose of introducing the Family Support Act of 1995. Senators who have been following the subject of welfare policy will recognize this as a successor to the Family Support Act of 1988, which was adopted in this Chamber just this side of 7 years ago, on September 29, 1988, by a vote of 96 to 1. I was the manager on our side and recall very specifically the atmosphere, the emotion; we knew this bill, from a near unanimous Senate, was going out the door to the House of Representatives where it would be received and treated in much the same manner; only thereafter to go to the White House where President Reagan, having helped shape the legislation would welcome it, sign it. He would sign what he called ``this landmark legislation'' in the company of such great Senators still in this body as our hugely respected majority leader, Senator Dole; my revered colleague, now chairman of the Finance Committee, Senator Packwood; our former colleague, subsequently Secretary of the Treasury, Lloyd Bentsen, as well as Members of the House of Representatives. It was a grand moment in the Rose Garden. President Reagan said that Congress and those particularly active on this measure would be remembered for accomplishing what many have attempted but no one had achieved in several decades, ``a meaningful redirection of our welfare system.'' It will seem unimaginable to us today, but the Family Support Act of 1988 was not a partisan political measure. There in the Rose Garden was Senator Dole, Senator Bentsen, the Speaker was there, Mr. Foley, Mr. Michel, the minority leader representing the Republicans. The chairman of the Governors Association of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, was there, having been a wondrous, energetic advocate on behalf of the Governors. And with him his then colleague, as Governor of Delaware, the Honorable Mike Castle, now Representative from the State of Delaware in the House of Representatives. Democrat and Republican alike, joining in a near unanimous measure to do what needed doing, a good 50 years, a good half century into the experience with what we have called welfare, under the Social Security Act of 1935. We redefined the statute to bring it in line with a new reality. The original Social Security Act of 1935, adopted in the midst of the Depression, provided for aid to dependent children. Basically, it represented the Federal Government picking up the widows' pensions which had been adopted in almost half the States by this point. But these States were under severe economic stress in that Great Depression; the Federal Government assumed the responsibility for the children. In 1939 the mother of the family was included as well so it became Aid to Families with Dependent Children. And it was expected to be a bridge, very similar to Old Age Assistance, which would last until Social Security having matured, widows with their children were entitled to survivors insurance--Old Age and Survivors Insurance [OASI]. Indeed, that has happened. I think it is the case that only 71 percent of the recipients of Social Security benefits are in fact retired adults. The rest are, indeed, survivors and dependent children. But then something new happened. Family structure began to change in our country. It is not the most comfortable subject to deal with, but it is a necessary one, Mr. President, and we have become more open about it. In fact, it is President Clinton who now speaks of this. He spoke to us about this in a joint session of the Congress. We now have a rate of births of children in single-parent families that has reached 33 percent. At the time the Social Security Act was enacted it was probably 4 percent. Our first hard number is 4 percent, in 1940. We are not alone in this. The same phenomenon has taken place in the United Kingdom, in France, in Canada. We find it difficult to explain. Our other neighbors, as it were, find it difficult to explain. But we cannot doubt its reality. In 1992, for example, the ratio in New York City had risen to 46 percent, approaching half. It may be at that point now. Because we observe a regular rise, year after year, at a very steady rate of about 0.86 percent a year. There has not been one year since 1970 in which the ratio has not risen. One of the consequences has been the rise in the number of cases, of families receiving Aid to Dependent Children. There was a sharp rise in the late 1960's. It reached a certain plateau in the 1980's, which we think to be--do not know but think to be--a matter of demography. The childbearing population was flat or even declined a little bit. Then, starting in 1989 it begins a very pronounced rise. We go from 3.5 million to almost 5 million in 4 years. It is dropping just a little bit now, but we anticipate an increase in the population of childbearing age such that we have every reason to think there will be an increase in this caseload. And we knew those things in 1988. And we knew we had to do something quite different. We had to redefine welfare. It was no longer a widow's pension. I have the great honor to know Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor, who had been chairman of the Committee on Economic Security that presented the program to President Roosevelt, and she would describe a typical recipient--this is 1962, 1963--as a West Virginia miner's widow. Miners' women did not work in coal mines, and widows were not expected to do such things in any event. It was a permanent condition. Suddenly we found a population of young persons with very young children who were dependent but ought not to remain so. It is not fair to them, it is not fair to their children, it is not fair to the society that is maintaining them. So the Family Support Act of 1988, the first such act, said we will make a contract. We will say that society has a responsibility to help dependent families become independent, and they in turn have a responsibility to help themselves--a mutual responsibility. [[Page S6918]] We started the JOBS Program, the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Program. We said we will expect people to work. Well, of course. I have here a button from one of the JOBS programs in Riverside, CA. We had testimony in the Finance Committee just a while ago. It is a wonderful button. The director is an enthusiastic man. The button says, ``Life Works If You Work.'' He is right. And there is nothing wrong with that. Twenty years ago such ideas would possibly have been thought of as punitive, possibly stigmatizing. We are well beyond that in large part because of the JOBS Program. There is no doubt that we passed this legislation because States had begun to innovate. Those innovations seemed promising, and the Manpower Development Research Corp. based in New York City could measure results. And these innovations went right across the political spectrum. Governor Dukakis, a liberal Democratic Governor of Massachusetts, and Governor Deukmejian, a conservative Republican Governor of California, adopted very similar ideas--get people ready to work, get them thinking they can do it, and get them out of the house and into the mainstream. We based our program on those experiments that had taken place. We very carefully said we are going to work on the hardest cases, not the easiest ones. If I can say, Mr. President, at the risk of being a little too statistical, the population of the AFDC cases is what statisticians call bimodal. A little less than half, about 40, 45 percent are mature women whose marriages have broken up, or they are separated, or divorced. They will come into this arrangement for a brief period and they go off on their own. They organize their lives as people do, and the research is very clear on that. You can do all the effort you want with such people. They do not need your help, thanks very much. They just need some income support for a period until they get their other affairs in shape on their own. But slightly more than half are young people with no marriage, no job experience or little, often in settings where they are surrounded by such persons. Mr. President, may I ask if I can continue in morning business, there being no other Senator seeking recognition?

