Paul Simon

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Take a look at what happens there. Those are not just statistics. We are talking about the lives of people. That has been a dramatic change for coal miners in southern Illinois, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Why change this when both the industry and the coal miners say this makes sense? Let me give it from the viewpoint of OSHA. First of all, OSHA has just recently reviewed 33,000 pages of regulations and targeted more than 1,000 of those for elimination. Has OSHA been excessive, had too much minutiae in what they have been doing? No question about it. We have had too much regulation. But they are dealing with it and I am impressed by Joe Dear, who now heads OSHA, and what he is doing. We had a witness who testified about problems with OSHA. I asked that witness to come that afternoon and asked the head of OSHA to come to my office. He was there. They are moving. Trenches? 1990, trench deaths have fallen by 35 percent, since they put in their regulation on trenches. Grain dust, a major problem in Midwest States, deaths from explosions in grain elevators. The grain dust--since 1988, according to the grain industry, the fatality rate in the industry has dropped by 58 percent. And the injury rate has dropped by 41 percent. I would add here, even with the changes that we have made in OSHA, we still have, among the Western industrialized countries, the highest fatality and injury rate in manufacturing and in construction of any Western industrialized nation. If you adopt this legislation without the Kennedy amendment, let me tell you, the figures that you see right there on coal mine fatalities are going to go up. Just as certain as I am standing here, that is going to be the result. Brown lung: In 1978, there were an estimated 40,000 cases affecting 20 percent of the industry's work force. I visited with these workers in southern Illinois and talked about this problem. By 1985 only 1 percent of the textile industry work force was affected by the disease. Here we have OSHA--which, unquestionably, as we all know, has been excessive--getting hold of their situation. They are eliminating over one-third of the regulations they have. They are doing the job. Let us not interfere with the job that is being done well. The coal miners of Pennsylvania, the coal miners of Illinois, and of every State that has coal mines, would plead with us, if they knew the details of this, they would plead with us to adopt the Kennedy amendment. And the same on OSHA. I think it is extremely important that we protect our working men and women. OSHA is doing an improved job. OSHA is performing. There have been abuses, like in any good thing. Religion can be abused, education can be abused, affirmative action can be abused, anything can be abused. But OSHA basically has been doing a good job and improving the job. Let us not risk the future of our workers. I strongly urge the adoption of the Kennedy amendment. I yield the remainder of my time to Senator Kennedy.

Mr. SIMON. I ask unanimous consent that be set aside so this amendment can be considered.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I am pleased to say that I think we have an amendment that will be agreed to. It is very simple. It says: None of the provisions of this subchapter shall apply to agency rules or actions intended to protect children against poisoning; including a rule, and it specifies three: Iron toxicity poisoning. We had 28 children die of iron poisoning and those kinds of injuries in the last 3 years; Relating to lead poisoning from food products. That is, cans that come in from other countries that use lead soldering in the top of the cans; Third, promulgated under the Poison Prevention Packaging Act to protect children. I believe my colleagues, Senator Hatch and Senator Levin, find the amendment acceptable. I do not want to speak for them.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Finally, I simply want to commend the Concord Coalition, again, for a very constructive effort. I believe that their program is more solid than the one adopted and, particularly if combined with a balanced budget constitutional amendment, could really move our Nation in the direction that we ought to go.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, some may wonder, why is anyone still talking about the budget when the budget has been adopted? The reality is that until we act on reconciliation and appropriations, we are still a long way from getting our budget problems resolved. In addition, without a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, I believe the political pressure will mount to cause us to move away from the direction of a balanced budget. That has been our experience in the past. Legislative answers, such as Gramm-Rudman- Hollings, which I voted for, hold up until they become too politically awkward. And any real move on the budget deficit eventually does become politically awkward. My reason for mentioning all this is that in the midst of the struggle on the budget, I did not get a chance to read carefully the Zero Deficit Plan put out by the Concord Coalition, headed by two of our former colleagues, Senator Warren Rudman and Senator Paul Tsongas. It is an impressive document. Each of us could probably make some adjustments, but the staff and officers of the Concord Coalition should take great pride in their solid contribution. The executive director of the Concord Coalition is Martha Phillips, formerly on [[Page S 9934]] the staff of the House Budget Committee, and the president is Peter G. Peterson, the former Secretary of Commerce. The other officers are: Lloyd Cutler, secretary and treasurer; Dr. John P. White, vice chair, issues committee; Eugene M. Freedman, vice chair, finance committee; David Sawyer, vice chair, public relations; Roger E. Brinner, vice chair; Hon. Maria Cantwell, vice chair; Dr. John W. Gardner, vice chair; Dr. Hanna Holborn Gray, vice chair; Hon. William H. Gray III, vice chair; Dr. George N. Hatsopoulos, vice chair; Hon. Barbara Jordan, vice chair; Harvey M. Meyerhoff, vice chair; Hon. Timothy J. Penny, vice chair; Joseph M. Segel, vice chair; and Paul Volcker, vice chair. In the introduction to their proposal, they have a statement that responds to the question ``Why Balance the Federal Budget?'' I ask that the statement be printed in the Record. The statement follows: Why Balance the Federal Budget? The Zero Deficit Plan is a plan for our economic future. The goal is to assure a more secure, prosperous future for us and our children. We are not seeking to balance the budget for its own sake. Reducing government spending and increasing taxes means short-term sacrifice. This can only be justified by the long- term economic benefits that will flow from putting our fiscal house in order. Eliminating the deficit will help put the nation back on the path to lasting prosperity and to a rising standard of living in the next century. That larger goal cannot be achieved as long as the nation continues to run large budget deficits in good times and bad, year in and year out. A balanced budget and the nation's economic future are directly linked. There is a tie between budget deficits today and what we can enjoy tomorrow: Because there are only so many hours in each day, the principal way in which Americans can increase their standard of living is for each worker to become more productive: workers must produce more and better goods and services for each hour worked. For workers to become more productive, investments must be made in education and training; in modernized plants, equipment, and productive techniques; in new discoveries and innovations; and in transportation, communications, and other infrastructure. To make these investments, there must be a pool of savings that can be used for this purpose. Historically, the United States has had a particularly low rate of private savings, but, what is worse, the federal government's deficit is financed by soaking up most of the savings we do manage to put away. When the government spends more money than it has, it borrows the rest. Most of the money borrowed comes from private savings. Only if the government stops using up private savings will the money be available for investment. Balancing the federal budget will free up the nation's savings for investments that would increase our productivity, create good jobs, and raise our standard of living. The declining trend in what Americans produce for each hour worked illustrates how serious a problem this has become. From 1946 to 1973, what Americans produced for each hour of work increased 2.9 percent each year. From 1974 to 1994, the increase was only 1.1 percent a year. If productivity had improved as rapidly in the past two decades as it had in the previous three, the median annual family income today would be over $50,500, instead of the $35,000 it is. That $15,500- a-year gap is related to our large federal deficit. But because we never had the $15,500, we don't miss it in the same way we would if we had first enjoyed the income and then given it up. As long as incomes continue to creep up even slightly from one year to the next, the cumulative shortfalls in income remains largely hidden from public indignation. Solving the deficit problem does not automatically guarantee a rosy economic future. Other developments are needed to complement a balanced budget: reduced consumption, increased savings and investment, improved productivity, education, inflation and interest rates at desirable levels, and a favorable worldwide economic climate. But unless we get our deficit problem behind us, we will remain unable to take advantage of these other necessary economic ingredients. We cannot ignore the consequences of deficits much longer. Growing commitments made by one generation to the next cannot be honored on empty pocketbooks. A stagnant long-term economy cannot support retirement payments, medical care, and all the other benefits and services we would like. And it cannot support economic opportunity for today's youth to live as well as their parents' generation. Massive federal budget deficits threaten our economy in other ways as well. They increase the likelihood of reigniting inflation by putting pressure on the government simply to print more money to pay off its debt. The more dollars are printed, the less each dollar in your wallet is worth. As foreign ownership of our resources has grown, so has our dependence on the actions of foreign investors and governments. These entities have come to own more and more of our productive capacity. In addition, foreign investors have bought up almost 20 percent of our government's recently issued debt. As foreign holding of U.S. debt grows, so will U.S. interest payments to foreign nationals. Huge, continual deficits strangle the ability of even a nation as rich as ours to respond when emergencies arise or when new opportunities or problems emerge, including recession. With our government deep in debt and continuing to run huge deficits, we remain unable to shoulder new responsibilities. how large are our annual deficits and accumulated national debt? In 1994, our government spent $203 billion more than it raised in taxes. That deficit amounts to $780 for every single American, or $3,120 for each family of four. That is the sum your government borrowed on your behalf last year, whether you wanted it to or not. The $203 billion deficit was equal to 14 percent of federal spending. For every dollar the government spent, 14 cents was borrowed. The $203 billion deficit was for all government operations in 1994. It included the $57 billion 1994 surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund., and a $1 billion deficit in the Postal Service. This means that all other government spending exceeded other revenues by $259 billion. Our national debt, the net accumulation of all of the annual deficits we have run and all the money we have borrowed from government trust funds, stood at $4.8 trillion in May 1995. That is $18,460 for every single American, or $73,840 for each family of four. The $4.8 trillion debt is equal to 67 percent of our national economic output in 1995 (called the gross domestic product, or GDP). If every American worked from January 1 through September 1 and paid all of his or her earnings to the federal government and spent nothing on food, clothing, shelter, or anything else, the public debt would still not quite be paid off. Some people say there is no line-item in the federal budget labeled ``waste, fraud, and abuse.'' But, in a way, there is. It is called interest on the national debt, and last year it cost our government $203 billion. We spent more on interest than we spent on the entire U.S. military and almost as much as we spent on Social Security. What did we get for it? Nothing--not a single Social Security check, military aircraft or mile of highway--not even a single school lunch. Because annual interest payments on the debt are so large, our government is actually borrowing just to pay interest. It is as if we were running up our MasterCard to pay off our debt to Visa, knowing that next year we will have to borrow even more from American Express to keep the game going. how did we accumulate a $5 trillion national debt? Our nation was born in debt, a consequence of the high cost of fighting the Revolutionary War. Our first president, George Washington, adopted the practice of running generally balanced budgets. President Thomas Jefferson went one step further, pledging the nation to the goal of paying off its debt within one generation. All subsequent administrations for more than the next century and a half following the founders' lead: running infrequent deficits during most wars and deep recessions, and building surpluses to pay down the national debt in times of peace and relative prosperity. The Great Depression of the 1930s led to large deficits when government revenues fell dramatically due to the high number of people out of work, who were no longer paying income taxes. Following on the heels of the depression, World War II required still greater borrowing to mobilize 16 million American troops to fight in Europe and Asia. In the early postwar period, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations and the Congresses with which they worked roughly balanced the budget. Each president presided over three surpluses and five deficits. As the economy boomed, the national debt fell as a percentage of GDP. However, during the 1960s and 1970s, the government began to run deficits continuously. The debt grew slowly and steadily, and by 1980 it was almost $1 trillion. By the beginning of 1993, it had exploded to $4 trillion. And, despite enactment of President Clinton's deficit reduction legislation in 1993, the debt will reach the $5 trillion level by the end of 1995. Since 1980, our debt has grown far more quickly than our economy. Today, the debt is a much greater percentage of GDP than it has been since the 1950s. The 1980s marked the first peace-time economic expansion during which the debt grew faster than the economy. Who is to blame for amassing such debt in times of peace and relative prosperity, a debt that would have shamed our nation's founders? All of us. Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton, as well a secession of Congresses, resisted spending cuts and tax increases of the magnitude needed to balance the budget. And voters supported candidates of both parties who kept telling us what we wanted to hear instead of what we needed to hear. two visions of the future What Happens if We Do Nothing? If we ignore our mounting debt, if we just wish it would go away and do nothing about it, it will grow and grow like a cancer that will eventually overwhelm our economy and our society. The interest we owe on the debt will skyrocket. We will continue our vicious [[Page S 9935]] cycle of having to raise taxes, cut spending, and borrow more and more and more to pay interest upon interest. Our productivity growth will remain stagnant; more of our workers will have to settle for low-paying jobs; and our economy will continue its anemic growth. America will decline as a world power. Sometime early in the next century, we will have to confront in the fundamental truth that low productivity and slow economic growth have failed to generate enough goods and services to satisfy all of our demands. Working people will be required to pay an ever larger share of their earnings to support a growing retired population and to pay the exploding interest on the debt that the older generation accumulated. Eventually, working people will refuse to submit to the crushing burden forced upon them by their elders. They will vote for leaders who will slash entitlement programs, even on the truly needy, rather than raise taxes still further. Millions of elderly people who thought that they could count on their retirement benefits will find that the resources are not there to meet their needs. There will be a generational conflict pitting American against American, child against parent, in a way that our nation has not seen before. What Happens if We Instead Balance the Budget? We could, on the other hand, do the right thing: we could refuse to let our leaders continually borrow and spend and borrow and spend; insist that they stop wasting our money and our children's money on programs that do not work and on entitlement payments for the well-off who do not need them; insist that what spending is done is paid for now, out of current taxation. If we do this, our deficits will disappear; our debt will shrink; our interest payments will become more and more manageable; our businesses will invest; our economy will renew its rapid growth of earlier years; and more of our people will find employment in higher-paying jobs. Our society will continue to flourish, and the American dream will be restored to our children and to our children's children. do we have to start now? Yes. Every year we delay deficit elimination, the problem gets worse. And every year we muddle through with halfway measures, we slip deeper into debt. Even a smaller deficit adds to our mounting national debt and pushes up interest payments. Some argue that the economy is headed into recession and that this is the wrong time to launch a serious deficit reduction campaign. the same voices were heard opposing deficit reduction in 1993, when the economy was recovering from a severe recession, and opposing a serious run at the deficit in 1994 because an election was approaching. There will always be excuses for postponing the tough choices required to balance the budget. But until we get control over our deficits and our debt, we will not control our economic destiny.

