Paul Simon

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I receive the Armenian Mirror- Spectator regularly, a weekly publication circulated primarily in the United States. There are two items of interest in the October 28 issue. And the headings on the two items tell much of the story. One is ``Presidents of Armenia and Turkey Meet in New York,'' and the other is ``Armenia Suggests Normalization of Ties With Turkey.'' The animosities of decades and, sometimes, centuries have to be diminished in our world. One of those that hurts both Armenia and Turkey is the historic difficulties between these two peoples. I urge both countries to continue to move along this path toward reconciliation. And I ask that the two articles be printed in the Record. The articles follow: [From the Armenian Mirror-Spectator, Oct. 28, 1995] Presidents of Armenia and Turkey Meet in New York (By Florence Avakian) United Nations, NY.--On Monday, October 23, a private meeting took place between Turkish President Suleyman Demirel and Armenian President Levon Der Petrossian and their aides at the Turkish Mission to the United Nations in New York. The meeting at the Turkish UN headquarters, which is across the street from the United Nations, underscored the importance that Armenia puts on improved relations with Turkey. Just before the Demirel-Der Petrossian meeting, the Turkish President had met privately with Azerbaijani President Geidar [[Page S 17792]] Aliyev, also at the Turkish Mission to the United Nations. Following the Demirel-Aliyev meeting, the two leaders came out for a photo opportunity with the more than 60 Turkish and Azeri media representatives. This correspondent, who was the only Armenian journalist present, asked the Turkish President: FA: Mr. Demirel, do you have plans to have a trilateral meeting with Presidents Der Petrossian and Aliyev? SD: No, that will not happen. We are having bilateral meetings with each other. At this time, there is no need to have a summit. Armenia and Azerbaijan don't have a common ground or agreement in order to have a three-way summit. When the President of Armenia arrived for his meeting with the Turkish leader, the Demirel-Aliyev meeting was still in progress. He waited on another floor of the Turkish Mission until the Azeri President left. Following the more than half hour meeting between the Armenian and Turkish heads of state, the two also came out for a photo op with the press. Speaking in Armenian with an English interpreter, President Der Petrossian commented, ``We are using all the opportunities to achieve peace. During our meeting today, the issue of settlement of the Nagorno Karabagh conflict was discussed as well as the issues connected with bilateral relations between Armenia and Turkey. I think that the common understanding is to allow the resumption of military activities in Nagorno Karabagh. ``At the same time it is necessary for all parties to express good will and to find constructive compromise and solutions to the conflict. There are details that are to be settled and discussed during the negotiating process. And it's not only Lachin, but there are tens of issues in which the parties' opinions differ from each other. Tomorrow, the same issues will be discussed with Mr. Aliyev.'' This last statement was in reference to a private meeting between the Armenian and Azeri Presidents which was scheduled to take place on Tuesday morning, October 24, at 9:30 am, at the United Nations headquarters. Following the two bilateral meetings, the Turkish President held a press conference with only the Turkish press, intended for public consumption in Turkey. The Turkish press representative summarized the information for this correspondent after the briefing. Demirel had reportedly said, without elaborating, that after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, the importance of Turkey had increased. Concerning the Caucasus, he said that it was Turkey's second foreign policy priority, after the war in the former Yugoslavia, and that the Karabagh conflict hurts not only Armenia and Azerbaijan, but also Turkey and Georgia. His statement reportedly was that when one neighbor is hurt, all are hurt. The Caucasus conflict cannot be resolved by force, he said, and that peace will open new opportunities. The Turkish press representative continued the Turkish President's comments which included the statement that Turkey does not have designs against its neighbors, and that Armenia and Azerbaijan will reach peace through the Minsk Group. Demirel reportedly stated that he wants ``1.4 million Azeris to return to their homes.'' In answer to a question by this correspondent three weeks ago, Former Turkish Foreign Minister, Erdal Inonu, at a press conference at the United Nations, used the figure of one million Azeri refugees. (It is interesting to note, as I reported at that time, that the International Red Cross puts the figure of refugees resulting from the Caucasus conflict at 1.1 million, 350,000 of which are Armenian refugees from Baku, Sumgait and Karabagh.) The Turkish President also mentioned that he had cancelled his meeting with President Clinton in Washington because of the government crisis in Turkey. However, he said that President Clinton, at the Presidents' dinner at the United Nations, told him that he is supporting Turkey. To this, Demirel thanked Clinton for his support on the oil and terror issues. The United States has supported Turkey on the Kurdish question. One of the most vocal protest groups outside the United Nations were the Kurds asking for freedom and self- determination. The Turkish crisis which brought down the Ciller government resulted in the Turkish President returning to Turkey on the evening of Monday, October 23. It was widely expected that on Tuesday, October 24, Demirel would appoint a new government, and set a new date for elections. Reportedly, he has asked Tansu Ciller to remain as Prime Minister. Reliable sources also say that Hikmet Cetin, who held the post before, will replace Erdal Inonu as the next foreign minister.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, during this National Diabetes Awareness Month, I am pleased to join my colleague Senator Strom Thurmond in introducing the Diabetes Research Act of 1995, a bill to authorize increased funding for diabetes research. It is identical to legislation introduced in the House earlier this year by Representative Elizabeth Furse and Representative George R. Nethercutt, Jr. Information from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases shows there has been a dramatic increase recently in the number of Americans with diabetes--almost a 50 percent increase since 1983. About 15 million Americans now have diabetes, and an estimated half of them do not know they have the disease. Diabetes is one of the leading causes of death by illness in the United States. It can lead to blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, stroke, and nerve damage. And it affects minority groups two to three times more frequently than others. The rapid increase is taking place primarily in type II diabetes-- adult-onset diabetes--which makes up 95 percent of cases. This type of diabetes is usually diagnosed at age 51, and with increasing numbers of Americans in this age range, we can expect an even higher incidence of diabetes in the future. The diabetes-related costs to the Nation each year are estimated at over $100 million. And each day, thousands of Americans are facing blindness, amputation of extremities, and heart disease as a result of the disease. We need to make research in this area a priority, and that is the purpose of the $315 million increase in NIH funding in this bill. The good news is, diabetes research is making great strides, and additional effort has an excellent chance of providing breakthrough results, saving thousands of lives, improving the lives of millions more and saving billions of health care dollars. I invite my colleagues' support for this legislation.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I have felt for some time that the United States made a mistake in recognizing the People's Republic of China and derecognizing Taiwan, sometimes referred to as the Republic of China. My position for a long time was that we should recognize both Chinas, as we recognized both Germanys. That did not prevent East Germany and West Germany from uniting as one country. But when the mistake was made of playing the China card, in large measure in response to the Soviet Union and its perceived threat, we had set up a situation that potentially could mean military trouble in Asia. The New York Times carried a story on Saturday, November 18, by Patrick E. Tyler that talks about an improvement in United States ties but a worsening of China-Taiwan ties. I am concerned about any leadership that could emerge in dictatorial China that might be a threat to the free Government of Taiwan. I hope that our military leaders and our diplomatic leaders will not pussyfoot around in making clear that there would be serious repercussions if China were to invade Taiwan. I ask that the article be printed in the Record. The article follows: China-U.S. Ties Warm a Bit as China-Taiwan Relations Chill (By Patrick E. Tyler) Beijing, Nov. 17.--China and the United States made new progress today in resuming a program of high-level military contacts by agreeing to an exchange of visits of their top military officers next year. But American defense officials visiting here this week reported that during private conversations they encountered trenchant rhetoric and signs of unrelenting determination by Beijing's military and civilian leaders to undermine the rule of the President of Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui. In recent days, China has restated its intention to use all means, including military intimidation and force if necessary, to end what Beijing considers a drive by Mr. Lee to achieve independence for Taiwan. Mr. Lee insists he is only seeking greater international recognition for the island, which has been estranged from the mainland since the nationalists fled there after their defeat by the Communists in 1949. As three days of talks ended, the Pentagon was receiving reports that China had begun a new military exercise off its southeastern coast near Taiwan, military officials here said. It followed a Taiwanese drill earlier in the week intended to demonstrate the island's ability to repulse an invasion from the mainland. The visit of the American delegation led by Joseph S. Nye, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, was the first by American military officials since the diplomatic rift that followed a White House decision to allow Mr. Lee to make a private visit to the United States in June. And it demonstrated that United States-China relations are recovering at a time of unremitting military tension across the Taiwan Strait that could lead to another rupture in relations and, perhaps, military conflict. ``The Chinese have a military operation starting right now,'' an official traveling with Mr. Nye said tonight. ``And what is clear is that China is brushing off military plans and operational contingencies that they haven't thought about since the 1950's. This is an issue we are very concerned about.'' Mr. Nye and officials traveling with him said that communication between China and the United States is improving in some areas, but ``there was no give whatsoever'' on Taiwan, one official said. ``Every single person referred to Taiwan, and their point was that every Chinese is united on this question,'' the official said. ``It was interesting because they made a comparison with our system. They said you may have differences in your Congress, but in China we are all united that there is only one China and Taiwan is part of China.'' Chinese military leaders, during extensive closed door talks with the American delegation, engaged in ``subtle exploration'' of how the United States would respond in the event of a military crisis over Taiwan, one official said. But the American officials refused to discuss United States contingency planning. ``We stand for peaceful resolution of disputes across the Taiwan Strait,'' Mr. Nye said at a news conference today. Any use of force by China against Taiwan ``would be a serious mistake'' and, he added, continued military exercises near Taiwan ``are not helpful.'' Mr. Nye announced that the Chinese Defense Minister, Gen. Chi Haotian, would visit Washington next year and that Gen. John [[Page S 17789]] Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would pay a reciprocal visit to Beijing. Visits by American and Chinese warships to each other's ports will also resume, Mr. Nye said.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I had the honor to speak at a tree planting across from the White House, a ceremony honoring the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, conducted by the Jewish National Fund. It was the first time a tree had been planted in the area of the White House honoring a foreign leader. My hope is that all parties in the Middle East, as well as other nations, including the United States, will do everything we can to pursue Yitzhak Rabin's dream of peace, a practical peace where neighbors can get along and trade and have normal discourse. At the funeral tribute to Prime Minister Rabin in Israel, which I watched on television, nothing was more moving than the tribute of his teenage granddaughter, Noa Ben-Artzi Philosof. You would have to be hard-hearted indeed not to have tears come to your eyes as she made this moving tribute to him. I was proud of President Clinton's tribute, and I thought King Hussein and President Mubarak also did an excellent job. But for those who may not have heard or read the tribute of Prime Minister Rabin's granddaughter, I ask that it be printed in the Record. The tribute follows: [Translated and transcribed by the New York Times] A Granddaughter's Farewell (By Noa Ben-Artzi Philosof) Please excuse me for not wanting to talk about the peace. I want to talk about my grandfather. You always awake from a nightmare, but since yesterday (Sunday) I was continually awakening to a nightmare. It is not possible to get used to the nightmare of life without you. The television never ceases to broadcast pictures of you, and you are so alive that I can almost touch you--but only almost, and I won't be able to anymore. Grandfather, you were the pillar of fire in front of the camp and now we are left in the camp alone, in the dark; and we are so cold and so sad. I know that people talk in terms of a national tragedy, and of comforting an entire nation, but we feel the huge void that remains in your absence when grandmother doesn't stop crying. Few people really knew you. Now they will talk about you for quite some time, but I feel that they really don't know just how great the pain is, how great the tragedy is; something has been destroyed. Grandfather, you were and still are our hero. I wanted you to know that every time I did anything, I saw you in front of me. Your appreciation and your love accompanied us every step down the road, and our lives were always shaped after your values. You, who never abandoned anything, are now abandoned. And here you are, my ever-present hero, cold, alone, and I cannot do anything to save you. You are missed so much. Others greater than I have already eulogized you, but none of them ever had the pleasure I had to feel the caresses of our warm, soft hands, to merit your warm embrace that was reserved only for us, to see your half-smile that always told me so much, that same smile which is no longer, frozen in the grave with you. I have no feelings of revenge because my pain and feelings of loss are so large, too large. The ground has been swept out from below us, and we are groping now, trying to wander about in this empty void, without any success so far. I am not able to finish this; left with no alternative. I say goodbye to you, hero, and ask you to rest in peace, and think about us, and miss us, as down here we love you so very much. I imagine angels are accompanying you now and I ask them to take care of you, because you deserve their protection.