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I thank the Chair for his kind attention.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I agree, Mr. President, and I would also say that we have an immediate problem of the 14, 14.5 million persons in this present program who are living today. And in very short periods of time we raise children, watch children being raised, we know how quickly things go badly or, alternatively, how quickly things get on the good road and how hard it is to change thereafter. There are those who suggest that some savage removal of this entire Social Security provision will somehow change behavior. And I say, Mr. President, that is so deeply irresponsible as to make one wonder how it ever could have gained currency. Lawrence Mead, who is a professor at New York University, now visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, testified before the Finance Committee on March 9 about the proposals which have come to us, in effect, are here now from the House, in H.R. 4, the Personal Responsibility Act of 1995. I think Dr. Mead would not in the least object to being described as a conservative. He has been very much at odds with what he thought of as a liberal social policy in the time when it went pretty much unchallenged in New York City officialdom. He said to us, however, now, just wait a minute. What are you doing? What do you know now that you did not know previously when we enacted the Family Support Act? I do not wish to have him quoted as referring specifically to the Family Support Act, but he was saying what do we know now different from what we have known? I quote him: Can the forces behind growing welfare be stemmed? Conservative analysts say that unwed pregnancy is the greatest evil in welfare, the cause not only of dependency but other social ills. On all sides, people call for a family policy that would solve this problem, but we have no such policy. The great fact is that neither policymakers nor researchers have found any incentive, benefit or other intervention that can do much to cut the unwed pregnancy rate. This bears repeating, from a social scientist of impeccable conservative antecedence, appearing before our committee, the Committee on Finance, which will deal with this legislation, this area of legislation. He said: Can the forces behind growing welfare be stemmed? Conservative analysts say that unwed pregnancy is the greatest evil in welfare, the cause not only of dependency but other social ills. On all sides, people call for a family policy that would solve this problem. May I interject that he could be describing this Senator. I have spoken of family policy; I have written on the subject for a generation now and watched family circumstances only worsen and have been as baffled as any other. But then to continue Lawrence Mead: But we have no such policy. The great fact is that neither policymakers nor researchers have found any incentive, benefit or other intervention that can do much to cut the unwed pregnancy rate. And if we do not know how to do it, how can we possibly decide to do nothing, when we have in place a program that is showing some results, not in changing family structure but in the response of dependent families to their situation? Dr. Mead has done some analysis of the effects of the JOBS Program where it has been attempted. It had a problem of coming into place just as we went into recession. State governments had not the resources they needed and the Federal funds were not, in fact, fully used. But where they were used, there were responses, not large but real. And every time you succeed, you change the lives of a mother and her children, and there can be no larger purpose in domestic social policy. The same sentiments were echoed by Nathan Glazer, perhaps our reigning sociologist, professor emeritus now at Harvard University. He wrote a paper for an Urban Institute conference here in Washington just a year ago, anticipating some of the turmoil we have seen in this debate. The Urban Institute, Mr. President, was, of course, established in the mid-1960's in the aftermath of the first turmoil associated with some of these changes in social structure that appeared in American cities. President Johnson help sponsored it. It passed the Congress. Mr. William Gorham has dedicated a very distinguished career to the Urban Institute. Here is what Nathan Glazer said on April 12, 1994. Do we know that much more than we knew in 1988 to warrant new legislation? I don't not think so. Do we feel confident enough about the programs we prescribed to States to undertake in 1988 to put substantially larger sums into them? It seems doubtful to me. Can we get a substantial part of long-term welfare clients off the welfare roles by increasing their earned income through investments and learning how to work, basic education, training programs, and the like? We cannot. That is the passage I quote from Dr. Glazer. I think we can do better than that. I think the record is better than that. I think the case is to be made: Continue what you are doing and strengthen what you are doing. The Family Support Act of 1995 builds on what we have learned, even as the original was based on what we had learned. Social learning is hard. It takes generations sometimes. No one in 1950 could have imagined that our GDP would double and redouble and we would end up with the poverty that we see in cities everywhere in our country, that kind of intractable poverty that is not associated with employment or economic growth. There is a measure to which the AFDC caseload responds to cyclical changes in the economy. Dr. David Ellwood, who is the distinguished Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Policy Planning, estimates that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the rise in caseload in recent years might fairly be ascribed to the rise in unemployment in the beginning of the last recession. And yet, the unemployment figures go down, the caseload figures continue to go up. There is a lag, but even so we are not dealing basically with an economic issue in the sense that we think of in terms of employment, earnings. We are dealing [[Page S6920]] with social change for which we have little, little explanatory device. And so, Mr. President, I would like to thank the Senate for the kind attention in these somewhat extended remarks to the introduction of the Family Support Act of 1995. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a brief summary of the bill; the wonderful remarks on the signing of the Family Support Act of 1988 by President Reagan; and also an item in this morning's New York Times in which representatives of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and of the National Association of Counties observed that the legislation that has been sent us could be devastating to county government and to city government. I think in time more Governors will recognize the same. We are on a good steady path. Steady on.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I agree.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I could not start working into my wallet, but I know the Senator could work into his.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. And antigrand- children.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. I would.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. It was made available in 1965, previously unknown. But curiously a benefit to the children became an obstacle to leaving welfare and that is what we overcame. The Senator was one of the fine supporters of the Family Support Act of 1988. And I will see how we proceed at this point. But I thank the Senator.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. That is not the whole story. I was speaking earlier of Medicaid.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Entirely.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, in late January I came to the floor to speak of our relations with Mexico in the context of the new North American Free-Trade Agreement. My remarks appeared in the Record under the heading ``Free Trade With an Unfree Society.'' I returned to a theme which I had stated on a number of occasions since NAFTA was first proposed during the administration of President Bush. I had been an enthusiastic supporter of the free-trade agreement with Canada, but was troubled by the thought of a similar arrangement with Mexico, and for the most elemental reason. I argued that the political and legal arrangements of the United States and Canada being essentially symmetrical, the vast involvement in one another's affairs, the partial ceding of sovereignty implicit in such an agreement would provide quite manageable. There would be no political loss and considerable economic gain. Optimality, as an economist might say. By contrast, I feared that our political and legal institutions were anything but symmetrical with those of Mexico. Mexico, I said, was a Leninist state. I had hoped for some response to this statement from the executive branch, but there was little. Indeed, apart from a gracious note from our distinguished Treasury Secretary, Robert E. Rubin, there was none. In any event, we were then, in January, caught up in an intense effort to save Mexico from defaulting on its foreign debt. This was the first of what I fear will be a sequence of such crises, and it seemed gratuitous to press the argument in that atmosphere. But now the first crisis has eased, thanks in large measure to what Alexander Hamilton, our first Secretary of the Treasury, termed ``energy in the executive,'' now embodied in his successor, Secretary Rubin. And so I would take this quiet morning to return to the subject. I would begin by calling attention to an essay by William Pfaff, which appeared in the International Herald Tribune on March 16. Mr. Pfaff, who writes from Paris, is a foreign policy analyst of unexampled range, depth, and experience. He would be such if he lived in Utica, but living abroad gives him a singular perspective on American affairs. His essay begins with this simple, chilling analogy. The commitment the United States now has made to Mexico bears a distinct resemblance to the commitment it made to Vietnam during the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when the troubles in that country were only beginning. That was war and this is peace. Nonetheless now, as then, with as little reflection and a simplistic ideology, Washington has taken on responsibility for the fortunes of another nation that it scarcely knows and fails to understand. In Mexico this American assumption of responsibility is primarily economic, but Mexico's economic plight is inseparable from the political crisis afflicting the eleven- decade-long dictatorship in Mexico of the PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party, historically the vehicle of Mexican nationalism--and of resistance to American exploitation of Mexican oil resources. Washington has demanded, and last Friday was given, Mexico's promise of a program of economic austerity with distressing implications for millions of Mexicans, who only weeks ago were being told that their country's membership in NAFTA assured rising prosperity for them and their country. One aspect of the new arrangement is that a major part of Mexico's future oil revenues is pledged against the new American and international loan guarantees. Even without the debt crisis a national upheaval is under way in Mexico which not even the Mexicans can be sure they can solve. Washington's commitment to a solution is an engagement with the uncontrollable and unforeseeable. In my January statement I was unapologetic about discussing government in the abstract. I allowed as how Speaker Gingrich, by encouraging us to read or re-read The Federalist, was directing us to just such abstractions, which very much engaged the Founders of the Nation. They ransacked history for different ideal types of government for lessons to be learned and contrasts to be made with the new American Republic which they had set about constructing. Here, then, is a definition of Leninism from the ``Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought.'' The capitalized words are employed in the original for purposes of cross reference: Leninism. The term refers to the version of MARXIST thought which accepts the validity of the major theoretical contributions made by Lenin to revolutionary Marxism. These contributions fall into two main groups. Central to the first was the conception of the revolutionary party as the vanguard of the PROLETARIAT. The workers, if left to their own devices, would concentrate on purely economic issues and not attain full political CLASS consciousness, and therefore the revolutionary seizure of power needed the leadership of committed Marxist ACTIVISTS to provide the appropriate theoretical and tactical guidelines. The role of the party was thus to be a ``vanguard'' in the revolutionary struggle which would culminate in the overthrow of the CAPITALIST STATE and the establishment of a DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT under the HEGEMONY of the party. The second major theoretical contribution made by Lenin was to draw the political