Frank Pallone

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. I thank the Chairman for yielding to me. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment, but I would like to enter into this colloquy in lieu of that at this time. Each year over 660,000 people become ill and more than 300 die from a single contaminant in a single food. That is the bacterium Salmonella in eggs. More than 170 outbreaks of Salmonella illness from eggs have been documented in the past decade. Children, the elderly, and the immune-impaired are especially at risk. In an effort to combat the threat to public safety posed by Salmonella eggs, the administration proposed an egg safety action plan last December. The Food and Drug Administration is currently in the process of developing regulations to implement this plan. It is extremely important that Congress join the administration in an effort to implement a strong science-based system to locate eggs contaminated by Salmonella before they reach the consumer. During the committee process for the agricultural appropriations bill, my colleague, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Kingston), successfully offered an amendment that was of great concern to a number of food safety, public health and consumer groups, as well as a host of Members in this body who regularly work on food safety issues. Accordingly, I drafted an amendment to strike the Kingston language from the bill that I intended to offer today. Specifically, I was concerned about three issues. The first was that the Kingston amendment would have sharply limited environmental testing for Salmonella. Producers need to test the chickens' environment, not just the eggs, to find out if the flock is contaminated with Salmonella. My concern on this front is that the Kingston amendment would have limited environmental testing until 2 or 3 weeks before the end of the life of the flock. If Salmonella is found at that time, it is far too late to recall or pasteurize most of the eggs produced by the contaminated flock, and the public will have been put at risk. Testing should occur at a much earlier time in order to ensure that if Salmonella is found, it is found early enough to prevent the contaminated eggs from reaching consumers. Secondly, I was concerned that the Kingston language would have severely restricted the FDA's authority to require the egg industry to identify contaminated eggs and pasteurize them. Pasteurization eliminates Salmonella but reduces the value of the egg because it can no longer be sold as a table egg. As I understood it, the Kingston amendment would have prevented FDA from requiring pasteurization on the basis of environmental testing. If an environment tests positive for Salmonella, the eggs that come from that environment must be properly tested to determine if they are contaminated. While it is true that a positive environment does not automatically mean eggs from that environment are contaminated, it is also true there is a great chance there will be contaminated eggs from that environment. Accordingly, we must have a system that takes the condition of the environment into consideration during the process of determining which eggs need to be diverted to pasteurization. Lastly, Mr. Chairman, I was concerned that the Kingston amendment would have required the taxpayer to foot the bill for testing eggs for Salmonella, instead of the egg producers. Many in the Egg Industry Council contend that it is fair to have the government pick up the tab for the testing because the government pays for Salmonella testing of meat and poultry. It is important to keep two points in mind, however. The first is that meet meat and poultry producers do not get a free ride. The government requires them to pay for E. Coli testing. The second is that although the government does pay for Salmonella testing in meat and poultry, it also owns the data and makes that data available to the public. So, in my view, it is very appropriate for egg producers to pay for the cost of Salmonella testing. It is also important to make sure that if the government pays for any testing, it owns the data from the testing. Fortunately, over the last several weeks negotiations between those of us concerned about the Kingston amendment, including myself, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Food Animal Concerns Trust, and those supporting the Kingston amendment, including the United Egg Producers, continued. It is my understanding that, as a result of those negotiations, the United Egg Producers have accepted a number of the recommendations the coalition of food safety, public health, and consumer groups were advocating be adopted to improve the Kingston amendment. I would like to enter into a colloquy with the gentleman from Georgia and ask him to elaborate on the actions that United Egg Producers have taken in recent days.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. I thank the gentleman from Texas. And contrary to what the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green) said, I think he said we enjoyed listening to the two Congressmen from Texas and the gentleman from Arkansas, and that is true, but I think more importantly than the way the gentlemen spoke, it is what you were saying. Because substantively I think that the gentlemen are really speaking about what the truth is. One of the concerns that I have during this whole debate that we went through a couple of weeks ago on Medicare and on the issue of prescription drugs is that the Republicans are trying to disguise what their intentions are with regard to a prescription drug plan. All they are really doing, as some of my colleagues have pointed out tonight, is trying to say to our senior citizens that they should go out and try to see if an insurance company will sell them a prescription drug-only plan. And if they will, fine; and if they will not, tough luck. As the gentleman mentioned, so many of the insurance companies and their lobbyists have come into Congress before our congressional committees, before the Committee on Commerce that I serve on, and said that they are not going to sell those policies. The example the gentleman mentioned about the State of Nevada, which passed, I guess about 3 or 4 months ago, something very similar to the Republican proposal, is that the insurance companies simply will not sell these policies. That is why it is not working in Nevada and that is why it will never work here, even if the bill ultimately passes, which is not what I think the Republicans intend. I wanted to state very simply from my perspective the reason why the Democrats tried to put forward a real Medicare drug benefit. Basically, what the Democrats were saying is that Medicare has worked. It was passed back in the 1960s by a Democratic Congress. Lyndon Johnson was the President then. And if we think of it from the point of view of the average senior, it makes sense. Right now they know that under part A of Medicare their hospitalization is covered. They know that if they voluntarily decide, which most people do, to opt for part B, which covers their doctors' care, that they pay a certain amount of premium per month and their doctors' bills are basically covered with some kind of a copayment. Now, what the Democrats are saying is we want to establish another part of Medicare, part C or D or whatever we want to call it, that covers prescription drugs. And just like part B that covers the doctors' bills, if an individual pays so much a month, an honest premium, then that individual will have most or a significant part of their prescription drug benefit paid for through Medicare. We are simply building on the existing Medicare program that has worked for the last 30 to 35 years, and we want to expand it now to cover prescription drugs. That makes perfect sense. Why go through all these hoops and bureaucratic niceties to say, okay, we will try to get the insurance companies to sell a drug-only policy, which they do not want to sell anyway, when we could simply expand Medicare to prescription drugs in the logical way we have included part B for doctors' bills now? The Democrats are also saying that the Medicare benefit provides the guarantee that individuals will have and will be able to obtain any prescription drugs that are medically necessary. The key again is medically necessary. If the doctor says that an individual needs that prescription, that that particular drug is needed, then it would be covered under the Democrats Medicare plan. The Republicans not only are telling seniors that their option is to go out and try to get somebody who will sell them an insurance policy, but they are also not saying what that insurance policy has to be, even if they could buy it, which they cannot. They are not telling seniors how much the premium would be, they are not telling the elderly or the disabled what kind of drugs the insurance company would cover. Basically, that is up to the insurance company to decide. Why, again, are we reinventing the wheel when we know we have an existing Medicare program that works and could be simply expanded to include prescription drugs? The other thing I wanted to mention tonight, and I think is just as important, is that the Republican plan leaves American seniors open to continued price discrimination. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Turner) said that as well. There is nothing in the Republican bill to prevent the drug companies from charging whatever they want. Now, what we said in our Medicare bill is by expanding Medicare to include prescription drugs, we will have the government basically choose a benefit provider in each region that will negotiate the best price. All these Medicare recipients, all these seniors, are now going to be in one program. I think there is something like 30 to 40 million Americans that would be eligible under this program. If these benefit providers are out there negotiating for a better price because they have all these seniors, they can get a significant discount. I do not know whether it will be 10 percent, 20 percent, or whatever it will be, but they will get a significant discount. So at least we are trying through our Democratic proposal to address the price discrimination issue. The Republicans are not even dealing with that. I just wanted to mention two things, and I think the gentleman actually already mentioned it, about this article that was in The New York Times on Saturday regarding the Nevada experience. I do not think I have ever seen an article where they compare what was being done in the States as compared to what is being done in the Federal Government. We usually pride ourselves in the fact that the States sort of serve as the laboratories and do things, and if they work out well then we adopt them at the Federal level. We did that in the gentleman's State of Texas with the Patients' Bill of Rights. Basically, the Federal bill that the Democrats have been pushing is very similar to what the gentleman has in his State on HMO reform. Here we have a situation in Nevada where they adopt a drug plan, and then what do the Republicans do in the House of Representatives? They copy the example, which is failing. Not the example that worked, like in Texas with the HMO reform, but the example in Nevada, which is failing; where they cannot get any insurance company to provide an insurance policy, and they adopt it here and say this is going to work. I do not like to quote from newspaper articles, but I just cannot help lift a few things from this New York Times article because it is so much on point in basically explaining how the Nevada plan is exactly the same as what the Republicans have proposed here in the Congress. If I could just go through a couple of things here. It says, ``Nevada has adopted a prescription drug program for the elderly very similar to one approved last month by the Republicans in the House of Representatives, but it is off to a rocky start. Insurance companies have spurned Nevada's invitation to provide coverage. The risks and the costs are too high, they say, and the subsidies offered by the State are too low. Nevada's experience offers ominous lessons for Congress, especially Republicans, who want to subsidize insurance companies to entice them into providing drug benefits to elderly and disabled people on Medicare.'' They go into how in March, as I mentioned and the gentleman previously mentioned, this was adopted. And I guess they have a task force, the way I understand it. There is a task force set up within the Nevada legislature that basically monitors the use of the money and decides whether or not, if an insurance company applies to sell these policies, that they would pass muster under the Nevada legislation. Apparently there was only one insurance company that was even interested, and they actually were disqualified under Nevada law. The assemblywoman, and it does not say what party she is on, but who was the cochairman of this task force monitoring the use of the money says, and I quote, ``I have my doubts that any insurance company will be able to offer meaningful drug benefits under this program. If an insurance company does bid on it, but the benefits are paltry, senior citizens will be up in arms.'' And then it goes on to say how even in Nevada the insurance companies came to the State legislature, just like we had the lobbyists from the insurance companies here in Washington, came to the legislature and said they did not want to sell these policies, and they passed the bill anyway. We have the same thing here. We had, as mentioned again in the article, the Health Insurance Association of America, which is the trade association for the health insurance industry, they came before the Committee on Commerce and they told us that they did not want to sell the policies. And they have a quote in here from the Health Insurance Association of America saying they are not interested in selling drug-only insurance to the elderly. I do not know how more clear it could be when the insurance companies tell you they are not interested, they are not going to sell these policies. I do not want to keep reading from this article, but it is amazing to me that so many times, and I was in the State legislature in New Jersey, how you pass something in the legislature and it works and then you come down here and you say, ``That's a good idea, let's adopt it nationally.'' Why in the world would the Republicans use a bad proposal that nobody wants to use and come here and say this is what we should adopt as the national example? The other thing I wanted to mention, because I did get into the issue of cost, is that the cost of prescription drugs continues to rise. There are so many examples over the last 6 months or the last 6 weeks about the increased costs. There was a survey that was done just before we left, I guess it was actually the week we were here voting on the prescription drug program, and this is again in the New York Times, it was a study released by Express Scripts of St. Louis on June 26. It said spending on prescription drugs increased a record 17.4 percent last year and elderly people experienced the largest cost increases. This was about the same time that we voted on it. It said that the statistics show why elderly people feel a pressing need for the coverage and why many Members of Congress are worried about the costs. Spending on prescription drugs averaged $387 a person last year, up 17.4 percent from the average the year before. But for seniors, the cost rose even more. In 1 year, a 17 percent increase. Where are we going with this? We have to do something about it. We have to provide comprehensive coverage under Medicare and we have to address the price discrimination issue as well. The gentleman has been doing such a great job this evening and at other times in bringing this to the attention of our constituents.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Quality Health Care Coalition Act. It is a good piece of legislation and I urge all of my colleagues to join me in supporting it. As you know, Mr. Chairman, current anti-trust law prohibits health care professionals, including doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and nurses from banding together to negotiate with managed care organizations. Although this prohibition alone has stacked the deck against health care professionals seeking to protect both themselves and their patients from managed care abuse, consolidations in the health insurance industry have exacerbated this imbalance even further over the last several years. To complement the enhanced negotiating power they have accrued through mergers and acquisitions, managed care organizations also use exclusionary contracting practices to bully health care professionals into accepting terms they surely would not accept if they were able to negotiate on a level playing field. These trends have enabled insurers to employ a ``take it or leave it'' approach when negotiating with health care professionals. As a result, the doctor-patient relationship has been compromised and the quality of care for all patients has suffered. I have heard many first hand accounts of these abusive practices from the New Jersey Medical Society, the New Jersey Pharmacists Association, and countless other physicians with whom I have met over the last several years. We must put an end to them. The Quality Health Care Coalition Act would correct this problem by giving health professionals the tools they need to band together when negotiating with managed care organizations. This enhanced negotiating power will level the playing field and allow health professionals to stand up for what's right and make medical judgments based on patients' medical needs rather than the managed care industry's financial motivations. Vote ``yes'' on final passage.