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I confess I just got in on the tail end of Senator Thomas' remarks. From what I heard, I agree. I hope we can move quickly, and it illustrates why Senator Thomas is going to be an asset to the Senate. I was told by a House Member from Illinois, Congressman Dick Durbin, he said, ``You are really going to like the new Senator from Wyoming.'' I hope I do not get him in trouble in Wyoming saying this now, but I have found that to be the case.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, Father Robert Drinan, former Member of the House, had a column in the National Catholic Reporter recently that is of interest. It points out where Catholics and Christian Coalition people can work together, and it is an area where liberals and conservatives can work together. That is the growing problem of gambling. I ask that the Robert Drinan column be printed in the Record. The column follows: Two Sides Agree on Opposing Gambling (By Robert F. Drinan) I was happy to discover recently that I agree with the Christian Coalition on at least one issue: opposition to gambling. Ralph Reed, the coalition's executive director (and a Presbyterian who looks like an altar boy) says that his organization may help finance an antigambling office in Washington. Reed asserts that his organization is ``pounding away'' at casinos and lotteries. A conservative Colorado group named Focus on the Family is also pushing an antigambling agenda. Gambling foes are planning their first national convention in Florida. Keynote speaker is Congressman Frank Wolf, a conservative Republican from Virginia who is working aggressively against government- sponsored gambling. It is far from clear that any coalition of antigambling groups can reverse the explosive growth of this form of entertainment. Lotteries, casinos, riverboat gambling and an ever-widening array of slot machines and other devices took in $482 billion last year. Substantial sums from that take have gone to Republicans, including leading presidential candidates. Sen. Robert Dole took in $477,450 from gambling interests in Las Vegas, Nev. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas has also benefited. A further sign of entanglement: The former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Frank Fahrenkopf, is now the head of the American Gambling Association, the industry's trade group. Daily and vehemently, the new Republican majority in the Congress proclaims agreement with the Christian Coalition on abortion, school prayer and welfare. But when it comes to gambling, the GOP is trapped between its devotion to the Christian Coalition and its desire for campaign contributions from the gambling industry. Will the Christian Coalition use its newfound power in Congress and some Southern states to reinstate laws against gambling--laws that religious groups, Protestant and Catholic alike, fought to get on the books a century ago? A clash before next year's presidential election is unlikely. Recognizing that the crusade against gambling is all but a lost cause, even the most ardent adherents of the Christian Coalition's agenda are not about to expend political capital telling state lawmakers to abolish gambling and tax their people fairly. A further complication is that most Americans have never really focused on gambling's evils. It appeared on the American scene as a phenomenon that is odorless, invisible and inaudible. Hardly anyone is angry or indignant. Still, the potential for scandal and corruption in the exploding gambling industry is so vast that almost anything could happen. The protests of the Christian Coalition against gambling should be welcomed by all citizens and persons of faith. The desire to get something for nothing and the fantasy that we can be millionaires overnight are arguably the product of a sinful heart. Count of Catholics, Mr. Reed, for support. On this issue, Catholics and the Christian Coalition are reading out of the same prayer book.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, we have had a variety of sources telling us that the Nation should not default on its obligations because of the debt limit. It should hardly be necessary to stress that. If we create debt, we have to pay for it. For that reason I have consistently--with one exception--voted for extending the debt limit whether it was a Democratic President or a Republican President. The real choice is when we create the debt. Once it is created we have to face up to it. But a publication which probably has limited circulation that I have come to respect is Grant's Interest Rate Observer, published by James Grant. His November 10 issue has a front page commentary titled, ``On the Advisability of Not Defaulting.'' It approaches the question of default from a slightly different perspective that I believe my colleagues should note. I ask that the commentary be printed in the Record. The material follows: [From Grant's Interest Rate Observer, Nov. 10, 1995] On The Advisability of Not Defaulting Over the past 12 months, the 30-year Treasury bond actually delivered a higher total return than the stock market (source: the authoritative center pages of this publication). The margin of outperformance, 32.92% to 29.60%, was remarkably strong for an asset class that is under the cloud of default. It would be better if there were no default, we think. Over the past 46 years, according to our friends at Ryan Labs, income contributed a little more than 100% of the total return of the overall Treasury market. Thus, the contribution of capital gains to the same calculation--the bear market lasted for 34\1/2\ years, until September 1981--was less than zero. Because the bond is an income security, low interest rates work a hardship on bondholders. Default would work the ultimate hardship. To achieve the identical 32.92% total return in the next 12 months, Ryan calculates, the current 30-year Treasury would have to rally to a yield of 4.59%. Over the past five years, the long bond has produced a total return of 12.35%; to reproduce that feat in the next five years would require a rally to 3.60%. To match the past decade's total return of 11.48%, the 30-year Treasury would have to rally to 0.29%. Repeat: 0.29%. Since May 1974, bonds have delivered 12-month total returns in excess of those achieved by stocks in no fewer than 110 months, a fact almost guaranteed to win a bar bet from any stock market chauvinist who insists that the returns to management, diligence, hard work and ingenuity should, by right, exceed those to coupon clipping. Perhaps the creditor class isn't finished yet. As the graph on pages six and seven points up, bond market out- performance is rarely a one-month flash in the pan; it tends to roll on. But that is a question of relative return. The immediate risk of default is one of absolute performance, not in the short run but over the long pull. One long-term risk is the precedent of default (to be technical, this would be the second American default; in 1933, the government abrogated the contracts under which it had promised to pay gold to its bondholders). A second is that the temporary nonpayment of interest and principal would cause intelligent people to reexamine the nation's monetary institutions. Wondering about the whereabouts of their money, they might turn to the Federal Reserve's balance sheet. Reading it, they would observe: non- interest-bearing currency on the liabilities side; Treasury securities on the asset side. Their eyes would flash to a footnote: $484 billion in Treasurys held in custody by the Federal Reserve for the account of foreign central banks. A very intelligent American reader would come to appreciate that he or she is the beneficiary of a vast fandango. The world has willingly come to accept the promises of this government, either in interest-bearing or non-interest- bearing form. The half-trillion dollars or so worth of dollar securities visibly held by foreign central banks constitute the evidence not of American strength but of weakness. Mainly, they represent the track of currency intervention. Buying dollars, the central banks turn them in for U.S. government securities. It is an indirect gift. Another subversive feature of a Treasury default is that it would turn the spotlight on other classes of non-interest- bearing investments. Of these, perhaps none is so lowly as gold, which this year has caused even its few remaining friends to despise it. However, notes Peter McTeague, of MCM TradeWatch, Boston, gold option volatility has collapsed, speculators are short the market, central banks are hostile toward it and producers continue to sell the metal forward (the proof of which is a gold lease rate that has surged to 2.3% from 1.8% in the past month: even at the lower yield, it would represent towering value in the Japanese bond markets). On Tuesday came news that the output of the South African mining industry is closing in on a 40-year low; a spokesman for the Anglo American Corp. described the country's gold operations as being in a ``state of managed decline.'' The other day, a friend described his own growing, unfashionable bullishness toward gold. However, he added before hanging up: ``I'm not sure I want my name used with this.'' It has been a vale of tears.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, we have been discussing the Bosnian situation. I was critical of President Bush for not responding right away. I was critical of Bill Clinton when he became President for not responding. I joined those who voted for lifting the arms blockade. But I believe the President is acting in the national interest now, and we have to recognize the great threat to the future of our country in terms of security is no longer nuclear weapons, I am happy to say, it is instability. We are not going to get stability in Bosnia without United States leadership and involvement. To the credit of the President, Warren Christopher and others, there is a peace agreement, which evolved in Dayton, OH, the Midwest of the United States, and I think it is imperative that we move ahead. Last night, I was reading the Weekly Standard, Irving Crystal's new magazine. I try to get a diverse readership, and I hope it will not shock him that I am reading his publication. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the lead editorial.

Mr. SIMON. The lead editorial, Mr. President, says: ``Bosnia: Support the President.'' This is a magazine, as the Presiding Officer knows, that is primarily oriented to people of conservative view and primarily to Republicans. The final paragraph says: Congress, for its part, should hold its hearings and delineate whatever conditions on deployment it believes appropriate. But while they're at it, Republicans should remember why it is they have spent the past 15 years defending Presidential leadership in foreign affairs. At the end of the day, the Republican Congress should support the President on Bosnia. I was pleased last night, Mr. President, when I heard the interview on CBS, Dan Rather's interview with Senator Dole. Senator Dole, obviously, could benefit politically right now by denouncing President Clinton and the move that was made. Senator Dole, to his credit, did not take that posture. It was a statesmanlike response. I think insofar as possible--obviously, we all have to make judgments on these things, and I respect those whose judgments differ from me on this--but insofar as possible, we should have bipartisan foreign policy. That does require the President to work with Congress and, frankly, I think more than has been done up to this point by this administration. But the lessons from Woodrow Wilson are that the executive branch has to work with Congress, but the other lesson is a lesson from right after World War II when we had a Democratic President and a Republican Congress, and President Truman, through General Marshall at the Harvard commencement, suggested the Marshall plan, which we look back upon with great pride. After that was announced, the first Gallup Poll showed 14 percent of the American public supporting the Marshall plan, a plan that ultimately saved western Europe from communism and helped to bring about the demise of communism in Europe. In the U.S. Senate there was a Republican Senator by the name of Arthur Vandenberg. The Presiding Officer is nodding as though he remembers that. He is too young to remember when Arthur Vandenberg was a member of this body, but I remember it well. Arthur Vandenberg did not take advantage of the situation but worked with the President for the best interests of this Nation and the best interests of the world. I think that is what we have to do at this point, Mr. President. I hope we will. We are going to differ and differ strongly on this thing. That is the way it should be. I hope it will not be on a partisan basis. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, in going through the Congressional Records I came across Senator Frank Murkowski's comments on Senate Joint Resolution 29. In that resolution, he calls for dialog between North and South Korea. Almost a year ago, Senator Murkowski and I visited North Korea and South Korea, and I applaud what he suggests in this resolution and his leadership on it. Let me add that I believe the United States could be a facilitator of this dialog. Senator Murkowski and I sent a letter suggesting that North Korea send 10 parliamentarians to the United States and South Korea the same, and that after visiting the United States for about 8 days, that the parliamentarians of both countries meet the last 2 days in an isolated setting with a few of us who would be hosts from the United States. Because of the tensions that have arisen since the death of Kim Il Sung neither side was willing to take that step. It is time to explore this again. Nowhere in the world do you have as many troops facing each other, heavily armed, with a total lack of communication between the two sides. The potential for explosion is very real and there are 140,000 American troops on the South Korean side. We would have an interest in resolving this even without the presence of those troops but that adds a meaningful dimension to this. I am sending a copy of these remarks to the Assistant Secretary of State for Asia, Winston Lord. I ask that the text of the resolution be printed in the Record. The text of the resolution follows: S.J. Res. 29 Whereas the Agreed Framework Between the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea of October 21, 1994, states in Article III, paragraph (2), that [[Page S 17672]] ``[t]he DPRK will consistently take steps to implement the North-South Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula''; Whereas the Agreed Framework also states the ``[t]he DPRK will engage in North-South dialogue, as this Agreed Framework will help create an atmoshphere that promotes such dialogue''; Whereas the two agreements entered into between North and South Korea in 1992, namely the North-South Denuclearization Agreement and the Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression and Exchanges and Cooperation, provide an existing and detailed framework for dialogue between North and South Korea; Whereas the North Korean nuclear program is just one of the lingering threats to peace on the Korean Peninsula; and Whereas the reduction of tensions between North and South Korea directly serve United States interests, given the substantial defense commitment of the United States to South Korea and the presence on the Korean Peninsula of United States troops: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, Victor Navasky, publisher of the Nation and many years ago an aide to Senator Ed Muskie, recently had an item in the Washington Post that we ought to be paying attention to; and I hope the Postal Rate Commission will look at carefully. What the Postal Service should be doing is encouraging the free flow of ideas. We talk about the melting pot strength of America sometimes as if it [[Page S 17360]] were a breeding process. The Italians marry the Germans and the Germans marry the Chinese and so forth. In fact the melting pot strength of America is the cross-fertilization of ideas. And anything that weakens that flow of ideas weakens America. Journals like the Nation and their counterparts on the conservative side render a huge public service. It is of interest to me to note that as you look at the rise in the rate of delivering packages