Mr. SIMON. Then, they outline their principles for the deficit elimination. Those principles strike me as being eminently sound. It is of no small significance that they do not ask for a tax cut. Why both political parties are so enamored of a tax cut when we have this huge deficit simply defies all logic. I ask to have printed in the Record their principles of deficit elimination at this point. The material follows: What Are Our Principles for Deficit Elimination? From the experience of past deficit reduction attempts, the views of our members, and the economic needs of the country, we have derived the following principles for deficit elimination: 1. Balance the budget by the year 2002, and aim for a surplus thereafter. 2. Distribute short-term sacrifice fairly and equitably among Americans of all ages and income groups, except for the very poor. 3. Enact policy changes right away, but phase them in gradually to accomplish steady deficit reduction while minimizing short-term economic dislocations. 4. Cut defense spending prudently, according to a realistic assessment of the military capability needed to counter threats to our national security today and in the foreseeable future. 5. Control entitlement growth. 6. Contain mounting health care costs. 7. Keep revenue increases to a minimum, but if revenues must rise, the increase should come from energy, luxury, and alcohol and tobacco taxes. 8. Enforce deficit elimination with credible mechanisms, including a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. 9. Avoid gimmicks. Use conservative economic projections. 10. Attract and deserve broad public support with a sound, realistic deficit elimination plan.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, a longtime friend of mine, Lawrence Hansen, vice president of the Joyce Foundation, sent me a copy of a speech made by Deborah Leff, the president of the Joyce Foundation, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the League of Women Voters of the State of Illinois. The subject of her address is campaign financing. It contains material that would be startling to most citizens though, unfortunately, not startling to those of us who serve in the Senate. While the bulk of her remarks are about campaign financing, I want to quote one item that is not. She says: I am saddened by the media's increasing tendency to exploit, entertain and titillate, leaving us less informed about public affairs and more cynical about politics. She announces that the Joyce Foundation will make a 3-year, $2.3 million special study on money and politics. While the emphasis of her project will be the State of Illinois, clearly she draws lessons from what has happened at the national level, and we should draw lessons beyond the State of Illinois. For example, she says: In 1976, the average cost of winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives was less than $80,000. Last year, it leveled off at $525,000. Between 1990 and 1992 alone, the cost of winning a House seat jumped by 33 percent. In fact, 45 House candidates in 1994 spent over $1 million each. On PACs, Ms. Leff says: To understand the competitive effects of the current campaign finance system, consider the giving habits of political action committees--PACs. Last year, PACs distributed close to $142 million to House candidates, three- quarters of which went to incumbents. To appreciate the enormity of this bias, it's worth noting that the winning candidates last year raised more money from PACs than their challengers generated from all sources, including from PACs, individual contributors, their own donations and loans. She is concerned, as we should be concerned, the present system of financing campaign makes our political institutions unrepresentative. She observes: The skewed distribution of political money is not just a problem for challengers. There's another--and some would argue more pernicious--side to this imbalance. The campaign finance system favors wealthy candidates over poor candidates, male candidates over female candidates, and white candidates over African-American and Latino candidates. And this bias continues to be reflected in the composition of many legislative bodies. Although less than one-half of one percent of the American people are millionaires, there are today at least 72 millionaires in the U.S. House of Representatives and 29 in the U.S. Senate. (And these figures don't include Michael Huffington, who spent $5 million of his own money to win a House seat in 1992 and an additional $28 million last year in his failed bid to become a Senator.) There is something terribly wrong when millionaires are over-represented in the ``People's House'' by a factor of 3,000 percent and in the Senate by a factor of more than 5,000 percent. The president of the Joyce Foundation also notes something every one of us knows to be the fact: Candidates' increased reliance on television ads has led to less informative and more mean-spirited campaigns. We are told that attack ads work; they must, because why else would candidates invest so much money in this stuff? But who really benefits and at what cost to the political system? The public is fed slivers of information, often deceptively presented. Real issues are not discussed. The most obvious victim, of course, is a political tradition that once prided itself in allowing serious candidates to debate serious issues in a serious way. Then, she says something that I do not know to be a fact, but, as far as I know, it is accurate. She tells her audience: The United States is the only major democracy that neither restricts the amount of money candidates can spend on broadcast advertising nor regulates their access to and use of this powerful medium. As a result, the quality of the nation's political discourse has declined sharply. And so, too, has the public's confidence in the veracity and judgment of our leaders. A minor correction I would make to her speech is that she refers to $100 million being spent to defeat health care. Newsweek magazine uses the figure $400 million, and I believe that Newsweek magazine is correct. She also notes: In 1992, half of all the money raised by congressional candidates--$335 million--was provided by one-third of 1 percent of the American people. Deborah Leff has a number of illustrations of the abuses. They include references to my friend, the former speaker of the Illinois House, Michael Madigan, and the current speaker of the Illinois House, Lee Daniels. What Michael Madigan and Lee Daniels are doing is using the present system. I do not fault them for that. But what Ms. Leff is saying is that the system should be changed, and I agree with her. She does not call for any specific program of change. My own belief is that at the Federal level, we have to have dramatic change, and it will not come about without the President of the United States really pushing for change. The system I would like to have is a check-off contribution of $3 or $5 on our income tax that would go to major candidates for the Senate and the House, and no other money could be spent. Then, in a State like Illinois, instead of spending $8 million or $10 million on a campaign, the candidates could spend $2 million, and have some required free time made available by radio and televisions, not for 30-second spots, but for statements of up to five minutes by the candidates in which there is a serious discussion of the issues. I ask that the full Deborah Leff speech be printed in the Record, and I urge my colleagues of both parties and their staffs to read the Deborah Leff speech. The material follows: Speech of Deborah Leff, President, the Joyce Foundation at the 75th Anniversary Convention of the League of Women Voters of Illinois--June 2, 1995 introduction I am delighted to be here this evening and to play a small role in celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the League of Women Voters. No organization in this century has contributed more to expanding informed citizen participation in the political process and can legitimately claim more victories for democracy than the league. Yours is a proud legacy, and I salute you. Through the years the Joyce Foundation has frequently partnered with the league. We have labored together to simplify the Nation's voter registration laws--and despite some unseemly footdragging here in the land of Lincoln and several other States, we have made real progress. I read in the newspaper a few weeks ago that in the few months since the Motor Voter Act was put into effect early this year, two million new voters have been registered. Two million. It's a wonderful number. And you should be very proud. Joyce also stood with the league in its efforts to institutionalize presidential debates, and happily that has occurred. Two years ago, we supported the ``wired for democracy'' project. This collaborative effort, involving the national league and a number of State and local chapters, has been exploring ways of making greater use of communication technologies to meet the informational needs of citizens. And last year we joined forces with you in an ambitious experiment to make the Illinois gubernatorial race more issue-oriented. The goal was to enable the people of Illinois to identify their major policy concerns, frame an issues agenda, and engage the candidates for Governor in a conversation about their visions and plans for the State's future. That the candidates took less notice of these citizens' messages than they should have only confirms how desperately we need new and inventive ways for reconnecting people and their elected representatives. The ``Illinois voter project'' was a valiant and useful attempt to bridge that gulf, and Joyce was glad to play a part. a crisis of confidence Will Rogers once wrote, ``I don't make jokes, I just watch the government and report the facts.'' And although we have much to celebrate tonight, there are a lot of facts to report. And, unfortunately, they're not funny. A terrible malaise has settled over our democracy. The fact is millions of our fellow citizens are fed up with politics. They feel left out, disconnected, unheard, unappreciated and powerless. And in frustration and anger, they are abandoning the system in droves. The signs of discontent are myriad. I'll mention only a few: Three our of four Americans today say they ``trust government in Washington'' only ``some of the time'' or ``almost never.'' In the mid-1960s, only 30 percent--rather than 75 percent--of Americans felt that way. (Roper Organization) [[Page S 9939]] Nearly 60 percent of us believe that ``the people running the country don't really care what happens to us.'' (Louis Harris) Public approval of Congress almost reached rock bottom in 1994. The Roper organization reports that millions of citizens have withdrawn from community affairs over the last 20 years. In 1973 one in four American adults said they attended a public meeting on community or school business during the year. Two years ago, only 13 percent of us claimed we had attended such forums. And from a relatively high point in the early 1960s, voter turnout in national elections has declined by nearly a quarter. In State and local elections, the trends are even worse. Only 37 percent of Chicago's voters bothered to participate in February's mayoral and aldermanic primary election; and just over 40 percent went to the polls in April's general election, marketing the lowest turnout in a city election in more than a half century. I wish I could report that these discontents were traceable to a single cause, to some easily identified and manageable condition. But clearly, as everybody in this room recognizes, that is not the case. We know, for example, that economic anxieties are taking a toll on our civic life. Millions of Americans have grown pessimistic about getting ahead in a rapidly changing economy. Many are struggling just to stay even, and they blame government for their plight. We know that the breakdown of traditional institutions, like families and schools, and an accompanying rise in social pathologies have deepened the public's despair about the political system. We know that civic education is in a deplorable state and that the ranks of those voluntary organizations that have traditionally and energetically labored over the years to fill this vacuum are today greatly depleted. As some of you know, I worked for the news media for years. I respect the news media, and I often admire it. But I am saddened by the media's increasing tendency to exploit, entertain and titillate, leaving us less informed about public affairs and more cynical about politics. We know that technology, television, and talk radio can reinforce our isolation and exacerbate social divisions rather than fostering the cooperative, tolerant, and generous spirit which a democracy requires. And then there's the issue of money in politics--an old and spirited demon with which both the league and the Joyce Foundation have done battle off and on over the years. As Senator Bill Bradley recently noted, ``Make no mistake, money talks in American politics today as never before. No revival of our democratic culture can occur until citizens feel that their participation is more meaningful than the money lavished by pacs and big donors.'' The fundamental problem, Bradley says, is that ``the rich have a loudspeaker and everyone else gets by with a megaphone.'' And, of course, he's absolutely right. The Joyce Foundation believes that overhauling the campaign finance system is as urgent a piece of unfinished business on the Nation's crowded policy agenda as any other. You know, Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote, ``I think if the people of this country can be reached with the truth, their judgment will be in favor of the many, instead of the privileged few.'' We want a Government for the many, a Government where the concerns of the citizenry are respected and addressed. And for that reason, the Joyce Foundation decided last year to launch a 3-year, $2.3 million special project on money and politics. Campaign finance reform is not a sexy issue. It doesn't get enough attention from the media, and it doesn't get enough attention from foundations. But I want, in my remaining time with you, to talk about why this problem is so critical to the future of America, and why it must be taken on. the problem As you know, the financing of political campaigns is governed by a patchwork of laws and regulations. Federal candidates operate under one set of rules; State and local candidates under others. The variations among jurisdictions are endless, but these systems have one thing in common: they don't work very well. Let me briefly discuss their most obvious deficiences, leaving to last what I regard as the most compelling argument for reform. Problem 1: The current system has allowed campaign costs to rise to prohibitive levels The cost of running for public office has skyrocketed over the past 20 years, especially at the Federal and State levels. Few campaign finance laws make any effort to restrain spending. In 1976, the average cost of winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives was less than $80,000. Last year, it leveled off at $525,000. Between 1990 and 1992 alone, the cost of winning a House seat jumped by 33 percent. In fact, 45 House candidates in 1994 spent over $1 million each. The same pattern can be seen here in Illinois. Five State Senate candidates spent more than $500,000 each in their 1992 campaigns. The 20 most expensive Senate races that year cost over $5 million. These trends have had three effects. First, they have rendered public service unaffordable for a growing number of qualified citizens of ordinary means. Second, the escalating costs of campaigns are making it easier for wealthy and well-connected citizens to win public office. And third, those willing to pay the price of admission find themselves spending more time begging than meeting voters, doing their policy homework, and governing. Problem 2: Under the current campaign finance system, money, more than any other factor, determines who wins and loses elections As a general rule, candidates who raise and spend the most almost always win. Cash--not the qualifications, character and policy views of candidates--has increasingly become the currency of democracy. In last year's election, House incumbents on average outspent their opponents by nearly 3-to-1 ($572,388 vs. $206,663), and despite the public's anger with Congress and a higher than usual turnover in the House, 90 percent of the incumbents survived. In fact, 72 percent of House incumbents running in last fall's election outraised their challengers by $200,000 or more, and 23 percent outdistanced their opponents by at least $500,000. If a challenger did not spend at least $250,000--and fewer than one-third of last year's challengers reached that threshold, his or her chances of winning were only one in a hundred. Problem 3: The current campaign finance system has made elections less competitive The current rules tilt so heavily in favor of incumbent officeholders that most challengers cannot hope to win. As a result, large numbers of elections that should be competitive rarely are. In 1994, less than one in three congressional races were financially competitive. In fact, four out of five House incumbents faced challengers with so little money--typically less than 50 percent of the amount available to the incumbent--that they did not pose a serious threat. To understand the competitive effects of the current campaign finance system, consider the giving habits of political action committees--PAC's. Last year, PAC's distributed close to $142 million to House candidates, three- quarters of which went to incumbents. To appreciate the enormity of this bias, it's worth noting that the winning candidates last year raised