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, it is my great pleasure to rise today to honor a man who has spent the last 35 years of his life representing the interests of working men and women in the State of New Jersey. William G. Terrell, Friday, retires as UAW International Representative Community Action Programs (CAP) Director for the State of New Jersey. For the last several decades, Bill Terrell has spent a majority of his time improving the quality of life for thousands of workers in the State of New Jersey. Throughout his career in organized labor, Mr. Terrell has held numerous positions within the UAW, culminating with his current position as CAP Director since 1985. Bill Terrell has been a tireless advocate on behalf of autoworkers throughout the State of New Jersey, as well as the nation as a whole. He has played an active role in UAW contract negotiations, workplace safety and ensuring New Jersey's automobile plants continue production in our State. He is a constant supporter of organized labor and works extremely hard to ensure that all workers have a voice. With Bill Terrell's retirement, the NJ UAW is losing a worker, a family man, and a leader. I want to offer Mr. Terrell my congratulations and thanks for his outstanding career of service. It is with men like Bill Terrell that our nation's labor movement is such a huge success. He will be sorely missed.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I only ask that my Republican colleagues be honest about the substance and the procedure here tonight. They are not giving us a Medicare prescription drug benefit, and they are not willing to work on a bipartisan basis. They have stopped us from bringing the Democratic plan to the floor, no substitute, no amendments. All the Republicans are doing is throwing some money at the insurance companies hoping they will sell a drug-only insurance policy that the insurance companies have already told us that they will not sell. Let us look at this from the point of view of the average American senior. That senior will benefit directly from the Democratic plan and they will get absolutely nothing from the Republican plan. Seniors know what Medicare is. They get their hospitalization under Part A. They pay a monthly premium through Part B and they get their doctors bills paid. What the Democrats are saying, very simply, is we will give them a prescription drug benefit in the same way. They pay a modest premium and the Government pays for a certain percentage of their drug bills. The Democrats give them the benefit through Medicare if that is what they want, it is voluntary, and it covers all their medicines that are medically necessary as determined by their doctor, not by the insurance company. What the Republicans tell them is to go out and see if they can find an insurance policy to cover their medicine. If they cannot find it, tough luck. And even if they do find it, there is no guarantee as to what the monthly premiums are going to be or what kind of medicine they are going to get. Lastly, Mr. Speaker, and just as important, the Republicans leave America's seniors open to continued price discrimination. We know that our seniors have complained to us about the high cost and about the discrimination, about the prices in Canada versus the prices in Mexico, or the prices that they pay for their pet. The Republicans do nothing to prevent the drug companies from charging them whatever they want.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Chairman, I rise on behalf of the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) and myself in support of the Sherwood- Markey-Barton amendment to reauthorize the Energy Policy and Conservation Act and establish the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve. On April 12 of this year, the House overwhelmingly approved the Energy Policy Conservation Act reauthorization by a vote of 416 to 8. This bill included language that the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Markey) authored to provide for the establishment of the heating oil reserve in the Northeast. Unfortunately, these provisions have languished at the hands of the Republican leadership in the Senate. The administration supports these provisions, and these provisions have bipartisan support here in the House. The Democrats and some House Republicans are working to address our high gas and heating oil prices by crafting bipartisan solutions. Unfortunately, some members of the Republican leadership are using tactics to prevent this Congress from implementing a long-term energy strategy, one that will provide real energy security for all Americans. This legislation would give the President the flexibility that he needs to create a Northeast heating oil reserve and release the heating oil from this reserve in the event we have a repetition of the type of severe price spikes, supply disruptions or severe weather situations that we saw last winter which drove home heating oil prices way up. This provision helped assure that as we are reauthorizing EPCA, that we are addressing both the needs of the producing States, who are worried about what happens when prices go too low, and the consuming States, who worry about what happens when prices get too high. So if my colleagues voted aye for H.R. 2884, the EPCA reauthorization to create a Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve, they should vote aye today to assure that we can make the Reserve a reality. I urge adoption of this bipartisan amendment. Announcement By The Chairman Pro Tempore

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I speak today in support of the reauthorization of the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act. The Atlantic striped bass is a valuable coastal resource and one of the most important fisheries for recreational anglers--especially within the Sixth Congressional District of New Jersey. As a senior member of the Subcommittee on Fisheries Conservation, Wildlife, and Oceans, I have a long history of involvement in protecting, preserving, and enhancing the striped bass. In fact, I have sponsored legislation to designate the striped bass as a federal gamefish. This bill would prohibit the commercial harvesting of striped bass and reserve this resource for recreational catches only, therefore ensuring a healthy sustainable recreational fishery. The recovery of the striped bass fishery since the crash of the late 1970's is a example of successful state and federal cooperation and angler support over the last two decades. By the numbers, the Atlantic striped bass fishery appears to be thriving and healthy, but maintaining these harvests will require continued coordination and careful management. The 1998-99 harvest data show a harvest increase for both commercial and recreational fishermen over previous years. In fact, harvest levels have been increasing steadily since the moratorium on striped bass fishing was lifted in 1990. In its 1999 report to Congress, the Atlantic States Marine Fishery Commission states that the 1999 stock assessment revealed cause for concern that striped bass were fished above the target level in 1998 and 1999. Of particular concern was the finding that fishing mortality for older (age 8 and up) fish exceeded the definition of overfishing in 1998. These age 8 and older fish represent the most important age class for recreational fishermen, and provide a large percentage of the spawning biomass. While these stock assessment figures raise concerns about the harvest of larger fish, the fishery does not appear to be in danger of collapse in the near future. However, I believe we must take precautionary measures now to avoid that potential threat of a collapse in the future. In 1979, Congress first authorized the Emergency Striped Bass Study as part of the Anadromous Fish Conservation Act to address the problem of declining striped bass stocks. This legislation was later expanded by the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act of 1984 which ensured that the states would comply with a coast-wide fishery management plan. Since its inception, this bill has been a positive step in managing the Atlantic striped bass fishery. It is for that reason that I support passage of the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Reauthorization.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, this evening I would like to expose the Republicans' attempt to make a campaign issue out of the Nation's gas price spike crisis and Democrats' efforts to solve this crisis and continue working to protect our long-term energy security. Higher gas prices should not be a partisan issue, but the Republicans are making it into one. On the other hand, the Democrats are trying to come up with bipartisan solutions. For instance, Democrats have called on committee chairmen holding hearings on this topic in the coming days to invite oil executives to testify so that these hearings are balanced. Democrats insist on exploring why the oil companies are showing record profits and why, when an investigation was announced, prices dropped immediately. Yet, the Republican leadership instead is making a sham of these hearings by using them as a forum to attack the Clinton-Gore administration. Moreover, the Republicans also do not want to invite the oil executives to testify, because they are in the pockets of big oil. GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush is one of the worst offenders. He has raised 15 times more money from oil and gas interests than Vice President Al Gore, and at least 25 of his top fund-raisers are connected to the oil industry. Last year, one of the first bills he signed bailed out the oil industry with a $45 million tax break. Let us look at other dilatory tactics by the Republicans. The Senate Republican leadership has held up reauthorization of the President's authority to draw down the strategic petroleum reserve and the Northeast heating oil reserve. These reserves would provide additional supplies for the gasoline and heating oil markets and would, in turn, bring down prices. The Clinton-Gore administration has supported both of these reserves. Yet, the Senate majority leadership has delayed action for too long, so even if both of these reserves were authorized today, the action is already too little, too late. As a result, Americans unfortunately are again to experience heating oil shortages in the Northeast this winter, and they have the Republican Congress to thank for it. While the Clinton-Gore administration is trying to provide tax credits for energy efficient vehicles, buildings, homes and equipment, the Republican leadership is cutting funding for alternative energy sources and energy conservation measures. They have slashed funding for these common sense programs since they have been in the majority, which has resulted in a $1.3 billion shortfall. As recently as last week, the Republican leadership voted again to cut funding substantially below current funding levels for renewable energy programs in the Energy and Water funding bill. Tomorrow, the Republicans will have a chance to restore some of this funding. If they are serious about resolving this crisis, they will literally put their money where their mouths are on this vote. The GOP leadership also wants to repeal gas taxes and jeopardize our Nation's transportation infrastructure. In addition, they want to gut environmental protections that cost only 2 to 3 cents per gallon. Just in case anyone out there thinks a few pennies are too much to pay for clean air, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) and the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Baldacci) and I introduced a bill on Friday, H.R. 4739, that would enable the patent for blending cleaner, reformulated gasoline to be made available to all refiners. This would level the playing field for all refiners and, in turn, would bring down the price of reformulated gasoline. If the Republican leadership is serious about working together in a bipartisan fashion to develop true solutions to this crisis, then they will work with us to bring legislation such as the bill my colleagues and I introduced last week to the floor quickly. They also would find common sense programs that promote alternative energy options, ensure that oil executives are present at this week's hearings, and work with us to resolve this crisis as quickly as possible.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, it is with a sense of disappointment and concern that I rise tonight to respond to a misguided initiative that some of my colleagues in this House are involved with. Several Members of Congress have attached their names to a letter to President Clinton that makes some outrageous and false charges about recent events in India. I believe these claims cannot go unchallenged. The letter repeats the malicious claims that the massacre of 36 Sikh villagers in Chittsinghpora, in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, was the work of Indian security forces. That massacre occurred on March 20, at the beginning of President Clinton's historic trip to India. I had the opportunity to take part in the President's trip, and this tragic and shocking massacre did cast a shadow over the trip. It left a deep sense of sadness among all of us in the American delegation and among all the people of India that we encountered. President Clinton condemned the attack in the strongest terms. Less than a week after the attack, Indian investigating agencies in Jammu and Kashmir made an arrest in the case, apprehending one Yakub Wagey, a terrorist belonging to the Hizbul-Mujahideen. Mr. Wagey, a resident of Chittsinghpora, revealed that the massacre was the work of a group of 16 to 17 terrorists, including six militants of Hizbul- Mujahideen and 11 to 12 foreign mercenaries owing allegiance to Lashkar-e-Toiba, the LeT. Both of these terrorist organizations are on the long list of terrorist organizations that receive support from Pakistan. This terrible incident was the first large-scale attack against the Sikh community in Jammu and Kashmir, but it is consistent with the ongoing terrorist campaign that has claimed the lives of thousands of peaceful civilians in that state. This terrorist campaign has repeatedly and convincingly been linked to elements operating within Pakistan, often with the direct or indirect support of Pakistan's government. As I discussed in this Chamber earlier this week, the Pakistani- supported terrorist campaign has ethically cleansed Jammu and Kashmir of its indigenous Hindu community, the Kashmiri Pandits. The terrorists have also sought to clear out members of other Muslim sects or those Muslims who cooperate with the lawful Indian authorities of the state. And now with this incident, the ethic cleansing campaign has turned on the Sikhs. It is no coincidence that this massacre took place during President Clinton's visit to South Asia. I believe that these terrorist groups and their supporters in Pakistan wanted an incident that would draw attention to the Kashmir issue. Pakistan has been seeking to internationalize this conflict for years. What better time to perpetrate a high-profile atrocity like this then when the President of the United States is in the region with all the attendant diplomatic and media attention that such a visit brings with it. What makes the claim that India was behind the massacre all the more absurd, I mean this is why it is absurd. At a time when India was before the world stage, what possible motive would there be for such an ugly incident to detract from all the positive publicity India was seeking to generate. It does not make any sense. Mr. Speaker, this allegation really makes no sense at all when we look at the record of the two South Asian neighbors, India and Pakistan. India is a secular, pluralistic democracy that seeks to promote civil and human rights for all of its many ethnic, linguistic and religious communities. Pakistan is a military dictatorship that has a long record of fomenting instability and violence in Kashmir while denying human and civil rights at home. One of the motives behind trying to link India to the attack against the Sikh villagers in Kashmir is to try to generate separatist sentiment against India's Sikh community. Indeed, I understand that an organization based here in this country that seeks to promote the Sikh separatist cause has lent its support to the letter circulating on Capitol Hill. The reality is that, in India's State of Punjab, where the Sikhs constitute a majority, Mr. Prakash Singh Badal, who happens to be a Sikh, has been elected as Chief Minister of the State. The predominantly Sikh Akali Dal Party holds a majority in the State's legislature. The State government has set up the Human Rights Commission whose primary purpose is to investigate claims of human rights abuses by government security forces, just as India has done on the national level. The democratically-elected Sikh political leaders in Punjab are not buying the claims of Indian Government responsibility for the atrocity that took place in Kashmir this past March. Mr. Speaker, finally I want to say, India's Democratically-elected leaders will admit that there have been abuses by security forces. There is also violence between various religious and ethnic communities which is not officially condoned. In both cases, India has sought to crack down on these kinds of acts in an honest and effective way that makes it a model among the nations of Asia. The call by some of my colleagues to declare India a terrorist nation is completely unreasonable. Indeed, following from the President's recent trip, cooperation against terrorism is one of the major areas of U.S.-India bilateral cooperation. The idea of cutting off aid to India, an approach that has repeatedly been tried and failed here in the House, is even more absurd, seeking to send a message by cutting vital nutrition and health care.