Paul Simon

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. This is for the purpose of laying down my amendment. It is No. 2468. I would like to call it up. I think there is another amendment pending that I have to ask unanimous consent to ask that it be set aside. I do so request.

Mr. SIMON. I call up my amendment No. 2468.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I ask that further reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. SIMON. I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be set aside.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I send two amendments to the desk and ask for their consideration.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendments be dispensed with.

Mr. SIMON. I ask unanimous consent that the amendments be set aside.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, sometimes the good news that we get comes in small pieces that we hope portend better things to come. The recent agreement between Turkey and Armenia for an air corridor is a small step toward improved relations between those two countries but, nevertheless, it is a positive development. It would be a mistake to exaggerate it, but it would be a mistake to ignore it. I noticed that when Prime Minister Tansu Ciller visited Azerbaijan, she returned to Turkey by way of the corridor over Armenia and was the first high-ranking Turkish official to use the air corridor. While she traveled, she congratulated Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrossian on the victory of his party in the July 5th parliamentary elections in Turkey. These concessions seems small, indeed, and they are small. But I hope they can result in improvements. I recall, about 2 years ago, flying in a U.S. military plane to Armenia. The Turkish Government would not let us fly over Turkey to go to Armenia-- [[Page S 13134]] strange conduct on the part of a government that has been helped in a substantial way over the years by the United States. It was an action taken that was not so much adverse to the United States as adverse to Armenia. In noting this step forward in better relations between Turkey and Armenia, it must also be noted with regret that Turkish President Suleyman Demirel refuses to use the corridor over Armenia. I hope he can overcome his fears or his hatreds enough to do that one of these days. And I hope the use of the air corridor over Armenia by the Turkish Prime Minister will be followed with more significant actions by Turkey and Armenia.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, some weeks ago, I gave a lengthier than usual talk on the floor of the Senate about the growing problem of legalized gambling in the United States. This is not a phenomenon only in the United States. The Jerusalem Post contained an article about the problem in Israel. The title of this article: ``They play to lose.'' The subhead is: ``Compulsive gambling is a disease that gradually overwhelms one's life, Ruth Beker writes.'' There is an unfavorable reference to the United States. The article quotes a Dr. Yair Caspi as saying: ``Together with an increase in use of alcohol and drugs, gambling is part of a general addictive phenomenon growing rapidly in Israel, trying to be little America.'' I ask that the article be printed in the Record. The article follows: [From the Jerusalem Post, March 25, 1995] They Play to Lose--Compulsive Gambling Is a Disease That Gradually Overwhelms One's Life, Ruth Beker Writes Gambling is a gate to dangerously false hope. For Michael, 53, a compulsive gambler, it was sweet at the beginning, hell at the end, and many things in between. Michael's sickness--for that's what it is--is rooted in the Holocaust. When he was six months old, he was given to a Gentile family for safekeeping before his parents were sent to Bergen Belsen, where his mother died. ``After the war [my father] found me and took me home. When I was eight he remarried. It was disastrous. ``My father and stepmother always punished me harshly for no reason. Once I spent three months in my room on bread and water. I was never allowed to play outside. My father forced me to wear a skullcap to school. This was very cruel as we lived in a Gentile neighborhood. ``My father and stepmother crushed my spirit and destroyed my willpower. I could not think for myself, make any decisions. My self-confidence was shot. I'm still afraid of my father and he's been dead for years.'' Such a background, according to at least one expert in the field, is typical. ``A compulsive gambler is like someone who touches a hot stove, gets burned yet keeps coming back for more,'' explains Don Lavender, clinical coordinator at Arizona's Sierra Tucson Treatment Center for Psychological and Emotional Disorders. He was in Israel recently to give a one-week workshop at the new Herzliya Medical Center for Addictions at Beit Oren. Gambling becomes the lover, the best friend, the only comfort as the sufferer runs from a pain he cannot deal with, Lavender explains. ``I didn't know I was addicted, but I knew something was wrong if I organized my whole day around gambling,'' Michael continues. ``At first gambling was fun, a diversion. Then it became a habit I couldn't live without and finally an escape for all my problems. I spent my business money, my children's money, everyone's money. ``My wife knew nothing about my gambling. I was a great liar and came home with a thousand stories. I was clever at ``combinations,'' the expertise of every gambler. I hid the truth brilliantly from everyone, including myself. ``I was in a trance, in a blackout when I played. Lost to the world. If the man next to me dropped dead I wouldn't look up. I wouldn't go to the bathroom. ``I could feel the adrenalin pumping in me while I was playing. I felt alive. ``You always lose. I didn't care. A compulsive gambler plays; it doesn't matter if he wins or loses. It has nothing to do with money. ``I know I have tons of anger in me and I can't let it go. I'm afraid to show my anger or any other emotion. I'm afraid to be myself. ``Nothing was sacred. I gambled everything away. If I had money to pay the bills, I gambled it away. ``Because gambling isn't physical like drugs or alcohol, it is hard for people to understand what a dangerous addiction it is,'' warns Michael. ``It sneaks up on you. ``Win or lose, I kept playing. I couldn't stop. My business was ruined. I owed money everywhere. I couldn't sleep. Suicide seemed the only way to go. Gambling had gobbled up my life.'' At that desperate point, Michael read about Penina Eldar's gambling disorder clinic. The treatment has been successful so far. ``I can't ever gamble again, not even for a penny,'' he insists. Eldar opened the Center for Compulsive Gambling in Jerusalem in 1991, and recently opened a branch in the Center for Alternative Medicine in Tel Aviv. ``The Jewish people are more vulnerable to this disorder than others because of their troubled history,'' Michael says. ``The Holocaust had a lot to do with all this.'' Dr. Yair Caspi, a lecturer in addiction at the Hebrew University Law School and the Tel Aviv School of Social Work, defines a compulsive gambler: ``What place has gambling in his life? Does he think about it all the time? Is every vacation planned around it, whether the casino is in Turkey, Egypt or Rio?'' ``Gambling gives you the same high you get from drugs. It's easy money. You don't have to work, you just play games,'' said Dr. Val Velkes, co-director with Dr. Pinhas Harris of the Herzliya Medical Center's addiction clinic. ``People here are addicted to Lotto, Hish Gad, Toto, all the state lottery games,'' says Harris. ``Gambling is much more of a problem here than anyone wants to admit.'' He adds that Jews are big gamblers. ``The mania of gambling sweeping Israel is going to cause lots of problems,'' Penina Eldar warns. ``Eldar is former director of the department for the treatment of alcoholics at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, and founded Alcoholics Anonymous 20 years ago. ``Now with credit and access cards you can phone around the world and bet on any sporting event you want, a dangerous and tempting situation for compulsive gamblers and people vulnerable in that direction,'' she warns. Eldar began the gambling program four years ago, but despite extensive media attention and an advertising campaign, ``of the 100 people who came to talk to me, only 50 decided on treatment.'' ``That in itself is no part of the problem. ``It is very hard for a compulsive gambler to admit his sickness,'' she says. ``Today we are treating 12 people in intensive treatment and 30 in group therapy. It is a commitment many are not ready to take.'' ``Eldar's method of treatment is more attractive than that used in Spain and France, [[Page S 13135]] where compulsive gamblers are kept in psychiatric wards. Eldar espouses rehabilitation and group and family therapy. The gambler seeking help gets 10 one-on-one sessions, 10 group meetings, two meetings with the family, and, if therapy is going well, monthly group sessions that continue ``for as long as necessary, sometimes forever.'' ``Compulsive gambling disorder is a man's disease,'' Eldar explains, ``though it is the wives and mothers who face the dire economic consequences.'' An alcoholic may drink only a bottle a day and still be an alcoholic, but a compulsive gambler spends all the family's money, leaving them physically and emotionally destitute, she says. Playing cards with family or friends is okay, but stay away from gambling clubs, she warns. ``It gets tricky when you start playing two to three times a week. Then it's only a matter of time.'' She says it can take five to seven years for gambling to develop into a compulsion. ``According to my statistics, 67,000 compulsive gamblers need treatment here, and there are between 50,000 and 200,000 gamblers at risk in Israel.'' The hundreds of illegal casinos mushrooming all over Israel signify the breakdown of Israeli society, warns Dr. Yair Caspi. ``This wasn't here 20 years ago. Not the growing gambling phenomenon, nor the drugs or alcohol. It isn't that we weren't aware, it just wasn't here. ``Together with an increase in use of alcohol and drugs, gambling is part of a general addictive phenomenon growing rapidly in Israel, trying to be little America.'' Caspi holds an opposing view to the widely accepted theory that addiction is caused by individual deficiency. ``Israel has lost its traditional Jewish value system. The '50s immigration from North Africa and Eastern Europe lost a value system from which they never recovered. Then Zionism and socialism and idealism were still strong and gave something back to replace it.'' Religion, he says, has ``reneged on its job.''