more money from PAC's than their challengers generated from all sources, including from PAC's, individual contributors, their own donations and loans. The real losers, of course, are voters. As elections become less competitive and as the range of candidate and policy decisions voters must make narrows, there is less and less reason to go to the polls. Under the circumstances people cannot be entirely blamed for staying away. Problem 4: Because of the campaign finance system's inherent biases, many of our representative institutions remain terribly unrepresentative. The skewed distribution of political money is not just a problem for challengers. There's another--and some would argue more pernicious--side to this imbalance. The campaign finance system favors wealthy candidates over poor candidates, male candidates over female candidates, and white candidates over African-American and Latino candidates. And this bias continues to be reflected in the composition of many legislative bodies. Although less than one-half of one percent of the American people are millionaires, there are today at least 72 millionaires in the U.S. House of Representatives and 29 in the U.S. Senate. (And these figures don't include Michael Huffington, who spent $5 million of his own money to win a House seat in 1992 and an additional $28 million last year in his failed bid to become a Senator.) There is something terribly wrong when millionaires are over-represented in the ``people's house'' by a factor of 3,000 percent and in the Senate by a factor of more than 5,000 percent. When 64 House and Senate candidates can reach into their own pockets and give their campaigns a $100,000 shot in the arm, as occurred last year, it takes your breath away. Twelve of these candidates, let me add, invested more than $1 million each in their campaigns. These financial disparities are not limited to just rich and poor candidates. In 1991, white candidates for the Chicago city council raised five times more money than African-American candidates and one and a half times more than Latino condidates. If African-Americans had to run regularly against white or Latino candidates in racially and ethnically mixed wards, they would likely operate at a severe financial disadvantage. And given the importance of money, their chances of being elected from such wards would at best be problematic. As I am sure you know, never in the long history of this city has an African-American represented a predominantly white ward. And were it not for the voting rights act which has helped to mitigate the financial disadvantages experienced by minority candidates, the city council would almost certainly be less representative of Chicago's diversity than it is today. Problem 5: The current campaign finance system has made legislators and candidates too financially dependent on a small number of legislative leaders. The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of political action committees established and controlled by Federal and State legislative leaders. These entities, which attract enormous amounts of special interest money, provide an alternative way of getting [[Page S 9940]] money to favored candidates. However, these conduits--which are perfectly legal--also allow leaders to solidify their positions within their party caucuses, exercise greater control over members and increase their influence over a range of legislative matters. This trend has not only accelerated the decline of political parties but has led to an unhealthy financial dependence by many rank and file legislators on their leaders and, according to some experts, to a dimunition of their independence. There was a time, of course, when leaders earned the loyalty of their followers; today, loyalty is increasingly a purchasable commodity. That is not a good development. In 1994, Federal leadership PACS distributed more than $3.6 million to congressional candidates. But what has occurred in Illinois makes the growth and reach of Federal leadership PACS look trivial in comparison. Last year, Michael Madigan, then the speaker of the Illinois house, controlled a $5.3 million war chest, and his Republican counterpart, Lee Daniels, the current speaker, had $2.5 million at his disposal. Much of this nearly $8 million was directed to candidates in 23 pivotal legislative races in which the candidates on their own had already raised $4.5 million Although I have not seen a detailed analysis of how these leadership funds were distributed last year, I can tell you what occurred in 1992. The Democratic House candidates running in 21 targeted races that year received on average $81,000 from the Madigan fund. Of all the money spent by those candidates, nearly 60 percent came from this single source. It is not hard to believe that those Democrats who won feel a special debt of gratitude for the speakers generosity. Problem 6: The current campaign finance system has coarsened the political dialogue in this country Costly broadcast advertising has driven up campaign costs. But that is not the only problem. Candidates' increased reliance on television ads has led to less informative and more mean-spirited campaigns. We are told that attack ads work; they must, because why else would candidates invest so much money in this stuff? But who really benefits and at what cost to the political system? The public is fed slivers of information, often deceptively presented. Real issues are not discussed. The most obvious victim, of course, is a political tradition that once prided itself in allowing serious candidates to debate serious issues in a serious way. The United States is the only major democracy that neither restricts the amount of money candidates can spend on broadcast advertising nor regulates their access to and use of this powerful medium. As a result, the quality of the Nation's political discourse has declined sharply. And so, too, has the public's confidence in the veracity and judgment of our leaders. Problem 7: The campaign finance system has driven people out of the electoral process and reduced their role to voting on election day The last 30 years have witnessed what can only be described as a hostile take-over of the election process by highly paid and often unaccountable professional operatives. The campaign finance system has spawned an industry of pollsters, ad producers, time-buyers, professional fundraisers, direct-mail specialists and spin-doctors. Their exorbitant demands on campaign resources require that ever increasing amounts of money be raised. It is a trend that leaves little room in campaigns for the citizen-volunteers who were once the backbone of most campaigns. The ascendancy of political consultants has robbed our politics of the fun, hoopla, and sadly, much of the substance once commonly associated with campaigns. Problem 8: The campaign finance system all too often elevates or appears to elevate private interests over the public interest Of all the system's shortcomings, this by far is the most serious. When citizens on a large scale harbor suspicions about the fairness and integrity of policymaking and regulatory processes, as is clearly the case today, it casts doubts on the legitimacy of the political system itself. vignettes Hardly a week passes without some news report about how special interest money is being used to skew policy priorities, shape legislation and influence regulatory decisions. Elected officials may find the suggestion offensive, but a growing number of Americans are convinced that those who pay the piper also call the tune. Let me give you some examples. Tort Reform. When Illinois State legislators on one side of the tort reform debate accept nearly $2 million in campaign contributions as well as business contracts from the Illinois State Medical Society, and lawmakers on the other side accept nearly half a million dollars from the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association and tens of thousands of dollars from individual members, what are we to think? Would it be unfair to conclude that the public interest may not have been the paramount consideration in this debate? I don't think so. Clean Water. In 1994, 273 PACs associated with industries bent on weakening the Clean Water Act contributed nearly $8 million to Members of the U.S. House Representatives. Those serving on the committee with jurisdiction over the bill alone received $1.2 million. So far, the industries' efforts appear to be paying off. Water quality standards have been rolled back. As a foundation committed to cleaning up the Great Lakes, we are all too aware that money talks . . . and it may speak loudly enough to drown out 25 years of progress on environmental issues. Pesticides. The environmental working group--one of our foundation's grantees--issued a report late last year showing that sponsors of legislation designed to weaken Federal pesticide laws received $3.1 million in contributions from 44 industry-supported PACs. This represented nearly a 100- percent increase over donations made during a comparable period two years earlier. What accounted for this sudden spurt of generosity? Industry was reacting to a Federal court decision that threatened to ban dozens of cancer-causing pesticides. In the end the pesticide industry got largely what it wanted. Whether the Americans people won is another matter altogether, money talks. Guns. Last year the National Rifle Association poured $3 million into the campaigns of Congressional candidates who support that organization's agenda--an agenda, I might add, which is at odds with the majority of the American people. The NRA targeted for defeat four Members who had voted in favor of last year's assault weapons ban. Three, including Speaker Tom Foley, lost. More recently Speaker Gingrich appointed a task force to review current Federal laws pertaining to guns, including the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. All six Members appointed by the speaker are outspoken opponents of gun control, and four received significant NRA financial support during the last election. Will this panel give people who want to quell the epidemic of gun violence a chance to be heard? And if it does, will it listen to what they, and so many others have to say? Or will they be--if you'll excuse the expression--shot down by the influence of money? State Contracts. In fiscal year 1992, the State of Illinois contracted with businesses and individuals for $4.6 billion worth of goods and services. A third of those contracts--$1.6 billion--were awarded to campaign contributors of statewide candidates. And about $437 million in State business went to contributors on a non-bid basis. According to the Illinois State-Journal, the dollar amount of the non-bid contracts awarded contributors was six times greater than the value of the contracts awarded non-contributors. For the more enterprising among us, I think there's a message here. Money talks. Health Care. Despite solemn promises from nearly all quarters, the American people didn't get health care reform last year. In the end, reform was swallowed up in a sea of dollars. I doubt we will never know how much money was at play. It is conservatively estimated that in 1993 and 1994 the medical professions, insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies and an assortment of business interests spent $100 million to influence the outcome of the health care debate. There are some things, thanks to disclosure, that we do know. For example, we know that during the last election cycle health care-related industries poured at least $25 million into the campaign coffers of Members of Congress. One-third of that largesse was directed to Members serving on the five House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over health care issues. We know that in 1992 and 1993 at least 85 Members availed themselves of 181 all-expense paid trips sponsored by health care industries--trips designed to help Members learn about health care in out-of-the-way places where distractions could be kept to a minimum. Places like Paris, Montego Bay, and Puerto Rico. We also know that health care interests hired nearly 100 law, public relations and lobbying firms to do their bidding at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue--and that these firms in turn brought 80 or so former high-ranking Federal officials on board, including recently retired Members of Congress, to give their efforts greater authority. We know that the health insurance association of America spent millions to produce and air its ``Harry and Louise'' ads--a strategy that almost single-handedly led to a 20-point drop in public approval of the Clinton proposal. We know that the tobacco industry spent millions more to scuttle a proposed $2 tax on cigarettes, the revenue from which would have helped finance a new health care system. We know that the national federation of independent businesses spent even more to kill a mandatory employer tax designed to help pay for universal health care coverage. We are told that all the pushing and shoving by competing interests around health care reform was a textbook demonstration of democracy at work. We may not like the results, we are told, but this is how a democracy functions and should function. This is not how a democracy functions. The analysis overlooks one critically important fact. The interests of those with the largest stake in reform--the 39 million Americans without health insurance, the 80 million with pre- existing medical conditions, and the 120 million with lifetime limits on their health insurance policies--were grossly underrepresented. Those most in need of help didn't have an army of lobbyists on capitol hill, couldn't afford television ads, and were in no position to contribute millions of dollars to Members of Congress. On every front, they were heavily outgunned. When the definitive history of this episode is written, one conclusion will be impossible [[Page S 9941]] to avoid: in the great debate over health care reform, money didn't just talk, it roared. cash constituents Defenders of the current system are quick to point out that suspected overreaching is not proof of official wrongdoing. They are right. But the absence of indictable offenses is a flimsy defense for practices that bring about widespread distrust of the political system. In the final analysis, what counts is what people believe, and most people believe they are being shortchanged by a system which puts them into one of two classes: cash constituents or non-cash constituents. Cash constituents have regular access to elected officials; non-cash constituents don't. Cash constituents are willing to pay to play; non-cash constituents can't afford to. If you remember no other statistic I cite tonight, let me offer one that's worth storing away for future reference. In 1992, half of all the money raised by congressional candidates--$335 million--was provided by one-third of 1 percent of the American people. Unbelievably, things could get worse. For example, in the name of deficit reduction, Senate Republicans recently tried to scrap the public finance system for presidential candidates--arguably, the most important and durable reform coming out of the Watergate era. The effort was narrowly beaten back. Congress has already passed legislation that would significantly reduce the budget of the Federal Election Commission. Unless President Clinton vetoes this bill, the agency's ability to ensure financial disclosure by political candidates and committees will be severely crippled. In an unusually blunt letter to Members of Congress, the commission's chairman recently warned that a deep cut could lead ``the public, fairly or not, to suspect that Congress is punishing the agency for doing its job.'' Now, if these developments were not enough for one season, G. Gordon Liddy, the former Nixon aide and mastermind of the Watergate break-in 23 years ago, has just been honored with the freedom of speech award by the national association of talk show hosts. It's enough to make you question the Bible's assurances about the meek inheriting the earth. the foundation's approach In the face of all these problems, what is the Joyce Foundation's strategy? Our goal is to make the issue of campaign finance a more prominent part of the public policy agenda. And we are seeking to do that through projects emphasizing expanded news media coverage, public education, fresh analyses of campaign finance practices and improved disclosure and regulation. Through the work of our grantees, we hope to create incentives that will help persuade lawmakers to face up to and finally meet their responsibilities. I should quickly add that the foundation is not promoting any particular reform approach. But we believe that reform, if it is worthy of that name, must at a minimum control the costs of campaigns, increase political competition, encourage voting and restore the public's confidence in the fairness of elections and in the integrity of the policymaking process. Two foundation-supported projects designed to move us in these directions deserve mention tonight. The Illinois Project. Twenty years have elapsed since Illinois last overhauled its campaign finance system. It is time to do it again. Here is a system in which the only limits are the sky itself. In Illinois, there are: no limits on the amount of campaign money candidates can raise; no limits on the sources of campaign contributions; no limits on the amount of money candidates can spend; no limits on the size of contributions individual and institutional donors can make; no limits on the vast war chests candidates can accumulate and carry over from one election to the next; no limits on candidates' use of campaign funds for personal and non-campaign related expenses; and no limits on leadership PACs. The only restrictions worth noting