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, in recent years the United States and the world community have been forced to confront the need for a resolution of the conflict in Kashmir. This conflict in the Himalayan Mountains has for decades poisoned relations between India and Pakistan. The conflict has also poisoned life within Kashmir itself. People from all ethnic and religious groups have suffered from the violence, be they Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, but the most forgotten victims have been the Pandits. Recently, it was reported by the Indo-American Kashmir forum that Karl Inderfurth, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, reiterated the view that Pandits should not be ignored in upcoming discussions of the Kashmir issue. In a meeting with the National Advisory Council on South Asia at the State Department earlier this month, Mr. Inderfurth acknowledged that the U.S. has not always mentioned the Pandits in its statements on the Kashmir, but assured the Council that the displaced status of the Pandits is a matter of concern to the United States. As a U.S. official who has frequently sought to give more attention to the plight of the Pandits, I am encouraged by Mr. Inderfurth's recent statement. I will urge our State Department to continue to draw attention to the suffering that the Pandits have endured and continue to endure in its statements on the Kashmir issue. I have also called for the U.N. and international organizations to devote greater attention to what I consider a case of ethnic cleansing that is afflicting the Kashmiri Pandit community. Mr. Speaker, India's Prime Minister Vajpayee has indicated that his government would be willing to meet with Kashmiri groups to address their concerns but the prime minister has stressed that Pakistan should not have any role in this dialogue, which is in fact an internal matter for India. Some of these separatist elements within Kashmir, the same organizations involved in the terrorism that has uprooted the Pandit community, are clearly working to promote greater Pakistani involvement in this process. Mr. Speaker, there is overwhelming evidence of Pakistani support for the continued terror campaign in Jammu and Kashmir. Indeed, Pakistani involvement and terrorist activities in Kashmir has been acknowledged by our State Department and a Congressionally appointed advisory panel has recommended that Pakistan be designated as the government that is not fully cooperative against terrorism. The Pakistani government itself has at least tacitly acknowledged, under heavy international pressure, that it must take action to curb the network of militants that has taken root on its soil. The one aspect of this tragedy that frequently is overlooked is the plight of the Hindu community of this region, the Kashmiri Pandits. As I have gotten to know the Kashmiri American community, and hearing about the situation facing the Pandits, I have been increasingly outraged not only at the terrible abuses they have suffered but at the seeming indifference of the world community. At the same time, I am impressed by the dignity and the determination that the Kashmiri Pandits have maintained despite their horrible conditions, and I am touched by the deep concern that the Kashmiri Americans feel for their brothers and sisters living in Kashmir in the refugee centers set up in India to accommodate the Pandits driven from their homes in the Kashmir Valley. Mr. Speaker, in the great international debates that we have, it is sometimes all too easy to overlook the so-called small problem of one persecuted ethnic group, but I hope that the United States and India, as the world's two largest democracies, will show determination to finally address this humanitarian catastrophe in an effective and humane way.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, on the eve of last year's meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, I was joined by 11 of my colleagues in this House on a bipartisan basis in calling on U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky to help move the accession of the Republic of Armenia to the WTO. Recently the Trade Representative's office provided me with an update on the administration's negotiations with Armenia for its accession to the WTO. In his letter, Trade Representative official Richard W. Fisher indicates that the United States strongly supports Armenia's WTO membership and its integration into the world economy. Quoting from Mr. Fisher's letter, ``Armenia has made impressive progress on economic reform and transition to a market economy under very difficult economic circumstances. We believe that Armenia's implementation of WTO provisions will facilitate further progress towards increased investment and economic growth and that its acceptance of WTO market access commitments will foster Armenia's further integration into the global trading system.'' Madam Speaker, the letter goes on to state that, ``In the last year, Armenia has made substantial progress in its negotiations to complete the accession process, both with the United States and with other WTO members. Market access negotiations on tariffs, services, and agricultural supports are very close to completion, and Armenia has reported that its efforts to enact legislation to implement WTO provisions are also in the last stages.'' Mr. Fisher notes that WTO delegations will meet in July to further assess Armenia's progress, and that the administration shares the goal of many of us in Congress that these negotiations be completed as soon as possible. Madam Speaker, this is certainly very encouraging news. Since achieving its independence about a decade ago, Armenia has sought to integrate its economy with its immediate neighbors, as well as with the larger world. While Armenia has achieved strong bilateral ties with the United States, Europe, and other regions of the world, unfortunately achieving economic integration in its immediate neighborhood has proven more difficult, through no fault of Armenia's, I should add. Armenia's neighbors to the west, Turkey, and to the east, Azerbaijan, continue to maintain devastating economic blockades. Armenia has sought to normalize relations with its neighbors, but has been snubbed. Still, despite the isolation imposed on this small landlocked Nation by hostile neighbors, Armenia endeavors to become an integral part of the world community through a range of international organizations, including NATO's Partnership for Peace program and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, among others. What Armenia needs most is economic development. Membership in the WTO will help Armenia attract investment and reach new markets under a predictable international framework. Madam Speaker, economic development for Armenia over the longer term will be based on that Nation's ability to establish trading networks, attract investment, and enact the kinds of free market economic policies that foster sustained prosperity. Armenia's elected leaders know this, but in the shorter term, Armenia still needs the kind of assistance that a great Nation like the United States can provide. In the immediate years after independence, as Armenia coped with the effects of blockades and the destruction wrought by a devastating earthquake, there was a crying need for direct humanitarian assistance. In the years since, the thrust of assistance has shifted to development aid. In order to help Armenia achieve self-sufficiency, the United States must continue to provide developmental and humanitarian assistance. We must also use our influence to bring about regional integration and confidence-building measures that will help Armenia and its neighbors achieve stability and become full-fledged members of the emerging global economy. We must also do more to resolve the Nagorno-Karabagh conflict, recognizing the legitimate security and self-determination needs of the Karabagh people. This will create the kind of stability that lends itself to economic development. Madam Speaker, I just wanted to say lastly this evening that I am encouraged by the support that the administration has demonstrated in helping Armenia's accession to the WTO. I will keep the pressure on the administration to help in the other areas through direct assistance and in fostering regional stability. That will make this anticipated accession to the WTO meaningful in the lives of the people of Armenia.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Tonight, Mr. Speaker, once again I would like to talk about the need for a Medicare prescription drug policy, and talk a little bit about the Democratic plan, the President's plan, in contrast with what I consider the lack of plan that the Republican leadership appears to have come up with and apparently is attempting to move through the House over the next week or two. My colleague, the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen), has been a leader on this issue and introduced legislation more than a year ago to deal most specifically with the issue of price discrimination. As he has said many times and I will reiterate, there are really two aspects to this Medicare prescription drug proposal. One is to provide the benefit, and the other is to make sure that the price discrimination that we have witnessed so often in the last few years does not continue. I would like to commend the gentleman for all that he has done to address this issue of price discrimination with his legislation, and also with his effort to get so many cosponsors to that bill. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen).

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I agree with the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen). I guess I just worry that the public does get confused because the Republican leadership proposal is designed to confuse them. I mean, one of the things that I know of, they try to give the impression somehow that if one does not go along with their proposal, and one has an HMO, and one would like the HMO or one has an existing pension plan that provides for prescription drugs, that somehow that is going to change. One of the things that I have made clear is that the Democratic proposal is a Medicare benefit, but it is voluntary. We have actually built into the President's proposal, the Democratic proposal, the idea that about 50 percent of the costs for an HMO or 50 percent of the costs if somebody has a drug benefit now through their pension or whatever would be paid for. We would not discourage people from leaving their HMO if they like it and they have a drug benefit or leaving their other private plan that they might have through an employer that they like, because we are going to build in that about 50 percent of the cost of that drug plan in both of these cases would be paid for by the government through this Medicare program. But what we are saying is that for those people who do not feel that they have a good program either because they have nothing or because they do not have a good program that they will be guaranteed a benefit if they do opt to pay for their premium per month just like they do with part B. It just seems to me it makes a lot more sense to say on the one hand everybody is covered who wants it. If one does not want it, one does not have to opt for it. Everybody has got a specific benefit that they know is guaranteed. Then if one wants to opt out, one can. But not to build, as the gentleman, says, this bureaucracy which is very similar to the existing HMOs. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen) for joining me this evening. We are going to continue the battle on this. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to go into a little detail about what the Democratic proposal is, which is essentially the President's plan. In describing what the Democrat proposal is, I am relying on the testimony that was made before the Committee on Commerce, of which I am a member, last week by Nancy-Ann DeParle, who is the administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration, which administers Medicare and would also continue to administer the prescription drug proposal under the President's plan which, as I said, is essentially the Democrats' plan. I want to outline this because I do not want to just talk about why the Republican proposal is bad, I want to explain what the Democratic proposal is and why it is a good plan. Basically, under the President's plan, it is voluntary. It is affordable. It is competitive. It has a quality drug benefit that would be available to all beneficiaries. The President's plan dedicates over half of the on-budget surplus to Medicare and also extends the life of the Medicare trust fund to at least 2030. So what we are doing is we are using the budget surplus that has been generated with the good economy to pay for this Medicare prescription drug program. Most important, the coverage is available to all beneficiaries under the President's plan. And I say that because I believe that the Medicare program has worked, and it makes sense to put this prescription drug plan under the rubric of the existing Medicare program. The advantage of doing that is that everyone, regardless of income or health status, gets the same basic package of benefits. All workers pay taxes to support the Medicare program; and, therefore, all beneficiaries should have access to this new drug benefit, just like they have for everything else in the Medicare program. Now, a universal benefit helps ensure that enrollment is not dominated by those with high drug costs, the so-called problem adverse selection, which would make the benefit unaffordable and unsustainable. One of the criticisms of the leadership plan is that what may happen is that only people with high drug costs would opt into it. What we want to do is create an insurance pool, just like with Medicare in general, that everybody is involved with. Because it is only when we have a large insurance pool with people of all categories of use for drug benefits that we can be successful. And, again, under the President's plan it is strictly voluntary. If a beneficiary has what they think is better coverage under an HMO or some kind of pension plan or something through their employer, they do not have to opt into it. As I said, what we are really going to do is to make sure that those plans get extra money, up to 50 percent of the cost of what it cost them for a drug benefit, the existing HMO would get or the existing employer benefit plan would get, in order for the individual to continue to use that plan if they do not want to opt into the Medicare plan. Now, for beneficiaries who choose to participate under the President's plan, the Democratic plan, Medicare will pay half of the monthly premium, with beneficiaries paying an estimated $26 per month for the base benefit in 2003. As the program is phased in from 2003 on, it becomes more generous; and, of course, the premium goes up accordingly. The premiums would be collected just like the Medicare part B program as a deduction from Social Security checks for most beneficiaries who choose to participate. Low-income beneficiaries would receive special assistance so that if they are below a certain income, just like now for part B, for those seniors in part B now, which pays for their doctor bills, if they are below a certain income, they get part of the premium paid for. If they are at a very low income, the complete premium is paid for. We would do the same thing with this prescription drug plan using the same criteria. The income basically that would be used for those criteria would be the same. Under the President's plan, Medicare would pay half the cost of each prescription with no deductible. The benefit will cover up to $2,000 of prescription drugs when coverage begins in 2003 and increase to $5,000 by 2009, with 50 percent beneficiary coinsurance. After that, that would be adjusted for inflation. But most important, also, we have a catastrophic benefit. So that basically above a certain amount, I believe it is $3,000 out of pocket, all the costs would be paid for by Medicare and by the Government. The price discrimination issue that my colleague, the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen), mentioned is addressed in the President's plan through competitive regional contracts to provide the service. In other words, basically in each region of the country we would ask people to apply or compete to be the benefit provider; to be the entity that would go out and negotiate a price for the drugs and provide the medicine or prescription drug benefits for the individual. And basically that would be reviewed by HCFA on some kind of yearly or biannual basis. If it was not working out so that prices remained too high, then they could drop those benefit providers that were not performing. I think that is important. Because, again, if we do not have some way to address the price discrimination issue, then I do not think that this program would work. And, again, there is nothing in the Republican proposal to address the issue of price discrimination or provide this kind of fair price that has been proposed in the President's program. I want to talk, again, about those people who are in HMOs. We are not saying that individuals in HMOs cannot continue in those HMOs and get a drug benefit. In fact, what is going to happen is that this Medicare program is going to provide money to the HMO for that drug benefit. Under the President's plan, essentially we strengthen and stabilize the Medicare+Choice HMO program. Today, most Medicare+Choice, or HMOs, offer prescription drug coverage using the excess from payments intended to cover basic Medicare benefits. They are only getting the amount of money that the Federal Government assumes would pay for basic Medicare benefits without the drug benefit. But under the President's proposal, those HMO plans in all markets will be paid explicitly for providing a drug benefit in addition to the payments that they receive for current