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, we are talking a great deal in the Senate these days about welfare reform. Recently, I had a chance to read an article by Ralph Hardy, a Mormon leader in the Washington, D.C. area, in the magazine American Enterprise published by the American Enterprise Institute. It is titled, ``Work not Welfare.'' For a long time we have known that Mormons have been exceptional in not having their people on welfare. But this article goes into more detail than I had known. If we try to get welfare reform without providing jobs for people, we will not have welfare reform. It is interesting to note in the article, he says, ``I quickly learned that the physical welfare of my charges was an important influence on their spiritual welfare.'' That is true in the religious sense and also in the non-religious sense. I will have an amendment to try a WPA-type of demonstration in four different places in the country. I hope it can pass. The reality is there is simply no great demand for unskilled labor in the United States today, and most of the people on welfare fall in that category. If we were to do that, not only would we help the people more, as the Latter-Day Saints do, but we would be moving on other social problems. We spend a great deal of time making speeches about crime and doing very little constructive about it. Show me an area with high unemployment, whether it is White, Black, or Hispanic, and I will show you an area of high crime. I ask that the Ralph Hardy piece be printed in the Record and I urge my colleagues to read it. The article follows: Work Not Welfare in the Mormon Church (By Ralph Hardy) In 1996, the 9 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (popularly known as the Mormons) will commemorate the sixtieth year of its welfare program. It was in 1936, with the Great Depression sapping the strength and spirit of the nation, that our church's visionary president Heber Grant inaugurated the Church Welfare Program as ``a system under which the curse of idleness would be done away with, the evils of a dole abolished, and independence, industry, thrift, and self-respect be once more established amongst our people. The aim of the [[Page S 13137]] church is to help the people to help themselves. Work is to be re- enthroned as the ruling principle of the lives of our church membership.'' From this beginning, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints developed a detailed system for social assistance that favors work instead of welfare. It has proven extremely practical and effective in helping vulnerable people. This I know from my own personal experiences. In the late 1940s, when I was about eight years of age, my father roused me out of bed one early Saturday morning and announced that we were going to the stake (roughly analogous to a diocese) welfare farm. This was an exciting prospect; I had never visited a farm and I eagerly anticipated seeing many creatures of my imagination. However, when my father and I arrived at the enterprise on the far west side of Salt Lake City, I was surprised not only by the lack of farm animals but by the large machete I was given. There ended the fun. For the remainder of that Saturday my father and I, along with several other men and their sons, harvested heavy, dirty sugar beets by hand, throwing them into the back of a three- quarter-ton truck. After hefting those beets I never felt the same about sugar again. I did, however, acquire a healthy respect for the life of a farm boy. Later, a few years after my family had moved to Washington, D.C., the assignment came again to work on the stake welfare farm. This time, however, I held no illusions. I braced myself to work in the intent heat and 95 percent humidity that only the Washington area can promise in July. Throughout that day, which still ranks as one of the hardest episodes of labor I can remember, my father and I toiled in the fields digging fence-post holes. It was with a little sadness that I later learned that this stake welfare farm had been sold, with a large dairy farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore acquired in its place. When I returned to Washington after graduate school, I spent many more Saturdays cleaning barns and pouring cement at the dairy farm. When I turned 12, I became a deacon in the church like other boys of my age. One of my first assignments was to visit about eight families in our local congregation on the first Sunday of every month. My purpose in going was to collect from these families a ``fast offering''--a cash contribution from each household equal to the value of two meals skipped by that family on the first Sunday of the month, known as Fast Sunday. I traveled by bicycle, and at the end of the afternoon I would bring all the offerings back to the bishop at the meetinghouse. These contributions created a pool of funds for our bishop to use in providing assistance to needy families in our ward. Although I did not know who these families were, I knew that our wise bishop would put the funds to good use. When I was 34, the leadership of the church asked me to serve as bishop of my ward. One of the key assignments I was given, like all other bishops in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, was to assume direct responsibility for the physical welfare of the nearly 600 members of the congregation. I quickly learned that the physical welfare of my charges was an important influence on their spiritual welfare. The good people of my ward were from all walks of life. Some were reasonably affluent, many were not. More than a few, especially young families, struggled. One adult member of my ward was retarded and living alone. Another was severely overweight, without family or transportation, and virtually unemployable. Over the five years of my service I spent an enormous amount of time administering to the many needs of these people. One day, after I had been bishop for only about four months, one of the very faithful men in my ward came to see me. He had been assigned as the ``home teacher'' to several families, and, as such, he visited these families faithfully each month on my behalf. This man said to me, ``Bishop Hardy, I am concerned about one of my families. The husband is out of a job, and his spirit and self-confidence are broken.'' I knew the man's name at once, and was distressed that I had not been perceptive enough to detect that the family was in difficulty. I immediately visited the man and his wife and confirmed that they were without the basic necessities of life. Their pantry was bare. All of their meager income went toward paying rent, now in arrears, and for gasoline so the man could search for work. And that search was not proving successful. That evening, I immediately called the very capable president of our ward's women's auxiliary, known in our church as the Relief Society, and asked her to also visit the home so that this family's immediate needs could be confidentially assessed. By noon the next day this was done. Counseling was begun, and a list of commodities and other necessities that this struggling family would need was compiled. By five o'clock in the evening, the Relief Society president and the wife in the family had driven to our regional bishops' storehouse facility and filled a large order of foodstuffs and other commodities to sustain that family of five for a period of time. A few days later, by prearrangement with the husband, I contacted the man's older brother living in the southwest and inquired about the extended family's ability to be of assistance to their kin. To my joy I received a commitment from them to donate not only cash assistance to their brother but also a good used automobile to replace the family's old car, which was not worth fixing. Then I asked a capable young attorney in my ward to help me prevent the family from being evicted from their rented townhouse; he was able to work out a rent moratorium with the landlord. From the Fast Offering funds donated by members of my congregation I advanced a deposit of one month's rent so that the landlord would feel a sense of commitment. Also from Fast offering funds I made several direct payments to the electric utility and to several physicians, in order to free up the family's meager cash resources for other purposes. As is the practice in our church, I asked the man and his wife if they would perform some church service to partially recompense for the assistance that they received. I asked the man if he would undertake a project to repaint one of the long hallway walls in our ward meetinghouse. This assignment was accepted and the work was performed over the course of several Saturdays. A member of our ward who had been assigned to serve as an employment specialist then began turning over to this man every possible job lead. Before we could succeed at this, however, the man's own extended family found him employment in the Southwest. I still hear from him every Christmas and can report that he has been gainfully employed ever since his crisis, and is a productive member of our church and society. At every turn the LDS church teaches the dignity of work and the importance of personal industry. Work is emphasized as a ruling principle in the lives of all of our believers. I learned this lesson as part of a religious congregation, through personal labor in the church welfare system, and through my participation in our system of financial and service offerings. Work is basic in the doctrine of our church, and the virtues of work--and the cursedness of idleness--are taught to Latter-Day Saints at a young age. More generally, the members of our church are taught to be self-reliant. Coming in part from our pioneer traditions, the importance of self-reliance and personal independence receives great emphasis. Spencer W. Kimball, a recent church president, taught that: The responsibility for each person's social, emotional, spiritual, physical, or economic well-being rests first upon himself, second upon his family, and third upon the church if he is a faithful member thereof. No true Latter-Day Saint, while physically or emotionally able, will voluntarily shift the burden of his own or his family's well-being to someone else. Our emphases on work and self-reliance lead directly to a third requirement in church teaching--that of provident living. This means we must train members, from youth, to live within their means; to avoid unnecessary debt; to adopt on a family basis the principle of the ``storehouse,'' which encourages laying up a year's stock of food, commodities, and financial resources against a time when they may be needed. These work- and independence-based principles inoculate most church members from serious problems of economic security. And where personal welfare problems do crop up, our vast system of temporary church assistance and guidance back toward work is able to ease most situations without any involvement by the government. This is not mere rhetoric. Last year within the United States alone, 35,207 of our unemployed members were placed in gainful employment through the church's employment centers. In addition, over 1,500 so- called ``unemployable'' persons were placed in jobs, with more than 85 percent still working at the same business over one year later. I have seen the LDS church welfare assistance system in action. I learned its principles as a child; I taught them as a full-time missionary for the church as a young man overseas; I have administered the system at the grassroots level as a church bishop. This system works because it is focused on the self-worth of the individual, and because it is administered as a part of religious practice at the local level. Ours is a program built on work, self-help, personal dignity, and redemption. I have seen it succeed. And I know that many of its principles could be applied to the world at large.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Five minutes.