consequences from an analysis of CAPITALISM as both international and imperialist. The phenomenon of IMPERIALISM divided the world between advanced industrial nations and the colonies they were exploiting. This situation was inherently unstable and led to war between capitalist nations thus creating favorable conditions for REVOLUTION. For Lenin, the ``weakest link'' in the capitalist chain was to be found in UNDERDEVELOPED regions of the world economy such as Russia where the indigenous BOURGEOISIE was comparatively weak, but where there had been enough INDUSTRIALIZATION to create a class-conscious proletariat. The idea of world-wide SOCIALIST revolution beginning in relatively backward countries led to the inclusion of the peasantry as important support to the proletariat in establishing a socialist order. Such socialist revolutions in underdeveloped countries would exacerbate the contradictions inherent in advanced capitalist economies and thus lead to the advent of socialism on a world scale. As compared with the ideas of Marx and Engels, Leninism gives more emphasis to the leading role of the party, to backward or semi-colonial countries as the initial site of revolution, and to the peasantry as potential revolutionary agents. With the success of the BOLSHEVIK revolution in 1917, Leninism became the dominant version of Marxism and the official IDEOLOGY of the Soviet Union. Lenin's analysis of imperialism and his idea of the ``weakest link'' also made his version of Marxism appealing to emerging ELITES in the THIRD WORLD. In the West, however, while Leninist principles are maintained by the small Trotskyist parties, many adherents of eurocommunism have begun to ask how far Leninist ideas reflected specifically Russian circumstances and should therefore be modified to fit the conditions of advanced capitalist societies. Clearly, Leninst doctrine and Soviet example had considerable appeal to the revolutionary leaders and intellectuals who came to power in Mexico in the 1920's. It happens this was a time of artistic energy, perhaps especially in mural paintings of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfonso Siquieros. To this day one can see on the walls of the Government buildings of Mexico City vast scenes of revolutionary tumult. Amid a sea of yellow sombreros and silver machetes there is sure to be found an incongruously bearded Lenin turned out in a starched collar and black necktie. That, and of course, swarms of red flags. If the Soviet experiment attracted sympathizers, even adherents, in the United States in those years, I would hazard that public opinion would have shown even greater sympathy for the goings-on in Mexico. A wonderful encounter came at the time of the construction of Rockefeller Center in New York City in the early years of the Great Depression. Diego Rivera was commissioned to paint a fresco for the lobby of the central RCA building, as it then was. Word got out that it would include not only red flags, but Lenin himself. Nelson A. Rockefeller, who was managing the enterprise, demurred. Much hullabaloo followed, leading in turn to the classic poem by E.B. White of the New Yorker, ``I Paint What I See,'' describing an imagined encounter between the youthful scion of great wealth and the revolutionary artist. Here are passages. ``Whose is that head that I see on my wall?'' Said John D.'s grandson Nelson. ``Is it anyone's head whom we know, at all? ``A Rensselaer, or a Saltonstall? ``Is it Franklin D.? Is it Mordaunt Hall? ``Or is it the head of a Russian?'' * * * * * ``For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks ``You painted a radical. I say shucks, * * * * * ``For this, as you know, is a public hall ``And the people want doves, or a tree in fall, ``And though your art I dislike to hamper, ``I owe a little to God and Gramper, ``And after all, ``It's my wall. . .'' ``We'll see if it is,'' said Rivera. As I noted in January, it was no accident that when Leon Trotsky fled the Soviet Union, having lost out to Stalin in the struggle to succeed Lenin, he did not settle in Paris, where failed revolutionaries were supposed to go. He went to Mexico City, where he set up in considerable style, surrounded often as not by American acolytes. Two things are to be said about the coming to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1929. First--the great English historian Sir John Plumb has made this point--it was a blessing for the Mexican people who for decades had lived through indescribably bloody and agonizing turmoil. Of a sudden, stability was achieved. Sir John makes the point that revolutions are easy; it is the onset of stability that is rare in human experience. The second point is that nothing like the Leninist terror followed the coming to power of the PRI. Diplomatic relations with the Papacy--severed since 1867 when Benito Juarez implemented strict controls of church power--became particularly hostile in 1926 during the rule of Plutarco Elias Calles, who would later organize the PRI. His strict enforcement of the anticlerical provisions of the Constitution sparked the Cristero rebellion which lasted 3 years. The Mexican Government and the church reached a modus vivendi in 1929 and after that Catholicism, the religion of the people, was not generally speaking suppressed. But do not fail to take note of Graham Greene's ``The Power and The Glory.'' Even so, one party control, and the corruption that so quickly follows, settled on the Republic of Mexico. The forthcoming 1994-95 edition of ``Freedom in the World,'' the authoritative annual survey published by Freedom House, states: Since its founding in 1929, the PRI has dominated the state through a top-down corporatist structure that is authoritarian in nature and held together through co- operation, patronage, corruption and, when all else fails, repression. The formal business of government takes place secretly and with little legal foundation. I correct Leninist practice, the party controlled not only the State, but all the private institutions that might seem to be arrayed against the State, most importantly the trade unions. The Department of State reports in the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1994: The largest trade union central is the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), organizationally part of the ruling PRI. CTM's major rival centrals and nearly all the 34 smaller confederations, federations, and unions in the Labor Congress (CT) are also allied with the ruling PRI. Of late, however, the Leninist state in Mexico appears to have entered a time of troubles, possibly of disintegration. As William Pfaff, writes, ``a national upheaval is underway.'' Let us turn to Tim Golden's account of the May Day celebrations in Mexico City this year. Defiant Workers in Mexico Protest Government Policies. may day demonstration in capital's center Defying the pro-Government union leaders who have dominated Mexican labor since the 1930's, independent unions and leftist political groups turned the celebration of Labor Day today into an outpouring of anger at the economic policies of President Ernesto Zedillo. The limited