containing everything from diapers to cashews, the increase in the rate of growth of sending these through the Postal Service has not been as great as the increase in sending ideas through the mail. Frankly, Federal Express and United Postal Service and all their counterparts can deliver diapers and cashews just as well as the postal service. But the Postal Service provides the ideas that are important to the Nation. One other item that I frankly was not aware of until I read Victor Navasky's column op-ed piece was that ``periodicals heavy in editorial content * * * will for the first time be charged postage by the mile.'' If that is accurate, and I am asking my staff to check that out right now, that is a great disservice. People in Alaska or Hawaii or the remotest U.S. territory should have the opportunity for ideas as much as people that live in Chicago or New York City or Washington, DC. I ask that the Victor Navasky op-ed piece be printed in the Record and I urge my colleagues to read it. The material follows: Stamping Out the Little Guys--Don't Let Postal Rate Reform Crush Us Small Opinion Magazines (By Victor Navasky) The Founding Fathers saw the circulation of opinion and intelligence as a condition of self-governance, and a postal service as the circulatory system of democracy. That is why, among other reasons, Benjamin Franklin agreed to serve as postmaster general. That is why Thomas Jefferson sought to persuade President Washington to appoint Thomas Paine as postmaster general. That is why Washington himself believed that all newspapers--which in those days were frequently partisan, radical and rabblerousing--should be delivered free of charge. And that is why (not to put myself in such illustrious company) I agreed to add my two pence to the 17,000 pages of testimony accumulated by the Postal Rate Commission, which is considering a proposal that would undermine the postal principle deemed by the Founding Fathers to be essential to the enlightenment of the Republic. Namely, preferential treatment for carriers of information and opinion. While we have heard too much about how Time Warner's rap records have contributed to the degradation of public discourse, we have heard too little about how lawyer- lobbyists for Time Warner and Dow Jones are pushing a proposed postal ``reform.'' Its main consequence would be to reward advertising-crammed mass magazines and newspapers and penalize small periodicals. It would especially hurt those with the highest percentage of editorial content, such as the journal of opinion whose financially precarious business it is to carry on the policy debate that democracy requires. To German philosopher Juergen Habermas, such journals are house organs to the public sphere and their role is nothing less than ``to set the standard for reasoned argumentation.'' One would have thought that the Magazine Publishers of America, which in theory represents all magazines large and small, would sound the alarm. But no, that job has been left to the American Business Press, which represents mostly smaller publications. Whether or not it is because a minority of its members, including Time Warner, pay a majority of its dues, MPA, along with the Postal Service, has been aggressively promoting a reclassification scheme whose consequence will be a de facto transfer of expense from magazines with a circulation in the millions, like People, to magazines with comparatively small circulations, among them the Nation. On the surface, the reclassification proposal makes free- market sense. The plan would divide what is now second-class mail into two sub-classes and reward those periodicals that save the Postal Service sorting time and shipping costs by giving them a lower rate. The catch, however, is that for the most part, only the nation's largest magazines will qualify for the lower rate. Periodicals that do not have 24 or more subscribers in 90 percent of the relevant ZIP codes need not apply. Magazines too small to print regional editions and hire private trucks to deliver them to regional post offices will suffer. So will periodicals heavy in editorial content (which will for the first time be charged postage by the mile, reversing nearly two centuries of postal policy favoring editorial content over advertising). And so too will those without the technology to do what is quaintly known as ``pre-sortation'' (sorting in advance by ZIP code, which the Nation does but some of our smaller siblings can't). Time Warner and other biggies will save millions on their postal rates; journals of opinion and most magazines with circulations under 100,000 will pay at least 17 percent more. No wonder, then, that the Postal Rate Commission's own Office of the Consumer Advocate denounced the plan because it would offer ``deeper discounts only to the largest and most technologically sophisticated mailers.'' So the Postal Service would turn the historic mission of second-class mail on its head. Until now, the independent Postal Rate Commission has barred the door against those who would drive the public-interest factor out of the rate-making process. It would be a tragedy if, at a time of unprecedented media concentration, one of the few remaining institutions dedicated to the propagation, circulation and testing of new policy ideas--the journal of opinion--were the casualty of lobbying by the very forces making it more important than ever that the independent voice be heard--whether the Nation, the New Republic or the new Weekly Standard. The Postal Service is chartered as a public service and, as economist Robert Nathan testified on behalf of the American Business Press, it cannot and should not adopt, ``in the guise of abstract economics, the profit-maximizing strategies of private enterprise.'' In September, Loren Smith, ``chief marketing officer'' of the Postal Service, sent a form letter extolling the reform proposals on cost-saving grounds, conceding that some magazines would get hit with higher costs but suggesting that even these might achieve savings through ``co-mailing.'' Thus, when I appeared before the Postal Rate Commission in October to make the case I have outlined above, I was not surprised to be asked why the Nation couldn't qualify for the lower rate category either by co-mailing with other weeklies (time and logistics would make that impractical) or by cutting isolated subscribers from our rolls (business and social policy considerations would make that invidious). What I didn't expect was to be cross-examined (on colonial history, yet) by counsel from both Time Warner and Dow Jones. They made much of the fact that in the 1790s Congress had singled out newspapers but not magazines for preferred treatment. That is a neat debater's point, but as historian Donald Stewart has documented, by far the greatest number of newspapers in those days were weeklies, the line between newspapers and magazines was murky at best (both were called journals), and the highly partisan colonial press was the equivalent of today's journal of opinion. When asked, inter alia, the source for my assertion that Jefferson had nominated Paine for postmaster general, I happily cited a Jan. 31, 1974, editorial commentary by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. This perhaps is what prompted counsel to ask, in the three-and-a-half-hour colloquy's most esoteric query: Could I name any job from which citizen Paine had not been fired? I thought the question a non sequitur, but it did occur to me that these too are times that try men's souls.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I would also like to respond to a statement made earlier by my colleague from Kansas, who chairs the Labor and Human Resources Committee. She made the statement that the bill we are considering today makes income-contingent repayment available to all students. [[Page S 17304]] My colleague is mistaken. The bill gives this option to banks, not to students. Section 4003(d) of the bill states clearly that this option is offered ``at the discretion of the lender.'' In fact, few banks are likely to use this discretion because of the difficulty of confirming borrowers' incomes accurately. They also will no longer face the competition from direct lending, which has caused lenders to be more flexible in offering repayment options to borrowers. The reconciliation bill not only eliminates schools from direct lending, it also also places several new obstacles in the way of these borrowers who, under current law, can get into direct lending in order to get access to income-contingent repayment. For these reasons, it is likely that fewer borrowers will have access to this important repayment option, rather than more borrowers. Mr. President, for these and many other reasons, I urge my colleagues to oppose the conference report. Exhibit 1 American Council on Education, Washington, DC, November 16, 1995. Hon. William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States, The White House, Washington,

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, when nearly 500 college and university presidents speak on an issue, Congress should stop and listen. Yesterday, 472 presidents contacted President Clinton and the congressional leadership to urge that competition be maintained in the student loan programs. We should listen. Colleges should be able to choose whether to participate in the direct student loan program or the guarantee program. The bill we are considering this evening does the opposite, forcing 1250 colleges out of the direct loan program, and preventing hundreds of others who want in from getting in. As my colleagues will see from the list of presidents signing the letter, free choice is not only the desire of colleges in the direct loan program, but many in the guarantee program as well. It is unfortunate that this issue has become so partisan that some of my colleagues have turned against principles of competition, market forces, and the elimination of red tape, and turned toward granting monopolies and entitlements for bankers and middlemen--at the expense of students, colleges, and taxpayers. The letter from the college and university presidents speaks for itself, and I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be dispensed with.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, it so happens that today is the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Higher Education Act of 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. Everyone knows it was a great step forward. Today, according to press reports, the conferees on reconciliation agreed that they would cut back on assistance to higher education and direct lending, which is now used by more than 1,300 colleges and universities in this Nation, including some colleges and universities in Oklahoma, every one of whom wants to keep the system. There is not a college or university that is using direct lending that wants to shift back into the old system. Let me just say, the new system reduces paperwork, makes it much easier for students and colleges and universities, and the new system is good for taxpayers. The old system has all kinds of paperwork. The old system says, ``If you have a student loan, you have to pay back x number of dollars whether you're employed or unemployed.'' The new system permits a student to have an income-contingent loan, so that if a student wants to become a teacher and not earn so much, then the student could pay back a smaller percentage or a smaller sum; while if a student became a lawyer, or a stockbroker, maybe earning quite a bit of money, that student would pay back a larger sum. If a student was unemployed, while that student was unemployed, you would not pay back anything. What happened in conference is they have agreed to cut back from 40 percent assistance, 40 percent of the schools, which is the cap now, down to 10 percent. Now, I do not know who is going to tell those students in Oklahoma which three out of four of them are going to be out of the direct loan program. I am glad I am not going to have to make that decision. And I am pleased that the President, I think, is going to veto this. Who benefits by cutting it back to 10 percent, giving a 90 percent monopoly to the banks and to the guaranty agencies? The banks and the guaranty agencies do. The guaranty agencies, incidentally, were created by us. These are not free enterprise operations. The guaranty agencies have the Federal Government guarantee. The one in Indianapolis, for example, the chief executive officer of the guaranty agency in [[Page S 16814]] Indianapolis is paid $627,000 a year. We pay the President of the United States $200,000 a year. And they are spending $750,000 to lobby against us. It is very interesting, Mr. President, my chief cosponsor on direct lending was the distinguished Republican Senator from Minnesota, Senator David Durenberger. And Senator Durenberger said in response, when he was asked about this, ``Shouldn't we let the free enterprise system work?''--that is what I want; I want to see competition; I want to see the schools in Oklahoma and Illinois and every other State have a choice between the old system and the new system and have competition--but Senator David Durenberger said, ``This is not the free market. It is a free lunch.'' It is not competition. We say in the law, banks get the Treasury rate plus 3.1 percent. We write into the law what their profits are, and they do not want to give it up. Now, if we want to have a banking assistance act, let us call it that. But if we want to have a student assistance act, then let us try and see what we can do to help the students. I hear all kinds of speeches about paperwork on both sides of the aisle. Here is a program that cuts down dramatically on paperwork, and we are going to put it back in. I just do not think it makes sense. There is an article in Rolling Stone. I confess, I am not a regular reader of Rolling Stone, Mr. President, but here is an article on this. I ask unanimous consent to have this article printed in the Record.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, it says: State by State, the guarantee agencies' record of fraud, conflict of interest and other abuses demonstrates that they are as cavalier with taxpayer dollars year-round as they are with loan checks at the beginning of the semester. Another quotation: The fate of direct lending in Congress this fall may have more to do with partisan politics than with the merits of either the old guaranteed student loans or the new direct loans. It should not be political. One of the things--and I am sure the Senator from Oklahoma, who is presiding, has heard me say this before-- one of the things that is bad about Congress, worse than when I came to Congress 21 years ago, is the increasing partisanship on both sides. Both parties are to blame. But this is an issue that should not be partisan. It was originally conceived of by Congressman Tom Petri of Wisconsin, a Republican. I took the idea from him and introduced it in the U.S. Senate. It is interesting, the ``Bond Buyer,'' a publication also I do not read regularly, I have to say, Mr. President, talking about this new agreement of a 10-percent limit, says: This is an important step in the right direction for State guarantee agencies. I want to take an important step for students, for colleges and universities. It also points out that these agencies have tax-exempt bonds for those who are interested in the tax-exempt bond market. One of the pluses of direct loans is, frankly, they do not use tax-exempt bonds, so the Federal Treasury gets additional income, one of the things that is not calculated in this skewed calculation we make. This is one program the President of the United States really understands. He came to my office when he was a candidate, and we talked about this. He gave a speech at Georgetown University about direct lending and how we have to simplify loans and reduce the paperwork and do a better job for the students of the United States. He spoke about it frequently on the campaign trail. He was down in Carbondale, IL, which is near my home, just a few weeks ago at Southern Illinois University and spoke about the program. He has spoken about it at Rutgers and elsewhere. I hope when we get past the Presidential veto; that we sit down and ask ourselves, No. 1, what is best for the students; No. 2, what is best for the colleges and universities; and No. 3, what is best for the taxpayers. I think if we ask those three simple questions, then I hope we will come to the conclusion the best way is to give people the option: If you want to go with the old program, you can go with the old program. If you want to go with the new program, you can go with the new program. But to say to the schools in Oklahoma and Illinois, three- fourths of you who like the new Direct Loan Program, three-fourths of you are going to have to get rid of that program, I do not think we should do that. Talk about unfunded mandates. They not only reduce paperwork, they reduce the work of personnel in colleges and universities. That is what we ought to be about. So, Mr. President, I hope we do the right thing after we get through this first phase of reconciliation that is going nowhere, and then sit down and work together and come up with what is sensible for the students, for the future of our country. It is interesting that some years back, prior to your being here or my being here, Mr. President, right after World War II, there was a big debate among veterans organizations. The American Legion wanted to have an education program, and the other veterans groups wanted to have a cash bonus. Fortunately, the American Legion won out, and we had the GI bill, which has been a huge plus for the country. If we had had the cash bonus, it would have been frittered away, and we would have gotten nothing out of it. We kind of face the same thing now. Do we cut back on assistance to students, or do we have this tax cut? The tax cut is $345 billion, and the cutback on students is only $10 billion. We can have both, but I do not think you build a better, finer America by cutting back on educational opportunities.