Mr. SIMON. I thank the Senator from New York. I wish he were accurate in that. We all want welfare reform. I heard the Presiding Officer at a committee meeting this morning talk about the need for that. I do regret that we do not have more of a bipartisan effort, not only on this but on a lot of things. This has happened gradually over a period of years on the Hill, and I think it has not been a healthy thing. So when the Senator from Minnesota makes his comments about the need for working together, I agree. I heard Senator Ted Stevens make similar comments yesterday morning, and Senator Byrd has made some comments along that line. Real candidly, the principal bill that we have, without the amendment, does not deal with the problem of poverty, does not deal with the problem of jobs. Whether you have a Democratic Senate or a Republican Senate, whether you have a Democratic President or a Republican President, one thing is not going to change, one trend line: the demand for unskilled labor is going down. Most of those on welfare are people who do not have skills. And so to have real welfare reform, we really have to be talking about jobs, ultimately. But, in the meantime, we cannot let people fall through the cracks. I heard what our colleague from North Dakota, Senator Conrad, said about Senator Moynihan. Senator Moynihan knows more about welfare than all of the rest of this body put together--meaning no disrespect to my colleagues here from Arizona and Minnesota, and anywhere else. But the reality is that we have, as a Nation, said we are committed to having a safety net for people. This bill, unamended, takes out the safety net. That is the reality. The State maintenance effort that is now required will die. If Arizona wants to do nothing, Arizona can do nothing. And if Illinois wants to do nothing, Illinois can do nothing. Let me add one other point. The Dole bill takes a bill that emerged from the Labor and Human Resources Committee, dealing with job training and a number of other things like that, and just drops it wholesale in here--a bill that I think most of us on the committee know needs to be refined. For example, the Job Corps is just decimated. Now, the Job Corps needs to be improved. But 79 percent of the people in the Job Corps are high school dropouts. This is not a Sunday school class we are picking up and saying we want to help you along; these are people who are on the fringes, and the Job Corps [[Page S 12773]] has been a remarkably successful enterprise. I will have an amendment, Mr. President, that is identical to a bill that Senator Boren and Senator Reid and Senator Wofford and I introduced last year, which will call for an experiment--basically, a WPA type of program in four locations, to be picked by the Secretary of Labor, in which we will say that you can be on welfare 5 weeks--not 5 years, not 2 years, but 5 weeks--and you have to work 4 days a week at the minimum wage. The fifth day you have to be out trying to find a job in the private sector. We will give you $535 a month--not much money, but at least something. I do not recall the average in Arizona, but the average welfare payment per family in Illinois is $367. And then projects would be picked by local citizens, and these people will work on the projects, as we did in the old WPA. Screen people as they come in. If they cannot read and write, get them into a program. If they have no marketable skill, then get them to a community college.

Mr. SIMON. Could I have 1 minute?

Mr. SIMON. I thank my colleague from New York. I intend now to speak for 2 or 3 hours, but I shall not. One other great advantage of the WPA-type of program that I will offer in this amendment is we do not restrict it to one person in a household. One of the things that we have done through our welfare policies is discourage families from sticking together. If you can have two people earning an income on a WPA-type of project, then, frankly, they would have a chance of not living in luxury, but there would be the economic incentive for families to stick together rather than families to separate. I certainly am going to support the amendment offered by Senator Daschle and Senator Moynihan. I hope we do not do real harm to this country in the name of welfare reform. Everything that is under a label ``welfare reform'' is not real good for this country. We have to recognize that. I yield the floor.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, this Defense appropriations bill includes $7.5 million for the National Security Education Program. I want to congratulate my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee for ensuring funding for this important program. The National Security Education Program has enjoyed bipartisan support. President Bush signed the National Security Education Act, which established the National Security Education Program, in December 1991. The chief Senate sponsor of the bill was Senator David Boren, who is now president of the University of Oklahoma. Senators Nunn and Warner were cosponsors. The National Security Education Program was designed to support study abroad by U.S. students. The program emphasizes the study of foreign languages and preparation for possible careers in national security. Funds go to U.S. institutions, undergraduate scholarships, and graduate fellowships. The program guarantees a return on the Federal investment by requiring that recipients of fellowships and scholarships be obligated to serve in a Federal Government agency or an educational institution in the area of study for which the scholarship or fellowship was awarded. According to CRS, this is the only major Federal program that supports study abroad by U.S. citizen undergraduate students. The program operates from interest on a trust fund, based on a one- time 1992 appropriation of $150 million. In fiscal year 1995, the trust fund yielded $15 million. Pressured to find savings in these tight budget times, the Appropriations Committee voted to cut funding for the program and eliminate the trust fund in the Defense supplemental bill we considered earlier this year. I offered an amendment on the Senate floor that restored funding for the program. The amendment was accepted on a voice vote. A compromise was reached in conference whereby all 1995 funding was saved but the trust fund was reduced from $150 million to $75 million. This was a fair compromise given that the House also had originally voted to eliminate the program. I am pleased that for fiscal year 1996, the Appropriations Committee decided to continue funding for the program, even though it is necessarily based on a smaller trust fund which yields less interest than it had previously. This is an effective program that addresses a serious national interest and I commend the committee for its wise action. Foreign language proficiency is crucial to our national defense and security but there is much that needs to be done. Of the 500,000 American troops the United States sent to the Persian Gulf, only five could translate Iraqi intelligence documents. The United States has the only foreign service in the world you can get into without the knowledge of a foreign language. Foreign language proficiency and knowledge of other cultures is also important for our economic competitiveness. There is a simple rule of business: ``You can buy in any language, but if you want to sell you have to speak the language of your customer.'' The fact is that four out of five new jobs in the United States are created through foreign trade. An article that appeared on the front page of the business section of the Sunday Los Angeles Times on August 28, 1994 noted that: ``In a global economy, study and business experience abroad are critical. Yet Americans stay home while 400,000 foreign students come here to learn.'' Last year, the National Security Education Program supported 317 students from 150 U.S. institutions who studied in 48 countries with 34 different languages. The average award was $8,000 per student. Cutting the program would yield very small savings. But the dividends from such programs are very real. I hope the Senate can maintain support for this program when the bill moves to conference. I thank my colleagues.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, today, I would like to call my colleagues' attention to an important issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which examines violence as a public health issue. As too many Americans know, violence has become an epidemic in our country. Despite some admirable efforts, the problem has unfortunately not been successfully addressed by congressional action. Given the scope of the problem, it is important for all Americans to focus on this issue and contribute to the solution. I would like to take this opportunity to commend the American Medical Association for taking a leadership role in drawing public attention to this issue. The June issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is a prime example of the AMA's commitment. This issue focuses on the recent emphasis in the medical community on addressing violence as a public health issue. Putting violence in this context raises the profile of the issue and, I believe, greatly contributes to creating better solutions. For example, an editorial entitled ``The Unrelenting Epidemic of Violence in America'' lists grim statistics about the prevalence of violence in our society, and estimates the tremendous social and medical costs to society caused by this violence. The editorial then calls upon physicians to take an active role in working to reduce the magnitude of this problem, and offers advice on ways to proceed: Patient centered interventions may include education that emphasizes primary prevention, such as discussing the hazards of firearms and encouraging safe firearm storage practices, appropriately