are those intended to inhibit public access to and understanding of the financial disclosure reports that candidates and committees are required to file periodically with the State board of elections. And, if perchance, you even rummage through these records, you'll quickly discover that it's virtually impossible to figure out, beyond names and addresses, who the State's political high rollers really are. Illinois has the distinction of being one of a handful of States that still does not require candidates to list the occupation of their contributors. Illinois' campaign finance system makes the federal system look relatively tame, if not pristine. And that is why the Joyce Foundation is supporting a 2-year, $200,000 examination of this system by the State's leading public affairs magazine, Illinois Issues. By this fall, the magazine's project staff will have put the finishing touches on a vast computerized database that will include all contributions of $25 or more made to legislative and statewide candidates since 1990. And as much occupational information about donors as can be independently obtained will also be incorporated into the database. This reservoir of information will enable Illinois Issues to begin answering a question that should intrigue us all: Who is giving how much to whom for what purposes and with what effects? Detailed and customized profiles of individual candidates, interest groups, regions and districts will be developed. These reports, which will be made available to the States news media, are certain to shed light on the often murky financial behavior of candidates and donors alike. Citizens wishing direct access to the database will be able to get it at relatively low cost through an on- line information network. In addition, the magazine has assembled a distinguished panel of citizens who over the next year and a half will examine various alternatives for reforming the State's campaign finance rules. This task force which is comprised of scholars, journalists, political practitioners, and civic leaders--including Senator Paul Simon, two university presidents and your own Cindy Canary--is expected to formulate and advance a set of reform recommendations late next year. But before doing so, the panel will consult with and collect testimony from a diverse cross-section of interested Illinoisans as well as carefully weigh the reform experiences of other jurisdictions across the country. Money, Politics and the Public Voice. As angry as people are about the influence private money exerts on our politics, there is no groundswell of popular support for one reform approach or another. Indeed, there is no clear and loud public demand for change--at least not the kind of impatient outcry elected officials are inclined to take notice of and heed. The foundation is convinced that reform will come more quickly if the public is brought into this debate in a much bigger way. But this is not small challenge. After all, just how do you clear a space at the policymaking table and pull up a chair for the American people? Well, that's the riddle the League of Women Voters education fund, in partnership with the Benton Foundation and the Hardwood group, have set out to answer over the next 2 years. And the Joyce Foundation is betting nearly half a million dollars that this unusual consortium will help solve that mystery. About a year from now thousands of citizens, armed with background and discussion materials, will meet in neighborhoods and communities across America to learn about the campaign finance problem, to debate various reform options, and to clarify and make known to their elected Representatives the changes they want and are willing to support. These will not be undisciplined rap and complaint sessions but instead structured and expertly facilitated conversations that we hope and believe will yield the kind of reasoned and considered policy judgments that the political community will find difficult to dismiss. It is our hope that other groups--like the American association of retired persons, the American association of community colleges and the university extension system--will eventually join the campaign, adding to the league's considerable organizational reach and enabling the project to host at least one forum in each of the country's 435 congressional districts. To ensure that every step of this process is fully amplified, including the final results and public interactions between project participants and elected officials, the project is developing an aggressive public information and media outreach strategy. In addition, video, teleconferences, computers and other communication technologies will be used to connect the project's participants with each other, the news media and policymakers. To date, the league-led project team has hired a staff of seasoned organizers, engaged the services of a professional communications firm, assembled an advisory panel of campaign finance experts and completed an exhaustive review of the vast literature on this subject. In the coming days, it will launch a series of focus groups in order to get a better fix on what people know and don't know about the campaign finance problem, how they talk about it, and how they would fix it, were it in their power to do so. These insights will aid in the development of the project's educational materials and a deliberative process designed to assist non-experts work through a complex policy problem like campaign finance. The two projects I've briefly sketched out are ambitious, complex, expensive and labor intensive. If they are to succeed, the sponsors will need all the help they can garner. I know the ED fund and Illinois Issues would warmly welcome your participation and assistance, and I hope you will be able to offer some of each in the coming months. Although this organization's plate is always full and this year is no exception, I would strongly encourage you to leave a little room for campaign finance reform. Your reputation for raising public consciousness on important issues, for educating and mobilizing citizens and for talking sense to lawmakers could make a huge difference in ending those campaign finance practices that often make the realization of the league's own policy goals needlessly difficult. So I hope you will join us; the water's fine and sure to get a lot warmer in the next year. conclusion If I sound perturbed about the problem of money in politics, it's because I am. It's a problem, after all, that hits very close to home. This year the foundation will award nearly $6 million in grants to scores of organizations that are working tirelessly and in most cases with limited resources to repair and reserve the environment for future generations. These nonprofit organizations are in no position to compete financially with [[Page S 9942]] those interests whose commitments to environmental protection often take a backseat to other economic considerations. It's not a fair fight, when the congressional co-sponsors of amendments to the Safe Water Drinking Act get 60 times more money from businesses supporting the bill than from pro- environmental groups. And it's even less fair, when the co- sponsors of the private property owners bill of rights get 300 times more money from the bill's industry supporters than from pro-environmental groups. For this reason, in addition to all the others I've discussed, the foundation has a keen interest in cleaning up the campaign finance system. If the playing field were more level, I know that our conservation grantees and those working in other areas, like gun violence, could more than hold their own against the forces that oppose them. But as things now stand, every fight involving the good guys is uphill these days, and that's not right. In conclusion, let me say this. The continuing debate on campaign finance reform is more than a squabble over how to revise the rules of the road. The debate is really about fundamentals and first principles; it is at bottom a struggle for the soul of the American political system. And that is a struggle which people who yearn for a more open, participatory and accountable politics--people like you and me--dare not take lightly, walk away from or lose.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, recently, I was pleased to note an article in the magazine, the Jerusalem Report, a magazine whose quality of reporting I have come to appreciate. The article concerns the Armenian genocide. Titled ``The Forgotten Genocide,'' the article deals not only with the genocide but the delicate matter of relations between Israel and Turkey. It is a frank but sensitive discussion of the problems that have been faced by a people who, in many ways, had an experience similar to the Jewish experience. I am pleased The Jerusalem Report has published this article by Yossi Klein Halevi, and I hope it is the first of many steps to bring about a closer relationship between Israel and Armenia. I also add the strong hope that the relationship between Armenia and Turkey can improve because both countries can benefit from that improvement. I ask that the article be printed in the Record. The article follows: The Forgotten Genocide (By Yossi Klein Halevi) Every night at 10 o'clock, the massive iron doors of the walled Armenian compound in Jerusalem's Old City are shut. Any of the compound's 1,000 residents who plan to return home from the outside world past that time must get permission from the priest on duty. The nightly ritual of self- incarceration is in deference to the monastery, located in the midst of the compound's maze of low arched passageways and stone apartments with barred windows. Yet the seclusion is also symbolically appropriate: Jerusalem's Armenians are consecrated to historical memory, sealed off in a hidden wound. Every year, on April 24--the date commemorating the systematic Turkish slaughter in 1915 of 1.5 million Armenians, over a third of the total Armenian nation, many of them drowned, beheaded, or starved on desert death marches--the trauma is publicly released, only to disappear again behind the compound's iron doors. The genocide remains the emotional centerpoint of the ``Armenian village,'' as residents call the compound. In its combined elementary and high school hang photos of 1915: Turkish soldiers posing beside severed heads, starving children with swollen stomachs. On another wall are drawings of ancient Armenian warriors slashing enemies, the compensatory fantasies of a defeated people. While elders invoke the trauma with more visible passion, young people seem no less possessed. ``There is a sadness with me always,'' says George Kavorkian, a Hebrew University economics student. In a large room with vaulted ceilings and walls stained by dampness, 89-year-old Sarkis Vartanian assembles old- fashioned pieces of metal type, from which he prints Armenian-language calendars on a hand press. Vartanian is one of Jerusalem's last survivors of the genocide. Though the community has a modern press, it continues to maintain his archaic shop, so that he can remain productive. Vartanian tells his story without visible emotion. In 1915, he was living in a Greek-sponsored orphanage in eastern Turkey. Police would come every day and ask who among the children wanted to go for a boat ride. Vartanian noticed that none of those who'd gone ever returned. One day, strolling on the beach, he saw bodies. He fled the country, and made his way with a relative to Jerusalem, joining its centuries-old Armenian community. When he finishes speaking of 1915, he relates some humorous details of his life, a man seemingly at peace with his past. But suddenly, without warning, he begins to sob. For minutes he stands bent with grief. Then, just as abruptly, he turns to the dusty boxes of black metal letters and carefully assembles a line of type. Even more than grief, Armenians today are driven by grievance: outrage at Turkey's refusal to admit its crime, let alone offer compensation. Though there has been some international recognition of the genocide, a vigorous Turkish public-relations campaign claiming the genocide is a myth has created doubts. The Turks insist that the numbers of Armenian dead have been exaggerated, that no organized slaughter occurred, and that those who did die perished from wartime hardships--the very arguments used by Holocaust ``revisionists,'' notes Dr. Ya'ir Oron, author of a just- published book tracing Israeli attitudes to the Armenian genocide. Perhaps the most forceful rebuttal to Turkish denial came from the former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, an eyewitness to the massacres, who wrote in 1917: ``The whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.'' Despite the overwhelming number of similar eyewitness testimonies, the Armenians must continually prove that their mourning is justified. Many of Israel's 4,000 Armenians--who live in Haifa and Jaffa as well as in parts of the Old City's Armenian Quarter just outside the monastery compound--feel an almost pathetic gratitude to those Jews who acknowledge them as fellow sufferers. One afternoon, George Hintlian, an Armenian cultural historian, took me to the obelisk memorial in Mt. Zion's Armenian cemetery. I laid a small stone on the memorial, the Jewish sign of respect for the dead. ``Thank you,'' said Hintlian with emotion, as though I'd performed some unusual act of kindess. While historians attribute the genocide to Turkish fears of Armenian secession from the Ottoman empire, Armenians themselves say the Turks were jealous of their commercial and intellectual success. We're just like the Jews, they say. Indeed, Armenians see the Jewish experience as a natural context for their own self-understanding. They envy the recognition our suffering has earned; they even envy us for having been killed by Germans who, unlike Turks, have at least admitted their crimes and offered compensation. Like the Jews, say Armenians, they too are a people whose national identity is bound [[Page S 9937]] up with religion, whose members are scattered in a vast Diaspora and whose homeland--politically independent since 1991 but economically dependent on neighboring Turkey--is surrounded by hostile Muslim states. And while some Armenians sympathize with the Palestinians, others privately concede their fear of Muslim fundamentalism. But for all their affinity with the Jews, Armenians are deeply wounded by Israel's refusal to recognize the genocide--a result, says Oron, of Turkish pressure. Israel looks to Turkey as an ally against Muslim extremism, and owes it a debt for allowing Syrian Jews to escape across its territory in the 1980s. And so no government wreath has ever been laid at the Mt. Zion memorial. And Israel TV has repeatedly banned a documentary film about the Armenians, ``Passage to Ararat.'' Though there are cracks in the government's silence--on the 80th anniversary of the massacre this past April 24, for example, Absorption Minister Yair Tsaban joined an Armenian demonstration at the Prime Minister's Office--the ambivalence persists. Last year, the Education Ministry commissioned Oron to write a high school curriculum on the Armenian and Gypsy genocides. But then, only two weeks before the curriculum was to be experimentally implemented, the ministry abruptly backtracked. A ministry-appointed commission of historians (none of them Armenian experts) claimed that Oron's textbook contained factual errors about the Gypsies and didn't present the Turkish perspective on the Armenians. A spokesman for the ministry says a new textbook will be commissioned. While Oron is careful to avoid accusing the ministry of political motives. Armenians are far less reticent. Says Hintlian: ``Obviously there is Turkish pressure. If the Turks get away with their lie, it will strengthen the Holocaust deniers, who will see that if you are persistent enough a large part of humanity will believe you.'' So long as the Turks claim the genocide never happened, the Armenians will likely remain riveted to their trauma. Bishop Guregh Kapikian is principal of the Armenian school. When he speaks of 1915 his head thrusts forward, voice quivering. His cheeks are hollowed, his chin ends in a white- goateed point--a face gnawed by grief and sharpened by rage. Kapikian, born in Jerusalem, was 3 when his father, a historian, died of pneumonia, having been weakened from the death march he'd survived. Kapikian eventually become a priest--``to be a soldier of the spirit of the Armenian nation.'' Are you concerned, I ask, that your students may learn to hate Turks? ``The Turks have created hatred. Our enemy is the whole Turkish people.'' But didn't some Turks help Armenians? ``They weren't real Turks. Maybe they were originally Christian, Armenian.'' If Turkey should someday admit its crimes, could you forgive them? ``They can't do that. They're not human. What can you expect from wild beasts?'' There are other Armenian voices. George Sandrouni, 31, runs a ceramics shop outside the compound. He sells urns painted with clusters of grapes, tiles with horsemen and peacocks, chess boards garlanded with pale blue flowers. As a boy, he feared everyone he knew would disappear. The son of a man who survived the genocide as an infant, Sandrouni grew up with no close relatives, all of whom were killed in 1915. He resolved that when he married he would have 20 children, to fill the world with Armenians. Now expecting his first child, he has become ``more realistic, less paranoid.'' He says: ``The Turks have to be educated about the genocide. But we also have to learn how to deal with our past. I won't teach my children about the genocide as something abstract, like mathematics. I'll teach them that other people suffer; that some Turks helped Armenians; that evil is never with the majority. I'll try to keep the horror from poisoning their souls.''