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, in response to a question I asked Dr. Jessica Mathews about an op-ed piece that appeared in the Washington Post, she sent me a speech made by Foreign Minister Gareth Evans of Australia. I took the trouble to read the speech, and it is a good summation of where the United Nations is, where it has been, and where it should go. Foreign Minister Evans points out the successes of the United Nations, like El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique, as well as areas where there are deficiencies. He calls upon the nations to move quickly on a chemical weapons convention, and I hope the United States would join in that effort. Of no small significance is his comparison of the costs of running the United Nations compared to other entities. Note these sentences from his address: The core functions of the U.N. (involving the Headquarters in New York, the Offices in Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi, and the five regional Commissions) cost just $1.2 billion between them: to take just one comparison last year the annual budget of just one Department in one United States city--the New York Police Department--exceeded that by $600 million. The total number of personnel needed to run those U.N.'s core functions is around 10,700; compare the local administration of my own national capital, Canberra--again just one city in one of the U.N.'s 185 member states--which employs some 22,000 people on the public payroll. The cost of the U.N.'s peace operations last year--in Cyprus and the Western Sahara and the former Yugoslavia and thirteen other locations--was $3.2 billion: that's less than what it takes to run just three New York City Departments (Police, Fire and Corrections). Add to the core functions of the U.N. all the related programs and organs (including UNDP, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNICEF, UNCTAD and International Drug Control) and you are talking about a total of around 33,000 people and a total budget (including both assessed and voluntary contributions) of $6.3 billion: that sounds like a lot, but not quite so much when one considers, for example, that the annual global turnover of just one international accounting firm, Price Waterhouse, is around $4.5 billion. Go further, and add to the core functions and the related programs all the other specialized programs and agencies of the entire U.N. family--that is, add agencies like the FAO, ILO, UNESCO and WHO, plus the IABA, and put into the equation as well the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank group and the IMF, which between them employ nearly 10,000 people and spend nearly $5 billion annually) and you are still talking about total U.N. personnel of just around 61,400 and a total U.N. system dollar cost of $18.2 billion. He also praises Canada's leadership in suggesting that we have a more effective system of responding to world emergencies, and I join him in lauding what Canada has done. I ask unanimous consent that the full statement be printed in the Record. The statement follows: The U.N. at Fifty: Looking Back and Looking Forward (Statement to the Fiftieth General Assembly of the United Nations by Senator Gareth Evans, Foreign Minister of Australia, New York, 2 October 1995) Mr. President, I congratulate you on your election to the Presidency of this great Assembly. Your election is a tribute both to you and to Portugal, and Australia will work with you to ensure that this historic Fiftieth Session is as memorable as it could possibly be. And I join in warmly welcoming, as the UN's 185th member state, our fellow South Pacific Forum member, Palau. If we are to effectively prepare for our future we must first be able clearly to see our past. If we are to see where we must go, we must know where we have been: we must be conscious of our failures, but we should be proud of our successes. The structure of today's world community--of sovereign, self-determined, independent states working together on the basis of equality in a framework of international law--simply did not exist before the Charter of the United Nations. There were imaginings of it in the minds of many for a very long time, and we saw emerge, between the World Wars, a pale approximation of it with the League of Nations. But it was at that special moment in San Francisco, fifty years ago, that today's concept of a community of nations was first truly born. And that concept has passed the test of fifty years of life. Gifted though the authors of the Charter were, they would I think be awed to see how very much their vision of a globalised world has now been answered, and exceeded. Today's world is one world, a world in which no individuals and no states can aspire to solve all their problems or fulfill all their dreams [[Page S 16688]] alone. The ideas of San Francisco have entered into the unconscious of people all over the world. Those who refuse to acknowledge the global character of our world, or recoil from it and retreat into unilateralism or, worse, isolationism, have simply not understood the new dynamics that are at work. Ours is an age in which we are called to more, not less, cooperation--and to ever more, and more responsible, sharing of our common destiny. The ideas of San Francisco have assumed many concrete forms, which have deepened and expanded over the last five decades. States now habitually, virtually automatically, conduct their relations with each other on the basis of the United Nations Charter. We have added continually to the corpus of international law and agreements made pursuant to the Charter, in ways that have touched every aspect of modern life. We have built institutions that have sought to deliver to the peoples of the world their most basic needs--for peace and security, for economic well-being, and for dignity and liberty. It was natural that, following a devastating World War and the hideous brutality which accompanied it, that the Charter would have at its heart the maintenance of international peace and security. So far anyway, we have passed the test of ensuring that the world would never again be subjected to global conflict. The United Nations has been, of course, deeply challenged in the maintenance of peace, from the very beginning and ever since. There are areas in which its attempts to maintain and restore peace have been flawed, and where the UN has faltered. But for all that has gone wrong in places like Bosnia and Somalia and Rwanda we should not forget the successes, like those in El Salvador, Cambodia and Mozambique. To go back a generation, no one should forget the role that was played by the Security Council and the Secretary-General in that desperate month of October 1962 when the hands of the clock were seconds before midnight, and the world faced potential nuclear holocaust. And no one should forget the role that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has played in falsifying the almost universal prediction in the 1960s that within two decades there would be twenty or more states possessing nuclear weapons. In development, in seeking to fulfil its commitment to promote ``social progress and better standards of life'' the United Nations has laboured hard, sometimes in very difficult circumstances. The gap between developed and developing countries still remains unacceptably high; there have been and continue to be difficulties with the availability of resources for development assistance; and we have to acknowledge the awful reality, according to the World Bank, that 1.3 billion of our people still live in absolute poverty. But in food and agriculture, in employment and labour standards, in health, in education and in building the infrastructure so vital to communities in the developing world--roads, bridges, water systems--the United Nations and its agencies have worked relentlessly in the service of the human family. It is because of UNICEF that today 80 percent of the world's children are immunised against six killer diseases. And this is just one of hundreds of similar stories that the UN can and should be telling. Basic to the United Nations' concept of the world community was that it should operate under and foster the development of law, justice and human rights. A fundamental commitment of the United Nations is to establish conditions under which justice may prevail, international law will be respected and peace can be built. In fulfilment of this charge, the United Nations has provided the setting for the negotiation of over three hundred major treaties, including in such crucial fields as arms control, transport, navigation and communications. This very practical area of international cooperation has formed the framework of a globalised world. The Charter of the United Nations spoke not just of securing better standards of life, but of those better standards being enjoyed ``in larger freedom''. And the articulation, development and implementation of human rights standards across the whole spectrum of rights--economic, social and cultural as well and political and civil--has been one of the UN's most important and constructive roles. One of the worst of all denials of personal and political freedom was that imposed by apartheid. The triumph over that evil was above all a victory for those South Africans and their leaders whose freedom and dignity apartheid had so long denied. But it would ignore the testimony of history not to recognize the importance of the role played by the General Assembly and the Security Council in creating the conditions for that to occur. For the peoples of the world, no political right has been more important than the right to self-determination. The achievements of the United Nations in this field alone are testimony to the indispensable role it has played in human affairs, with hundreds of millions of people having exercised their right to self-determination in these last fifty years. It is the great movement of decolonisation, as much as the Cold War and its aftermath, that defines the modern world as we know it, and which shapes the world's agenda for the years that lie ahead. The United Nations of the future will need to be, above all, an organisation which works and speaks for all its members, no matter how large or small, and whose legitimacy is thus without question. It must be an organisation better oriented to performance, to delivery to people of the things they need and have a right to expect. And it must be an organisation which seeks to reintegrate, and better coordinate, the implementation of the UN's three basic objectives so clearly articulated at San Francisco fifty years ago--the objectives of peace (meeting the need for security), development (meeting economic needs) and human rights and justice (meeting the need for individual and group dignity and liberty). the peace agenda Disarmament and arms control continue to be of crucial importance in the peace agenda, and a major challenge immediately ahead will be to maintain the momentum of multilateral disarmament and non-proliferation efforts. The decision by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Review and Extension Conference to extend the Treaty indefinitely was, and remains--despite what has happened since--the right decision. The work on a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty must be brought to conclusion, as promised, in the first half of 1996. We must also begin as soon as possible negotiations on a treaty to ban the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons purposes. A further helpful step, although more difficult to achieve, would be a regime requiring all states to declare and account for their present stocks of fissile material. The basic objective in all of this is to move towards the goal that is agreed by all--and it should never be forgotten that it has been agreed by all--that we will, ultimately, eliminate all nuclear weapons. It is in this context, particularly, that the decisions by France and China to continue nuclear testing are to be so strongly deplored. The environmental consequences are bad enough of setting off an explosion more than five times the size of that which destroyed Hiroshima--as France did yesterday on the fragile soil of Fangataufa in Australia's Pacific neighborhood. But the nuclear policy consequences are even worse. This is not the time to be reinforcing nuclear stockpiles and asserting their ongoing deterrent role; the world wants and needs to be moving in the opposite direction. This is the time to be negotiating away those stockpiles, and building verification systems of the kind we did with the Chemical Weapons Convention--which needs still to be ratified into effect (and I urge those states who have not yet acceded to it to urgently do so). This is not the time to be encouraging skepticism about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as the French and Chinese tests are doing. It is, rather, the time for the nuclear powers to be encouraging its universal observance in the way that they best can--by showing that they themselves are absolutely serious about moving to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the globe. The best way for them to do that right now is for France and China to immediately end their testing programs; for all the nuclear weapons states to sign on to the nuclear weapons free zone treaties that now exist in the South Pacific and elsewhere; and for those states to commit themselves wholeheartedly to negotiating a genuinely comprehensive zero-threshold CTBT into place by the middle of next year. The past few turbulent years of United Nations experience on the ground in peace keeping and peace enforcement has underlined the need for it to improve the effectiveness of its work in these important fields. Australia has welcomed the Secretary-General's further work in this area in his very lucid January 1995 Supplement to An Agenda for Peace. In our own contributions to the debate on these issues, we have argued for the clearest possible thinking to be given to the achievability of objectives right across the whole spectrum of responses to security problems--from peace building to peace maintenance to peace restoration to peace enforcement. We have consistently argued, and I make the point again briefly today, that if the United Nations is to be able to meet effectively the security challenges of the post-Cold War world it must begin to devote more resources to preventive strategies than to reactive strategies. It