political strength of the independent labor movement was evident in the colonial central square of this capital, where the biggest of more than a dozen protests around the country drew only about one-fifth of the 350,000 demonstrators that organizers had predicted. But for the first time in decades, May Day's main political act was something other than a loyal tribute to the Government and its long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary party. Leaders of the pro-Government unions had canceled their traditional parade through the square weeks ago, apparently out of fear that they would be unable to control the critics in their ranks. Trade union subservience to the PRI has been a settled fact for half a century. As I noted in January, this hardly escaped the notice of the American labor movement. Perhaps more recently the party seems to have begun parceling out hugely profitable state enterprises or resources to favored business leaders, who have evidently become fabulously wealthy. A dacha outside Moscow is one thing; $25 million a plate fundraising dinners in the Presidential palace are surely another. Such enormities, such contrasts can never be stable, and in Mexico the system is obviously under strain, as Pfaff observes. On March 23, 1994, Luis Donaldo Colosio, the Presidential candidate of the PRI, was assassinated in Tijuana. One Mario Aburto Martinez was arrested at the scene, convicted, and sentenced to 45 years in prison. The administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who had chosen Colosio as his successor, maintained that the assassination was the work of this lone gunman. However, on February 25, 1995, the new Mexican Attorney General Antonio Lozano Gracia announced the arrest of a second suspected gunman, Othon Cortes Vazquez, a PRI security guard. A second political assassination occurred on September 28, 1994, when Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the Secretary-General of the PRI was killed in Mexico City. On February 28, 1995, Attorney General Lozano Gracia announced the arrest of Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former President Salinas, in connection with Ruiz Massieu's assassination. The investigation into the Ruiz Massieu assassination had previously been carried out by the victim's brother, Mario, who was soon after arrested in the Newark, NJ airport with $46,000 in undeclared cash. The Mexican Attorney General has since located $10 million in United States bank accounts linked to Mario Ruiz [[Page S6747]] Massieu which he apparently obtained while in charge of Mexico's counternarcotics program. Add a further twist to the tale. Former President Salinas whom the United States supported as our candidate to be the first president of the World Trade Organization until this story was revealed, is now living in the United States in virtual exile. And now another political murder would seem to have occurred. On May 10 the former Jalisco State Attorney General, Leobardo Larios, who previously had been responsible for investigating the 1993 killing of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, was assassinated in Guadalajara. At the time of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo's assassination, the first official explanation of the killing was that the Cardinal had been accidentally killed in the cross-fire between two rival drug cartels. However when the autopsy later revealed that the Cardinal had been shot 14 times at close range, Leobardo Larios postulated that the Cardinal had been mistaken for the leader of a local drug ring, despite the fact that the Cardinal was wearing his clerical garb. Revelations such as these are familiar. Power in Mexico has resided within the PRI and on occasion arguments within the party settled by murder. These features of Leninist totalitarianism appeared early in the Soviet state. In ``Political Succession in the USSR'' (1965), Myron Rush explains, [W]hile Lenin still ruled, he exercised his power through both the Party and the government. In the Party, formally, he had no special position but was simply a member of the Politburo along with six others; he headed the government, however, as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. He governed through the state apparatus directly, through the Party apparatus indirectly. * * * The Party, as the embodiment of the Revolutionary will, decided overall policy. After Lenin's death, no one person was in a position to consolidate power. The ensuing power struggle was waged for control of the party, not for control of the Government. At the time of Lenin's death there were six other members of the Politburo, the chief deliberative body in the party for the formation of policy, including Stalin and Trotsky. By 1929 Joseph Stalin had managed to expel the other five surviving members of the Politburo and secure unchallenged leadership of the party, and by extension of the state. Stalin did not take a political title until May 7, 1941, when he became the formal head of the Government as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. Mexico continues to maintain the Leninist model of having the President fulfill the official role of head of state, while controlling the party without formal title, though the party and the Government appear to be moving apart somewhat. Much of what happened of late in Mexico echoes an earlier time of change and violence. But there is much that promises a new era altogether. On May 23, 1991, as we in the Senate debated granting fast-track authority to enable the administration to negotiate the North American Free-Trade Agreement, I took to the floor to explain my opposition. I began, ``Mr. President, for some months now, I have made the point to the administration that Mexico does not have an independent judiciary.'' This was, and I fear still is, a matter of seeming small interest to our Department of State. But observe. It has become a matter of considerable interest to the rulers of Mexico. On May 12, 1994, the first ever Presidential debate took place between Ernesto Zedioll Ponce de Leon, the PRI candidate who succeeded the assassinated Colosio, and his opponents from the National Action Party [PAN] and the Party of the Democratic Revolution [PDR]. During the debate Diego Fernandez de Cevallos of the National Action Party charged that Zedillo does not get a passing grade in democracy. If elected, Mr. Fernandez de Cevallos promised to form a plural government. In turn, Zedillo used the debate to announce his intentions to establish a truly independent judiciary. The CIA Foreign Broadcast Information Service records him as saying, ``I am proposing the total reformation of our judicial system. This must be a deep-rooted reform, starting virtually from ground zero, because we need a justice system that will function for the Mexican people.'' Once elected, President Zedillo in one stroke cleared the bench of all 21 sitting supreme court justices. These judges had been appointed for life. Like most things in Mexico, while the constitution provides for an independent judiciary, reality is something quite different. Appointments to