Medicare benefits. So they will no longer have to rely on the rate in a given area to determine whether they can offer a benefit or how generous it can be. And that is where we get into the problem where some of the HMOs drop the drug benefit or start charging more for the drug benefit. They will not have to do that because there will not be the regional variations. They will be getting money directly from Medicare, directly from the Federal Government, to pay for half the cost of the drug benefit. And that also will be true for any kind of employer plan that someone might have that they receive through their employer that they want to keep as well. I think that the concern that I have, if I contrast the Democratic plan, which I think is really a Medicare benefit that is available to all, that ends price discrimination, that has a defined benefit, if I contrast that with the Republican plan, the basic problem with the Republican plan is that it is imaginary. It is not going to work. It is just political cover. It is empty promises. My colleague talked about that before. And it is not an entitlement to anything. The one thing that really disturbs me is if we set up a system, as the Republican leadership has proposed, where this is basically a private insurance plan, we get away from the basic universality of Medicare that we have had for a long time. If we start breaking up Medicare and suggesting that one part of it, in this case the prescription drug plan, can be outside of the Medicare drug program, I think it undermines the whole Medicare program and the whole ideology of the Medicare program. I have been concerned because I think that is the goal of some of my Republican colleagues. They do not really like Medicare. They do not like the fact that Medicare was set up as a government program. They would rather have all of Medicare, perhaps, to be some kind of a private insurance program, and the prescription drug benefit becomes sort of the first way to accomplish that. The other problem with the Republican plan is that since it does not have a defined benefit, we are never going to know exactly what kind of benefit one gets. In other words, we say in the Democratic plan that if the medicine, the prescription drug, is medically necessary, if the doctor feels, and he is going to write a prescription that this drug is medically necessary, then the individual gets it. That is the definition of the benefit. But we do not have that under the Republican plan. We do not necessarily know what kind of drugs are going to be covered. And it is going to depend upon the whims of the private insurance market whether or not they can offer certain drugs or cover certain things at a given time. Seniors need to have a certain amount of certainty. I think one of the biggest problems that exists now when HMOs change their drug benefit plans or they simply drop seniors altogether is that I get a call saying what happened, I thought I had a certain HMO, I thought I had a certain drug benefit plan and all of a sudden I do not. We need certainty, and that is essentially what the Democrats are proposing. There was a very interesting article, I thought a really enlightening article, in The New York Times, Mr. Speaker, just yesterday, Sunday. It was on the front page. It was by Robert Pear, and it was entitled ``Party Differences on Drug Benefits Continue to Grow.'' And it talked about this whole Medicare debate in terms of what the Republican leadership proposes as opposed to what the President and the Democrats are proposing. I do not like to read, but I just thought that there were certain parts of this article that really sort of explained the differences between what the Democrats proposed and what the Republicans proposed, and why I feel that the Democratic plan really is a good plan that will work whereas the Republican plan simply will not work and it is just something they are putting forward. I would just like to read certain sections of this article, if I could, because it does draw such contrasts between the Democrats and the Republicans on the issue. It says, about halfway down the front page in the article from yesterday's New York Times, ``Democrats want more uniformity in premiums and benefits. They say the Republicans' free-market approach will confuse beneficiaries and encourage insurers to seek out healthy customers with relatively low drug costs, a practice known as cherrypicking.'' This is the whole idea of breaking the insurance pool. The reason why Medicare works is because so many people, almost everyone, most seniors, are involved with it. So it creates this huge insurance pool that does not depend on whether a person is sick or how much health care or hospitalization is needed. Well, we break that system by allowing insurance companies, through private insurance, to cherrypick those who use the least amount of drugs; and all of a sudden, we do not have a workable plan. Well, the article says that, ``The Republican proposal assumes that insurers can be induced to offer drug coverage subsidized by the government just as health maintenance organizations have been induced to sign contracts with the government to care for 6.2 million Medicare beneficiaries. But when asked if insurers would be interested in offering drug coverage under Mr. Thomas','' the Republicans', ``bill, Charles Kahn,'' this is Chip Kahn, ``President of the Health Insurance Association of America, said: No, I don't think so. They would not sell insurance exclusively for drug costs. The government may find some private entities to administer drug benefits, but the government would have to accept all or nearly all of the financial risk.'' Well, this again goes back to what my colleague from Maine was saying before. Who is going to offer a benefit or an insurance policy that has a benefit that almost all seniors need? The whole basic idea of insurance is risk. And if we have a situation where they have to insure and probably pay out money to almost every senior, they are not going to sell the policy. ``President Clinton,'' again from the New York Times, ``would offer the same drug benefits to all 39 million people on Medicare. House Republicans, by contrast, would describe a model insurance policy, known as standard coverage. Insurers could offer alternative policies with different premiums and benefits.'' That is the problem. Rather than having that defined benefit under the Democratic plan, we have under the Republican proposal a standard coverage that does not mean anything because the insurance companies do not have to provide the benefits that are under the standard coverage. They can vary as they see fit. Again, in this New York Times article from yesterday, ``Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration, which runs Medicare, said elderly people could be refused if they had a large number of choices.'' And she is talking about the Republican plan. ``It's difficult for seniors to navigate among plans,'' Ms. DeParle said. ``Moreover,'' Ms. DeParle asked, ``do seniors want and need all these choices? If you let plans design all sorts of benefit packages, that promotes choice, but it also promotes cherrypicking of the healthiest seniors. That's why we need defined benefits. Seniors want to know what's covered. It must be predictable.'' The Republicans keep talking about choice, but look at the example with the HMOs and how much confusion that has caused now in Medicare, where so many of them are dropping the plans or changing their plans and the seniors call us up and complain to us. Well, I frankly feel that if we have a defined benefit plan under Medicare that is certainly preferable. If someone wants to use an HMO, they can, but at least provide a guaranteed benefit. ``Democrats fear,'' again in the New York Times, ``that the market for drug insurance would be filled with turmoil as insurers went in and out from year to year. In the last two years, dozens of HMOs have pulled out of Medicare or curtailed their participation, disrupting insurance arrangements for more than 700,000 elderly people, and more health plans are expected to withdraw this year. Democrats say drug benefits should be fully integrated into Medicare, like coverage of hospital care and doctors' services. The bill,'' this is the Republican bill now, ``says Medicare officials must ensure that every beneficiary has a choice of at least two plans providing prescription drug coverage. One could be an HMO; at least one must be a traditional insurer. But Democrats say even if benefits have two options, both may be high priced plans. Under the House Republican proposal, Medicare officials could offer financial incentives to get insurers to enter markets in which no drug plans were available.'' Now, that is fine. In other words, just like HMOs, the Republican plan would say, and this is what the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) has said, well, if we cannot find any insurance companies to provide this prescription drug coverage, then we will just give them more money and then they will do it. Well, that is all very nice, but, again I am going back to this New York Times article, ``Chris Jennings, the health policy coordinator at the White House, said the availability of these incentives would encourage insurers to hold out for more money. It would encourage insurers to hold Medicare hostage, Mr. Jennings said. The policy says that if insurers don't participate in the marketplace, we'll give them more money.'' Now, do my colleagues think an insurer will decide to participate in the market at the beginning, when they get less money, or will they hold out a little longer and then they might get more? ``That's the most inefficient, ridiculous incentive mechanism one could imagine.'' That is, essentially, what we are getting now with the HMOs. HMOs that are pulling out of the Medicare senior market are coming back to Congress and saying, okay, we will stay in the markets if you give us more money, if you give us a higher reimbursement rate. Insurance companies that theoretically are going to tap into the drug benefit programmed under the Republican plan, they will do the same thing, they will say, well, we cannot offer the plan now. Give us more money. And then they will hold out until they get more money. And even then there is no guarantee that we are going to get a good benefit plan. I do not want to keep talking all night, Mr. Speaker, because I know that we are going to be dealing with this issue again and again. And I certainly plan to come again on other nights in special orders with my colleagues on the Democratic side to keep making the point that what we really need here is a Medicare benefit, a Medicare prescription drug benefit, that is voluntary; that provides universal coverage to everyone who wants to opt for it; that is designed to give all beneficiaries meaningful defined coverage; that has a catastrophic protection so that, if over a certain amount, the Government pays for all benefits; that has access to medically necessary drugs and, basically, defines what is medically necessary by the physician, not by the insurance company; and that, basically, says that if you are low income, we will pay for your premium, just like we do for part B for your doctors bills; and, finally, that is administered in a way that has purchasing mechanisms so that we can keep the price fair and not provide for the price discrimination that exists right now under current law for so many people. That is what we will push for regardless of what the Republicans come up with. And certainly, we are more than willing, as Democrats, to work with the Republicans to fashion a plan that will work. But, so far, what we are hearing from the other side of the aisle is a sham, is not something that is designed to provide a meaningful benefit, and that ultimately will not pass here, not pass the Senate, not land on the President's desk in time for the end of this Congress. And that is what I do not want to see. The Democrats want to see something that will pass and be signed by the President and become law so that Medicare beneficiaries can take advantage of it and that it not just be a political issue for this November election.

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Allen) for putting really so succinctly the difference, if you will, between what the Democrats are proposing and trying to accomplish here versus this Republican essentially sham proposal. It reminds me so much of the debate over HMO reform, the Patients' Bill of Rights. Because as my colleagues know, I guess it was about a year ago, maybe 6 months ago, the American people were crying out, we all would go to town meetings and hear from all our constituents about the need for HMO reform. The Democrats came up with the Patients' Bill of Rights, which is a very good bill to address the concerns and abuses within the HMO system. We heard the Republicans kept stalling and saying they did not want to deal with it, they did not want to deal with it. Nothing was happening in committee. Finally, the pressure got so great that they decided to push a bill which essentially accomplished nothing. But beyond the fact that the legislation that was being pushed, particularly on the Senate side, was so weak and so lacking in any kind of basic protections for those who were being abused by the HMOs was the fact that it was very obvious that it was not being done because they really wanted to pass the bill, it was being done so they could say they were doing something. Lo and behold, 6 months have passed, we have had conferences between the House and Senate, nothing has happened, and we are getting very close to the election without an HMO reform bill. I think the same thing is happening here. The gentleman from Maine is absolutely right. We keep coming to the floor talking about the need for a Medicare prescription drug program. The pressure builds because it is a real concern out there. All of a sudden, now we get a statement from the Republican leadership saying that they are going to do something which is a sham. They may have it in committee this week, they may bring it to the floor next week so they can pass something by the July 4th recess. What does that mean? The Senate will not act. If the Senate acts, there will be a conference. The conference will not go. It will never get to the President. The politics of this is really disgraceful because this issue, just like the HMO reform issue, is something that needs to be addressed, and it is not going to be. The gentleman talked about the Republicans using this insurance plan. It reminds me so much, I read a little bit about what happened in the 1960s when Medicare was first started. We were getting the same arguments then. There were all these people, all these senior citizens that had no health insurance. It was the majority of seniors that had no health insurance. The Republicans then in both the House and the Senate in the 1960s were arguing that we should set up some kind of private insurance program for the seniors. The Democrats rejected that. The Democrats passed the current Medicare program. The President, then Johnson, signed it. We have had a very good program. Why not build on the existing program? What the President has proposed and what the Democrats in the House and the Senate have proposed is basically adding another part to the existing Medicare program. We have part A for hospitalization. We have part B for one's doctor bills, which is voluntary. One pays so much of a premium per month. What the Democrats are proposing is that we set up another part C or D, whatever we want to call it, where one pays so much a month and one gets a prescription drug program. Everybody who is in Medicare is eligible for it. It is universal. It is affordable. It is voluntary. It is a defined benefit program so one knows that one will get all medically necessary drugs. It has the effort to address the price discrimination that the gentleman from Maine mentioned with the benefit provider so that, basically, we have these benefit providers that negotiate a better price for the seniors than many of them would get now in the open market. Why not build on the existing Medicare program and do just that? Why go back to this private insurance model which, as the gentleman from Maine said, does not work. I just wanted to mention one more thing, and I want to yield back to the gentleman from Maine because he has been doing such a good job. Chip Kahn, who is head of the Health Insurance Association of America, made that statement before the Committee on Ways and Means last week where he said, This insurance-only program will not work. The insurance companies will not sell it. It is a sham. He also came before our Committee on Commerce and said the same thing. One thing that he said that concerns me a little, he said, I was pleased to see that the Republicans at least have said that, if their private insurance program does not work and they cannot get it sold, then they will fall back on some sort of government assistance for the people who cannot buy private health insurance. Of course I said, well, it is not really clear what they are going to do. What is this fall back? Is it Medicare? They have not said. I said to Chip Kahn, I said, Well, Chip, does it make sense to have a private insurance program with a fall back when we already have an existing Medicare program that does work that we can just add a prescription drug benefit to it? He said, Well, I am not really in a position to comment. Health insurance people do not let me say yes or no whether that makes sense. Certainly I agree there is nothing wrong with having a Medicare program. They already realize that this will not work. That is why the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) is now starting to talk about some sort of fall back. What does one need the fall back for? Do the Medicare program the way it has been working for 30 years.