makes more sense to concentrate on prevention than on after-the-event peace restoration, both for inter-state conflict and in the unhappily now far more common case of intra-state conflict. Violent conflicts are always far more difficult and costly to resolve than non-violent disputes, and failed states are extreme difficult to piece back together. All that said, it has been encouraging to see the progress made in recent days toward resolving the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and in moving the Middle East peace process a substantial new step forward. The UN should always be prepared to lend its support and encouragement to preventive diplomacy and peace making efforts taking place outside the formal framework of the UN system, and it should remain particularly alert to the opportunities envisaged in the Charter for advancing the peace agenda through regional organisations. In this context, we in the Asia Pacific have been pleased with the rapid evolution of the ASEAN Regional Forum over the last two years as a new vehicle for dialogue, and trust and confidence building, in our own region. Particular attention has been given recently to the question of improving the United Nations' rapid reaction capability, and I [[Page S 16689]] warmly commend the work that has been done to clarify our thinking on these issues by the Netherlands and Danish Governments, and particularly in the major Canadian report, Towards a Rapid Reaction Capability for the United Nations, just presented to the Assembly. The very useful emphasis of the Canadian study is on the idea of improving the UN system's capability at the centre first--particularly in the area of operational planning--and thereby encouraging greater willingness by troop contributors to give practical and more urgent effect to standby arrangements. No organizational arrangements will substitute for clear- eyed decisionmaking by the Security Council on the responses and mandates that are appropriate to particular situations, but the implementation of changes of this kind should make us much better equipped as an international community to deal in the future with situations like that in Rwanda, where last time our response was so tragically inadequate. the development agenda The security agenda tends to dominate most popular perceptions of the UN's role, but we in the international community must never allow our attention to be diverted from the demands of the development agenda, now as pressing as ever. When historians hundreds of years hence look back at this last half century, the Cold War and its aftermath will not be the only great international current to be remembered: it will be the giant step of decolonisation that looms at least as large. Decolonisation led to the emergence of a world economy which for many years has been seen as divided principally into two categories--the developed and developing countries. But today the picture is more complicated. Mainly for reasons of change in technology and information systems, we now live in a global economy. No part of it is entirely separate from the whole, and no-one can act in that economy in an effective way entirely alone. Because we live in a global economy a key part of our action to deal with the problems of development must be multilateral. And the key problem facing us--both multilaterally and in our bilateral donor roles--is that within the global economy the gap between rich and poor countries, despite all efforts to resist this, has grown. The fact that some 1.3 billion of the 5.7 billion people alive today live at an unacceptable level of poverty is morally insupportable, and dangerous. The United Nations of the future must, as a matter of the most urgent priority, forge a new agenda for development and reshape its relevant institutions to implement that agenda effectively. This is as important as any task it faces in the service of the human family, and in recreating itself as an institution fit for the 21st Century. The agenda is available for all to see. It has been fulsomely described in the six global conferences held by the United Nations in the last four years--the conferences on children, the environment, human rights, population, social development and women. There have also been important studies by the international financial institutions and by academic institutions. We know now what we need to do. We must resolve, politically, to do it. In pursuing these various themes it is important, however, for us not to lose sight of those geographic regions where particular focus is still required, and where the UN's role is more vital than ever. Africa's influence and importance continues to be felt throughout the world in every field of human activity and culture. Exciting political developments, including the ending of apartheid, have been accompanied by major new efforts to restructure and reform national economies: those efforts demand the continued support of the international community, and in particular the UN system. Other regions where the UN needs to play a particular role to facilitate economic and social development are the Central Asian republics, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and in a number of areas in the Indian Ocean region. The Indian Ocean region is one where Australia, as an Indian Ocean country, has been promoting, with others in the region, both governmental and non-governmental efforts to enhance regional cooperation, particularly on economic and trade issues. The success to date of APEC in developing cooperative strategies in the Asia Pacific region to promote prosperity and stability, complementing the UN's broader work for these goals at the international level, offers one possible model for the countries of the Indian Ocean Rim to consider. The institutions of the United Nations relevant to economic and social development are urgently in need of reform. The General Assembly has created the high-level working group needed for political consensus on this. It must complete its work in this Fiftieth Anniversary year, and it must do so creatively, setting aside past vested interests in the system. We must implement the development agenda of the future in a way which ensures a productive and fair place in the global economy for all states. human rights The complex and inter-linked system of principles, legal regimes and machinery that the United Nations has established to promote human rights is one of its major achievements. It must be built upon and strengthened, recognizing always that the human rights whose universality and indivisibility we assert, are about economic, social and cultural rights just as much as the civil and political rights on which developed countries tend to focus their attention. Priority must be given to the major international human rights instruments and machinery and the committees which monitor their implementation. By this means we can provide a frank, non- confrontational and constructive dialogue amongst states parties. The advisory services and technical assistance activities of the United Nations can also play a role in promoting the observance of human rights and the implementation of democratic principles around the world. Programs to help countries develop national institutions and systems to promote and protect human rights will enhance their capacity to prevent violations and make a direct contribution to human security. the organizational agenda It cannot be emphasized enough that the peace and development and human rights agendas I have mentioned are all inter- linked. We need to avoid the compart- mentalisation that occurred throughout the Cold War years, in which peace and security issues, development issues and human rights and justice issues were isolated in completely different conceptual and institutional boxes. Any viable modern concept of international peace, let alone peace within states, must recognize that ``peace and security'' and ``development'' are indissolubly bound up with each other: there can be no sustainable peace without development and no development without peace. And human rights, in the fullest sense, have to come into the equation too; there is unlikely to be sustainable peace in any society if material needs are satisfied, but needs for dignity and liberty are not. No agendas of substance, no matter how clear in concept and well-coordinated in principle they may be, will mean anything to people if they are not able to be implemented through effective organizational structures and instruments. There has been widespread recognition in recent years that the structure of the United Nations that grew up during the last fifty years is simply not adequate to the tasks of the next. We now have an embarrassment of riches with respect to ideas and proposals for change to the United Nations organization. Just as it is urgent that we complete work on An Agenda for Development in this fiftieth year, it is equally urgent that we compete the work of the high-level working group on the reform of the United Nations system, also within the fiftieth year. The structural problem that it is probably the most urgently necessary to resolve, if the credibility of the UN system is to be maintained, is that of the Security Council. The debate on this subject has been long and detailed and is familiar to all of us. Australia's definite view is that it has been going on for long enough, and we are now at the time where action is required. Last year we submitted some illustrative models on the basis of which consideration could be given to an expansion in the membership of the Council. Others have made very specific proposals. Again, in this field there is no lack of ideas. What we must now do is move to the stage of forging political consensus on a new Security Council which will be effective, represents the whole membership of the United Nations and sensibly reflect the realities of today and the future, not those of 1945. There are many structural changes and personnel reforms that could and should be made within the UN system to improve its efficiency. But ultimately the quality of that system depends on what we are prepared to pay for it. It is important to appreciate at the outset the order of magnitude of the sums we are talking about. The core functions of the UN (involving the Headquarters in New York, the Offices in Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi, and the five regional Commissions) cost just $US 1.2 billion between them: to take just one comparison last year the annual budget of just one Department in one United States city--the New York Police Department exceeded that by $600 million. The total number of personnel needed to run those UN's core functions is around 10,700: compare the local administration of my own national capital, Canberra--again just one city in one of the UN's 185 member states--which employs some 22,000 people on the public payroll. The cost of the UN's peace operations last year--in Cyprus and the Western Sahara and the former Yugoslavia and thirteen other locations--was $3.2 billion: that's less than what it takes to run just three New York City Departments (Police, Fire and Corrections). Add to the core functions of the UN all the related programs and organs (including UNDP, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNICEF, UNCTAD and International Drug Control) and you are talking about a total of around 33,000 people and a total budget (including both assessed and voluntary contributions) of $6.3 billion: that sounds a lot, but not quite so much when one considers, for example, that the annual global turnover of just one international accounting firm, Price Waterhouse, is around $4.5 billion. Go further, and add to the core functions and the related programs all the other specialized programs and agencies of the entire UN family--that is, add agencies like the FAO, ILO, UNESCO and WHO, plus the IAEA, and put into the equation as well the Bretton Woods Institutions (the World Bank group and the IMF, which between then employ nearly 10,000 people and spend nearly $5 [[Page S 16690]] billion annually) and you are still talking about total UN personnel of just around 61,400 and a total UN system dollar cost of $18.2 billion. 61,400 may sound like a lot of people, but not when you consider that more than this number--65,000 in fact--are employed by the three Disneylands in California, Florida and France. Three times as many people--183,000--sell McDonald's hamburgers around the world as work for the UN system. And $18.2 billion might be a lot of money, but just one major multinational corporation, Dow Chemical, which happens also to have 61,000 employees world-wide, has an annual revenue in excess of $20 billion. When you put the UN's financial problems into this kind of perspective, the solutions do not look quite so hard. Surely between us the 185 member states, with our combined defence expenditure alone of around $767 billion (as calculated in the UNDP's 1994 Human Development Report), can find that kind of money? But of course the problem of paying for the UN has now become critical because of the unwillingness, or inability, of so many of the member states (including the biggest of us all) to pay their assessed contributions-- notwithstanding that the cost of these for the major developed country contributors works out at between $7 and $15 per head per year, the price of no more than one or two movie tickets in this city. We have a short-term problem, which can and should be solved within the UN system by allowing the UN to borrow from the World Bank. But we also have a longer-term problem which, frankly, does not look as though it is going to be solved-- however much we continue to work at adjusting assessment scales, and however much we exhort member states to pay up, and remind them of the consequences under Article 19 of the Charter if they fail to do so. So what are we to do about all this? In my judgment, it is time to look again--this time very seriously indeed--at the options which do exist for supplementing member states' contributions by external sources of finance. The practicability of collecting a levy on every one of the $300 thousand billion worth of foreign exchange transactions that now occur every year remains to be fully assessed, but simple arithmetic tells us that if we strike a rate for such a levy of just .001 per cent--which hardly seems likely to have any significant economic consequences--we could generate $3 billion. And we know that if we could levy international airline passengers just $10 for every international sector flown--which would be very easily collectable indeed--we could also raise $3 billion, nearly the whole annual cost of UN peace operations. There are as well other revenue options that have, to a greater or lesser extent, the same rational nexus with UN costs that these do, in the sense that they involve transactions which are international, which take place within a framework of law and cooperation provided by the United Nations, and can be harmed by a breakdown in international peace and security--precisely the areas in which the United Nations has a fundamental responsibility. But traditionally a threshold objection of principle has been mounted against any such talk. Member states, it has been said, should themselves own the UN system; if the Secretariat had direct access to non-member state revenue, who knows what adventures it might be inclined to get up to. But ownership and control are totally separate issues. The UN operates on a sovereign equality principle which means that, for example, those six states which presently between them pay over 55 per cent of the UN's regular budget should under no circumstances have greater authority over how it is spent than the overwhelming majority of members who each pay much lesser proportions of the total. Surely, whatever the funding sources involved, the crucial question is how and by whom the money is spent: it is absolutely crucial that there be appropriate control of funds by member states, with all the accountability mechanisms that implies, but that doesn't mean that those member states should themselves have to prove all the funds in the first place. In talking to many of my foreign ministerial colleagues from a wide range of countries and across all continents on these