the court are made by the President and approved by the Senate; in which 95 of the 128 Senators belong to the PRI. Again, Freedom House is instructive: The judiciary is subordinate to the president, underscoring the lack of a rule of law. Supreme Court judges are appointed by the executive and rubber-stamped by the Senate. The court is prohibited from enforcing political and labor rights, and from reviewing the constitutionality of laws. Overall, the judiciary system is weak, politicized and riddled with corruption. And yet, and yet, very possibly President Zedillo means to change this. And to change much else. The North American Free-Trade Agreement surely indicated a desire by Mexican elites to begin to put the institutions of the Leninist state behind them; indeed, to throw in with the liberal democratic states that appear to have prevailed in that epic struggle of the 20th century. Pfaff writes: The new president, Ernesto Zedillo, a product of the PRI system, is attempting to reform the party and the way it has perpetuated itself in power. For the first time crimes committed within the party leadership are being exposed to public view, investigated and given the promise of prosecution. It may be the United States can help. More to the point, we have no choice but to try to help. We have made a huge commitment to this relationship. There is no point arguing whether we should have done so. We did. And in no time at all we began to realize this. The Mexican currency crisis appears to have been the direct result of overspending on imported consumer goods, which the ruling party determined would help with yet another Presidential election, this time when there was serious opposition. Perhaps not least because in a North American free- trade zone it is taken as normal for elections to involve more than one party! My argument is to a somewhat different point. I have been here on the Senate floor talking about the nature of the Mexican state for half a decade. Apart, as noted earlier, from a generous note from the Secretary of the Treasury, I have never had the least indication from the executive branch that anyone had the least idea what I was talking about. In my remarks in January, I noted that the American labor movement had no such difficulty. From the time of Samuel Gompers, who in 1924 had to be brought across the Rio Grande so that he might die on American soil, American labor has followed events in Mexico with clear understanding of the threat a Leninist state poses to a free labor movement. Can the Nation ever adequately express our debt to the leaders of the A.F. of L. and later the AFL-CIO, for their international activism through all those years of the cold war? But the Department of State? To my knowledge, there has been little or no interest at all in any of this. The President has just returned from Moscow, where the great transition from totalitarianism is underway, to what purpose and what end we do not know. But surely, we know that it matters to us. Surely, the Department of State has focused attention on the matter; has proposed policies, responses. The same intelligent, patient, persistent attention needs to be paid to the transition in Mexico. There is, perhaps, not that much America can do, especially given our long history of aggression against Mexico, and the consequent suspicion of our motives. But surely we can let it be known that we have some inkling what they are going through. There are small ``d'' democrats in Mexico who need to know this. If there is anything we have learned from this hideous century is that it makes all the difference when those who resist totalitarian regimes know that there are those abroad who know of their resistance. I do not wish to suggest that Mexico is in any way to be compared with, shall we say, East Germany. But still, it is not Denmark and those who would see it change need to know that we are with them. At the same time, we need to be very careful about the commitments we take on. It is perhaps a heartless thing to say of so rare a thinker as William Pfaff, but I prescient. But this can only happen if we attend to what he foresees. The financial crisis has eased. We are free to think anew and act anew. There was at least one such moment in our involvement with Vietnam. We missed it.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, what we have today is so much at variance with what was thought we would get. Allen Dulles was very much part of the foundation of postwar intelligence, having been in the OSS, serving with great distinction in Switzerland during World War II. Peter Grose, in his new biography, ``Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles,'' recounts the testimony Dulles gave before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 25, 1947, as we were about to enact the National Security Act of 1947 which created a small coordinating body, the Central Intelligence Agency. Personnel for a central intelligence agency, he argued, ``need not be very numerous * * *. The operation of the service must be neither flamboyant nor overshrouded with the mystery and abracadabra which the amateur detective likes to assume.'' In a lecturing tone, he tried to tell the Senators how intelligence is actually assembled. ``Because of its glamour and mystery, overemphasis is generally placed on what is called secret intelligence, namely the intelligence that is obtained by secret means and by secret agents. * * * In time of peace the bulk of intelligence can be obtained through overt channels, through our diplomatic and consular missions, and our military, naval and air attaches in the normal and proper course of their work. It can also be obtained through the world press, the radio, and through the many thousands of Americans, business and professional men and American residents of foreign countries, who are naturally and normally brought in touch with what is going on in those countries. ``A proper analysis of the intelligence obtainable by these overt, normal, and aboveboard means would supply us with over 80 percent, I should estimate, of the information required for the guidance of our national policy.'' Mr. President, that did not happen. Instead, we entered upon a five- decade mode of secret analysis, analysis withheld from public scrutiny, which is the only way we can verify the truth of a hypothesis in natural science or in the social sciences. The result was massive miscalculation. Nicholas Eberstadt in his wonderful new book, ``The Tyranny of Numbers,'' writes ``It is probably safe to say that the U.S. Government's attempt to describe the Soviet economy has been the largest single project in social science research ever undertaken.'' He said this in 1990, in testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations. ``The largest single project in social science research ever undertaken,'' It was a calamity. No one has been more forthright in this regard than Adm. Stansfield Turner in an article in Foreign Affairs at about that time. He said when it came to predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, the corporate view of the intelligence community missed