Mr. PALLONE. I yield to the gentleman from Maine.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, this evening I would like to discuss my concerns over the changes in Social Security that have been proposed by Governor Bush of Texas. Mr. Speaker, as we know, Social Security has lifted millions of seniors out of poverty. It is by far the most successful economic program ever passed by Congress, and the reason for its success is simple. It offers a guaranteed benefit for every American retiree. More than half of all Americans, especially working families, have no retirement savings beyond Social Security. Without the guaranteed income provided by Social Security, millions of seniors could fall through the cracks, left to live out their lives in poverty. Recently, Governor Bush proposed a Social Security plan that would undermine Social Security, in my opinion, and simultaneously threaten our thriving economy. By diverting funds from the Social Security Trust Fund to set up individual retirement accounts, Bush's plan would hasten the insolvency of the Social Security Trust Fund and force seniors to question, rather than to count on, their Social Security benefits. Now, Governor Bush has also proposed a tax cut that would cost an estimated $1.7 billion. When combined with the cost of his individual retirement accounts, Governor Bush's plan would spend more than 3 times the projected surplus over the next 10 years. That money would come directly out of the Social Security Trust Fund, weakening the program even further, and leaving little room in the budget for other priorities like the prescription drug benefit under Medicare and investment in education. In my opinion, Mr. Speaker, no plan that would endanger the guarantees of Social Security or rob the trust fund and leave other priorities unfunded can possibly be taken seriously, and that is why I think it is important, Mr. Speaker, that Democrats fight this dangerously ill-conceived proposal every step of the way. Myself and other Members on our side of the aisle will be here frequently over the next few weeks and the next few months speaking out against Governor Bush's proposal. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to discuss some of the major problems that I see associated with replacing part of Social Security with individual accounts the way that Governor Bush has proposed, and I would like to just get into a little more detail about some of these problems this evening. First, I would point out that individual accounts would mean massive cuts in Social Security benefits. Using a portion of the payroll tax to fund individual accounts would divert vitally important financial resources away from Social Security and would make Social Security's financial shortfall much worse. We know that we are eventually going to have a shortfall in Social Security and we have to find some way of shoring up the fund to make sure that the money is available. Well, what the Bush individual accounts plan does is to basically make the financing shortfall even worse. For instance, redirecting 2 percentage points of the current payroll tax into individual accounts without other program changes would more than double Social Security's currently projected long-range deficit of 1.89 percent of taxable payroll. To make up for this lost payroll tax revenue, individual account plans would also have to impose dramatic cuts in Social Security benefits. One such plan introduced in the 105th Congress would have reduced Social Security benefits by one-third for an average wage worker retiring in 2025. I want to repeat that. It would reduce Social Security benefits by one-third for an average wage worker retiring in 2025. This is why I say that Bush's plan is so radical, because rather than having a guaranteed level of money that would come to you, a guaranteed income that would come to you, you could likely see a one-third cut in that income that you are expecting. Now, some claim that Governor Bush could avoid cutting Social Security benefits by relying on anticipated budget surpluses to finance individual accounts. We know that there is going to be a significant and ever-growing surplus, assuming the economy continues to be good. But the problem is that Governor Bush has already made commitments during his campaign for President that would preclude the use of budget surpluses for that purpose. First, he has offered a variety of tax proposals that, all told, would cost roughly $1.7 trillion from the years 2002 through 2010; $800 billion in excess of projected nonSocial Security surpluses over the same period. So the money is simply not there from the surplus to shore up Social Security or to pay for these individual accounts because he has already said that he wants to use it for these tax cuts, primarily for wealthy individuals and corporations. Also, Governor Bush has pledged to protect future Social Security surpluses by placing them in a lockbox, thus neither surpluses from Social Security nor outside of the program would be available to finance individual accounts if Governor Bush intends to keep his other campaign promises. Mr. Speaker, it just does not add up. On the one hand, Governor Bush proposes taking a percentage of the trust fund and using it for individual savings accounts; there is no money to pay for that, and it would actually force us to have less benefits for recipients in the future. On the other hand, he cannot use the surplus to make up for that because he already has this huge tax plan that would use up most of the surplus. Now, the next problem I would like to discuss, Mr. Speaker, is that individual accounts would force Americans to bear greater risk. Social Security protects against a host of risks: the risk of death or disability, the risk of low lifetime earnings, the risk of unexpectedly long life, the risk of inflation. Now, individual accounts would undermine these protections and would add the uncertainty of market risk to the program. Advocates of individual accounts argue that since fluctuations in the stock market average out over time, that individual investment risk is negligible. Well, I do not think that is true at all. I think it is highly risky and a lot of people do not realize what the risk is. Averages, essentially, are misleading. For every person whose investments perform above average, there is another person counting on Social Security whose investments perform below average with the stock market. Averages also ignore timing and the millions of Americans who might retire during a downturn in the stock market. Now, just to give some examples, and I use an example from the Congressional Budget Office. There were 15 years in the past century, 1908 through 1912; 1937 through 1939; 1965 through 1966; 1968 through 1973, in which the real value of the stock market fell by more than 40 percent over the preceding decade. Moreover, if we look at the AARP's Center for Retirement Research, they point out that between January 1973 and September of 1976, the stock market declined by 43 percent and did not return to its 1972 high for almost 10 years. And then, just as another source of data on this problem, the General Accounting Office observes that over the past 70 years or so, stock returns were negative in nearly one out of 4 years. So anyone who tells us that this is not a risky venture, that this investment does not pose potential problems for the money that one invests in these individual accounts, is simply not looking at the historical record. Another major problem I would like to mention this evening, Mr. Speaker, is that individual accounts would be expensive to administer. The governor does not say how he is administering or where the money is coming from to pay for administering these individual accounts. When he announced his Social Security principles, Governor Bush failed to specify the structure or the institutions he would create to oversee individual accounts. This should come as no surprise, since the administration of such accounts would impose new and substantial burdens on employers, workers, and to the Federal Government. Even administrative charges that appear small at the outset add up over time. An annual fee of 1 percent of assets under management over the course of a 40-year career would absorb 20 percent of the worker's individual account. So once again, this all sounds very nice in theory, but in practice, the reality is that the money just is not there. Mr. Speaker, another problem I would like to point out tonight is that individual accounts would cripple efforts to eliminate the national debt. This is such an important reason why Governor Bush's proposal should not be adopted, because we are now paying down the national debt for the first time in anyone's memory, and this is a significant factor in keeping the economy going and letting the economy grow. In the absence of benefit cuts, diverting a portion of the Social Security payroll tax into individual accounts would lead to significantly smaller Social Security surpluses and to the rapid depletion of the Social Security Trust Fund. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, if the current payroll tax were reduced by 2 percentage points to fund individual accounts, which is what Governor Bush has proposed, and if the current payroll tax were reduced by 2 percentage points in that way, the assets in the Social Security Trust Funds would be exhausted in 2023, well before the currently expected date of 2037. Moreover, Social Security benefit payments would begin to exceed payroll tax revenue by 2005, a decade earlier than what is now projected. So again, the money is not there. If we start taking the money away from these individual accounts, Social Security is going to become insolvent a lot sooner. Mr. Speaker, this has direct implications on the ability to pay down the national debt. Reduced Social Security surpluses and an earlier date of trust fund exhaustion necessarily implies less debt reduction. The Federal Government has been able to begin retiring decades of debt only because of large Social Security surpluses and fiscal discipline in the rest of the budget. Less debt reduction necessarily implies higher interest costs and using payroll taxes to fund individual accounts would mean that billions of dollars would be used for interest payments on the debt, rather than for critical investments in our Nation's future. Now, the President, President Clinton has suggested a plan that would dedicate all projected Social Security surpluses to debt reduction. The President's plan would not only extend Social Security solvency until 2054, but it would also eliminate the debt held by the public by 2013. The combination of Governor Bush's tax proposal and his Social Security principles would make it impossible to eliminate the publicly-held debt that quickly. When I talk to my constituents, they all tell me the same thing. They want to make sure that Social Security is there for them when they retire. Well, if we implement Governor Bush's plan, it will not be there because the insolvency will occur even earlier, and, worse than that, we do not pay down the national debt, which I think is a major factor in our ability to keep the economy going and to continue growth in our economy. Mr. Speaker, I would like to point this evening to an analysis that was done by the Social Security Network. The Social Security Network is a project of the Century Foundation. Basically, they did an analysis recently that evaluates the diversion of 2 percentage points of the current Social Security payroll tax into individual accounts. Now, Governor Bush has not specified how large his proposed individual accounts would be, but the Bush campaign has used examples involving the 2 percentage points, and that is why I use that 2 percentage points, and that is why the Social Security network used the 2 percentage points in its analysis. But this analysis, and I should also say, before I get into this analysis a little more, that the calculations it uses, if anything, underestimate the cuts in Social Security benefits likely to occur under a Bush-like individual account plan. But what this analysis by the Social Security network suggests is the following: first, if Social Security benefits were cut equally for all workers age 55 or younger in 2002, benefits would have to be cut by 41 percent to maintain the solvency of Social Security over the next 75 years. So here again, their analysis shows we are going to have an even greater problem maintaining the solvency of social security. To avoid a sharp reduction in retirement income for older workers that would result from this, benefit cuts could be phased in. Because less would be saved in early years, reductions for younger workers would have to be larger to ensure that social security remains solvent over the next 75 years. For example, under one plausible phase-in approach, social security benefits would have to be reduced by 29 percent for those 50 years old in 2002, and by 54 percent for those 30 years old or younger. So what we are saying is if we do not do this all at once but we phase it in, then the consequence on younger workers is even greater in terms of the amount of benefits they are going to have when they retire. Not only would the average benefits be cut relative to current law under the Bush proposal, but workers would also have to shoulder substantially increased risk under individual accounts. In other words, benefits might be smaller or larger than under current law. Here again, the Social Security Network gives us some examples. If holders of individual accounts suffer from market returns as low as the worst 35-year period since World War II, the total benefit reduction, including the individual account income, for 30-year-old single average earners would be 38 percent rather than 28 percent. So depending on the market fluctuations, and if we use the period before World War II as an example, we could have as much as a 38 percent reduction in the benefits that we get. Then the Social Security Network has another example. If, on the other hand, individual account holders enjoy market returns as good as the best of the 35 years since World War II, so now we are going in the opposite direction, instead of using the worst years prior to World War II we are using the best years after World War II, including now, the income for 30-year-old single average earners would be about the same as under current law. So what are we gaining? What this is essentially saying in this analysis is if we use the best years since World War II, you would not gain anything. If we use the worst years prior to World War II, we could have as much as a 38 percent reduction. There is no benefit. The problem is that everyone, that Governor Bush is relying on people's assumptions about the economy in the last 5 or 10 years, when things have been the best they have ever been. There is no guarantee that is going to continue over the life of the program before somebody who is younger retires, which could be 35, 40 years. The conclusion is that Governor Bush's proposal could cut social security benefits by more than 50 percent for young workers, and the proceeds from the individual account would on average make up only a portion of that cut while exposing individuals to significant risk. This is from, as I said, the Social Security Network's analysis. Mr. Speaker, I did not intend to take up a lot of time tonight because I intend to come back and keep talking about this on other occasions, but I just wanted to say in conclusion, Mr. Speaker, that the bottom line is that Governor Bush's social security proposal simply does not add up. Most of the surplus for tax cuts plus most of the surplus for a risky social security plan equals too much of the Federal budget. We cannot take the money from this tax plan and at the same time have a huge tax cut and end up with anything but less benefits for the average social security recipient. If we take these two things together, his social security plan and the tax cut, we swallow up the surpluses whole for the next 10 years, and we use a significant portion of the social security surplus as well, so both the general revenue and the social security surplus would be used up. Devoting all the surplus to these two plans, the Governor's social security plan and the tax cut plan, means leaving nothing at all for the rest of the budget. The combination would leave no room for other vital priorities like the Medicare prescription drug benefit or more funding for new teachers and modern classrooms. In addition to the fact that it does not add up for the recipient, who would probably end up with cuts in their benefits, it also means that money is not going to be available to expand Medicare, which I think, Mr. Speaker, we know that many of our constituents, most of our constituents, are saying that they would like Medicare to be expanded to include prescription drugs. There is no way we could do that if we adopted Bush's social security plan as well as his tax cut, because there would not be any money left over to do that, to help seniors with a program under Medicare that would pay for their prescription drugs. Of course, that does not even take into account other priorities that affect the general population, like the need for more money for education to go back to local schools so they can have smaller class sizes by hiring more teachers, or the need to pay for school construction and give money to the local schools so they can renovate school buildings and upgrade the infrastructure for the Internet, and those types of things. Nothing would be left. This would just take up everything, and for no reason, for no actual benefit to the average senior citizen. I just think that the Governor's proposal for social security is extremely radical. It does not add up. I just hope that over the next few months that we are able to expose this so the American people realize this, because it should not be enacted, and it certainly should not be the basis for any policy program by Governor Bush or anyone else.