issues over the last few days, I have found an almost unanimous reaction that the UN's present and likely continuing financial crisis demands that these issues be looked at again, without any pre-judgments of the questions of principle or practicability involved. I would suggest, accordingly, that the time is right for the Secretary-General to convene once again a high-level advisory group, like the Volcker/Ogata group established in 1992, with a mandate explicitly to think through what has hitherto been more or less unthinkable--how to fund the UN system in a way that reaches out beyond the resources that member states are prepared to directly put into it. Such a group could report to, or work with, a committee of representatives of member states--one in existence already (like the High Level Working Group on the Financial Situation of the United Nations) or one newly created for the purpose. A great deal of work has been already, or is being, done on many of these issues, and it should be possible for such a group to report within six months or so, and certainly within a year. The parameters of the debate have to be changed, and for that to happen we need an authoritative new statement of the art of the possible. Here as elsewhere, we have to move forward. We have to look to new ideas. We have to encourage humankind's ingenuity to search for better ways for states to deal with each other as relationships take new shape, as new states emerge and as problems which could not have been conceived of a few years ago become the challenges of the day. We will fail to meet those challenges if we adhere solely to the ideas and dogma of the past. The United Nations was itself founded on a mixture of idealism and pragmatism. Both were essential to build a new world fifty years ago, and in the past fifty years that idealism has not disappeared. It was an important force in bringing about the end of the Cold War, and more than anything else it was idealism that lay behind the process of decolonisation which shifted the tectonic plates of history. To some, idealism will always be the enemy of practicality. But to others, it will always involve, more than anything else, the courage to take advantage of new opportunities, ensuring that at least some of today's ideals will become tomorrow's reality. Perhaps now, fifty years beyond San Francisco, we need to renew that idealism, and walk down some of the uncharted paths that idealists have always been prepared to tread.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, when the New York Times ``Week in Review'' section had an article by Adam Clymer titled, ``Politics and the Dead Arts of Compromise,'' I read it and cut it out for my future reference. I have just re-read the article, and it is such a significant insight into where we are and where we're going or where we're not going, that I want to insert it into the Record. We have become increasingly an excessively partisan body. I do not blame either party specifically for that. I have seen that grow over the years, and it has hurt our country, and it has hurt the two-party system. What is essential is not that we win public relations battles, but that we work out practical compromises to govern. That's what Adam Clymer understands, and that's what we have to understand. I ask unanimous consent that his observations be printed in the Record. The observations follow: [From the New York Times, Oct. 22, 1995] Politics and the Dead Arts of Compromise (By Adam Clymer) Washington.--The most serious debate in at least three decades over the role of government in American life is being conducted in the nation's capital these days--with all the dignity of a 30-second spot. [[Page S 16691]] Polls are used to consider timetables for possible negotiations, as each side ponders its moment of maximum advantage. Television spots about Medicare have employed slogans only minimally more civil than ``liar, liar, pants on fire!''--which, of course, is their underlying message. And focus groups scripted the debate that preceded the House's vote Thursday to curb $270 billion in spending for Medicare and make wrenching changes in the centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Democrats may not have needed any research before accusing the Republicans of slighting the elderly to help the rich; that may be not be thoughtful, but it is instinctive. But when Republicans said ``preserve and protect,'' over and over, they were following their pollsters' advice, not engaging in a serious discussion. Even the most ordinary tasks of Congress are subordinated to political tactics. Only three of the 13 spending bills that Congress had promised to complete before the fiscal year began three weeks ago have gone to the White House. Some of those bills have real problems, and may be hard for even Republicans to agree on. But a few days ago Speaker Newt Gingrich explained the delay in purely tactical terms. He said he thought President Clinton would try to make headlines by vetoing them, and snapped, ``I'm not going to give his Presidential campaign new cheap-shot photo-ops.'' (In past Congresses, the dynamics were only a little different: Democrats invited vetoes by passing bills they knew Presidents Reagan and Bush would reject, seeking campaign issues for the next election.) arranging surrender One reason that major legislation and national issues are being approached with the winner-take-all-quality of elections is that the normal process of getting things done in Washington, compromise, has become synonymous with capitulation. If compromise is evil, then who needs negotiations? All that's needed to arrange are the terms of surrender. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Anneberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on political language, suggests the problem is more than rhetorical. ``The thing that the word `compromise' was designed to describe--the process by which you forge consensus--is no longer an acceptable part of the political process,'' she said. That was especially true in the House, she said, where ``institutional courtesies'' like consideration for the minority and civility in debate have fallen into disuse. Republicans, driven by a huge and unbending freshman class, offer no apologies. Representative David M. McIntosh, an Indiana freshman, explained last week: ``When we went home in August, we all heard from the public, `Don't back down, don't give in to the Senate or the President.' We came back and we told the leadership that we won't back down, and we haven't.'' Mr. Gingrich knew what was coming, for right after the election last year he proclaimed himself ``very prepared to cooperate with the Clinton Administration,'' but ``not prepared to compromise.'' And even Senator Bob Dole, the majority leader, who has built a considerable legislative reputation on making deals, said last month, ``This will not be an autumn of compromise, make no mistake about it.'' Mr. Clinton does not always spurn compromise. But he has not given it a good name, either. Last week he even seemed to be trying to cut a deal with himself on the subject of taxes, first sounding contrite that he had raised taxes ``too much'' in 1993 and then pronouncing himself proud of that year's budget. But he has been attacking many of the Republicans' spending cuts as ``extremist,'' so he risks being accused of surrender if he reaches an agreement with them on next year's budget. feats of clay House Democrats will oppose almost any deal that involves spending cuts; they don't believe in them. But Mr. Clinton also fears attacks from the press, which cannot believe that Mr. Clinton can give ground to help the country, but only because he is wishy-washy. Compromise was once highly prized in American politics, at the Constitutional Convention, in the Republic's early days, and when Henry Clay, the dominant lawmaker of the first half of the 19th century, was hailed as the ``Great Compromiser.'' But in the years leading up to the Civil War, compromise lost its good name. Abolitionists held slavery to be a moral abomination, and Abraham Lincoln himself rejected a pre- inaugural effort to preserve the Union by guaranteeing slavery forever in the states where it then existed. Joel Silbey, a Cornell University historian, noted that compromise again fell into disrepute just before the Progressive Era, when ``government seemed to be forever compromising with evil power.'' Like the Civil War period, and like today, he said, that was a time when outsiders got involved in the political process and scorned its traditions. An important House Republican leadership aide said the same circumstances prevailed today: ``The American people think that politicians, once they get to Washington, are all too willing to give up their principles, wedded to a system of selling out.'' Today's politicians find a lot of moral imperatives, like the difference between achieving a balanced budget in 2002 and, say, 2003. Not Mr. Clinton, who has said at various times that it would take five years, seven years, eight years or nine. But seven years is what the Republicans say they must have--or else. There are Democrats who speak of cuts in Medicare in the apocalyptic terms they would use if faced with a bill completely repealing this greatest of the Great Society's programs. And there are Republicans, like Mr. McIntosh, who look in absolute terms on a pet project of his and Representative Ernest Istook's--an effort to prohibit groups that get any Federal money from lobbying the Federal Government, ever. They threaten to hold all other legislation hostage until they get that prohibition adopted. Norman Ornstein, the Congressional scholar from the American Enterprise Institute, says there may be 100 House Republicans ``who believe, deep down, that compromise is a bad thing.'' He said the leaders were giving themselves very little breathing room by leaving only three weeks to get major bills passed and then settle things before the debt limit expires Nov. 12. ``It's a dangerous end game,'' he warns. Earlier this month, it seemed both sides might negotiate. But the Clinton side thought the Congressional quest for Medicare cuts was hurting the Republicans and saw no reason to give ground. It may be only when both sides think the public will blame them for stubbornness that they may sit down together. If so, politicians may be too busy testing attack phrases-- like ``tax cut for your wealthy contributors,'' or ``a joke wrapped in fraud and shrouded by farce''--to judge the public clearly. Peter D. Hart, a Washington pollster, said a recent poll conducted for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal showed that a majority of Democrats wanted the President ``to make adjustments to reach compromise'' with Congressional Republicans on budget issues and that a majority of Republicans wanted their lawmakers to compromise with Mr. Clinton. ``Compromise may be a dirty word in Washington,'' he said. ``But out among the public it is a very positive term.''

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, one of the finest journalists in our Nation today is David Shribman. He writes a column that appears, among other places, in the Chicago Tribune. He recently had a column that suggests solving the problems of race in our country cannot be done dramatically by any one leader or person. That does not suggest that a President, Senator, Governor, or leader in [[Page S 16687]] any capacity cannot have an impact. But his column reflects on the depth of the problem that we have in our country, and I would urge my colleagues to read it. I ask unanimous consent that the column be printed in the Record. The column follows: Can America's Racial Rifts Be Healed by a Black President? (By David Shribman) Washington.--Yes, there is a national political angle to the O.J. Simpson murder trial. And yes, it's as troubling as the social angle, the criminal-justice angle, the media angle and the commercial angle. It's this: Next year's election is going to be conducted in a country that is so racially divided that one side can't comprehend why the other side sees things the way it does. And the irony is that the greatest imponderable in this landscape of confusion is an African-American man. Right now, as O.J. Simpson begins a new life, retired Gen. Colin L. Powell contemplates his plans. Both are embarking on uncharted paths. Both will be watched carefully by the public. Both will in no small way shape the country we become in the next century. Simpson and Powell, to be sure, have so little in common that it's almost stilted to connect them. One is a star athlete, man about town, a bit of a libertine: fast on his feet, fast in his life. The other is a war hero, a man of probity, a paragon of discipline: slow to judge, slow to rile. But the murder trial of the one has opened up racial rifts so wide that the temptation is to say that the steely drive of the other might help the healing. American voters know that the risk of hiring President Powell isn't substantially different from the risk of hiring President Dole or the risk of rehiring President Clinton. But there is something about the Powell boomlet that carries echoes from the tortured and tortuous American life of Orenthal James Simpson. And those echoes are warning signals: Colin Powell can't fix everything. But that's not what you're hearing from the commentators, handicappers, analysts, instant experts and grandstand big mouths who proclaim their opinions on national politics much the way they proclaim their opinions on, say, the National Football League. Many of them suggest that a Powell campaign could be the George Washington Bridge of modern American politics, a wonder of political architecture spanning wide distances-- between Republicans and Democrats, between liberals and conservatives, above all between blacks and whites. It's an appealing, even an intoxicating, notion: Bring centuries of racism, violence, suspicion and repression to an abrupt end by electing a black president. But listen, too, to the undertow of the American conversation. This is what many whites say about Colin Powell: He doesn't seem black. He moves so easily between the races. His accomplishments are so vivid that they are without color content. That's what some blacks say, somewhat warily, about Powell as well: Not really black. Moves between the races. Without color content. And that, of course, is what everyone said about O.J. Simpson. He was black but not too black. He was everybody's favorite golf partner. He was the most fabulously appealing black corporate spokesman of his time. When O.J. ran--and I saw this myself two decades ago, at Buffalo Bills training camps in Niagara Falls and again in Rich Stadium in Orchard Park, N.Y.--the whites cheered as lustily as the blacks. Everybody said that Simpson transcended race. He didn't. Everybody says that Powell transcends race. He doesn't. The wounds of America's centuries-long signature struggle are too deep to be bandaged by one man. Winning the respect of George Bush, who is privately urging Powell to run, isn't enough to end tensions that have been festering since the early days of colonial Virginia. It's a start, but it isn't a finish. Now that the trial of O.J. Simpson is over, the nation's newspapers and television networks can start chronicling another American drama: the 1996 presidential campaign. The first subplot is Powell's decision, expected next month, about whether to run for president. One thing, however, is sure: A Powell candidacy can't become a feel-good experience--or an excuse for not talking about race. Everyone now knows--press your TV remote and you'll see it reinforced on O.J. retrospectives, talk shows, town meetings and news broadcasts--that racial misunderstanding and mistrust can't be overestimated in this country. And so the Simpson trial isn't irrelevant to the campaign. It tells us that race is more than skin deep, and so is racism. It tells us that the leader who takes America into the 21st Century will have to understand these gaps, not paper them over. It tells us the president will have to say something about things that, for many years, were better left unsaid--about racism, injustice, fear. It tells us that, after all these years, we still must summon what Lincoln called the ``better angels of our nature.''