by a mile. I can remember in the first years of the Kennedy administration meeting with Walt Rostow, chairman of the policy planning staff in the Department of State. As regards the Soviet Union, he said he was not one of those ``6 percent forever people.'' But there it was, locked into our analysis. That is what the President knew. In Richard Reeves' remarkable biography of John F. Kennedy, he records that the Agency told the President that by the year 2000 the GNP of the Soviet Union would be three times that of the United States. Again, that is what the President knew. Any number of economists might have disagreed. The great conservative theorists, Friedman, Hayek, Stigler, would never have thought any such thing. Important work done by Frank Holzman, at Tufts, and the Russian Research Center at Harvard disputed what little was public. But to no avail. The President knew otherwise, and others did not know what it was he knew. The consequence was an extraordinary failure to foresee the central geo political event of our time. A vast overdependence on military and similar outlays that leave us perilously close to economic instability ourselves. I would like to close with a letter written me in 1991 by Dale W. Jorgenson, professor of economics at the Kennedy School of Government, in which he said: I believe that the importance of economic intelligence is increasing greatly with the much-discussed globalization of the U.S. economy. However, the cloak-and-dagger model is even more inappropriate to our new economic situation than it was to the successful prosecution of the Cold War that has just concluded. The lessons for the future seem to me to be rather transparent. The U.S. Government needs to invest a lot more in international economic assessments. * * * (I)t should reject the CIA monopoly model and try to create the kind of intellectual competition that now prevails between CBO and OMB on domestic policy, aided by Brookings, AEI [American Enterprise Institute], the Urban Institute, the Kennedy School, and many others. That is wise counsel. I have the confidence that John Deutch, as a scientist, will understand it. I am concerned, however, that the administration will not. Mancur Olson, in his great book, ``The Rise and Decline of Nations'', asked: Why has it come about that the two nations whose institutions were destroyed in World War II, Germany and Japan, have had the most economic success since? Whereas Britain, not really much success at all; the United States--yes, but. He came up with a simple answer. Defeat wiped out all those choke points, all those rents, all those sharing agreements, all those veto structures that enable institutions to prevent things from happening. And we are seeing it in this our own Government today, 5 years after the Berlin wall came down. Nothing changes, or little changes. Recall that 3 years before the wall came down the CIA reported that per capita GDP was higher in East Germany than in West Germany. I hope I take no liberty that I mentioned this once to Dr. Deutch and added, ``Any taxi driver in Berlin could have told you that was not so.'' Dr. Deutch replied, ``Any taxi driver in Washington.'' A most reassuring response. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas for her graciousness for allowing me to speak when in fact in alternation it would have been her turn. Exhibit 1 [From the Congressional Record, Apr. 25, 1995] The Paranoid Style in American Politics Mr. Moynihan. Mr. President, as we think and, indeed, pray our way through the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, asking how such a horror might have come about, and how others might be prevented, Senators could do well to step outside the chamber and look down the mall at the Washington Monument. It honors the Revolutionary general who once victorious, turned his army over to the Continental Congress and retired to his estates. Later, recalled to the highest office in the land, he served dutifully one term, then a second but then on principle not a day longer. Thus was founded the first republic, the first democracy since the age of Greece and Rome. There is not a more serene, confident, untroubled symbol of the nation in all the capital. Yet a brief glance will show that the color of the marble blocks of which the monument is constructed changes about a quarter of the way up. Thereby hangs a tale of another troubled time; not our first, just as, surely, this will not be our last. As befitted a republic, the monument was started by a private charitable group, as we would now say, the Washington National Monument Society. Contributions came in cash, but also in blocks of marble, many with interior inscriptions which visitors willing to climb the steps can see to this day. A quarter of the way up, that is. For in 1852, Pope Pius IX donated a block of marble from the temple of Concord in Rome. Instantly, the American Party, or the Know-Nothings (``I know nothing,'' was their standard reply to queries about their platform) divined a Papist Plot. An installation of the Pope's block of marble would signal the Catholic Uprising. A fevered agitation began. As recorded by Ray Allen Billington in The Protest Crusade, 1800-1860: ``One pamphlet, The Pope's Strategem: ``Rome to America!'' An Address to the Protestants of the United States, against placing the Pope's block of Marble in the Washington Monument (1852), urged Protestants to hold indignation meetings and contribute another block to be placed next to the Pope's `bearing an inscription by which all men may see that we are awake to the hypocrisy and schemes of that designing, crafty, subtle, far seeing and far reaching Power, which is ever grasping after the whole World, to sway its iron scepter, with bloodstained hands, over the millions of its inhabitants.''' One night early in March, 1854, a group of Know-Nothings broke into the storage sheds on the monument grounds and dragged the Pope's marble off towards the Potomac. Save for the occasional ``sighting'', as we have come to call such phenomena, it has never to be located since. Work on the monument stopped. Years later, in 1876, Congress appropriated funds to complete the job, which the Corps of Engineers, under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas I. Casey did with great flourish in time for the centennial observances of 1888. Dread of Catholicism ran its course, if slowly. (Edward M. Stanton, then Secretary of War was convinced the assassination of President Lincoln was the result of a Catholic plot.) Other manias followed, all brilliantly describe in Richard Hofstadter's revelatory lecture ``the Paranoid Style in American Politics'' which he delivered as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University within days of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Which to this day remains a fertile source of conspiracy mongering. George Will cited Hofstadter's essay this past weekend on the television program ``This Week with David Brinkley.'' He deals with the same subject matter in a superb column in this morning's Washington Post which has this bracing conclusion. ``It is reassuring to remember that paranoiacs have always been with us, but have never defined us.'' I hope, Mr. President, as we proceed to consider legislation, if that is necessary, in of a history in which we have often overreached, to our cost, and try to avoid such an overreaction. We have seen superb performance of the FBI. What more any nation could ask of an internal security group I cannot conceive. We have seen the effectiveness of our State troopers, of our local police forces, fire departments, instant nationwide cooperation which should reassure us rather than frighten us. I would note in closing, Mr. President, that Pope John Paul II will be visiting the United States this coming October.