screening for child abuse, domestic violence, and elder abuse, and identifying and initiating proper counseling for harbingers of violence such as alcohol and other substance abuse, behavioral problems, emotional disorders, and inadequate social support. JAMA also encourages physicians to become antiviolence advocates by participating in community, State, or national public health policy debates on violence, influencing public attitudes in favor of violence prevention initiatives, and supporting legislative and regulatory measures intended to reduce violence, such as those that limit the availability of handguns. Because the causes of violence are so complex, we sometimes feel overwhelmed before we even begin the work to find solutions. To encourage its members, JAMA relates the story: . . . of a stranger walking along a beach at noon on a brilliant sunny day. As the tide has receded, a large number of starfish have been stranded on the hot sands, baked by the noonday sun. They surely will not survive until the next tide returns. An older woman skitters about the beach, gently picking up the starfish and tossing them back into the ocean. As the stranger approaches and notices the tens of thousands of starfish on the miles of sandy beach, he stops to ask the woman, ``How can you possibly make a difference, with the vast number of starfish that are stranded?'' The woman replies, gently picking up a starfish next to her and showing it to the stranger, ``For this starfish, it makes all the difference in the world.'' To further encourage its readers, JAMA then relates the work of John May, a physician with Cermak Health Services in Chicago, who is making an important difference in his community. According to JAMA, Dr. May has received local and national attention for his work to develop patient screening and counseling techniques, study risk factors associated with firearm violence, and promote violence prevention awareness. May has developed a simple mnemonic device involving the word ``guns'' to assess whether someone is at risk for a firearm injury: Is there a gun in your home? Are you around users of alcohol or other drugs? Do you feel a need to protect yourself? Do any of these situations apply to you: Seen or been involved in acts of violence? Sadness? School-aged children at home? Furthermore, May believes that physicians must work to deglamorize the gun, as they have done with cigarettes: Unfortunately, guns and violence are promoted as powerful, sexy, and effective. It's no wonder that young people are drawn to them and, tragically, killed by them. The June issue of JAMA is not, however, the first example of the AMA's commitment to exploring the issue of violence. In 1994, the AMA joined with the American Bar Association and nearly 100 other groups in presenting the National Conference on Family Violence: Health and Justice. This important conference focused on the disturbingly widespread problem of family violence, and made specific recommendations, such as primary prevention through education, early intervention in at-risk families, and the development of community- coordinated efforts to address this problem. My colleagues, the Nation's physicians, and all Americans, can learn from the articles in the June issue of JAMA. But more importantly, we can all learn from the AMA's example of [[Page S 12750]] civic responsibility. I applaud their efforts and encourage my colleagues to review the June issue and share it with medical professionals in their communities.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, while I commend the work of the Senators involved in negotiating this compromise amendment on missile defenses, which is certainly an improvement over what is currently in the bill, I cannot support the amendment. By nature, compromises are never perfect, but they usually take the form of something each side can live with. In this case, I do not believe that the language in this amendment is something we can afford to live with. Despite the changes, this proposal still commits us to the deployment in the near future of expensive and destabilizing missile defense systems. This is not the way we should be going. The time and energy the Senate has put into this issue would be much more wisely spent on ratification of the START II and chemical weapons treaties, which are sitting in the Foreign Relations Committee. The proponents of robust missile defenses argue that the end of the cold war makes obsolete arms control treaties negotiated in that area. I could not disagree more. The way to a more secure United States and a more peaceful world is through building on our arms control treaties, not destroying them. This amendment, while designed by its authors to be compliant with the ARM Treaty, moves us in the direction of fundamentally altering or even withdrawing from the treaty. The AMB Treaty is a cornerstone of our arms control policies, and I believe we must retain its integrity, especially to ensure Russian ratification and implementation of START II. Putting at risk this ratification makes us less safe, not more. I am also concerned about the costs of deploying national missile defenses, which has not entered into this debate to the extent it should. By one estimate, it could cost some $100 billion, and the way weapons systems go, like the B-2, it is not hard to imagine the costs soaring higher. Many of the proponents of this star wars-like deployment joined me in supporting the balanced budget amendment, but have not explained how they would reconcile that goal with the huge costs of this program. I recognize the choices that had to be made on this issue, and Senators Nunn and Warner got the best deal that they could. But when Senator Warner says that the amendment sets a clear path to deployment of national missile defenses, I have no choice but to oppose it.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, one of the most thoughtful observers in the Nation today is Felix Rohatyn, an investment banker, who has had considerable leadership experience at both the local, State, and Federal levels. He was chairman of New York's Municipal Assistance Corp., from 1975 to 1993 and helped put the pieces together when New York City was in such desperate straits. He had an article recently in the Washington Post that comments specifically about the District of Columbia and New York City, but it is really much more than that. He is really talking about what our priorities are as a Nation and what we must do to revitalize urban American and revitalize the Nation. To the timid souls in the House and Senate and the administration who are afraid to face our problems and come up with realistic answers to those problems, because realistic answers are not going to be immediately popular, I would note his comment: Many of our actions were deemed to be political suicide when first considered, but it is worth noting that Governor Carey's approval rating was the highest ever in December 1975 when we had carried out the most painful parts of the restructuring. The American public yearns for genuine leadership, not public relations talk. Instead to much too great a degree, we are providing the public relations talk but not genuine leadership. I ask that the Felix Rohatyn article be printed in the Record, and I urge my colleagues to read it. The article follows: Big Mac To Go; Hold the Lies; New York's Recipe for Recovery--and What D.C. Can Take From It (By Felix Rohatyn) Watching the evolution of the District of Columbia's fiscal crisis inevitably brings to many of us here in New York City memories of our own brush with bankruptcy in the 1970s. There are too many differences between our situation 20 years ago and the District's today to draw direct parallels. Still, there are lessons in our successes--and in our failures--that may provide some useful insights to those trying to direct the District's future. [[Page S 12628]] The first of those lessons is that recovery was not rapid and--for reasons both of our own making and beyond our control--it was not permanent. It took New York City almost six years from the time we lost access to the financial markets in 1975 until we regained it in 1981, having balanced three consecutive budgets in the meantime. Now, 14 years later, New York City is again in the throes of a serious budgetary crisis which shows no signs of early resolution. To the extent that we succeeded, much is owed to a few factors: putting able and responsive people into top city management positions; enlisting the cooperative efforts of all parties--state and city officials, labor, business--who contributed to the problem in the first place; getting financial controls into place; building public support for the tough actions needed; securing help from higher levels of government. To the extent we failed, it was because we relied too much on stopgap measures and postponed structural reforms needed to secure the city's future. There are caveats for the District in all this. Many of the forces that drove New York City towards bankruptcy in the '70s are not unlike those that now cast a shadow over the District's, and, indeed, the entire country's future: excessive borrowings, escalating budget deficits, excessive public spending and shrinking private employment, compounded by weak political leadership. Just as the District's problems had been building for many years, under the nose of the mayor, city council and their federal overseers on Capitol Hill, New York's crisis was obscured for many years by imaginative bookkeeping and by lenders who looked the other way. By May 1975, when the banks refused to provide additional loans to the city, short-term debt had climbed from practically nothing six years earlier to almost $6 billion. (In each of those years the city's budget was reported to miraculously, ``in balance.'') The city work force had