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I do not ordinarily enter into the Record speeches that are 6 years old, but I came across a speech given by James Perkins, the distinguished former president of Cornell, to the Nassau Club in Princeton, NJ, on November 1, 1989. It was titled ``Europe Views the Ivy League: With Astonishment and Jealousy.'' Because it contains so many insights into where we are and how we got where we are, I think it is worth reprinting in the Congressional Record, and I urge my colleague and their staffs to take the time to read it. For example, he says: ``It is not uncommon for an Ivy League university to have a public relations office of a dozen or more people and a development office of 50 and sometime as many as 70 full-time persons at work on maintaining accurate and up-to-date files on the financial prospects of its important alumni. These files would be the envy of the CIA and the KGB.'' As a former Ivy League college president himself, he notes: ``that the presidents of Ivy League institutions spent at least 25 percent of their professional time on the financial needs of their universities and personal attention to both individuals and institutions which can provide financial resources to meet its needs.'' He finds a German observer, ``reminded his audience that in Japan, it was the public universities that restricted their enrollment and so expansion was taken care of by the proliferation of private institutions which had, of necessity, to live off their tuitions. [[Page S 9818]] The result was the Ivy League experience in reverse. It is the universities of Tokyo and Kyoto that are the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons of Japan. The best students apply to the prestigious public institutions while the privates have to fight to maintain anything like the same quality of instruction. While in the United States 80 percent of undergraduates are in the public sector, in Japan almost 80 percent of students are in private institutions.'' Many of my colleagues will remember James Perkins as the person who headed the Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies appointed by President Carter. It was one of the finest commissions ever to serve this Nation, and no small part of the reason was the leadership of Jim Perkins. I ask that the text of his 1989 speech be printed in the Record. The speech follows: Europe Views the Ivy League With Astonishment and Jealousy (By James A. Perkins) European higher education is suffering from three pressures. The first is new limits on public funds after three or four decades of increasing financial support. Consequently, there is a serious effort to secure funds from private sources. In educational systems that have almost been free of student charges, there has been the need to establish tuitions or, in those cases where they exist in small amounts, to increase them. These efforts have not been successful and have often led students to take to the streets. Support from wealthy individuals or corporations is practically non-existent because most European societies see business support as damaging to the intellectual integrity of the university. A second pressure comes from the increasing demand to decentralize authority from the central government to regions on the one hand and to the universities on the other. The recognized need for flexibility and the capacity to innovate requires plural rather than uniform arrangements. But the legacy of Napoleon, who viewed higher education as a centralized public function, required equal treatment through a uniform curriculum which could only be installed and managed by a central authority. Efforts to decentralize have had extreme difficulties because local authorities have had little experience in managing educational institutions and the universities themselves do not have a system of governance that assures effective autonomy. The two exceptions to this general rule are Western Germany, where the states preceded the establishment of the central government (although they did not create it), and Spain, where Catalonia and the Basque country have had a long history of considerable independence from the central government in Madrid. It is worthy of some note that the education reform law of 1984 in Spain does, in fact, provide for increased educational responsibility for the provinces, which only a half dozen of them have been able to accept. A third pressure for change involves the educational consequences of the provision for a strong European community to be established in 1992. There is the possibility of a growing move towards something like the federal system in the United States where the individual countries of Europe are prepared to surrender some of their independence to community authorities. On all three counts, the search for private funds, the decentralization of control from central governments and the prospects for a European community with federal overtones-- all three of these pressures and prospects have led to serious soul-searching on the part of European public officials and educators. It is not surprising that their attention would turn to the experience of the United States which, in one way or another, has had to deal with maintaining a decentralized system, a successful effort to secure private funds for higher education, and a federal system that has acquired a reasonable balance between federal and local authorities, along with a substantial private sector. It could be that four distinguished European educators decided to study one of the most successful examples of private institutions in the context of a decentralized system on the one hand and a network of connection between universities (both public and private) on the other. The four of them could have decided to make a special study of what we know as the Ivy League. Here are eight private institutions with the highest academic standards, with steady and high demand for admission (in spite of high tuition rates), and having secured what, to European eyes, seems like phenomenal amounts of money, both as endowments under their own control and annual gifts from all sources running into tens of millions of dollars. The question these four educators might have asked themselves was, ``how do they do it and what lessons can we draw from their obvious success?'' They visited the Ivy League universities, studied their governance and academic programs and their financial arrangements in considerable depth and reported on their findings to a large gathering of their colleagues. The first critique was by a Swedish social psychologist from the University of Stockholm who reported somewhat as follows. The current success of these 8 institutions finds its roots in the origins of the country where 13 independent colonies became the original states which, on their own initiative, formed a federal government. The United States, he reported, did not have to face the extreme difficulties of decentralizing political power because political power started out decentralized. And each colony was determined to create institutions of higher education long before the successful revolutionary war, the only exception being Cornell which became a land grant university in the 1860s but inherited the academic traditions of its colonial predecessors. A second historical fact of importance is, so he reported, that early higher education had powerful religious sponsors which, in turn, reflected the many sects of Protestantism as well as the presence of a Catholic interest in higher education. This diffuse religious background assured the plurality of university design and purpose on the one hand and gave the universities strong support in securing their independence from governments, both federal and state. There was, and is, no Church of England or Lutheran predominance as in Scandinavia, nor Catholic monopoly as in the southern half of Europe. Thus independence and differentiation soon led to competition and provided some of the historical basis for the flourishing of these private institutions. Finally, because of their private initiation, they were almost completely dependent upon the tuitions they charged their students which was possible because only a very small fraction of an age group had any interest in higher education. The dependence on tuition meant that from the very earliest days these institutions were sensitive to student and family demand on the one hand and society's needs on the other for a diversity of trained citizenry with widely held democratic values. This market orientation helped assure that individual needs could have a priority over government prescription. The Swedish educator ended his report by emphasizing that in the United States the states came first and they, in turn, supported the independence of the private college. Thus they never experienced the agony faced by European universities urging their government bureaucracies to let go some of their power and to build up their regions and universities and the capacity to exercise the responsibility that goes with decentralized power. His summary point was that not only did the states come first but so did private universities supported almost entirely with private funds. With this background the development of the Ivy League institutions was almost a natural consequence of the early political and social arrangements of the United States. The next reporter was a French professor from the University of Paris. He said he accepted the report of his Swedish friend and fully agreed that the processes by which the United States developed from states to a federal system and the fact that the private universities came first as a natural consequences surely described the favorable soil which nourished private institutions like the Ivy League. But he went on to report that this independence is, in modern times, secured by multiple sources of funds to carry on the work of these institutions. The early dependence on tuitions has already been noted, but today, they represent only a part of the needed income. Having carefully excluded government in early days, government has not been welcomed back as an important and, indeed, a decisive source of funds for the research enterprise that has given the university its substantial position in society. Tuitions continue to rise, but, in a concern for equal treatment and social justice, they are offset by the availability of scholarships, loans, and campus jobs that have kept these institutions from becoming intolerably elite. They are elite, but only in a meritocratic sense, and not in a social or economic sense. A second source of funds has been gifts from various sources such as corporations, individuals, and particularly alumni of the various institutions involved. Private universities have relied on gifts for many years but now, it is astonishing to report, public universities are beginning to receive large sums of private money also. He said that it seemed to be deep in the American culture that people of wealth should give to charities, their churches, and their educational institutions. Some of the wealthiest donors to higher education, like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, really believed that a wealthy man had almost a religious duty to use his wealth for the good of society. It was as if they wished to atone for any sins that might have been committed in the acquisition of their wealth. As has been mentioned, the third source of funds from government falls into two categories. State governments have been an almost negligible factor in the financing of Ivy League institutions. Once again, he mentioned that Cornell University is something of an exception because the State of New York finances four of its colleges by contracts that provide both its capital and its ongoing expenses. He also found it interesting that many States had now adopted a plan to provide public funds to its private institutions on a formula basis. This means they provide a specified amount of funds based upon the number of recent bachelor's and doctor's degrees granted by the institution in the previous year. This process effectively neutralizes the prospect of undue interference coming along with state money. [[Page S 9819]] With respect to the federal government, the Ivy League institutions receive funds based on the programs they pursue that are of interest to the federal government. Thus, scientific research, undergraduate scholarships, and occasional fellowship programs come to these universities not based upon a judgment of the university as such but rather the value of the programs they pursue as part of the federal interest. It was not many years ago, he reported, that there was a large debate in the United States as to whether federal money should go directly to the institutions. However, this view did not prevail because it was felt that it would interfere with state responsibility on the one hand and the independence of the universities, both public and private, on the other. Finally, he reported, that in the last 40 years there had been an astonishing increase in support of private universities in general and the Ivy League in particular from business corporations. In 1988 higher education had received over $2 billion of funds with a substantial fraction of this money paid to private universities in general and to the Ivy League in particular. He reported that universities had been able to receive this money, just as they had from government, through a process that effectively protected their independence from having the business interests exercise undue influence over its teaching programs. He stated, however, that in the area of research there was large debate in process in the United States as to whether the desire to acquire business corporations as partners in various research enterprises was not raising danger flags on the integrity of the research enterprise, compromising the primary university preoccupation with basic research, and forcing an imbalance in curricular interests in favor of the more short-run interests of profit-oriented commercial enterprises. He thought that this debate should be followed with interest by the European countries that were looking to business as a source of replacement funds for reduced government expenditures. His main point was that these four sources of financial support--tuitions, gifts, government, and business--not only were important in themselves but, together, they helped assure the independence of the university by balancing both the funds and their interests in a way that would insure both the development and the independence of their institutions. The next critique was presented by a Professor of the School of Architecture at the University of Rome. She said that she fully supported the presentations of her two colleagues that the educational quality and institutional success of the Ivy League schools had to be traced to their colonial origins and the current success in arranging for financial support from multiple sources. However, she said that to these two primary factors must be added the skillful development of institutional loyalty on the part of alumni and friends--especially alumni. Looking at the U.S. scene from Europe, the strong, emotional attachment and loyalty to their universities on the part of their graduates is a distinctive feature of the higher educational scene. Among all the institutions, it is the private ones which have been, of necessity, most successful since private contributions are a decisive part of their total income. And of private institutions, perhaps the Ivy League has developed the process of securing alumni support to the highest level of both art and governance. She pointed out that this highly developed institutional loyalty has produced a continuing influx of funds for operating expenses, for capital buildings, and endowments. But this financial support has not come by chance. She was astonished to find that the development of institutional loyalty started soon after a student's original entry. Even the student newspapers carry reports of the latest benefactions. They also were likely to headline the achievements of its more distinguished, or at least more visible, alumni. Their football teams, whether they won or lost, receive continuous and vocal support from the university's alumni. And all of this adds to the central notions of pride in the university and encourages their interest to assure their university's financial health. But all this requires hard and careful work by professionals to make sure that the university's activities continually appear in the press and on television. At the same time, every effort is made to encourage alumni to return to the campus, not only for athletic events, but also for lectures and public events of interest to alumni. To assure the success of this activity, the university has a very substantial office concerned with constructive public relations on the one hand and having an up-to-date knowledge about the potential of key individuals for making financial contributions to the university. It is not uncommon for an Ivy League university to have