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, we still are not doing what we should to control the proliferation of weapons in our country, despite the overwhelming evidence of the need to do that. The Bob Herbert column in the New York Times recently was powerful evidence once again of the need to face up to these problems. I commend him, I commend Oprah Winfrey, I commend Paul Newman, and anyone else who has played a part in putting together what, apparently, is a powerful, two-part program on ``The Oprah Winfrey Show.'' I ask unanimous consent that the Bob Herbert column be printed in the Record at this point. The column follows: [From the New York Times, Oct. 30, 1995] Kids Pay the Price (By Bob Herbert) Paul Newman, in the 30-second television spot, is reading from a newspaper: ``Matilda Crabtree, 14, jumped out of a closet and yelled `boo' to scare her parents.'' He pauses very briefly before adding, ``And was shot to death when her father mistook her for a burglar.'' Mr. Newman continues: ``Matilda was supposed to be sleeping at a friend's house but decided to sneak home and play a joke on her family. Her last words were, `I love you, Daddy.' '' This is followed by a stark message displayed full-screen against a black background: ``A gun in the home triples the risk of homicide in the home.'' We then hear Mr. Newman say, ``Before you bring a gun in the house, think about it.'' The Newman spot is one of many compelling moments in a special two-part Oprah Winfrey program devoted to the terrible toll that gun violence is taking on young people, especially children. The first part airs today. The program opens with Ms. Winfrey standing in front of a blackboard that says 15 children are killed by guns in the United States every day, and that a teen-ager commits suicide with a gun every six hours. ``If we were to build a memorial'' to the kids killed by gunfire in the last 13 years, Ms. Winfrey says, ``the names on that memorial would outnumber'' the American lives lost in Vietnam. The program uses the terms children and kids in the broadest sense, so that they cover the entire period from infancy through the teen years. In 1992, the last year for which complete statistics are available, 37,776 people were killed by firearms in the U.S. Of those, 5,379 were 19 years of age or younger. Those are extraordinary number, and they have risen since 1992. And yet we pay very little attention to the problem of guns and children, in part because of denial, and in part, as Ms. Winfrey points out, because ``the frequency of death has numbed us to what the death of one child really means.'' Today's show takes a step toward remedying that. For example, we see glimpses of the exuberant life of Kenzo Bix from home videos and a photo album and the comments of his mother, Lynn. We see him as a toddler, and in that angelic guise peculiar to the first grader, and romping as a teen- ager, ``He was kind of whimsical,'' his mother said. She shows us a Mothers Day memo he posted: ``Do not go in the kitchen. Your gifts are in there.'' ``That was actually the year just before he died,'' she said. When he was 14, Kenzo was accidentally shot and killed by a friend who was playing with a gun. One of the things that comes through in Ms. Winfrey's program that is usually missing from news accounts of homicides and suicides is the sheer suddenness of the absence of the one who dies. Those who knew the child, were close to the child, loved the child, cannot believe that he or she is gone, and gone for good--gone irrevocably because of the absurdity of the pulling of the trigger of some cheap and deadly mechanism, usually for some cheap and stupid reason. Larry Elizalde, 18, was a high school track and football star, and Olympic team hopeful, who was shot to death on the street in Chicago by gang members who mistook him for someone else. Mr. Elizalde died in the arms of a young seminarian, a stranger named Doug Mitchell, who happened to have witnessed the shooting. Mr. Mitchell, in an interview with Ms. Winfrey, said he did not want ``the hatred of the gun, the violence of the gun'' to be the last thing that mortally wounded youth would experience, but rather the love and concern of another human being.'' This was clung to as a blessing by Mr. Elizalde's anguished mother, Lynette, who at first had harbored the desperate fear that her son had died alone. Throughout the program, Ms. Winfrey offers us evidence of the humanity that is sacrificed--not just the lives lost, but the humanity in all of us that is sacrificed by our acceptance of the mass manufacture, mass sale and mass use of firearms in this country. She tries to lift at least a corner of our blanket of denial to disturb and maybe even awaken us. After all, she seems to be saying, children are dying.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, the Washington Post on Monday, October 16, 1995, ran a column by Jessica Mathews that is absolutely on target. My colleagues have heard me speak before about the need for a more responsible foreign policy. I thought it was particularly fascinating to note the quotation in the Jessica Mathews column that it costs $600 million less to run the United Nations than it does the New York City police department. How foolish we are to fail to do what we should in support of a more enlightened and responsible international policy. I ask that the Jessica Mathews column be printed in the Record at this point, and I urge my colleagues to read it. The column follows: Head-in-the-Sand Foreign Policy (By Jessica Mathews) A dispassionate foreign observer of Congress's budget choices would have to conclude that Americans' only international aspiration is to be global policemen. Or, to be scrupulously fair, policeman with a handout for refugees and the most wretched victims of disaster. That isn't what Americans want, but its' what--unless drastic adjustments are made in the next few weeks of bargaining--they're going to get. In both the House and Senate versions of next year's budget every means of keeping the peace short of military action and every other cost of international leadership or national self-interest-- political, economic, environmental, humanitarian--is stripped to near or below the minimum while more money than the Pentagon thinks it can usefully spend is crammed down it throat. In round numbers, Congress has added $7 billion to a $220 billion military total that already dwarfs what all of the rest of the world outside NATO spends on defense. Meanwhile, in the name of deficit reduction, it is planning to cut $3 billion to $4 billion from all other international spending. That may not sound like much but it amounts to 15 percent to 20 percent of the $20 billion total in international affairs spending and includes reductions for most international agencies of 25 percent to 60 percent. The cuts mean that U.S. embassies and consulates will close when a globalizing economy and more independent countries mean that more should be opening. They translate into fewer foreign service officers, hamstrung diplomacy and less of the most cost-efficient means of intelligence gathering. They mean long lines and poor services for Americans at home and abroad. All of that is tolerable, if neither sensible nor necessary, given defense increases. What will really hurt American interests--indeed already has--are the cuts to the United Nations, the World Bank's fund for the poorest countries and the host of small international agencies that provide hundreds of services Americans need and value and underpin agreements that both parties have spent years of tough negotiating to achieve. Where the cuts are in dues for which the United States is legally committed, as are its U.N. dues, the cost will be measured in an unraveling of international law not limited to finances. If the United States can renege on its funding obligations why can't X on Y (fill in the country and topic of your choice)? Even where the cuts are in voluntary contributions, the result of a U.S. pull back from the international community along a front that reaches from peacekeeping to environmental protection will be a declining interest on the part of other countries in supporting U.S. initiatives. That will fuel further disenchantment in the United States etc., with results that no one wants. The cycle has already begun. The United States owes the U.N. $1.5 billion, a debt that threatens to tip that institution into insolvency. The U.N. is limping along by not paying what it owes to contractors and to countries that supply its peacekeeping troops. In effect, the likes of Pakistan and Bangladesh are covering our bad check. Congress wants to see organizational reforms at the U.N. before it will consider even a partial payment. But for the rest of the world, the No. 1 item on the agenda is that a country that can afford to do so does not pay its dues year after year. As Britain's foreign secretary remarked to an appreciative audience, the United States seems to want ``representation without taxation.'' Part of what has brought us to this sorry pass is too many years of cheap shot--and now almost obligatory--political rhetoric that has inflated the self-evident need for U.N. reform into a problem of unrecognizable dimensions in the minds of most Americans. Even while defending the U.N., U.S. Ambassador Madeline Albright called it ``elephantine.'' It took Australia's Gareth Evans to provide some perspective by pointing out that the U.N.'s secretariat and core functions (in New York, Geneva, Vienna, Nairobi and the Hague) cost $600 million less than the New York City Police Department. Adding the development, environment and population agencies, the huge refugee operation, UNICEF and others, the total is still less than Congress's defense add-on. Having launched a last-minute effort to reduce U.N. funds and the rest of the international affairs budget, the administration is battling a sentiment it helped create by blaming the United Nations for its own mistakes in Somalia and Bosnia, and an attitude on the part of congressional freshmen for which the politest description is a profound and willful ignorance of America's role in the world, its obligations, its interests and what it takes to meet them. However long it takes, this struggle deserves attention and public support. No American doubts the need for a superlative military. But it should be obvious by now that the best-armed force in the world cannot meet more than a fraction of the threats of the post-Cold War world nor help seize most of its opportunities. An America served by a rich military budget and impoverished funding for every other international function will be a country both poorer and less secure than it should be.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, Recently, the Wall Street Journal had an article that deals with sports; but much more important than that, it deals with where we are in our society and what one enlightened leader, Coach Lou Tepper, is doing to bridge the gap that exists between people in our society. The leadership he is showing on this is leadership that should provide an example to coaches all over the country, not simply to coaches but to schools, churches, civic organizations, and many other groups. I ask unanimous consent that the Wall Street Journal article by Frederick C. Klein be printed in the Record. The article follows: [From the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 13, 1995] Racial Harmony Is Contact Sport for Illini Coach (By Frederick C. Klein) Champaign, IL.--By now, I think, most people have come to understand that the interracial harmony they see on fields of play is more apparent than real. Black and white teammates may exchange high-fives or even hugs to celebrate moments of triumph, but once the games are over they go their separate ways, in keeping with the patterns of the society as a whole. Mention race relations to people in sports in any capacity, and the likely response is a shrug. Few volunteer to discuss the subject, and when it does come up it's quickly brushed off. The unspoken but clear consensus is that teams exist to win games, and what their members do on their own time is their own business. There is, however, at least one exception to this rule. Lou Tepper, the head football coach at the University of Illinois in this city amid the cornfields 150 miles south of Chicago, believes that as long as young men must get along on the gridiron in order to succeed, it'd be a shame if they didn't get to know one another better in other ways. He's made racial integration a part of his program, requiring his players to promise to get to know teammates of the other race and putting them in situations that promote such contact. ``This is a university, and I'm here as an educator,'' he says. ``I think there ought to be more to the sports experience than what appears in the box scores.'' Lest anyone get the impression that the earnest, bespectacled Mr. Tepper is insufficiently concerned with X's and O's--a high crime in big-time-college-coaching circles-- he's quick to set them straight. His record is 21-19-1. He puts in the 100-hour weeks that are standard at his level of his profession, and goes around honorably bleary-eyed from his scrutiny of game films. He tells a recent visitor that the only reason he has time for more than a quick chat about next Saturday Illinois foe is that, on the week in question, there was none, his team having that Saturday off. That said, however, he became more expansive. ``Maybe I come at coaching from a different perspective than some people,'' he remarked. ``Maybe I come at life that way, too.'' That life began 50 years ago in Keystone, PA., a hamlet 50 miles south of, and, maybe, 30 years behind, Pittsburgh. Sixty-one people lived in Keystone at the time, and 31 of them were his relatives. His father, whose education ended with the eighth grade, was a janitor, and his family lived on and worked a plot of land he calls ``too small to be a farm but too big to be a garden.'' On his first day at the area's consolidated high school, an hour's bus ride from his home, he learned what it was like to be an outsider. ``I found out quick I was a bumpkin,'' he says. ``I talked and dressed different from the other kids. I smelled different, too; that happens when you start your day feeding pigs and chickens. Being an athlete helped me gain acceptance, but I've never forgotten how it felt to be an object of prejudice.'' [[Page S 16681]] Mr. Tepper says that feeling drew him close to the blacks he met while attending Rutgers University on a football scholarship. His determination to bridge racial gaps, fed in part by his active Christianity, grew during the 24 years he spent as an assistant coach at a half-dozen schools before Illinois promoted him to head coach from defensive coordinator in late 1991. ``My wife, Karen, and I told ourselves that if I ever got a top job, we'd make it reflect our views about how people should be treated,'' he says. Those views are contained in a ``mission statement'' that's sent to everyone Illinois recruits for football. One of its provisions is a ``family concept'' that asks team members to treat each other with ``love and discipline.'' In case anyone misses the point, Mr. Tepper tells them it especially applies white-to-black and vice versa, and requires the lads to pledge to do that before they sign scholarship papers. The school has lost several recruits as a result. ``I've had whites balk [at the pledge], but never a black,'' the coach notes. Players quickly get the chance to prove their words. Seats at all team meetings are assigned on a black-white-black- white basis. Room assignments for summer practice before classes start, and for team road trips, are made the same way. The process is facilitated by the fact that the team is almost 50-50 white and black. Thursday team dinners in season are designated as ``Unity Nights,'' and players are encouraged to eat next to ones they don't know well. Players joke that this can mean that defensive players sit next to members of the offense, but the dinners also are occasions for interracial fraternizing. Some of the ties fostered in those ways have flowered in others: Several whites and blacks on the team now are full- time roomies, and interracial team parties, the exception in pre-Tepper days, have become the rule. Team members admit their white-black relationships are, mostly, no more than skin deep; ``serious'' racial issues, such as the O.J. Simpson trial, go undiscussed. ``We like to keep things light,'' says Chris Koerwitz, an offensive lineman from Oshkosh, Wis. But while most of the Fighting Illini continue to take their ease with others of their race, it's with the knowledge that it could be otherwise. ``You might say I was prejudiced before. I knew very few black people, and accepted the negative things white people say about them,'' says Paul Marshall, a defensive lineman from almost-all-white Naperville, Ill. ``Here, I've seen that the negatives aren't true, and that, given the chance, guys want to be friendly.'' ``Yeah, I signed coach's pledge, but I thought it was just recruiting stuff. Then I got here and, right away, I had this white guy for a roommate,'' says David James, a linebacker from almost-all-black East St. Louis, Ill. ``It wasn't so bad,'' he smiles. ``I played some rap for him and he played some Van Halen for me. We still do it sometimes.''