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, for weeks now, the newspapers have carried stories about the recent escalation in the fighting in Sri Lanka, the island nation located just to the south of India. Sri Lankan Government forces have been battling a violent rebellion by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE, commonly known as The Tigers, a separatist organization that the United States has designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The Tigers' campaign has gone on for 17 years, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. Their goal is the establishment of a Tamil Eelam, a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka, to divide this small island nation into two ethnic states, a Tamil state and a Sinhalese state. Last month, the Tigers stepped up their campaign in the Jaffna Peninsula in the northern part of the island. The government forces have continued to battle the Tigers. Sri Lanka's president, Mrs. Chandrika Kumaratunga, has vowed not to surrender to the terrorists and not to stand by and allow the partitioning of the country. Instead, the government is urging the LTTE to put down their arms and come to the negotiating table for good-faith talks aimed at addressing the concerns of Tamil people in a peaceful way. Mr. Speaker, I believe that the Sri Lankan people, both Sinhalese and Tamil alike, reject the idea of dividing their nation into two ethnically based, ethnically cleansed homelands. The LTTE by no means speaks for all of the Tamil people. Indeed, Mr. Speaker, there are Tamil political parties and organizations committed to working with the government to achieve a higher degree of autonomy through peaceful means. And the government has had on the table for a long time a Devolution Plan that would recognize the Tamils' legitimate claims. If nothing else, the government's plan offers at least a basis for beginning negotiations. Mr. Speaker, President Kumaratunga, who is elected as the nation's first woman president in 1994, was reelected last December in an election in which 73 percent of the eligible voters turned out. In the final days of the presidential campaign, she was injured in a terrorist attack blamed on the LTTE. That attack took the lives of 22 people and left more than 100 injured. Yet, despite this attack and despite the recent escalation of violence by the LTTE, President Kumaratunga continues to ask the separatists to lay down their arms and begin talks. In this current crisis, Sri Lanka has reached out to the international community to help bring the separatists to the negotiating table. Yesterday, President Kumaratunga appealed to India, Sri Lanka's democratic neighbor to the north, to facilitate the effort to bring the Tamil Tigers to the table. Sri Lankan officials have also been meeting with diplomats from Norway in an effort to resume the negotiations with the rebels that broke off 5 years ago. Next Monday, U.S. Under Secretary of State, Thomas Pickering, will go to Sri Lanka where he will meet with government officials and other leaders of the other Tamil parties. Mr. Speaker, the position of the United States and of India and of other Western nations is that this conflict can only be resolved through negotiations, and that the solution should preserve the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka. The campaign by the LTTE to force the break up of Sri Lanka does not have the support of the international community, and it must never gain that legitimacy. As I mentioned, Mr. Speaker, the U.S. State Department has branded the LTTE a terrorist organization. Recently, the parliament of the European Union has urged its member nations to take similar steps. The Tigers maintained their determination for an outright win militarily, but that strategy seems destined only to kill thousands of more people by shattering lives in both the Tamil and Sinhalese communities. Mr. Speaker, I urge Under Secretary Pickering to continue to make clear that this crisis can only be resolved through a political solution. We must step up our efforts to work with other international friends, including India and Western European nations, to maintain the pressure on the LTTE to come to the negotiating table. The Tigers should join with the rest of the Tamil community to promote the interests of their community through the institutions of the united, sovereign, and democratic Sri Lanka.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the Committee on Rules for allowing this motion to recommit on the issue of section 527 political organizations, because this will be the first vote of the new year, really the first vote of the new millennium, on the issue of campaign finance reform. Time and time again I hear the Republican leadership state that the only way to fix our campaign finance system is through disclosure, but it is very cynical and hypocritical that they make that claim when at the same time they conduct themselves and their political cronies through the auspices of these section 527 political organizations. We have seen report after report of the Republican Party structure creating and funding secret political organizations to funnel corporate dollars to further the agenda of the extreme right. To do this, they use section 527 of the Tax Code which allows the right wing to hide the names of their donors and also hide how their money is spent. What is particularly disturbing about this is that the Republican leadership is allowing this cynicism to pervade the campaigns of their new candidates throughout the country. In my own reelection campaign in 1998, my Republican opponent used one of these section 527 groups to funnel $5 million, I stress $5 million, in undisclosed and unaccountable dollars to malign me and try to defeat me. My campaign had a lot of success in tracking down the corporate sources given to the group on our own. It was not disclosed, but we were able to find out about some of them, and many of the corporate CEOs whose corporations gave to these groups; and I spoke to them, had no idea how their own dollars were being donated and spent because of the lack of disclosure. Two years after my campaign now, this same young Republican candidate that I ran against has now moved to a new district in New Jersey and is using these same methods in another run for the House, and here in the Capitol I am reading news reports that Republican leaders of the Congress are publicly pressuring lobbyists to donate to these same secret groups. Mr. Speaker, it is nice to have a vote on the floor to repeal an antiquated tax provision like the telephone excise tax. I am, in fact, a co-sponsor of H.R. 3916. However, I also think it is equally important to strip our Tax Code of these provisions which undermine our political process and our electoral integrity, and I challenge the Republican leadership, the self-described disciples of disclosure, they keep talking about disclosure, to bring a bill to the floor to end the abuses of section 527.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, the Northeast District of the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs, Inc., will hold its 42nd Annual District Conference at the Doubletree Somerset Hotel in Somerset New Jersey from June 2nd through June 4th. The theme of the conference is ``Leadership By Example: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.'' What an appropriate theme: for the challenge of leading by example has been the driving force behind this great organization, on the national level, throughout the Northeast District, and especially the Central Jersey Club. The organization, through its leadership, helps to plant the seeds from which many projects grow, both from within and from outside the organization. The Central Jersey Club was one of the first organizations to give an AIDS/HIV workshop in the Central New Jersey area, and they also care for AIDS babies at St. Clare's Home in Neptune, NJ. The Club also provides career awareness programs, offers scholarships to needy students, works with the homeless by tutoring the clients and teaching them to knit, and donates clothing and Easter egg hunts for children. Some clubs donated food baskets to the needy during Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, and they celebrated Women's History Month by sponsoring essay contests at various schools. The North Jersey Unit promoted and implemented at the local level the Leontyne Price Vocal Arts Competition for talented African American opera singers. The winner will be competing at the semi-finals at the upcoming conference. The Union County Club plays an important part in their community with their scholarship program. The Northeast Division was organized in 1959, being one of seven districts in the organization. The Northeast is the largest in the organization, consisting of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Northern New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and the Commonwealth of Bermuda. As a non-profit organization, the organization's national program thrust is Health, Education, Employment and Economic Development (HEED). Other projects that clubs participate in are Breast Cancer Awareness Programs, Adopt-A-School, Welfare to Work, and Black Entrepreneurship programs, among others. The Northeast District's involvement in National projects includes sponsorship of water wells in Cameroon, and the opening of a health care facility in the Village of Atrapa in Ghana. Mary Singletary, past national president and a member of the North Jersey Unit, was very instrumental in these projects. In addition, the District continues to be involved with UNICEF and the United Nations as a non-governmental organization. I want to salute the great work of Yvonne Harris Jones, the Governor of the Northeast District of the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs, Inc., and all of those whose efforts contribute to making this organization such a force for positive change in our community.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to join in urging my colleagues to vote No on granting PNTR for the People's Republic of China. Since relations between the U.S. and China were normalized, Congress has had the opportunity, every year, whether or not to grant China the same trading status we give to other ``friendly'' nations. Although the China trade deal has won out every year, at least we had an annual review in place. If this bill passes, I am sure the dictators in Beijing will take our concerns even less seriously than they have in the past. It is well known that China has a terrible record on human and worker rights, environmental protection, fair trade and weapons proliferation. China has repeatedly violated almost all of their prior agreements. The United States consumes 40 percent of China's exports, so common sense dictates that we can influence China's actions by threatening to cut off market access. By essentially granting China permanent guaranteed access to our markets we would surrender our only political and economic leverage. Big business claims that granting China PNTR will allow for more American products to be sold to the 1.2 billion consumers in China. But even if China opens their doors to our products, which I don't believe they intend on doing, how many cars or designer jeans will American workers sell to Chinese workers making 13 cents per hour. I urge my colleagues to vote against this ``Blank Check for China.''

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, I do not intend to use the entire hour this evening, but I want to take what time I have to discuss my fears, and I stress fears, this evening over the changes in the Social Security system that have been proposed by Governor Bush of Texas. Mr. Speaker, Social Security has lifted millions of seniors out of poverty. It is, by far, the most successful economic program ever passed by Congress, and the reasons for the success are simple. It offers a guaranteed, and I stress guaranteed, benefit for every American retiree. More than half of all Americans, especially working families, have no retirement savings beyond Social Security. Without the guaranteed income provided by Social Security, millions of seniors could fall through the cracks left to live out their lives in poverty. Recently, Governor George Bush proposed a Social Security plan that would undermine Social Security, in my opinion, and simultaneously threaten our thriving economy. By diverting funds from the Social Security Trust Fund to set up individual retirement accounts, as Bush proposed, the plan would hasten the insolvency of the Social Security Trust Fund. It would also force seniors to question rather than count on their Social Security benefits. Now, Governor Bush has also proposed a tax cut that would cost an estimated $1.7 trillion. When combined with the cost of his individual retirement accounts that he has mentioned with regard to Social Security, Governor Bush's plan would spend more than three times the projected surplus over the next 10 years. That money would come directly out of the Social Security Trust Fund, weakening the program even further and leaving little room in the budget for other priorities like a prescription drug benefit for Medicare. No plan that would endanger the guarantees of Social Security, rob the trust fund, and leave other priorities unfunded can possibly be taken seriously, and that is why I refer to the Bush plan as extremely radical. Democrats have pretty much said that we are going to fight this dangerous ill-conceived proposal, and I think we need to fight it every step of the way. Mr. Speaker, I want to discuss three of my concerns about the Bush Social Security plan in a little more detail this evening. First of all, I would like to express my concern that ultimately Governor Bush's plan would lead to complete privatization of Social Security. Right now the governor is saying only 2 percent of the money would be invested by individuals in retirement accounts. But in an Associated Press story on May 17, just a week or so ago, Governor Bush said it was possible workers would eventually be allowed to invest their entire Social Security tax, not just a portion of it. The Houston Chronicle reported on the same day, and I quote, ``Bush on Tuesday said his plan to create private savings accounts could be the first step toward a complete privatization of Social Security.'' And I want to stress this: the Social Security program was began under Franklin Roosevelt. The Republican leadership for many years totally opposed it being started, and I think that this is part of a historical trend essentially that what Governor Bush is saying, I do not like a government program, Social Security is a government program. Ultimately, I think it is best if it is privatized completely. The second concern I have is this question of whether or not there will be a guaranteed income, because that is what Social Security is about to most seniors. They know that when they retire they will have a guaranteed income every month, and a certain amount over the course of the year. Well, when asked on May 15 whether or not there would be a guaranteed income, basically Governor Bush said this, and this is from the Dallas Morning News of May 15, ``maybe or maybe not.'' Asked whether he envisions a system in which future beneficiaries would receive no less than they would have under the current system, Mr. Bush said ``maybe, maybe not.'' Well, what he was essentially admitting was that it was conceivable that a worker taking advantage of these private investment accounts would get a lower guaranteed benefit from Social Security, and we know that that obviously is the case, because it would depend how that worker invested the money since it is an individual decision. The New York Times reported on May 17, and I quote, ``Bush also refused to say how much benefits might be reduced for workers who created private investment accounts. That is all up for discussion,'' Mr. Bush said. When I say that this is a radical proposal, it is radical because most Americans think that they are going to have a certain guaranteed income from their Social Security. It is clear that with the private investment accounts and the further privatization that Governor Bush has been talking about, there is no guaranteed income. The third major concern that I have and would like to focus on in a little more detail this evening is what I call the transition costs, the trillion dollars in transition costs that might not be accounted for or that Bush is really not accounting for. Bush acknowledged in this same Associated Press story that I mentioned on May 17 that he has not fully accounted for the cost of moving from the current Social Security system to his proposed one. Now, Vice President Al Gore says that the cost of that transition could be something like $900 billion, almost $1 trillion. The plan laid out by Governor Bush leaves out the most important factor, and that is the cost. According to a new report published by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Bush's privatization plan would cost $900 billion over the first 10 years. These costs occur because the Social Security system must simultaneously pay out current benefits while privatization drains over 16 percent of the amount of money coming into the system. That is assuming the 2 percent point diversion that Bush has talked about. If we combine this with the cost of Bush's nearly $2 trillion tax cut, the Bush plan will leave multitrillion dollar debts as far as the eye can see. This is basically from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. I want to talk a little further about some of the other impacts that Governor Bush's privatization plan with regard to Social Security would have. Here I would like to raise three issues, three impacts, if you will, from this Bush Social Security privatization plan. First, it would weaken our economy by eliminating our chance to pay down the debt, which we have started to do ever since the surplus occurred. Second, it would place at risk the secure retirement benefit that Social Security provides. Third, and this is something that I think a lot of people have not thought about but we have to think about, the Bush Social Security privatization plan would force a massive S&L, savings and loan-style bailout if people's investments failed. Let me talk, Mr. Speaker, in a little more detail about these three impacts from this privatization plan. First, let me go back to the fact that the Bush plan will eliminate the chance to pay down the debt. This goes back to this $1 trillion in transition cost that I mentioned before. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Bush's privatization plan would cost the $900 billion I mentioned over 10 years. The reason these costs occur is because the Social Security system has to pay out the current benefits, as I mentioned, while the privatization drains this other 16 percent. But the bottom line is that Bush's own aides acknowledge that these transition costs would siphon away the money that could be used to pay down the debt. Less debt reduction would translate into higher interest payments on the debt over the same 10-year period, which in turn would reduce the budget surplus. If I could talk about this in a little more detail, I would like to contrast it with what Vice President Gore not only has proposed but what he is doing. Under Mr. Gore's plan, all of the Social Security surplus will go to reducing the national debt held by the public. Some of this is already happening. Some of the debt is actually being paid down now. What Gore is saying, that he would take all of the Social Security surplus and use it essentially to reduce the national debt. There would not be that opportunity with Bush's plan. The money simply would not be there to exercise that option. As I said, not only Vice President Gore but President Clinton and the administration's deficit and debt reduction that they have already done has already helped the economy and families. Seven years ago, the budget deficit was nearly $300 billion and growing; and as a result, interest rates were high and growth was slow. By the year 2012, it was projected that 25 cents on every tax dollar would be needed to pay interest on the debt. Because of this administration, the Clinton-Gore administration's commitment to fiscal discipline, deficits have turned into surpluses and the Nation's debt is already $1.7 trillion lower than it was projected to be this year. Because of the deficit and debt reduction that the Clinton administration has already done, it is estimated the typical family with a home mortgage might be expected to save roughly $2,000 per year in mortgage payments. Currently, about 13 cents on every Federal dollar is spent on net interest payments. These payments which were once projected to be nearly double that would be eliminated under Al Gore's plan. With the Government no longer draining resources from capital markets, interest rates are lower and businesses have more funds for productive investment. Paying off the debt will continue to help fuel investment and productivity growth. What I am trying to say, Mr. Speaker, is essentially this. Let us continue the policy of paying down the debt because ultimately that makes the economy grow and it saves money that would be available in the long run for Social Security. Let us not go down this risky, radical plan that Governor Bush has proposed where on the one hand he is spending trillions of dollars on tax cuts and on the other hand his transition costs to this privatization plan would use up a significant portion of the surplus as well. I talked about why my fear about how Bush's privatization plan places retirement funds at risk, but I would like to talk about that a little more in terms of the second point here on potential impacts of this risky Bush plan. For whatever reason, I guess it is because the stock market has done so well in the last 5, 10 years now that people do not even remember that there was a time when it was not doing that well. But the bottom line is that if you have privatization the way Governor Bush proposes, it puts individual retirement security at the whims of the stock market where people can lose. Throughout its history, Social Security has stood as a guaranteed secure retirement regardless of the fluctuations of the economy or the stock market. Investing these funds in the market means that some or all of that benefit could be lost. There was a GAO report that shows the risk of stock market investments with Social Security. This is from a statement by the associate director of income security issues for the GAO, April 22, 1998. The GAO report noted that caution is warranted in counting on future stock returns in designing Social Security reform. The report goes on. However, an average over nearly a century obscures the reality that stock returns fluctuate substantially from year to year. Over the past 70 years or so, stock market returns were negative in nearly 1 out of 4 years. There is no guarantee that investing in the stock market even over 2 or 3 decades will yield the long-term average return. The stock market could drop and stay depressed for a prolonged period of time. Of course it has. We know that historically it has stayed depressed for a long period of time. Interestingly enough, in this same GAO report they point out that the Social Security Trust Fund actually outperformed nominal stock returns 35 percent of the time from 1950 to 1996, over a period of 45 or so years. The 10-year moving average of the S&P 500 underperformed the Social Security Trust Fund's treasury returns at times. A long-term average does not reflect fluctuations in year-to-year stock returns. In fact, nominal stock returns were less than the Social Security Trust Fund's annual yield in 17 years from 1950 to 1996, more than 35 percent of the time, from that same GAO report. Sometimes I wonder why it is necessary to explain why the stock market is a risky business, because I would think that anybody who looks at the history of the market knows that that is the case, but I guess because the market has done so well in the last few years and the last decade there are people, particularly young people, who feel that it will always do well. But that is simply not true. It is not borne out by the historical facts. Let me mention the third impact that I would like to discuss in a little more detail this evening, and that is that privatization could result in massive government bailouts. The reason for that is simple, that if the people who take these private investment accounts do not succeed and actually lose money or the stock market goes bad, they are going to come back to the Government and ask the Government to bail them out, because everybody does that, the big corporations do, the savings & loan associations did, and obviously the average person is going to do that if they lose all their money and they cannot make ends meet. Bush and his advisers have indicated that his privatization plan for Social Security will have no downside risk and the Government will guarantee that future Social Security beneficiaries will receive no less than they would have under the current system. Thus, the risky nature of the stock market could force the Government to bail out Social Security during market downturns or for people who make poor investment choices. The Governor is saying, Don't worry. If you do these investments with your private accounts, don't worry, because we will make it good if you don't do well. How is he going to do that without a massive bailout, and where is the money going to come from? Ultimately the taxpayers. We would have a major problem. The other thing is that obviously privatization could make Social Security go insolvent a lot earlier. Plans to divert 2 percentage points of the payroll tax, or 16 percent of the money paid into the Social Security system, into private accounts, could make Social Security go insolvent 14 years sooner than it would if no action were taken at all. Under a 2 percentage point plan, Social Security could go bankrupt by 2023, according to a study again from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Well, that is common sense. If this money is taken out of the system, then this system will go broke sooner; and that is, again, why it makes no sense to move with this very risky Bush privatization plan. Now, I want to talk a little bit, if I could, about what Vice President Gore has proposed and why his plan to shore up Social Security is much preferable to Governor Bush's, and certainly not risky, by any means. Because of the administration's commitment to fiscal discipline, as I have mentioned, the Nation's debt is already $1.7 trillion lower than it was projected to be this year. In fact, when the administration took office, by the year 2012 it was projected that 25 cents of every dollar would go to pay the interest on the national debt. That has not happened, because we are now paying down the national debt with the surplus that has been generated. Vice President Gore is basically saying that he is going to pay off the national debt and help maintain America's prosperity in a number of ways. But what I want to zero in on is how he would dedicate $2.1 trillion for debt reduction, and this is basically to prepare the Nation for the retiring of the baby-boomers. He is proposing to use more than 95 percent of the Social Security surplus to pay down the debt, with the idea being, of course, that ultimately that will strengthen the economy and prepare for the fact that so many more senior citizens are going to be retiring as part of this baby-boom generation. After a decade of debt reduction, Gore transfers the interest savings that come from using the Social Security surplus to buy down the debt to strengthen the solvency of the Social Security program. By 2016, Gore will be adding about $250 billion annually to strengthen Social Security until at least 2050. He is investing $103 billion, less than 5 percent of the surplus, in strengthening Social Security's benefits for older women, because, as we know, poverty among elderly women is a major national challenge. In 1997, poverty among elderly widows was 1 percent, compared to 5 percent for married women. Gore believes that we can and should strengthen benefits for widows and mothers that were penalized for years spent caring for children as part of the plan to extend the solvency of Social Security. Now, I could talk in more detail about how the Vice President's plan helps older women, but I just want to mention two things, if I could, about that before I conclude this evening. One point is to eliminate the motherhood penalty. The current Social Security formula is based on average earnings over 35 years of work. Because women take several years raising their children, the typical woman only works 27 years. However, those years raising children do not count towards Social Security earnings, effectively creating this motherhood penalty. Gore says that he would eliminate the motherhood penalty by allowing parents to take credit for up to 5 years of earnings, if they take that time to raise children. This would increase Social Security benefits for those women by about $600 a year. The second thing that Gore would do to strengthen benefits for women, under current law widows can have their combined benefits cut in half. Living costs such as rent and utilities often do not decrease with the death of a spouse, but then there is a cut in benefits to that widow. In fact, single elderly women are four times as likely to be poor as married women. Gore would fight to raise the widow's benefit to three- quarters of the couple's combined benefit, helping more than 3 million elderly women receive a benefit that reflects their cost of living. I am not going to go in more detail tonight, but I know over the next few weeks, and certainly after the Memorial Day recess, you are going to see myself and other Democrats come to the floor and constantly talk about our concerns with regard to the Bush privatization Social Security plan, because I really believe it is a radical plan, and I do not think the average American or senior understands what it is all about. This plan, and this is how I want to conclude this evening, the greatest fault in it is the numbers simply do not add up. I think this goes back, again, to the fact that he has this $1 trillion tax cut, and then he is taking all this money out of the Social Security system. If you take the money out of the surplus for tax cuts, and then you put in effect this risky Social Security plan, it just has too much of a drain on the Federal budget. Taken together, the tax cut and Bush's privatization plan essentially would swallow the whole surplus for the next 10 years, and also use a significant portion of the surplus that is dedicated to Social Security. The combination of those two large $1 trillion plans and the impact that they would have on the budget would basically not leave any room for other vital priorities. I think, Mr. Speaker, you know that both the Democrats and the Republicans have talked about a Medicare drug benefit. There is no way that there would be any money left in this surplus to pay for a Medicare drug benefit for seniors if we implemented the Bush plan. The money would simply not be there. It just does not add up. That is not to mention other priorities. Governor Bush has talked about education. Where is the money going to come from to pay for our education priorities, such as money that goes back to the municipalities to pay for extra teachers to bring class size down, or money that would go back to the towns around the country for school construction and renovation? It just does not add up. The money simply is not going to be there. So that is why I think it is important for me and Democrats, and hopefully Republicans as well, to bring up the truth about this very risky privatization plan that Governor Bush has proposed, because it would not only have a negative impact on Social Security, but would have a negative impact basically on the economy and the Federal budget, and essentially I think what Americans see today as the reasons for our prosperity.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, last month a landmark decision was announced, marking an important recognition of one of the most horrible crimes against humanity of the 20th century, the Armenian Genocide. What was particularly important was that the action came from the State of Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people who were victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Israel's education minister, Yossi Sarid, made the historic decision to include the Armenian Genocide in the national curriculum. Mr. Sarid announced his decision on April 24, the traditional day of commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, at a ceremony in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. Expressing regret that Israeli students know very little of the genocide that began in 1915, in which some 1.5 million Armenians, one-third of the Armenian people, were killed by Turkish forces, Mr. Sarid said, ``I will do everything so that Israeli pupils will study and learn about the Armenian Genocide.'' Mr. Speaker, the issue of Israeli recognition of the Armenian Genocide received extensive coverage in an article that appeared in the May 12, 2000, Internet edition of the Jerusalem Post titled ``A Tragedy Offstage No More,'' by Leora Eren Frucht. As the article noted, ``When Hitler ordered his death units to `exterminate without mercy or pity, men, women and children belonging to the Polish-speaking race,' he was confident that the world would overlook the mass murder. `After all,' he asked rhetorically on the eve of the 1939 invasion of Poland, `who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?' '' By the time that the Nazis were finally stopped 6 years later, 6 million European Jews had been murdered, as well as millions of other innocent victims of other nationalities. Mr. Speaker, the Armenian and Jewish peoples are united in a common bond of suffering and in the struggle to overcome the tragedies of the past. While they were being massacred in unthinkable numbers, Armenians in the Ottoman Turkish Empire during World War I and European Jews during World War II, most of the rest of the world was looking the other way, although many knew what was happening. After the Holocaust, the Jewish people built the State of Israel into a prosperous democracy, despite being surrounded by hostile neighbors. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Armenian people have worked to build democracy and economic reform in the Republic of Armenian, despite being surrounded by hostile neighbors. One of the hostile neighbors who has threatened Armenia since its independence a decade ago is Turkey. It was, of course, in the territory of the present-day Republic of Turkey and in the name of Turkish nationalism that the genocide against the Armenians took place during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Yet Turkey continues its unconscionable official policy of denying that the genocide ever took place. In today's world, Turkey, a member of the NATO alliance, continues to blockade its much smaller and more vulnerable neighbor, Armenia, despite Armenia's standing offer to normalize relations without preconditions. In the aforementioned Jerusalem Post article, Turkey's official policy of denial was described as ``outrageous'' by Deborah Lipstadt, the American historian who defeated Holocaust denier David Irving in a highly publicized libel trial in London court last month. Professor Yehuda Bauer, academic director of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, stated, ``If you accept the U.N. 1948 definition of genocide, which we and many other nations have done, then there can be no argument about calling this a genocide,'' referring to Armenia. Yet the decision by Israel's education minister was a difficult one. Israel has been working to steadily improve its relations with Turkey at the same time that Israel works to improve relations with Armenia. Mr. Sarid's decision on including the Armenian Genocide in the Israeli curriculum prompted an outcry in Turkey that included a protest to Israel's charge d'affaires in Ankara. Indeed, Mr. Speaker, Turkey frequently has shown its willingness to play hardball to intimidate other nations into not recognizing the Armenian Genocide. When the National Assembly in France adopted a bill in 1998 to acknowledge the genocide, Turkey promptly suspended the signing of a $145 million defense contract. Thus, Mr. Speaker, considering Israel's vulnerable position in the Middle East and its need to cultivate relations with Muslim nations, the action by Education Minister Sarid was a true profile in courage, a real statement of principle. In closing, Mr. Speaker, I wanted to cite a letter dated May 22, 2000 that the Armenian Assembly of America has received from Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid, and I quote, ``I fully intend to allow Israeli pupils to learn the lessons of your tragedy, which is ours and the world's, as well. Israelis are the last people who can afford to forget the tragedies of this magnitude.''