a public relations office of a dozen or more people and a development office of 50 and sometimes as many as 70 full-time persons at work on maintaining accurate and up-to-date files on the financial prospects of its important alumni. These files would be the envy of the CIA and the KGB. Furthermore, these development offices work closely with university management and faculty leadership to see that these key individuals become members of important departmental advisory committees, leading members of the alumni council, and are promoted to membership on boards of trustees. She found that the presidents of Ivy League institutions spent at least 25% of their professional time on the financial needs of their universities and personal attention to both individuals and institutions which can provide financial resources to meet its needs. In summary, she said, the business of raising money for private institutions, like the members of the Ivy League, is a big business, requiring many professionals, very hard work, and careful attention to matching needs and sources of funds over a long period of time. She could not fail to mention to her European colleagues, who may believe that securing private support was merely a matter of just asking for it, that it required considerable attention and substantial offices over a long period of time. The fourth and final rapporteur was the German Director for Higher Education in the Ministry of Education and Science. He, also, reported on the importance of early history, multiple financial sources, and the sophisticated fundraising efforts of the Ivy League universities as decisive factors in their current success. But he was astonished to discover how little the Ivy League institutions themselves recognized the role of public bodies in assuring this success. He reminded his audience that it was the privilege of the Ivy League schools to remain both selective and relatively small in their admissions which made it possible for them to concentrate on the quality of their education and research. He pointed out that in the great expansion of higher education in recent decades it was public institutions which took in almost 80% of this explosive demand for higher education. Without this expansion of pubic universities, the pressure on the Ivy League schools to double or even quadruple their numbers would have been irresistible. They would either have to have become much larger or there would have to have been 3 or 4 times as many, which could not possibly be of the same quality. Diverting from the European scene for a moment, he reminded his audience that in Japan, it was the public universities that restricted their enrollment and so expansion was taken care of by the proliferation of private institutions which had, of necessity, to live off their tuitions. The result was the Ivy League experience in reverse. It is the universities of Tokyo and Kyoto that are the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons of Japan. The best students apply to the prestigious public institutions while the privates have to fight to maintain anything like the same quality of institution. While in the United States 80% of undergraduates are in the pubic sector, in Japan almost 80% of students are in private institutions The German rapporteur ended by repeating that, in his judgment, the administrations and faculties of the Ivy League should recognize that Harvard must be grateful to the University of Massachusetts, Yale to the University of Connecticut, and Princeton to the public universities of Rutgers, Trenton State, and Mercer County Community College. They should view these institutions as their unsung friends, making it possible for them to be universities with world reputations for high quality and institutional success. The final European report was by the former Vice Chancellor of Sussex University in England. He said it was his assignment to bring the discussion out of the euphoric clouds of astonishment and jealousy. In other words, he, speaking for the group, felt they should record some concerns they had about the future of the Ivy League universities. They had been very successful in being able to continuously raise tuitions to meet their rising costs. But now these increases were going up faster than inflation and faster than the increase in personal incomes. They had already heard rumblings of discontent on the part of many who felt they could not afford these higher costs which available scholarship funds, particularly for middle income groups, could not fully compensate. They believed the time is not far off when there would be a strong reaction to these increases which would certainly come with any serious recession. In short, the golden age of the Ivy League may be here and now but perhaps not forever. A second concern was the widely understood knowledge of the great wealth of these institutions with endowments, in some cases, of well over $1 billion and annual gifts in excess of $30 million a year. As the view persists and expands that the Ivy League universities are extremely well off, it will become more difficult to secure support in the face of the rising concerns of drug abuse, the deteriorating environment, and the obvious need to refurbish the physical infrastructure of the nation. A third concern that must be on the list of these institutions is the rising quality of both instruction and research at the public universities and their recent successful efforts to raise private funds. Indeed, he reported, two of the five wealthiest educational systems, in terms of endowment, were public--Texas and California. And reports of large and successful endowment drives and annual fundraising on the part of the large public universities had become commonplace in the press. The private universities are obviously uneasy at the successful invasion of the private sector by the public universities. But they have no easy reply to the counter-complaint that public funds, both federal and now state, are finding their way into the private institutions. [[Page S 9820]] To top off this report on the fragility of success, the Englishman said that perhaps the biggest difficulty he and his colleagues saw in the Ivy League was a tendency towards complacency. They felt they ``had it made'' and deserved support just because they were who they were. He was sensitive to this matter because he felt that some of the difficulties of Oxford and Cambridge in his own country was traceable to their belief that they had a right to public support which it was the government's duty to make good. However, he concluded by saying that, as Europeans, they were jealous of Ivy League success, astonished at the way it was accomplished, but far from clear as to how far the U.S. experience could be transferred to Europe. He thought it was impossible to believe that anything like the Ivy League could be reproduced in Europe. The heavy hand of the Napoleonic belief that the university was a public utility, the faculty appropriately civil servants, and the chief administrators who reigned but did not rule would preclude any similar development. Their higher education would remain public, but he did see the real possibility that there would be an increase in private support of these public institutions and a closer relationship between them and the private sector that would take the form of tuitions providing a larger fraction of income and the business community a larger fraction of research as well as of general costs. On this last score, the hard work of the Ivy League universities over decades of time was a lesson that all European universities could well take to heart.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, recently the New York Times had a series of three articles on addiction. The second of the three articles titled ``Drug Therapy: Powerful Tool Reaching Few Inside Prisons'' tells a tragic story of our failure to provide drug treatment for those in our prisons. Those who serve on the Labor and Human Resources Committee with me know of my discouragement over our failure to pay more attention to drug treatment. About a year ago, I visited Cook County Jail in Chicago, and in the process of going around a minimum security area where there were perhaps 40 men on cots in a large room similar to my old Army basic training barracks, I asked one of them what he would like to see to give him a better chance for the future. He told me he would like to get into the drug treatment program. I turned to the jail official taking me around and asked why he could not. I was told they had 9,000 prisoners and places for only 200 in the drug treatment program. I asked for a show of hands among the other men in the dormitory who would like to get into drug treatment, and 25 or 30 raised their hands. Our failure to provide that opportunity for these men is as short-sighted as anything I can imagine. As Mr. Treaster points out in his story: ``Only a fraction of inmates--about 2 percent--undergo the kind of serious rehabilitation that can change destructive behaviors that have been congealing for a lifetime.'' The article also accurately points out: ``Drug treatment is a glacial process. Powerful changes can occur, but they take months, not days.'' Many of the drug treatments are being cut back in time and, as a result, being cut back in effectiveness. [[Page S 9822]] We should be listening to the practical words of experience that come forward from Joseph Treaster's article. I ask that his article be printed in the Record and urge my colleagues and their staffs to read the article. The article follows: Drug Therapy: Powerful Tool Reaching Few Inside Prisons (By Joseph B. Treaster) On a summer night as sweet and soft as any he had ever known, Pierre Mathurin and another young man pulled to the curb in a quiet section of Queens, snorted a couple of lines of cocaine and set out down the sidewalk. They had spotted a man and a woman strolling alone, and now they were going after them, Mr. Mathurin's fingers tightening on a chrome- plated .25-caliber pistol. It was just a week shy of Mr. Mathurin's 20th birthday, and his career as a drug dealer and armed robber was gathering momentum nicely. But that evening did not go as expected. The woman screamed, and Mr. Mathurin, fleeing with a wallet and a gold chain, was chased down by neighbors with baseball bats, turned over to the police and eventually sent to a prison drug treatment program that transformed his life. Now, more than four years later, Mr. Mathurin says he is a retired criminal and recovering cocaine addict, earning a living as a barber and a partner in a video shop, paying taxes and finding it hard to visualize the frightening predator who stalked the streets in his skin. An energetic fireplug of a man who has traded the excitement of the streets for the dreams of a budding entrepreneur, Mr. Mathurin seems to be living proof that drug treatment, long viewed by skeptics as just so much touchy-feely hokum, can have a powerful impact on the lives of those who sustain the drug culture. With more than one million Americans now behind bars and up to 80 percent of them involved with powerful drugs like cocaine and heroin, rehabilitation programs, at their best, offer a potent weapon for decreasing addiction, crime and the spiraling costs of incarceration. Yet only about one in six inmates receives any kind of treatment, and much of it amounts to little more than ``just say no'' admonishments. Only a fraction of inmates--about 2 percent--undergo the kind of serious rehabilitation that can change destructive behaviors that have been congealing for a lifetime. A result is that prisons perpetuate a kind of pinwheel of failure among drug users, who return to the streets unchanged and end up back in prison, sometimes within weeks. The best programs drastically cut the rearrest rate of participants. And they seem to be economical. One study in California showed that every $1 invested in solid drug treatment saved $7 in future costs of crime and incarceration. Abstinence alone would not end the longing for drugs, experts say, but abstinence is not even an issue at most prisons, where drugs are available for those willing to pay. Drug treatment advocates say the country could be providing intense anti-drug therapy to everyone in prison who needs if for a tiny fraction of what is being spent on the most explosive prison-building spree in history. But the nation's political leaders have stuck with bricks and mortar. Last fall, the Democratic-controlled Congress authorized $8 billion to build new prisons over the next six years, and only $400 million for drug treatment in state and Federal prisons. This year, the new Republican majority in Congress increased the prison construction allotment to $10 billion, leaving the treatment money the same. few states, like California and South Carolina, are expanding drug treatment for prisoners. Texas began a sweeping new program four years ago, but is now scaling it back. And in New York, one of the pioneers, Gov. George E. Pataki, has cut treatment for several thousand prisoners as part of his plan to reduce state spending. Joseph A. Califano Jr., the former aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson who now heads the Center on Alcohol and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, said society has a warped image of the inmate population that works against greater allocations for drug treatment. ``The average American thinks we've got guys in jail like the ones Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart played in the 1930's,'' Mr. Califano said. ``In reality, the prisons are wall to wall with alcohol and drug abusers and the mentally ill. They're not hardened criminals; they're people who can change. But they can't change without help.'' But Representative Bill McCollum, a Florida Republican who heads the House subcommittee on crime, said he and many others remain skeptical about the rehabilitative powers of treatment and about its power to reduce prison populations. ``The priority is in taking violent criminal offenders off the street and locking them up for long periods of time,'' he said. ``That comes before drug treatment.'' reshaping people ``My life started changing'' Prison is an ideal place to apply drug treatment, in large part because that is where the addicts are. On the outside, heavy drug users are scattered through almost every community. It is often hard to locate them and even harder to persuade them to enter treatment. Inside prisons, most inmates are motivated to enter treatment not because they are concerned about their drug problems but because they have something else to gain: early release, in New York; a relief from boredom; a cell in a prison closer to home. After months in a treatment program, however, many inmates find that they have been drawn into the process despite themselves. That was the case with Mr. Mathurin. ``It just started growing on me,'' he said. ``Stuff started happening and my life started changing.'' Keeping addicts from dropping out of treatment is almost as big a problem as coaxing them to enter in the first place. In prison, though, partly because the alternative is just another bunk in another cell block, the dropout rate is much lower. Drug treatment programs, even the least intense ones, seem to bring tranquility to prisons. Administrators and officers say inmates in treatment programs fight less and give their keepers less of a hard time. John P. Erickson, who is in charge of substance abuse programs in the California prison system, said, ``There is a ripple effect in terms of the overall prison environment.'' The kind of treatment that has proved most effective with inmates is done in a so-called therapeutic community. Residents are housed together, and they eat, sleep and work on their drug problems together. They begin the day at the crack of dawn by cleaning up their cells and making their beds with military tucks. Then, after a peppy morning meeting, they march through a schedule of encounter groups and seminars that continues into the early evening. The structure itself is part of the treatment. While drug abuse is the universal link in these programs, it is addressed as a symptom rather than the heart of the problem. ``The therapeutic community is a school about life,'' said Ronald Williams, a former heroin addict and armed robber who now runs New York Therapeutic Communities, which operates treatment programs in prisons in New York and Texas. ``It's teaching how to live a life that is crime free and drug free, and providing the tools to accomplish that.'' It amounts to reshaping people, and researchers say the best results usually take 12 to 18 months. But a therapeutic community at the R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a medium security prison in southern California, has shown a striking impact after only 9 to 12 months. In that therapy program, the reincarceration rate has been cut by about a third. A year after leaving prison, 42.6 percent of the inmates who graduated from the program were back behind bars again-- compared with 63 percent of those who had served their time merely lifting weights, playing