ballooned to 300,000 people while private employment (and tax revenues) plummeted during the recession of the early 1970s. When newly elected Gov. Hugh Carey, formerly a liberal Democratic congressman from Brooklyn, appointed four private citizens (including me) to recommend a course of action, we were 18 days away from a default and a bankruptcy filing. During the next six months, we put in place practically every new structure and agreement that served as the ultimate cornerstone to our recovery. Some survive to this day. These were the main components: Getting control. In this and many other instances, strong bipartisan leadership at the state level was crucial, support that the District must look to the federal level to supply. Under great pressure from the governor, practically the entire top management of the city was replaced, including the first deputy mayor, budget director, and deputy mayors for finance and operations. All but one of the new appointees came from the private sector. They, together with the executive director of the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB), constituted as capable a management team as the city ever had. The EFCB, analogous to D.C.'s new financial control board, consisted of the governor, mayor, city and state comptrollers and three private citizens appointed by the governor. It had the power to set the level of city revenues and to reject any budget submitted by the mayor not in compliance with the long-term plan. All major city contracts, including labor contracts, were subject to its approval. Once these control structures were in place after the usual political struggles, we had total cooperation from city officials--including Mayor Abraham Beame, despite the high cost to his political career. The EFCB's veto power and the shared commitment of top city management meant that it was possible to translate the requirements of the approved budget plan into actual savings. It is always easy to demand or promise cuts on paper; it is much harder to pocket them. This is especially true if, as some in the District are urging, reliance is placed on the voluntary response of city workers to accept buyouts or on privatization to cut costs and payrolls. Getting the facts. We knew the numbers we were working with were meaningless and that we needed a factual basis for any long-term plan. It took many months, but ultimately the city, with the help of outside experts, put in place a system of financial controls and accounting second to none. Just as the true dimensions of the District's fiscal gap were revealed only over a period of months, New York City's 1975 deficit turned out to be almost triple the initial estimate--close to $1.5 billion on a total budget of about $13 billion (including about $600 million of expenses buried in the capital budget). Negotiating a social contract between business and labor. Key to our success was enlisting the help of those who had created the problem. The city's labor and business leaderships (including the banks), as well as the state and city themselves, provided a relatively small number of people who could make commitments on behalf of their constituents and deliver them. Having a common goal was important; carrying it out was agonizingly difficult. The ``social contract'' provided labor support for deferring all wage increases, at no interest cost, and a minimum 6 percent attrition rate. Ultimately 60,000 workers, 20 percent of the work force, went off the payroll through layoffs or attrition. Pension benefits were rolled back, while union pension funds purchased $2.5 billion of city bonds (which proved a good investment for retirees). Just as the District is beginning to do, we looked hard at city functions to see which were essential and which we could live without. Tuition was imposed, for the first time, at City University. Transit fares were doubled. Services were sharply cut, with the worst impact borne by the school system. Rigid cost controls were imposed. Taxes were temporarily increased. The banks, in turn, supported creation of the Municipal Assistance Corp., a state agency directed by a board of nine private citizens and authorized to issue up to $10 billion of long-term bonds, backed by a portion of the city sales tax. MAC financed the phaseout of the city deficit by 1980, as well as a dramatic increase in the city's infrastructure investment by 1985. All of these actions resulted from difficult and often acrimonious negotiations. For example, after the initial wave of 20,000 layoff notices, striking sanitation workers disrupted the city and greeted arriving passengers at Kennedy Airport with signs saying: ``Welcome to Stink City.'' This scared the mayor into rehiring a number of workers--which, in turn, caused financing for MAC's first private market bond offering to collapse. Still, we were able to stop the bleeding. Getting outside help. For all the pain, the city's redemption depended importantly on help from the state which assumed certain of the city's costs for courts, correction and higher education. At a critical time, the state also purchased $250 million of MAC bonds and provided MAC with its ``moral authority'' to maintain our credit. Federal help, while psychologically critical, was far more limited (Remember the famous New York Daily News headline ``Ford to City: Drop Dead.'') Still, the Ford administration provided a limited amount ($1.5 billion) of seasonal loans which was replaced by the Carter administration by long-term loan guarantees which were totally paid off in the early 1980s. Building public support. Being open with the public and consistently explaining actions and goals helped the city's emergency management build and sustain a positive public spirit (an effort made easier by the natural pride and civic spirit of New Yorkers). The fact that New York has a number of powerful newspapers also helped to create the public support our political leaders needed to carry out extremely painful actions every day--the details of which were almost impossible to explain on television. Many of our actions were deemed to be political suicide when first considered, but it is worth noting that Gov. Carey's approval rating was the highest ever in December 1975 when we had carried out the most painful parts of the restructuring. Important as these stern measures were, the city could not have moved its budget into balance after four years without the help of the national economic recovery and the revitalization of the city's own private sector. And a sharply accelerating public investment program helped generate the strong local economy. Budget cuts alone will not create recovery. But it is also true that temporary budget cuts won't solve much of anything. And here is where we made our greatest mistake: Postponing fundamental reform. We believed that we had basically changed the city because we had balanced the budget and regained our credit. We were wrong. The economic recovery of the 1980s seduced the city back into some of its prior spending habits. Prosperity is the enemy of reform. The work force swelled to pre-crisis levels; cost increases were not offset by productivity increases; full pension benefits were restored. No serious though was given to the gradual elimination of certain services or to the possible privatization of functions like the municipal hospital system or to restructuring the school system. No real improvement was made either in the quality or efficiency of service delivery. Similarly, temporary measures were always taken to deal with long-term reductions in the city's revenue base. By the time Mayor Rudolph Giuliani came on the scene in 1993, a major structural deficit was again built into the city's budget. The problems our mayor--like the District's--faces are greater than those of the 1970s, in both the private and public sectors. Much higher levels of crime, drugs and AIDS; rising caseloads for welfare and Medicaid funds; inadequate public schools; high taxes and poor quality-of-life and unsustainable labor costs--all these are driving taxpayers and businesses out. Ultimately, however, success in New York, as in every city, will depend on the private sector. But for a city to retain its advantages as a cultural, communications and financial center, it must provide a level of public service far superior to what most provide today. It must have an educated work force and first-class public schools; safe and clean streets; attractive and affordable public transportation; a business-friendly tax environment; a thriving entertainment district; airports and railroad stations friendly to the traveler; partnership between universities and high- technology companies; and adequate housing for employees. These are all things that only cooperation between the private and public sector can provide. In this regard, the District may have some advantages New York City did not enjoy. [[Page S 12629]] The biggest one, so far, seems to be the willingness of the Republican leadership in Congress to encourage fundamental change to improve the District's long-term prospects. Tax benefits, school vouchers, extensive privatization, increased infrastructure investment and more should be tried not only in Washington, D.C., but in every metropolitan area. A bipartisan interest in developing a real urban agenda in America is way overdue. Without such an agenda, no city plan anywhere in this country is realistic in the long run. Some of the problems we face in New York as well as those of the District were self-inflicted and due to irresponsible policies. Many others, however, are not of our doing. Only national policies can deal with national problems such as poverty, health care, crime, education and immigration. The idea that sending welfare and Medicaid back to the states will be viable is total fantasy--simply an excuse for massive cutbacks with unfathonable results. America is the only advanced Western democracy that does not consider its cities as both its cultural and economic crown jewels. In Europe, cities existed long before countries came into being. The notion that Paris, Rome, London, Berlin or Amsterdam could face the kind of economic pressures and physical neglect that is faced by America's major cities is unthinkable. Without a change in the appreciation of what cities mean to the U.S. economy, we will ultimately be doomed to fail here in New York, and the District of Columbia will be a permanent ward of the federal government. If the cities fail, ultimately we will be doomed to fail as a society and as a nation.