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I thank my gallant friend from Nebraska. I rise in support of the position he has taken and also that of the distinguished chairman of the committee, the Senator from Pennsylvania. In the 103d Congress and then the 104th, I offered legislation that would basically break up the existing Central Intelligence Agency and return its component parts to the Department of Defense and the Department of State. This in the manner that the Office of Strategic Services was divided and parceled out at the end of World War II. I had hoped to encourage a debate on the role of intelligence and of secrecy in American society. That debate has taken place. Some of the results, I think, can be seen in the nomination of a distinguished scientist and public servant, John Deutch, to this position. This could not have been more clear in his testimony. He made a point, self-evident we would suppose, but not frequently to be encountered in a pronouncement of a potential DCI. He said: Espionage does not rest comfortably in a democracy. Secrecy, which is essential to protect sources and methods, is not welcome in an open society. If our democracy is to support intelligence activities, the people must be confident that our law and rules will be respected. It may have come as a surprise--although it ought not to have--in recent months and weeks, to find how many persons there are in this country who do not have confidence that our laws and rules will be respected; who see the Government in conspiratorial modes, directed against the people in ways that could be of huge consequence to Americans. Richard Hofstadter referred to this disposition when he spoke of ``The Paranoid Style in American Politics.'' Thus, for example, the widespread belief that the CIA was somehow involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. It is important to understand how deep this disposition is in our society. In 1956, even before Hofstadter spoke of it, Edward A. Shils of the University of Chicago--a great, great, social scientist, who has just passed away--published his book, ``The Torment of Secrecy,'' in which he wrote: The exfoliation and intertwinement of the various patterns of belief that the world is dominated by unseen circles of conspirators, operating behind our backs, is one of the characteristic features of modern society. Such a belief was very much a feature of the Bolshevik regime that took shape in Russia in 1917 and 1918. Hence the decision to help found and fund in the United States a Communist Party, part of which would be clandestine. The recent discovery in the archives in Moscow that John Reed received a payment of 1,008,000 rubles in 1920. As soft money, that would be a very considerable sum today. It is said that organizations in conflict become like one other. There is a degree to which we have emulated the Soviet model in our own intelligence services. A very powerful essay on this matter has just been written by Jefferson Morley in the Washington Post under the headline ``Understanding Oklahoma'' in an article entitled ``Department of Secrecy: The Invisible Bureaucracy That Unites Alienated America in Suspicion.'' I would refer also to Douglas Turner this weekend in the Buffalo News. I spoke of these concerns in an earlier statement on the Senate floor entitled ``The Paranoid Style in American Politics,'' which I ask unanimous consent be printed in the Record.

Mr. MOYNIHAN

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my distinguished colleague, Senator Chafee, in introducing a bill to restore a full, fair-market-value deduction for gifts of publicly traded stock to private foundations. This was in fact the law through 1994, but the provision in the tax code providing for a charitable deduction measured by the fair market value of stock donated to a private foundation expired on December 31, 1994. As many in this body will recall, I worked for many years to restore a full, fair-market-value deduction for gifts of appreciated property to public charities. That deduction had been limited in 1986 tax legislation for taxpayers subject to the alternative minimum tax, so that they could only deduct the ``basis''--usually, the original purchase price--of property donated to public charities, such as college and universities, museums and other charitable institutions that receive the larger share of their support from the public at large. Happily, the full, fair-market-value deduction for all such gifts--personal property, real estate and intangible property such as stock--was restored on a permanent basis in the 1993 budget legislation, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. The bill we introduce today concerns charitable gifts to private foundations, which unlike public charities, receive their support from, and are often controlled by, a limited group of individuals. A full, fair-market-value deduction for gifts of publicly traded stock had been available in the case of private foundations over the past 10 years under a special rule enacted in 1984 and scheduled to expire on December 31, 1994. This automatic expiration was intended to provide Congress an opportunity to review the private foundation contribution rule with the benefit of several years of practical experience under it. I believe that most commentators have concluded that the private foundation rules are working relatively well, and that the rule providing for fair-market-value deductions for gifts of publicly traded stock has not been a source of compliance problems. As a result, there is no reason to provide different treatment for gifts of publicly traded stock to private foundations that is currently provided for such gifts to public charities. The bill we introduce today would conform the rules for both. Mr. President, private foundations are an important aspect of America's by nonprofit institutions to our society in the areas of education, health, disaster relief, the advancement of knowledge and the preservation of our history and cultural artifacts is vast. I daresay it is often not fully understood or appreciated, particularly the extent to which nonprofit institutions perform functions that are typically governmental undertakings in other societies. Nonprofit institutions are a part of our culture that we should take care not to lose, and government has a role in insuring that they thrive. The legislation we introduce today is a part of that role.