basketball and doing chores. The results have been even better at a therapeutic community in a Delaware prison with a program that runs 18 months. Drug-treatment programs promise eventual savings because they reduce the recidivism rate among graduates. But they require more initial spending, raising the cost per prisoner by about $10 a day in Texas and California and $15 a day in New York. Without treatment, Texas spends $44 a day to keep an inmate in prison. In California the cost is $57, and in New York it is $71. States try to cut costs while still offering treatment by offering lectures on the dangers of drugs--which are pretty well known to most addicts--and weekly meetings of an hour or two of Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous. California and New York offer some drug education programs that run over several months, and Alabama and Florida have been providing eight weeks of intensive treatment for many prisoners. But experts say such abbreviated treatment has little lasting effect. ``It's a false economy,'' said Dr. Lewis Yablonsky, a sociologist at East Texas State University who has been working with therapeutic communities for years. ``If the states get behind the therapeutic community concept, we will cut our prison population in half over the next 25 years. That would save billions of dollars.'' showing the way Once an inmate, now a counselor Drug treatment is a glacial process. Powerful changes can occur, but they take months, not days. In a session shortly after breakfast one Monday morning at the Donovan Correctional Facility in California, on a sun- parched plateau overlooking the Mexican border, a handful of inmates sat in a circle of armchairs in a pleasant, carpeted room with paintings and color photos on the walls. Michael Watkins, an imposing young burglar who likes crack cocaine far too much, was hunched over, glowering. ``I dreamed I was getting high,'' he said. He was upset. He had been working to rid himself of cravings for three months, and now he worried that he was sliding back. But across the circle, Phillip Serrato, a 25-year-old drug smuggler and heroin addict, could not have been happier with himself. He had been out on the grassy prison yard, between the plaza filled with barbells and weight lifters and the asphalt basketball courts, he said, when some friends from his old neighborhood started passing around heroin and crystal methamphetamine. ``It gave me the chills,'' he said. ``But I didn't take any, and I feel real good in my chest.'' Gregory Kuhn, a 30-year-old drug dealer, had just turned down a marijuana joint in the yard. ``Being right there, smelling it,'' he [[Page S 9823]] said wistfully. ``I looked at it and I know I couldn't touch it.'' It was the start of another week of treatment at Donovan, where the drug culture that persists behind bars is so accepted that it goes unremarked upon by prisoners and counselors alike. Russell Power, who has the name Rita tattooed on his neck in small, loopy script, was leading the group. Like many of the counselors working in the program at Donovan, run by Amity, a private treatment organization also operating in Arizona and Texas, Mr. Power, 38, is a former inmate and recovering drug addict methamphetamine was his drug, manufacturing it was his crime. Like most of America's inmates, many of the men came from households and neighborhoods where conversations about ideas, emotions and dreams were rarely held. Thinking broadly and deeply about their lives was not easy for them. And so Mr. Power's objective that morning was simply to get them talking and, in turn, thinking, first steps in recognizing and changing habits that repeatedly landed them in prison. The addict-counselors, like Mr. Power, often seem to be participating as equals. But they are quietly suggesting ethical approaches to life, ways to get along without drugs, often using their own recovery and return from crime as illustrations. Later that Monday, departing from his notes in a seminar dealing with truth, information, priorities and support, Mr. Power talked about using the group sessions to let off steam and tension. ``If you're dreaming about using, you need to be talking about it in groups,'' he said. ``If you're thinking about killing somebody you need to be saying it in the group. ``I use the group that way. If I talk about it, I usually won't do it.'' On another afternoon in group therapy, after watching a film about German concentration camps intended to provoke a conversation about hatred, one inmate, Jimmy Carpenter, an heroin addict and shoplifter, objected to comments from another, Larry Jones, that compared the new Republican leadership to the Nazis. Certain that Mr. Carpenter, who has two years of college, was putting him down Mr. Jones sprang to his feet, veins pulsing in his neck, and lunged across the circle. Standing inches apart, the two men blustered and sputtered. Finally, with everyone shouting them down, they slumped into their chairs. It has been a close call, two men at the precipice of what would have been the first fist fight since drug treatment was started at Donavan in 1991. And, as it turned out, it was not about Nazis and Republicans at all. Mr. Carpenter and Mr. Jones had been friends for 25 years. A year ago, when they entered the treatment program, they promised each other they would stay away from drugs. But not long before the holocaust discussion, Mr. Carpenter had broken his word. He had got hold of some marijuana and crystal methamphetamine in the yard and, after everyone else went to sleep, he turned on the light by his bunk and began to party. He stayed up all night, reading, listening to music and savoring the drugs. A guard notice the light and, in the morning, Mr. Carpenter was asked to give a urine sample, which, of course, proved he has been using drugs. Though they try not get so close to the edge, the explosion was the sort of thing the counselors strive for. ``It teaches the inmates how to work through emotions,'' said Rod Mullen, the executive director of Amity. ``If they don't learn to control their emotions.'' he said, ``the first bad thing that happens will set them off. They'll go rob a store, beat up their girlfriend, get drunk, get into a high-speed chase and then, of course, they're right back in the institution again.'' gradual acceptance Success brings more programs Drug treatment in American prisons has had a rocky history. From its inception in the 1930's at Federal institutions in Lexington, Ky., and Forth Worth, it has generally been poorly administered and ineffective. By the mid-70's, criminal justice experts had come to believe that nothing works. Some of the first convincing evidence that treatment could have a significant impact on crime came in the late 1980's from a therapeutic community in a New York State prison. Tracking inmates who had been out of the Arthur Kill state prison on Staten Island for three years, Dr. Harry K. Wexler found that of those who had spent a year in the Stay'n Out drug treatment program there, 27 percent had been in trouble with the police again, compared with 41 percent of the inmates who received no treatment. Gradually, drug treatment in prisons began to expand as word of the success at Arthur Kill and at a prison in Oregon spread among professionals and Federal officials began financing pilot projects around the country. In a bit of horse trading in 1989, the New York State Assembly, which was Democratically controlled, agreed to go along with Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and the Republican-controlled Senate to build more prisons on the condition that drug treatment also be increased. By last year, there were eight therapeutic communities, treating about 8 percent of the state's 68,000 inmates. Except for Stay'n Out, the therapeutic communities in the New York prisons run programs that last six months, about half as long as most experts think is the minimum necessary. Most of the inmates who go into therapeutic communities are primed with about six months of anti-drug education. But experts say the combined programs have far less impact on inmates than a full year of intensive treatment. living without drugs On his own, tempted no more Pierre Mathurin's journey to recovery started in the Mohawk state prison in the gently rolling farmlands of central New York. He had been in prison for about a year and he had been getting high on marijuana and cocaine about every other week, depending on how supplies were running. Once in a while, he would get some heroin, he said, and sell it for 10 times its street value. One morning at Mohawk, he said, he woke up and said to himself, ``I don't want to get high no more.'' He was not particularly interested in drug treatment. He did not think he needed it. But he was told that the only way he could get into the work release program that would get him back on the street a year earlier was to go into treatment. So he signed up, and was sent to a therapeutic community run by a Phoenix House, the largest residential drug treatment organization in the nation at the state prison in Marcy. He was not a model patient. Twice he became incensed in encounter groups and threatened to punch other inmates. Each time, he was punished with extra chores and required to repeat parts of the treatment. Therapeutically, that may have worked to his advantage, because he ended up with nine months of treatment, three months more than the standard in New York. Though experts say that follow-up treatment outside prison further diminishes the likelihood of inmates' being rearrested by as much as 20 percent, Mr. Mathurin, like most inmates around the country, was not required to continue his treatment after being released. But something had taken hold in him, and he arranged to participate in encounter groups at a Phoenix House center in Manhattan three times a week. Then it was twice a week. Then, once a week and finally, he was on his own, except for the Narcotics Anonymous meetings that he attends three times a week. He is back with some of his old friends now, and some of them are still using drugs. One of them is the young man with whom he did his last stickup. He got away that night, was picked up for gun possession a couple of years later, but got off with five years' probation. He is still using drugs, and he and Mr. Mathurin are still close. But Mr. Mathurin said he did not feel tempted to get high with his friend. ``He doesn't do it in front of me, and we don't talk about it,'' Mr. Mathurin said. ``One day, he'll probably be like me. But I'm not going to preach recovery. He's got to want it.'' In the old days, Mr. Mathurin said, he considered himself mainly a drug dealer and had gone out to rob people only when sales were slow. There was, though, a certain amount of excitement, he said, in ``putting somebody in fear.'' ``Now,'' he said, ``I don't think that was right. I'm not going to say I'm making more money now. But I'm feeling better. I may make less, but you spend more wisely when you actually earn it.''

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, that article is about this legislation. Listen to the last sentence of this article. This is not from some wild-eyed radical liberal publication. This is from Business Week. Overreliance on cost-benefit analysis could make things worse for business, workers, and the environment. I think we ought to be going back to the bill by our colleague from Delaware, Senator Roth. I think that has balance. I think this bill does not have balance. This bill is going to end up in endless litigation. I know my colleague from Louisiana is sincere, as is the majority leader. But I think it is moving in the wrong direction. I am pleased to yield to my colleague from Louisiana for a question.

Mr. SIMON. Point of order, Mr. President.

Mr. SIMON. That was my question: Who has the floor?

Mr. SIMON. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. President.

Mr. SIMON. I am pleased to yield to my colleague from Michigan.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I think the dialog we have just had suggests that my point is valid, that we are going to end up with the courts deciding what is quantifiable and what is not quantifiable. I think we should move slowly in this area. I have been in Government a few years now, Mr. President. I was first elected to the State legislature when I was 25. I am now 66. I have found generally that when we take solid, careful steps, we are much better off than when we do these sweeping things. I think what we have before us now is well intentioned, but too sweeping, in answer. The pendulum will go from one cycle to the other. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Iowa for making the unanimous-consent request. What we need in this field is some balance. There is no question we have overregulation. Anyone, in any field--I do not care whether it is education, medicine, what the field is--recognizes we have overregulation. But the bill that came out of the committee headed by Senator Roth and Senator Glenn, being the ranking member, that came out 15 to nothing--that strikes me as having that balance. Let us just take a look at a few examples. Iron poison--between 1990 and 1993, 28 children under the age of 6 died from iron poisoning after taking adult iron-containing products. Overdoses of iron tablets by children can result in intestinal bleeding, shock, coma, seizures, or possibly death. Iron is now a leading cause of poisoning deaths for children under the age of 6. The FDA has proposed warning labels. This bill might well delay what could come, and would permit judicial review that clearly could cause delay. Let me give another example. When it was proposed that we have safety belts in our cars, the automobile industry was not enthusiastic about that, as many of us here will recall. Here is Henry Ford II, in response to this proposal, in 1966. Many of the temporary standards are unreasonable, arbitrary and technically unreasonable. If we cannot meet them when they are published, we'll have to close down. This was seatbelts. They were going to have to close down American automobile manufacturing because of seatbelts. We voted for seatbelts and, lo and behold, it has not hurt American manufacturing. As a matter of fact, the Japanese were there ahead of us and we are saving thousands of lives every year. Here is Lee Iacocca, and I am ordinarily a Lee Iacocca fan. He was then vice president of Ford Motor Co., in a meeting with President Richard Nixon, April 27, 1971: . . . the shoulder harness, the head rests are complete wastes of money. You can see that safety has really killed all of our business. We're not only frustrated, but we've reached the despair point. Now, all of a sudden it sells cars. Now they are bragging about the very things that they opposed: Airbags. I can remember, in 1990, the fall of 1990, right after the election I wanted to buy an American car. The only American car that had airbags on the passenger side was a Lincoln--meaning no disrespect, I am not the Lincoln type. I am a Ford, Chevrolet, or Plymouth. I could not buy an American car that had airbags on the passenger side. I finally bought a Chevrolet that had them on the driver's side, not on the passenger side. Now they are bragging about the very things they opposed. If this law were not in effect, would we have moved ahead on seatbelts and airbags? I think the answer is clearly we would not have. Let us take a look at a few other things. Lead solder out of food cans. These are examples from the FDA. Final rules published June 27, 1995; effective date to stop manufacturing cans with lead solder is December 27, 1995. What is going to happen if this law comes into effect? I do not know. Requiring quality standards for mammography tests, publication of proposed regulations are planned for October 1995. You have people who are not providing quality tests for women. What happens if this goes into effect? Cables and lead wires in hospitals have caused the deaths of a number of people. FDA has proposed a regulation to require that cables which connect patients to a variety of monitoring and diagnostic devices be designed so that the cables could not be plugged directly into a power source or electric outlet. Proposed rules were published June 12, 1995. What happens? Take another example, Mr. President. I had a press conference with two little boys with asthma. Asthma is the leading illness of all U.S. children. A young boy named Kyle Damitz spoke at this press conference. He and his brother both spoke. Here is what Kyle Damitz had to say. Hi, my name is Kyle Damitz. I am 6 years old. I go to Farnsworth school. I have asthma. I love to play sports. In the summer when the air is dirty, I can't go outside. I can't breathe in the dirty air. And my mom makes me come inside. This is not fair to me and my brothers and everyone with asthma. We need to tell the president, to make new laws. So that all the kids with asthma can play outside all the time. How do you do a cost-benefit analysis on kids playing outside who have asthma? I think you have to recognize the cost-benefit test simply is not a workable test.