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, the University of California has been the focus of above-average attention on the issue of affirmative action because of the presence of two national political figures, Governor Pete Wilson and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. I wish we lived in a time in which affirmative action was not necessary but that is not the case. We have improved as a society--even though many people may not recognize that--since the days of my youth, but we still have a long way to go. Of particular interest to me was a New York Times op-ed piece by Professor Orlando Patterson about the California situation. I ask that the op-ed piece be printed in the Record, and I urge my colleagues to read his remarks, if they did not read them in the New York Times. The material follows: [From the New York Times, Aug. 7, 1995] Affirmative Action, on the Merit System (By Orlando Patterson) Cambridge, MA.--For years Americans have complained about government programs for the disadvantaged that do not work. Now, however, we are on the verge of dismantling affirmative action, the one policy that, for all its imperfections has made a major difference in the lives of women and minority groups and has helped us achieve the constitutional commitment to the ideal of equality and fairness. In utilitarian terms, it is hard to find a program that has brought so much gain to so many at so little cost. It has been the single most important factor in the rise of a significant, it still economically fragile, black middle class. So it is hard to understand why it has become the most contentious issue in the nation. One would have thought that a policy that so many politicians denounced would have adversely touched the lives of at least a substantial proportion of those opposing it. The facts show just the opposite. A National Opinion Research Center survey in 1990, still applicable today, found that while more than 70 percent of white Americans asserted that whites were being hurt by affirmative action for blacks, only 7 percent claimed to have experienced any form of reverse discrimination. Only 16 percent knew of someone close who had. Fewer than one in four could even claim that it was something they had witnessed or heard about at their workplace. Standards rose at the University of California in the last 12 years So what was the source feeding all the outrage? The vast majority of those interviewed claimed to have heard about the problem either through the press or from other second-hand sources, like their political leaders. Of course, such data would not matter were affirmative action something inherently evil. But this could hardly be the case, because for more than 15 years leaders of both parties, including Senator Bob Dole and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, both Republican Presidential candidates, supported this initiative. Indeed, they lauded it, as both morally defensible and the only effective means of remedying the intolerable exclusion of disadvantaged minorities and women from opportunities to train and apply for the better- paying working- and middle-class jobs. What happened? How did so manifestly worthy and effective a program lose the support, including that of some people who stood the most to gain from it? Blaming the media or the cynicism of our leaders will not do, the transparent opportunism of Mr. Dole and Mr. Wilson notwithstanding. Several factors account for the collapse of support for affirmative action. The first is that the largely erroneous arguments of neo- conservative and other right-wing critics somehow carried the day. Merit, we were repeatedly warned, was being undermined, resulting in both individual inequities and, worse, severe threats to our economy and the demands of a high-tech society. Nonsense, both. Only a minuscule number of whites, we now know, are affected by affirmative action, and of this small fraction, a still smaller percentage are able to claim genuine grievances. The claim that our economic efficiency is being threatened is simply laughable. Oddly enough, the problem right now is not a shortage of highly trained manpower but an oversupply, demonstrated by a saturated market for scientists and engineers. An alarming number of them are becoming lawyers (the overdependence on which being perhaps our biggest waste of manpower resources). White men still control more than 99.9 percent of all the important top positions in private and public institutions, as well as the vast majority of middle-level and high-paying jobs. They will continue to do so unit well into the next millennium. There is also the argument that affirmative action has done nothing for the underclass and poor but favors people already in the middle class. Although rhetorically it is extremely effective, it is deliberately misleading. This point figured prominently the recent broadsides against the University of California's affirmative action policies from Governor Wilson and an influential university regent, Ward Connerly. But affirmative action was never intended to help the poorest and least able. It is, by nature, a top-down strategy, meant to level the field for those who are capable of taking advantage of opportunities denied them because of their sex or race. For the underclass and the working poor, an entirely different set of bottom-up strategies are called for, although no one seems to know what these might be. The University of California's experience with affirmative action demonstrates beyond doubt the shallowness of the politicians' criticisms. Over the past 12 years, it has achieved its goal of incorporating students from disadvantaged minorities. But far from experiencing a decline in standards, the university has not only fulfilled its mandate of selecting students from the top one-eighth of the state's graduating class, but has increased its eligibility requirements five times during this period. It is now a far more selective institution than before the introduction of affirmative action, with improved graduation rates for both black and non-black students. [[Page S 12630]] Nothing could be more hypocritical and contradictory than the spectacle of a Republic governor demanding that his state's university system rely solely on the crude instrument of test scores to select 70 percent of its incoming students. Republicans never tire of saying that what made America great are the virtues of honesty, courage, initiative and imagination, integrity, loyalty and fair play, all best demonstrated by a person's track record and especially his or her perseverance in the face of adversity. Why then are conservatives vilifying universities for taking these values seriously in selecting the next generation of leaders? Race, we are told, should have nothing to do with the assessment of these virtues. Race, however, refers to several aspects of a person. It refers to physical appearance, and this, every African-American would agree with Senator Dole and Governor Wilson, should be a matter of no importance. But for African-Americans, race also means surviving an environment in which racism is still pervasive. It has to be taken into account in assessing the content of any black person's character, and to assert that this amounts to a divisive glorification of race is as disingenuous and as absurd as claiming that we are divisively glorifying poverty and broken families when we take account of these factors in assessing a white student's character. There is a third important meaning of race, and it is here that we enter tricky ground. Blackness also connotes something positive: the subcultural heritage of African-Americans that in spite of centuries of discrimination has vastly enriched American civilization out of all proportion to the numbers, and treatment, of the group creating it. The University of California, like other great institutions of learning, rightly has seen the exposure of all its students to this important minority culture as part of its educational mission. a policy that works only in an ecumenical america This is a noble goal, but it is fraught with dangers. What brought me around to support affirmative action after some strong initial reservations was not only its effectiveness as a strategy for reducing inequality, but also its possibilities for cross--pollinating our multi-ethnic communities. In the process, it could promote that precious, overarching national culture--the envy of the world--which I call ecumenical America. But the promotion of diversity has done nothing of the sort, as Governor Wilson and Mr. Connerly were able to argue with devastating impact. To the contrary, both on an off our campuses affirmative action seems to have been distorted by its beneficiaries into the goal of balkanizing America both intellectually and culturally. One has only to walk for a few minutes on any large campus to witness the pervasiveness of ethnic separatism, marked by periodic outbursts of other chauvinisms and hostilities. No group of people now seem more committed to segregation than black students and young professionals. Their motto seems to be: separate, yes, but make sure there is