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, a longtime friend who headed my Illinois operation for many years and still is associated with me, Jerry Sinclair, once again showed why he is a valuable friend by sending a column that appeared in World Business in their September- October 1995 issue. It deals with the Canadian health care system written by Diane Francis, the editor of Canada's foremost business newspaper, the Financial Post. It views things from a business perspective. She is the author of five books on business. Ms. Francis spells out very clearly why the Canadian health care system is far superior to the United States system. The propaganda spread against the Canadian system here in the United States by those who profit from the present system terribly distorts what the Canadians have. This column helps to balance that. I would add, in the last poll I saw of Canadian citizens, exactly 3 percent of them said they would prefer the United States system of health care to theirs. That does not, as this column points out, suggest there are no problems with the Canadian system. But they deliver superior health care to their [[Page S 16680]] citizens. We spend more and do a worse job. Ms. Francis quotes a Peat Marwick 1995 study titled, ``A Comparison of Business Costs in Canada and the United States.'' Listen to this analysis: ``Costs of hospitals, surgical, medical, and major medical insurance premiums are the prime reason for the difference in costs. These insurance premiums represent a cost of 8.2 percent of gross pay in the United States compared with 1.0 percent in Canada.'' American businesses who, frankly, fell down on the job, when they should have been backing the Clinton plan, ought to be taking a good look at what is happening in Canada. I ask unanimous consent that the Diane Francis column be printed in the Congressional Record at this point. The column follows: All Better Now Among the health care systems of the world's wealthiest industrialized countries, the United States' is the most expensive; even worse, it fails to provide health care for all Americans. Canada, on the other hand, provides excellent, comprehensive coverage to all of its citizens. Its system, administered jointly by the federal government and the twelve provincial governments, provides Canadian business with an enormous competitive advantage. And yet vested interest in the United States--including doctors, privately owned health care facilities, and insurance companies--have lobbied against government systems such as Canada's. They say that Canadians must wait months for procedures. This is simply not the case. They would also have Americans believe that Canadian hospitals are second-rate, and that Canadian physicians are poorly trained. These are also not so. The same type of lobbying took place in Canada in the late 1960s, when the government-run plan was first implemented. It is interesting to note that Vice President Al Gore became a fan of Canada's health system after his seriously brain- injured son was successfully operated on in Toronto by one of the world's best neurosurgical pediatrics teams. A look at the facts leaves little doubt that the Canadian system is superior. An average of 6.3 out of every 1,000 babies born die before the age of 1 in Canada, as opposed to 8.3 in the United States. Life expectancies in Canada are 81 years for women and 74.5 for men, compared with 78.9 and 72.1 years, respectively, in the United States. Yet the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international monitoring group, reports that while Canada spends just 10.2 percent of its gross domestic product on health care services for all its citizens, the United States spends 14.1 percent and still has millions of citizens with inadequate or nonexistent coverage. It isn't just the individual that benefits from Canada's comprehensive health program. The Canadian system affords business many advantages, including reduced employee costs and an expanded, healthier labor pool. According to a March 1995 study by KPMG Peat Marwick called ``A Comparison of Business Costs in Canada and the United States,'' Canadian employers spend less on employer-sponsored benefits than their American counterparts. ``Costs for hospital, surgical, medical and major medical insurance premiums are the prime reason for the difference in costs,'' the study says. ``These insurance premiums represent a cost of 8.2% of gross pay in the United States compared with 1.0% in Canada.'' Unlike in the United States, Canadian health coverage is not tied to welfare benefits; unskilled workers can take low- paying entry-level jobs without fear of losing access to government-paid health care. This removes the possibility of creating an entrenched underclass with health problems who are handcuffed to welfare because of medical-cost issues. Businesses in Canada are also able to hire workers regardless of their health history. This is particularly important when it comes to using the talents and efforts of senior citizens, or people with chronic illnesses. Canadian workers aren't trapped in dead-end or unsatisfactory jobs because they are afraid of losing company-provided health benefits. Reduced labor costs are not the only corporate benefit of the Canadian system. Individuals rarely file the type of high-stakes personal injury lawsuits commonly seen in the United States. Because all citizens are guaranteed quality medical care, catastrophic medical expenses, generally the largest component of a settlement, are usually not sought when such suits are filed. In the United States, product liability insurance converge costs corporations upwards of $500 million a year, and the premiums are growing by 20 percent to 30 percent annually. Insurance costs are dramatically lower in Canada--unless a manufacturer is exporting to the United States. Canada's government-run workers' compensation plan is managed by the provincial governments, in contrast to the patchwork quilt of private and public systems at various levels of government in the United States. The workers' compensation premium for a Canadian autoworker in London, Ontario, is 4.56-percent of his or her wages; for an American autoworker in Minneapolis, it is 9.07 percent, according to the KPMG comparative report. Business should be free to conduct business, and in Canada this is so. There is no need for every company to have personnel employed just to handle the paper burden of private-sector workers' compensation or health care. Canada's systems is not perfect; nor is Canadian business able to outcompete American business at every turn as a result of cradle-to-grave medical care for its population. But the advantages to citizen and business alike are very real. And as American health care costs outpace economic growth and the country's population ages, a dose of Canadian medicine may cure what ails it. Failing that, the United States' system will make its insured workers increasingly expensive to employ and its uninsured workers increasingly unable to afford proper health care. Diane Francis is editor of Canada's foremost business newspaper, The Financial Post, and the author of five books on business. She also writes a monthly column for Maclean's, Canada's national news magazine.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, as my colleagues know, I believe that affirmative action is a very good thing for our country; even though, like any good thing, it can be abused. Prof. Steven Lubet of Northwestern University had an interesting article that points out that affirmative action is part of the U.S. Constitution. My colleagues, who may be startled at that bit of information, will find the Steven Lubet article of interest. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record. The article follows: Affirmative Action Is as ``American as the Constitution'' (By Steven Lubet) Opponents of affirmative action say the idea is contrary to basic American principles because it unfairly disadvantages blameless individuals, needlessly emphasizes group rights and enshrines an ethic of victimization. Affirmative action, they say, is a failed experiment from the despised '60s. The real truth, however, is that affirmative action originated in the '80s. Not the 1980s, but the 1780s--1789, to be exact. Here is what the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 3) says about affirmative action: ``The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two senators from each state.'' That's affirmative action--in fact, a quota system--for small states. There is no denying that the framers designed the Senate to protect group rights, notwithstanding any disadvantage to blameless individuals, and all on a theory of possible victimization. While any specific instance of affirmative action may be unnecessary or ill-advised, the concept has been with us from the beginning. The size of a state's delegation in the House of Representatives is determined on the basis of population, in keeping with the democratic principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence. In the Senate, however, small states are given special treatment. They are afforded representation far out of proportion to population, to ensure that they will not be victimized, oppressed or subjected to discrimination by the majority. There is no clearer example in our history of institutionalized group rights. Based upon accidents of birth and geography, the citizens of small states, such as Delaware and Maine, enjoyed the benefits of a quota system that made their political influence comparable to that of New York and Virginia, the giants of the time. In the 1990s, the same quota operates to the advantage of Alaska (one senator per 300,000 citizens) and to the detriment of California (one senator per 15,000,000 citizens). Is it unfair to count the vote of an Alaskan at 50 times the vote of an Californian? Sure it is, but we have become so inured to the Senate that it just seems natural. That's our system. That's the way it works. And so it is; but it is also group-based affirmative action. We are all familiar with the original arguments in favor of the Senate. One concern was that the interests of small states would not be respected in a Congress constituted strictly on the basis of population. Another consideration was the need to protect minorities (primarily meaning political minorities) from the temporary passions of transient majorities. And after more than 200 years, there is far-reaching agreement that the Senate has well served its intended functions. State-based affirmative action has worked according to plan. So let's compare the establishment of the Senate to current programs of race-based affirmative action. To be sure, the parallel is inexact, but certain principles do overlap. In 1789, the small states feared the possibility of future discrimination under the newly-proposed Constitution. They were not willing to accept promises of benevolence or paternalism, but insisted on structural protection even at the cost of proportional democracy. Today, racial minorities and women fear not only the hypothetical possibility of discrimination, but the persistence of a proven historical fact. They, too, decline to trust benign intentions and demand a structural [[Page S 16682]] remedy. A requirement of special treatment or attention to women and minorities similarly assures that they will be protected from the ``passions'' of today's majority, which, in the case of upper-level decision-makers, still consists overwhelmingly of white males. It is true that the non-proportional Senate came about as the result of a political compromise. The small states extracted it as the price of their acceptance of the new national government. They had the right to withhold ratification of any constitution that did not satisfy their perceived needs. Today's minorities, African-Americans in particular, do not have that power. Their ancestors were brought here involuntarily, without the ability to agree or disagree with the political or economic system. Certainly, though, there must be something about democracy that prevents us from saying that affirmative action was a one-time-only phenomenon, imposed only at the insistence of certain framers and never to be repeated for the benefit of future minorities. To accept that argument would transform constitutionalism from an enduring philosophy into little more than an 18th Century version of ``Let's Make a Deal.'' I do not want to make too much of this analogy. Many recent efforts at affirmative action have been ineffective or counter-productive. The wisdom or appropriateness of any particular program ought to be subject to continuous review. But when Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) or Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) inveigh against affirmative action, they ought to do so with some sense of humility, if not irony. After all, they owe their Senate seats to affirmative action's first appearance in our national life. It is simply wrong to say that affirmative action--as a tool for achieving political equity--is out of place in the American system. To the contrary, it is as American as the Constitution.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, the interim chancellor of the University of Illinois at Chicago, David C. Broski, had a letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune about direct lending. Because our colleagues are trying to figure out right now what to do on direct lending, I thought they would be interested in seeing the perspective of a college administrator. I ask that the letter to the editor be printed in the Record. The letter to the editor follows: Loan Plan Good for Schools, Students Chicago.--I couldn't agree more with the Tribune's editorial opposing the changes in the Federal Direct Loan Program that have been suggested by the banking industry (``Cooking the books on student loans,'' Sept. 11). The program received a big boost last year when rules were changed to allow the government to lend directly to students at some universities, without running the money through banks. But it could lose all it gained if Congress succumbs to pressure from banking interests and goes back to the old system. The debate in Washington has centered on arcane--and conflicting--reports from accountants. Some say the new program is more costly; others say it's not. I'm not qualified to analyze the accountants' reports (though I don't understand how eliminating a middleman can cost you money). But I do know that the new program has benefited the people it was supposed to help: the students and the universities. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, the direct- lending program has cut the average processing time for a student loan from seven weeks to three. And it has saved time and effort for our financial-aid staff because they don't have to deal with a multiplicity of banks. As a result, students get their [[Page S 16674]] money sooner and UIC saves money in reduced staff time and processing costs. We expect to process more than $40 million in direct student loans this academic year. At our sister campus in Urbana-Champaign, direct lending resulted in 2,500 more students receiving their loan proceeds at the beginning of the fall semester, compared with the previous year. A Harvard University official echoed the sentiments of our financial-aid people when he said, ``Now that we're no longer caught up in the paper chase from many lending institutions and guarantee agencies, we have more time to deal with real issues.'' There's another good thing about the direct lending program that was not mentioned in your editorial. It offers a greater variety of repayment options. In addition to the standard repayment plan spread out over 5 to 10 years, students can choose: an extended repayment period with lower monthly payments, a plan in which payments increase over time, a plan with payments pegged to the borrower's income. The advantage of these options, of course, is that they give college graduates the freedom to take lower-paying but socially useful jobs and still repay their student loans. Federally guaranteed bank loans haven't been abolished. In fact, they make up more than half of the $25 billion in annual student loans. But UIC, like most of the state universities in Illinois, has switched to direct lending-- with excellent results. The program is good for our students and good for Illinois taxpayers, and it shouldn't be abolished or weakened.--David C. Broski.