Mr. SIMON. I think the answer is what is quantifiable and what is nonquantifiable is going to become a matter of jurisdiction of the courts under this legislation. I think we are going to have endless litigation.

Mr. SIMON. Let me just add, there is no question that the Senator from Louisiana has improved the bill before us.

Mr. SIMON. They are not. That is why I think we have to be very, very careful in this area. If I may regain my time just for a minute, when you talk, for example, in an area that the Senator from Louisiana knows much about, and the Presiding Officer does, and I do, and that is flood control, then when you talk about cost-benefit, it is very easy. When you talk about something like asthma, then you are talking about something where it becomes very, very difficult.

Mr. SIMON. Let me finish, and then I will be happy to yield to my colleague from Louisiana. The State of Illinois tried a cost-benefit criteria in terms of its water and air pollution and found it just was not workable. Jacob Dumelle, the chairman of the Pollution Control Board from 1973 to 1988 commented about why the Illinois Pollution Control Board had banned the mandatory economic impact analysis. This is a quote from him: Cost-benefit analyses are expensive, hard to do. In the end, you try to put a dollar value on human lives. You just cannot do that effectively. The cost-benefit test just does not make sense. Let me quote, and I ask unanimous consent, Mr. President, that an article of July 17 from Business Week be printed in the Record.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, one of the issues that will eventually have to be confronted is the status of Jerusalem. No Israeli Government can survive that divides Jerusalem. We should understand that, and we should not create false impressions among our Arab friends that there is going to be any other status. Unfortunately, we have seen a recent President and Secretary of State unnecessarily raise doubts about Jerusalem. But there will have to be some practical, symbolic adjustments made. Recently, I saw an article in the Jerusalem Post by Abraham Rabinovich, a member of the Jerusalem Post editorial staff, which had some observations. I am not, at this point, ready to endorse those observations, but what they do involve is fresh and practical thinking on this issue. My own guess is that the current peace negotiations will stumble ahead. It will not be a graceful march, but Israel will be ahead and the Arab people, of whatever nationality, will be ahead. A full-scale war will gradually diminish as a probability. But wars can erupt again and frequently erupt over symbols as much as over substance. The Rabinovich article is one that, I believe, merits reading by people who are looking for practical answers. I ask that it be printed in the Record. The article follows: [From the Jerusalem Post, May 27, 1995] An Arab Identity in the Capital (By Abraham Rabinovich) The terrifying scent of sanctity mixing with politics in the mountain air probably accounts for the fatuousness from normally sober politicians on the subject of Jerusalem. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sought to justify this month's expropriations in east Jerusalem as an attempt to meet the needs [[Page S 9471]] of an expanding population. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres suggested that it was an evenhanded taking from Jews and Arabs in order to build for Jews and Arabs. Mayor Ehud Olmert said that any housing shortage in the Arab sector is their fault--even as he raises funds for Jewish messianists who, like detonators, insert themselves ever deeper into Arab quarters. The expropriations, of course, have nothing to do with urban considerations or even-handedness. They are the opening shots in what Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer has called the battle for Jerusalem. What makes this relatively small expropriation different from previous massive ones is that the latter were made in a context of political confrontation, while the current one comes in the midst of a delicate and troubled peace process. The controversy may serve a useful purpose, however, if it jars us collectively into beginning to think about the unthinkable: finding a political solution for Jerusalem. An undivided city under Israeli sovereignty is a slogan, not a solution. There will be no solution unless Arab and Moslem sensitivies concerning Jerusalem are taken into account. Rabin's pledge of religious freedom will not carry far. The Arabs, who have lived here for 1,400 years, want political rights too, not just religious rights. Jerusalem's Arabs are already entitled to almost 30% of the seals on the City Council, although they have thus far chosen not to take up the option. It is entirely conceivable that, in the not-too-distant future, an Arab-haredi coalition will leave Israel's capital in the hands of a non-Zionist city governments (a possibility hastened by the current expropriation, which the government says is intended for haredim and Arabs). The Arabs, however, want more than that. They want an expression of their national identity in Jerusalem as well. It is possible to give it to them without endangering Israel's dominant status. Creative diplomacy could permit the Palestinians to have their capital in a place called Jerusalem without negating Israel's position that it will not share its capital with them. Eizariya, for instance, is outside the city limits--outside Israel, in fact--but is closer to the Old City, the heart of Jerusalem, than is the Knesset. What if the Palestinians were to call this Jerusalem too-- even if Israel does not acknowledge it as such--and establish their seat of governance there? Boroughs and areas of jurisdiction that partly overlap and partly don't are other elements that have been proposed for a Jerusalem solution. The Temple Mount remains the core of the problem. Moshe Dayan's proposal to permit an Arab flag to fly there is still one of the most constructive on the table. The current boundaries of Jerusalem are not biblical writ. They were drawn up in our own time by mortal men, guided by strategic and demographic, not religious, considerations. The new boundaries of 1967 tripled the size of Israeli Jerusalem by incorporating not only Jordanian Jerusalem, but numerous Arab villages around it. There is no reason those boundaries could not be fuzzed in working out a solution both sides can live with. Israeli construction in east Jerusalem has far surpassed what was envisioned in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War. The main objective then was to link west Jerusalem--via Ramat Eshkol and French Hill--with the isolated Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus. When this had been achieved and the diplomatic sky did not fall, bolder expropriations were carried out. Eventually one-third of east Jerusalem was expropriated. In addition, a corridor left open east of Jerusalem in anticipation of a Jordanian solution was eventually sealed off by Ma'aleh Adumim. As geo-political strategy, this policy worked brilliantly. The main-stream Palestinian camp, watching the hills in Jerusalem and the territories being covered with Israeli housing finally sued for peace. Such heavily charged skirmishing, however, and even war itself or intifada, seems simple compared to the prospect of Jews and Arabs trying to share the city in political peace. The absence of an assertive Arab political voice since 1967 has made it relatively easy for Israel to run Jerusalem. A Jewish-Arab council is easier to imagine as a cockpit of rancorous conflict than of co-existence. (It is rancorous enough, let it be said, as an all-Jewish council.) For the Arabs, there will be an ongoing grievance at least as massive as the Jewish housing estates covering the hills around Jerusalem. For the Jews, the most authentic Arab voice will long remain the one that drifted over the walls of the Old City from the Temple Mount loudspeakers on the first dawn of the Six Day War--itbach alyahud, slaughter the Jews. It will not be easy. With wise leadership on both sides, ever mindful that we are lying down and rising up together in a mine field, it may be possible.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, one of the Americans who has a great deal of firsthand knowledge of Zaire, the troubled country in Africa, is Dr. William Close, a physician who spent a number of years in Zaire. He is a remarkable person whose 16 years were not only given to service of the people of Zaire but given to keen observation. Dr. Close, whose instincts and insights I have come to trust, believes that the United States should be backing Prime Minister Kengo more firmly. It is the peaceful way out for a nation that is now destitute. It is a way out from Mobuto dictatorship. He has written a novel about the disease that we have heard so much about, ebola. That is also the title of his book. I have not read the book, but I understand it provides real insights into Africa. I have read the epilog to the book, which is not fiction. The book is fiction but based in large part on facts. The epilog contains insights, not only into Zaire but into international tragedies, as well as domestic tragedies. For example, when Dr. Close writes: ``Devastating diseases breed in the cesspools of poverty,'' he could be writing about other countries, but he could also be writing about our country. He prods our consciences when he writes: When the people of one nation are crushed by destitution, disaster from revolutions or plagues are inevitable. Then, countries such as ours, which with small amounts of timely assistance could have prevented the worst from happening, are forced into more massive involvement. Recent history proves the point. I ask that Dr. Close's epilog to his book, ``Ebola,'' be printed in the Record. The epilog follows: Epilog After the first explosion of Zaire's Ebola virus in 1976, the country continued on its inexorable decline into economic collapse and political chaos. A different strain of Ebola erupted in south Sudan three years later. As before, it came . . . it killed . . . it disappeared. Ten years after the tragedies in Yambuku, I had settled into a remote rural medical practice in Wyoming. One morning I opened the newspaper and read that the United States Army intended to build an aerosol lab at Dugway Proving Ground near Salt Lake City to test hemorrhagic fever viruses, including Ebola, for ``defensive purposes.'' With Salt Lake City only a three-and-a-half-hour drive from my Wyoming home, I felt a tightening in my gut: there would be no defense against a laboratory accident. An outcry from the people of Utah delayed the project--for the time being. Four years ago, Zaire was again on the front pages. Like a coup de grace, a violent mutiny gripped the country by its throat. The troops, backed by a desperate, hungry population, rampaged through the major cities and destroyed what little remained of industry, commerce, and the rotting infrastructure. In August of 1994, I returned to Zaire at the invitation of the Prime Minister of the transitional government, Mr. Kengo wa Dondo, an old friend. With Zairian and Belgian colleagues, we reviewed the medical crises that continue to overwhelm the country. Sleeping sickness, river blindness, goiters and cretinism, and malaria had been under effective [[Page S 9476]] control during the decades before independence and into the sixties and early seventies. But, with the disintegration of Zaire's economy, exacerbated by gross corruption and mismanagement, by the early 1990s these diseases were again ravaging large segments of the population and AIDS played out its slow-death scenario in every city. I visited the capital city's general hospital, called ``Mama Yemo'' after the president's mother. Her bronze bust still stands among fetid, skeletal buildings of what had been a proud and efficient referral center of two thousand beds. Old midwives walk four hours to come to work. Doctors thumb rides to be on call. The personnel is there, trained and ready to work, but there is no equipment, no medicines, no IV fluids worth mentioning. The medical staff come, still hoping that they can do something for people. Prime Minister Kengo's government has started up the long and dangerous road to reforming the national economy. This means eliminating powerful and wealthy forces that have profited from the virtual collapse of government. This means countering political egos and stepping on sensitive toes. Communications, schools, medical services, and normal government functions like tax collecting and customs at the ports of entry must be rebuilt from scratch. For this to happen, roads, telephones, postal services, water supply, and sewer systems must function properly. The disintegration of these combined services signifies an infrastructure that has plummeted to catastrophic levels. In such conditions, it is not surprising that major epidemics are flourishing, and devastating diseases like hepatitis, AIDS, ``red diarrhea,'' and now, once more, Ebola, are threatening the population and, possibly, the world. In 1976, Zaire was still a client state of the West, and although President Mobutu's long, all-powerful dictatorship had stifled progress and milked profits for himself and his entourage to the detriment of his people, some services were still working, especially the mission hospitals and schools. Today this situation is far worse. Zaire, Rwanda, and Burundi are examples of countries whose strategic value to the West all but disappeared when the Berlin Wall came down. ``Africa has fallen off the horizon.'' ``We will help you, Mr. Kengo, when you have straightened out the country.'' Catch-22 nonsense dressed in meaningless, diplomatic jargon and papered with documents that begin, ``We deplore . . .'' It takes a corrupter to exploit the leader of a client state. The present resurgence of Ebola in Zaire, the deaths in Kikwit of patients along with their Zairian doctors, nurses, hospital workers, and Italian nursing sisters, can either generate fear and more panic-provoking films, or it can give rise to an awakening in all of us. We live in a small community of nations. When one nation coughs, others cannot sleep. When the people of one nation are crushed by destitution, disaster from revolutions or plagues are inevitable. Then, countries such as ours, which with small amounts of timely assistance could have prevented the worst from happening, are forced into more massive involvement. Recent history proves the point. Devastating diseases breed in the cesspools of poverty. Many Zairian doctors and nurses are well-trained, competent professionals, but they have little or nothing with which to work. Maintenance and even the most basic supplies are lacking in government hospitals because of the gross mismanagement characteristic of regimes that preceded Mr. Kengo's government. We must graduate from judgment and neglect to realistic actions, and we must encourage the handful of men and women now struggling against monumental odds in countries all but abandoned by the West. I am sad that the occasion for the publishing of my book ``Ebola'' coincides with another outbreak of this African hemorrhagic fever in Zaire. My heart joins the many who mourn. I bow to the courage of those who take care of the sick and dying. Whether this resurgence is caused by our trifling with nature's balance or by some other tragic circumstance, let us hope that Ebola's hiding place will be found this time. If this book opens hearts, stimulates minds, and broadens our human perspectives, it will have played a small part in surmounting an immense challenge.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, if someone on this side wants to take the time now, fine. Otherwise, I will yield that remaining time. I yield the time that remains to the Senator from Washington, and I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to yield an additional 4 minutes to the Senator from Washington from the 6 hours remaining under the statute on the budget resolution.

Mr. SIMON. Now. We are talking about yielding 10 minutes to the Senator from Washington now.