equality, by affirmative action or any other means. To a lesser extent, the tendency of the new black middle class to segregate itself residentially and to scoff at the norms and values of the ecumenical mainstream is the off-campus version of this lamentable betrayal and abandonment of the once cherished goal of integration. Ethnic separatism has also had deleterious academic consequences. In an experiment conducted at the University of Michigan by two psychologists, Claude Steele and Richard Nisbett, a group of disadvantaged minority students who were encouraged to be part of the campus mainstream, and made to understand that the highest standards were expected of them, consistently performed above the average for white students and the student body as a whole. Members of a control group who took the familiar route of ethnic solidarity and consciousness-raising performed well below the average. At its best, affirmative action compensates for one of the greatest disabilities of minority members: their lack of access to vital networks and other social capital which white men simply take for granted, whether it is the construction worker who mobilizes his neighborhood ties to get on a high- paying work crew, or the upper-middle class manager who draws on his grammar school and Ivy League contacts to land the vice presidency of some budding company. Once in, however, too many minority workers and women felt entitled to automatic promotion and were too quick to use the accusation of racism or sexism when it was denied. Too many supervisors practice a patronizing racism or sexism. The cynical promotion of unqualified people, even if it happens only occasionally, damages the legitimacy of affirmative action since it takes only one such mistake to sour an entire organization. Also damaging were clearly illegal practices like using blacks and women as entrepreneurial fronts to gain access to preferential contracts. These are all correctable errors. Universities and businesses should return to the principle of integration, to the notion that diversity is not something to be celebrated and promoted in its own right, but an opportunity for mutual understanding and the furtherance of an ecumenical national culture. The President should remain firm in his principled resolve to defend a corrected version of affirmative action. And if we give it a time limit of 10 years, it might still be possible to save this troubled but effective and badly needed policy.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, recently, I read in a denominational magazine, the Lutheran, an article by Judge Richard L. Nygaard on capital punishment. It was of interest to me that the South African Supreme Court unanimously ruled against capital punishment, making South Africa join the large majority of modern, civilized nations that outlaw capital punishment. The article has practical wisdom for all of us, coming from a judge who has no political agenda. I ask that the article be printed in the Record at this point.. The article follows: Victims of Vengeance (By Richard L. Nygaard) Perry Carris is dead. I doubt that many mourned him. Even among those who did not want him to die, most would readily admit that the world is a better place without him. He was a brutal killer. He and a friend entered the home of the friend's elderly uncle and aunt, then killed and robbed them. The uncle was stabbed 79 times and the aunt, who weighed only 70 pounds, 66 times. But, you see, Carris didn't just die--we killed him. One night last year officers of the prison where he spent his final hours injected him with lethal chemicals, and, quietly, he met eternity. Many more are scheduled to die in like fashion. Moreover, the new federal crime bill imposes death as a penalty for 50 more crimes. Is it not time to think about what society is doing? What we are doing? Carris' act was deliberate. So was ours. Carris' motivation was a cruel disregard for life. What was ours? The first killing clearly was criminal and unjustified--and sinful. But how about the second? The death penalty as the ultimate sanction brings punishment sharply into focus. It is the surrogate for society's frustration with the failures of government to maintain order and protect them. As a form of punishment, the killing of criminals is an issue with which Christians also must reconcile their beliefs. Many who are quick to condemn abortion because it kills an innocent being are just as quick to accept the death penalty, ostensibly because it kills a guilty being. Each is the killing of a human: The first is one whom Jesus said knows no sin; the second is one whose sin Jesus said could be forgiven. Is there a difference? Is this a paradox? Or can we reconcile our ambivalent attitudes about death? why we punish It is important first to know the purpose of our punishment. American penology is really quite simple. We have just three means of criminal punishment: probation, incarceration and death. And we rely upon only four justifications: rehabilitation, deterrence, containment and retribution. How does the death penalty serve these ends? When we look at each possible justification, it becomes clear that both society's motivation and the penal system's justification for the death penalty is simply retribution: We are ``getting even.'' First, one can easily reject rehabilitation as the goal. The death penalty surely does not rehabilitate the person upon whom it is imposed. It simply takes his life. The second purpose, deterrence, is more problematic. Statistics uniformly show that condemned criminals on death row did not consider the possibility that they might die for their crimes. Others, of course, may have thought of the consequences--and did not kill. But this possibility has been little-researched. We simply do not know much about this aspect of deterrence. Death, of course, is permanent deterrence. But the question is whether it is necessary. Life imprisonment will protect society from further criminal acts by the malefactor--and at less expense than execution. Containment, the third justification for punishment, also poses a philosophical problem because it punishes a person for something as yet not done. We use the crime already committed to project, sometimes without further information, that he or she will do it again. Then we contain the person to prevent that. Although killing the offender does, in a grim and final sense, contain and so protect society we must ask again: Is it necessary? It is not. Penologists recognize that an offender can be effectively and economically contained in a prison. They also reject containment to justify the capital punishment. the ultimate payback This leaves only retribution. Revenge--the ultimate payback. As a tool of retribution, death works wonderfully. The desire for revenge is the dark secret in us all. It is human nature to resent a hurt, and each of us has a desire to hurt back. Before the time of law, the fear of personal reprisal may have been all that kept some from physical attacks upon others or property crimes against them. But with law, cultures sought to limit personal revenge by punishment controlled and meted out in a detached fashion by the sovereign. Revenge between citizens is antithetical to civilized society. It invites a greater retaliation . . . which in turn invites counter reprisal . . . which invites more revenge. A spiraling escalation of violence between society and the criminal subculture results. By exacting revenge upon criminals, society plays on their terms and by their rules. We cannot win. `Acceptable' revenge Leaders know, and have for centuries, that civilization requires restraint. They know that open personal revenge is socially destructive and cannot be permitted. That, indeed, it must be renounced. Official revenge is not better, and the results are no less odious. By catering to the passions of society, government tells its citizens that vengeance is acceptable--it is just that you cannot do it. Leaders today respond politically to the base passions of society rather than act as statesmen upon the sociological necessities of civilization. Vengeance requires a victim. In putting a criminal to death, our government gives us one. ``Paying back,'' although destructive to culture and family alike, is politically popular. And so it is the law. Christians also must confront what institutionalized killing is doing to our attitudes toward ourselves. As a judge, I have seen the defiant and unrepentant murderer. I know how easy it is to identify only with the innocent and injured. But should we not, as Christians, strive to exemplify the grace and mercy of Jesus? Should we not desire this quality also in our society? On the eve of one execution last year, crowds gathered outside the prison to await a condemned man's death. And at the fateful hour, they cheered. The Sunday before another execution, the newspaper printed a photograph of the stretcher upon which the offender was to die. By urging vengeful punishment, society exposes its own desire for violence. Yes, the death penalty is constitutional. It is legal. But is it proper for government to give vent to this base desire of its citizens? I doubt that we, as a society, can kill without doing psychological damage to our culture. Perry Carris, I know, received a fair trial and his full measure of due process on appeal. I know because I sat on the court that declined to stay his execution. What, however, does his death and the deaths of others executed mean--to me or to you, Christians who must decide whether or not to support death as a penalty? We are a government of the people. We citizens are obliged to scrutinize the reason our society, and thus our government, kills. We who are Christians also must be satisfied that the reason is reconcilable with the tenets of our faith. Is it, when the reason is revenge?