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Madam Speaker, this morning I want to examine the environmental record of the Republican leadership and of the GOP Presidential candidate, Governor Bush. Last Thursday, Madam Speaker, the EPA released its Toxics Release Inventory which highlights the fact that Texas continues to have the largest amount of airborne toxic emissions in the Nation, as has been the case every year since 1995. More than 300 million pounds of toxic chemicals were released into Texas' air, water and land according to this latest report. Yet, Governor Bush has pushed a strictly voluntary program for dirty power plants to reduce harmful emissions, even though Texas' deteriorating air quality has reached a crisis proportion. Madam Speaker, of the air pollution produced by companies exempt from mandatory regulations in Texas, 75 percent, or 741,000 tons of toxic emissions, came from companies that contributed to and are close to Bush's gubernatorial races from 1994 to 1998. And only 3 of 36 plants who pledged to reduce emissions under this voluntary plan have actually done so and not even 1 percent of emissions from grandfathered plants have been reduced. In fact, Texas has experienced significant increases in emissions. Specifically, Texas experienced an increase of 2 million pounds of cancer-causing and other toxic chemicals from 1997 to 1998. Madam Speaker, although Texas ranks third worst in water pollution from chemical dumping, Governor Bush has done nothing to improve water quality and has subsequently underfunded Superfund cleanups. He also appointed industry representatives to State environmental agencies that had previously fought against environmental regulations. Several environmental groups have called on Governor Bush to stop gutting the environment and act proactively. We know this will not happen. So we have to continue our efforts, in my opinion, Madam Speaker, and elect a President that will close the loophole for grandfathered power plants. Vice President Gore has called for a market-based approach to reducing power plants that addresses the four primary pollutants of concern, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and mercury. I have a bill that establishes a trading program to reduce these four pollutants, and I urge my colleagues to enact this type of legislation as quickly as possible to improve the health of our citizens and our environment. Madam Speaker, let me also point out that Vice President Gore has lead the fight on many environmental efforts from preserving open space to protecting air and water quality. He also has lead the brownfield development program. And I can tell my colleagues the importance of this program, because my hometown of Long Branch, New Jersey has received a $200,000 grant from the EPA to help redevelop brownfields. The Republican leadership's ideas of Superfund reform is to gut water quality protections and put a cap and fence around a site and call it a day. I have over 115 superfund sites in my district, and I can tell my colleagues that this is not environmental cleanup or protection. Again, I just wanted to highlight this morning the major differences between the Republicans and the Democrats on environmental issues and, particularly, the differences between our Presidential candidates. We have our Presidential candidate, Vice President Gore, who has fought hard over the last 7 years and even before as a Member of Congress to protect the environment and improve the environment around our country.

Mr. PALLONE

Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, on Wednesday, May 10, the New York Times published an extremely important article on a subject that receives far too little attention, in my opinion, and that is the Armenian genocide. What was particularly interesting about this article was that it addressed the issue of the Armenian genocide from the Turkish perspective, from the point of view of ordinary people living in what were the killing fields. Many in the Armenian community and their friends and supporters frequently discuss the painful memories of the genocide from the perspective of the victims. The article in last week's New York Times presents the history of the genocide from the descendents of the perpetrators, the people who live on land in what is now the eastern part of the Republic of Turkey but which once was the center of Armenian life. I include this article for the Record from the New York Times, Wednesday May 10. It is entitled ``Turkish Region Recalls Massacre of Armenians,'' by Steven Kinzer. Every year in late April Members of this House come to this floor to commemorate the Armenian genocide. April 24th of this year marked the 85th anniversary of the unleashing of the Armenian genocide. Over the years, from 1915 to 1923, millions of men, women and children were deported, forced into slave labor and tortured by the government of the ``Young Turk Committee.'' 1.5 million of them were killed. To this day, the Republic of Turkey refuses to acknowledge the fact that this massive crime against humanity took place on soil under its control and in the name of Turkish nationalism. That is why this newspaper article was so interesting and important. Let me quote from one woman, Yasemin Orhan, a recent university graduate and a native of the town of Elazig, Turkey. She says, ``They don't teach it in school, but if you are interested, there are plenty of ways you can find out. Many Armenians were killed. That is for sure.'' Ms. Orhan told the New York Times reporter that she had learned about the killings from her grandmother. Another woman, Tahire Cakirbay, 66 years old, standing at the site of a long-gone Armenian Orthodox church, pointed to a nearby hill and said, ``They took the Armenians up there and killed them. They dug a hole for the bodies. My parents told me.'' Mr. Speaker, it is hard to erase from memory such a monumental crime as the Armenian genocide, but the Turkish government is trying. The Times article notes that in the rest of Turkey little is known of and remembered of the Armenian genocide or of the former thriving Armenian community in what is now eastern Turkey. As Ms. Orhan says, ``They don't teach it in school.'' In fact, what they do teach Turkish young people in schools is a skewed version of their own history. Not content with merely propagating this false version of history for internal consumption, Turkey is using its resources to endow Turkish Studies Chairs at prestigious American universities, staffed by scholars sympathetic to the Turkish official version of history. They are also using their lobbying resources, including former Members of this House, to lobby against bipartisan legislation in this Congress affirming U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide. Mr. Speaker, the United States must go on record acknowledging the genocide, and rather than appease Turkey on this issue, we should use our significant influence with that country to get them to do the right thing, to admit what happened in the past, and to work for improved relations with their neighbor, the Republic of Armenia. The Republic of Armenia is working to build a strong democracy, despite the hostility from Turkey and their ally Azerbaijan, both of whom still maintain blockades preventing vitally needed goods from reaching the Armenian people. Last week, seven leading Members of the Armenian Parliament came up to Capitol Hill to meet with a bipartisan group of Members of Congress. This week, officials from Armenia and the Republic of Nagorno Karabagh, as well as from Azerbaijan, will be in Washington for a conference on how to resolve the Nagorno Karabagh conflict. The Armenian people look forward to a bright future of freedom, independence, prosperity and cooperation with their neighbors, but they cannot forget the bitter history of the early 20th century, and they cannot accept Turkey's efforts to deny that it happened. In closing, Mr. Speaker, I would like to quote from another of the Turkish citizens quoted in the New York Times article, a factory worker named Selhattin Cinar: ``This used to be an Armenian area, but now they are gone. Dead, killed, chased away. Our government doesn't want to admit it. Why would you want to say, `my yogurt is sour'?'' [From the New York Times, May 10, 2000] Turkish Region Recalls Massacre of Armenians--But Many Deny Violence of 1915 (By Stephen Kinzer) Elazig, Turkey, May 7--Groves of mulberry trees at lakeside resorts are about all that remains from the days when this region was a center of Armenian life. One of the gnarled trees used to stand beside a long-gone Armenian Orthodox church. Now it shades Tahire Cakirbay, 66, as she looks out over her fields and shimmering Lake Hazar below. ``They took the Armenians up there and killed them,'' Ms. Cakirbay said, pointing to a hill above her. ``They dug a hole for the bodies. My parents told me.'' More than one million Armenians lived in what is now eastern Turkey until their community was shattered in an orgy of ethnic violence that exploded 85 years ago this spring. Many aspects of what happened then are still hotly debated, but here where the killings took place, few people doubt that they occurred. ``They don't teach it in school, but if you're interested there are plenty of ways you can find out,'' said Yasemin Orhan, a native of Elazig who graduated from the local university last year. ``Many Armenians were killed. It's for sure.'' Ms. Orhan said she had learned about the killings from her grandmother. Here in eastern Turkey, the passage of several generations has not been enough to wipe the killings from memory. In the rest of the country, however, most people know little about the killings of 1915. Turkish textbooks refer to them only indirectly. They stress that Armenian militants were rebelling against the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and discount or ignore the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians after the abortive revolt. Conflicts over how to deal with the episode have provoked a worldwide propaganda war between Armenia and Turkey. Armenian lobbyists want foreign governments to declare that what happened in 1915 was genocide. Some Armenian nationalists say that if Turkey can be forced to concede that, their next step might be to claim reparations or demand the return of land once owned by Armenians. Turkish diplomats resolutely resist those efforts. They assert that Muslims as well as Christians were killed here in 1915, and that it is unfair to blame only one side. To most Turks the events of 1915 seem distant, but in the Armenian consciousness they are a vivid and constant presence. Awareness of what is simply called ``the genocide'' is acute in Armenian communities around the world. Often it is accompanied by fierce anger at Turkey's recalcitrance. That anger boiled over into violence during the 1970's and 80's, when a group calling itself Commandos of the Armenian Genocide mounted a campaign against representatives of the Turkish government. It killed Turkish diplomats in the United States and elsewhere, and bombed targets including the Turkish Airlines counter at Orly Airport in Paris. Since then the battle has shifted back to the diplomatic arena. Each spring, foreign leaders issue carefully worded commemorations of the killings. Last month, President Clinton issued a proclamation recalling ``a great tragedy of the twentieth century: the deportations and massacres of roughly one and a half million Armenians in the final years of the Ottoman Empire.'' He did not use the word ``genocide.'' In the last year, Turkey has greatly improved its relations with Greece, but there has been little progress with Armenia. The two countries feud over a variety of political issues, but the wound that 1915 has cut into the Armenian psyche also plays an emotional role in keeping them apart. In recent months, some of the first efforts toward reconciliation between Turks and Armenians have begun. One was a conference of Turkish, Armenian and American scholars who met at the University of Chicago to begin a joint inquiry into the events of 1915. ``This was the most difficult paper I have ever written in my life,'' said Selim Deringil, a historian at Bosporus University in Istanbul, as he presented his analysis of Turkish-Armenian relations. ``Venturing into the Armenian crisis is like wandering into a minefield.'' The scholars who gathered in Chicago plan to meet again. Another group plans to open a series of conferences later this spring in Austria. In a different kind of gesture, seven Turkish and Armenian women, all in their 20's, have joined in a campaign aimed at improving relations between their peoples. The group's first project will be raising money to restore an Armenian church near Van, a city in eastern Turkey that was one an Armenian capital. ``This kind of thing has never been tried before,'' said one of the organizers, Safak Pavey, a Turkish journalist. ``We want to give an example of unity between two peoples who lived together for a long time but became alienated from each other. It's about restoring a church as a way of restoring souls.'' Elazig is just one place where Armenians were killed by Ottoman soldiers and Kurdish tribesmen in the spring and summer of 1915. But because several foreigners were living in the area and recorded what they saw, the killings here were unusually well documented. One of the foreigners was an American consul, Leslie Davis, who took a trip around Lake Hazar, then known as Lake Golcuk, after the massacres. ``Thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly helpless women and children, were butchered on its shores and barbarously mutilated,'' he later wrote. Armenian houses, churches and schools in this area have long since been destroyed or allowed to collapse. New villages have sprung up along the lake. Residents picnic under the mulberry tress that Armenians planted around their summer homes a century ago. It is still possible to find artifacts of Armenian life here. At one antique shop near Elazig, $250 will buy a heavy copper serving tray inscribed with the name of its former owner in distinctive Armenian script. Just last month, a couple of men were discovered digging at what they believed to be a former Armenian cemetery. They were apparently looking for gold that, according to local lore, was often interred with wealthy Armenians. Nevzat Gonultas, manager of a telephone substation on the lakeshore, is considered a local historian because his father spent many hours telling him stories from the past. Like most people around here--although unlike their brethren in other parts of Turkey--he knows what happened in 1915. ``Other people don't know because they don't live here,'' Mr. Gonultas said as he sipped tea on a recent evening. ``My father told me that Turkey was weak at that time and the Armenians decided to stage an uprising. Then the order came to kill them. Almost all were killed. It wasn't a war; it was a massacre. The Turkish authorities do not accept that version, and many Turks never hear it. A historical atlas issued by a leading Turkish newspaper does not show that much of this region was under Armenian rule for centuries. At historical sites in this region, signs and brochures often discount or omit facts about the earlier Armenian presence. According to one new travel book, ``guards are under instruction to eavesdrop on tourist guides who might be tempted to tell another story.'' Anyone who seeks to learn about the events in 1915, however, need only come here. ``This used to be an Armenian area, but now they're gone,'' said a factory worker named Selhattin Cinar. ``Dead, killed, chased away. Our government doesn't want to admit it. Why would you want to say, `My yogurt is sour'?''