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, one of the gravest injustices perpetrated by the American government in our more than two centuries of history was in February 1942, when we told 120,000 people who lived in the States of California, Oregon, and Washington that they had 1 to 3 days to sell all their property and put everything they own into one suitcase and they would be taken to camps. Almost all of these 120,000 people were Japanese-Americans. A few were actually citizens of Japan. Gary Matsumoto, a national correspondent for NBC, had an op-ed piece in the New York Times about his family's experiences. Our colleague in the House, Congressman Norman Mineta, was moved from California to a detention camp. Not one person, among all those 120,000, had been charged with any crime. My reason for paying special attention to this is that I grew up in the State of Oregon. My father was a Lutheran minister there. When this occurred my father made a statement on a local radio station, KORE, that it was wrong to treat American citizens in this way. My mother also recalls that he wrote a letter or two to the editor of the local newspaper, though I have no recollection of that. What I do know is that we received some phone calls and experienced some minor unpopularity. I was 13 years old at the time, and I would love to relate to my colleagues in the Senate that I stood up and defended what my father did, but I did not. I remember him explaining it to my brother and me, why it was wrong. But I was embarrassed by what my father did and wished he had not done it, perhaps a typical reaction for a 13-year-old. But now, as I look back on my father's life, it is one of the things I am proudest of him for. He was active in what we then called race relations and was always responsive to the needs of people. Up until the last few weeks before he died, he was a volunteer every Thursday morning at a facility for the mentally retarded. But perhaps nothing my father did makes me prouder of him than standing up for Japanese-Americans when it was not popular to do so. I ask that the Gary Matsumoto op-ed piece be printed in the Record, and I urge my colleagues to read it. The material follows: Lost Years, Lost Peace (By Gary Matsumoto) For millions of Americans, this week's anniversary of V-J Day conjured up memories, celebrations and passionate embraces. My parents were reminded of barbed wire and dust. They shared the fate of 110,000 Japanese-Americans living in California, Oregon and Washington after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Amid anti-Japanese hysteria and irrational fears of treason, all were expelled from their homes and exiled to concentration camps.They were told it was for their own safety. The Constitution was forgotten. My father, Kimitsu Matsumoto, was 15 years old and lived in Santa Maria, Calif. In the fall of 1942, he, his older sister, Imiko, and my grandmother were put aboard a dimly lit railroad car and whisked out of Los Angeles. For nearly 400 miles, they sat despondently, wondering if they would ever see home again. The Government sent them to the Gila River Relocation Center, a desolate tract on the Pima Indian reservation in Arizona. My father, being young, could adjust to the situation. He and friends made the best of it. They marked out baseball diamonds in the desert. Cactuses became football goal posts. They sang around campfires, danced on weekends and participated in talent shows. My Aunt Imiko, who was 22 in 1942, has darker memories. She answered the door when F.B.I. agents arrived before dawn to arrest my grandfather. Later, she delivered a shaving kit to him, standing her ground when a young G.I. lowered his rifle and threatened to run her through with his bayonet if she come any closer to the prison gate. My grandfather spent the spring and summer of 1942 in a detention camp in Bismark, N.D., before being reunited with his wife and children in the Arizona desert. They lived in crude barracks with cinder block floors. Guard towers were equipped with machine guns and searchlights. In the summer, the temperature reached 125 degrees, and the place would stink of roof tar. When the wind blew, clouds of suffocating dust would blanket the camp. For these fastidious people, the dust was a ceaseless affliction that symbolized their ruin. My grandparents missed the small cafe the family had run. My father missed the tortillas stuffed with beans he had bought from Mexican friends at school. My aunt missed her boyfriend, who had been drafted into the Army before the war broke out. (She eventually married him.) My grandmother and grandfather had come to America in the late 19th century seeking opportunities that they could never know in Japan's stultifying, feudal society. They reared their children, born in California, to love Fords, meat loaf and the New York Yankees. After Pearl Harbor, they not only lost their homes, they lost the sense that they belonged. My mother's family, who lived in Loomis, Calif., lost much more. They were sent to a camp, called Amache, in southeastern Colorado near the Kansas border. Before my grandmother left California, doctors warned that she could die in Colorado's altitudes: Amache was very high. Her blood pressure was high, and the air was thin. After several strokes, she was bedridden. For three years, my grandfather nursed her, first in the barracks, later in the camp hospital, where he would sleep on the floor beneath her bed. She died in the camp five days after the war ended, leaving seven children. On V-J Day, Aug. 14, 1945, most interned Japanese-Americans thought their ordeal would soon be over. But for them the war did not end so tidily. The last relocation camp did not close until March 20, 1946. Some people, especially the elderly, were afraid to leave. With their livelihoods destroyed and their children scattered, they reluctantly gave up the security of life behind barbed wire. When a family from the Amache camp returned to California, their shed was dynamited and shots were fired into their home. What people forgot was that a Japanese-American regiment that fought in Europe was among the most decorated military units in the war. Japanese-Americans also served in the Pacific. After the war, both sides of my family found shelter in Chicago from the virulent racism festering at that time on the West Coast. But they have never lost the fear that another cataclysm would provoke the Government to come for them again. A generation removed from the war, I have never fully shared that concern. Then I look at my baby daughter--part Swiss, part German and Irish, but with a decidely Asian cast to her eyes--and I wonder. This year, a memorial was erected at the Gila River camp. Except for the concrete slabs where the barracks once stood, all that remains is the dust. But for my family and successive generations of Japanese-Americans, Gila River is a place in the heart, a wound that never quite heals.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I want to join the others who are paying tribute to our colleague, who has announced today that he will not seek reelection. I heard Senator Chafee say the Senate today is a better place because of Senator Pell. I do not know that the Senate is a better place than the day Claiborne Pell arrived, but it is true that he has improved the quality of life around here by his conduct. And what is unquestionably true is that the Nation is a better place because of Claiborne Pell's service. We use the term ``public servant'' rather freely around here, more freely than sometimes we should. We apply it to anyone who holds public office. A man who died just a few weeks ago, who succeeded Averell Harriman as head of the Marshall plan in Western Europe, Milton Katz, told me one time that there are two kinds of politicians: Those who seek office because they want to be whatever it is--Senator, Governor, President, whatever the office--and those who seek office because of what the office can do. There is a little bit of both in all of us. But Claiborne Pell is there because he wants to serve the public. It is evident in everything he does. [[Page S 12560]] Someone--I forget who--used the word ``civility.'' We hear that a great deal these days. But we do not hear much genuine civility. There is excessive partisanship. I think one of the changes that I have seen--and I am sure Senator Pell would agree--in the 21 years that I have served in either the House or the Senate, is that we have become more partisan. I think, frankly, we serve the Nation less well when we become excessively partisan. That has not been Clay Pell's style. As has already been referred to, because of his contributions and what he has done in the field of education, millions of Americans are better off. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities are somewhat controversial today, but some day we are going to be remembered not for the aircraft carriers we build or the highways we build, but we are going to be remembered for our symphonies, for our works of art, for other things like that. In the international field, the Arms Control Disarmament Agency, Clay Pell is one of the authors. The United Nations, he was one of the alternate delegates to San Francisco. He has been a strong supporter of the theory that we have to work collectively with a community of nations. If we do not want to be the policemen of the world, to use the overworked phrase, we have to work with other countries. Clay Pell has recognized that. There is a whole host of things. The great tribute we can pay to Clay Pell is not these words that we use on the floor here, inadequate as they are. It is by seeing that we really do in the field of education what we ought to do, that we get the communities of nations to work together, whether it is Bosnia or the Middle East, or wherever it is, that we work together. I hope we will pay the real tribute to Clay Pell that he would like, and that is to see that educational opportunity is here and that the communities of nations work together. Mr. President, before I yield the floor, my colleague from Iowa, Senator Harkin, handed me a note, indicating he would like me to yield 1 minute to him so he can lay down an amendment before 5 o'clock. I yield to the Senator from Iowa.

Mr. SIMON. I do not yield the floor. I yield 1 minute to the Senator from Iowa, then I will yield the floor.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I do not know anything about the amendment. I was just trying to accommodate a colleague. I yield the floor.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to yield the floor for 1 minute to the Senator from Iowa.