Paul Simon

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. I will be pleased to yield.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I offer this amendment on behalf of Senator Glenn, Senator Harkin, Senator Moseley-Braun, Senator Feingold, and myself. And I believe I am willing to enter into a time agreement on that. I am checking with Senator Daschle on my side on the time agreement and I should know that very shortly.

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

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the amendment of the Senator from Kentucky.

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I offer an amendment.

Mr. SIMON. I thank my colleague from Nebraska.

Mr. SIMON. Yes, that is correct. And I agree with that completely. Whatever we do in the way of spending we have to have the revenue for it. I just want to make sure that we are not locking out some other possibility.

Mr. SIMON. If I could just ask one other question on the amendment, because I basically like the thrust of the Senator's amendment. Suppose that a year from now or 2 years from now or 3 years from now, we come in with a health program for the Nation with an increase in cigarette taxes or some other revenue. This amendment would not cause us to have 60 votes to pass such a package, would it?

Mr. SIMON. I will be pleased to yield.

Mr. SIMON. If I may have the attention of my colleague from Nebraska and also the attention of my friend from West Virginia, I have no objection to dropping point one because this is coming down the road. I would have objection to the language offered by Senator Byrd. Senator Byrd and I differ on this, and Senator Byrd is obviously trying to put some language in here where we will end up fighting over how we balance the budget rather than first establishing the principle. I think it is important that we first establish the principle. So if my colleague from Nebraska were to accept the Byrd amendment, with all due respect to the Cicero of the Senate, I would have to object, I would have to oppose the Exon amendment.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, on July 12, of last year, 4,200 members of the United Rubber Workers went on strike at Bridgestone/Firestone. The plants are in Decatur, IL; Des Moines, IA; Oklahoma City; Akron, OH; and Noblesville, IN. Negotiations had been going on for some time prior to that on the new contract. The United Rubber Workers had insisted on a similar contract to the contract they had with Goodyear. Bridgestone/ Firestone, which is wholly owned by a Japanese company, insisted they could not do that, and then negotiations broke off. The distinguished Senator from Ohio, as well as some of our colleagues, met with the Japanese Ambassador and urged that they renew negotiations. Unfortunately, the situation has deteriorated so that Bridgestone/Firestone has said they are going to permanently replace all these workers. It is the first time in modern history that that has been done in a large scale, with the exception of the PATCO strike. And there, frankly, you had people who were breaking the Federal law, and President Reagan--and I think it could have been handled better--but President Reagan made the proper decision that you cannot violate the Federal law and he replaced the workers. This is an unusual situation. It is contrary to the traditions of labor-management relations in our country. Interestingly, it would be illegal in Japan. Now, we have a situation where 2,000 or more workers are going to be permanently replaced. It is not going to be good for labor-management relations in those communities. It is not going to be good for United States-Japanese relations. It is just a bad situation all the way around. My hope is that we can urge our friends in Japan and urge the leaders of this company to recognize this is not wise. Short-term may save a few bucks. I do not know any of the details of the negotiations. But I have been involved in labor-management negotiations often enough that I know if you sit around a table and try and work things out, generally you can work out a practical compromise. I urge they do that. That they not go ahead as they are now planning. I will, later today, be contacting some of our colleagues in the affected States with a resolution that they may want to cosponsor, urging that they get back to the negotiating table and not have this permanent striker replacement. It is interesting that of the modern nations only Great Britain, Singapore, and Hong Kong permit permanent striker placement, plus the United States. But we have a tradition of not doing it. That tradition is occasionally violated by a very small company, but rarely by any company this large. I hope we can have some common sense by the leaders of this industry. I hope the leaders of this industry and the United Rubber Workers can get together. I urge them not to proceed with the permanent replacement of these workers. I yield the floor, Mr. President.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to address the Senate for 5 minutes as if in morning business.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, during the last session of Congress, I introduced a bill to set up a commission to look at the whole question of where we're going in the United States on gambling and what our policy should be. This is a major cultural shift that is taking place that has an impact on our citizens and has an impact on government revenue. Recently, I heard reference to an article by Stephen J. Simurda in the Columbia Journalism Review, and I got a copy of the article. I ask to insert it at the end of my remarks. My instinct is that we should move with some caution in this field. The article mentions that the Center for Addiction Studies at Harvard University says that between 3.5 and 5 percent of adults exposed to gambling can be expected to develop into pathological gamblers. Even more disturbing, the percentage is higher, 6 to 8.5 percent, for college and high school students. I do not know what the answer is, but I know that Congress and our federal government probably should not ignore this phenomenon. The article follows: When Gambling Comes to Town (By Stephen J. Simurda) Just five years ago state-authorized casino gambling in the United States was confined to Nevada and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Today, casinos can be found in eighteen states. Many are Indian-owned--as in New York, Connecticut, Minnesota, Michigan, Arizona, and Oregon. Others are floating casinos-- like those on the rivers of Illinois, Iowa, and Mississippi. And more are on the way. Missouri and Indiana have recently approved casinos, and the biggest one in the world is being built in New Orleans. Several more states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, are considering various forms of legal gambling. ``All of a sudden it's like, bang! legalized gambling is the biggest economic development force in almost every state in the country,'' says Robert Goodman, an urban planner at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who recently completed a two-year study of the gambling industry. The current gambling surge can be traced, in part, to state lotteries, which have become a fixture in the American landscape in the thirty years since New Hampshire started the first public lottery of this century. Today, thirty-six states have lotteries, and legislators would be hard pressed to make fiscal ends meet without the millions of dollars they generate. Taken together, these developments add up to a fundamental shift in the role gambling plays in U.S. society. In 1992, Americans spent a staggering $30 billion on legal gambling, a figure The Wall Street Journal reports was more than was spent on books, movies, recorded music, and attractions (such as amusement and theme parks) combined. The transformation of America into a gambling society was, of course, greatly accelerated by years of federal cutbacks, compelling cities and states to generate more revenue at a time when few politicians dare to prescribe an old-fashioned formula--raising taxes. So State legislators, mayors, and governors are often quite receptive to gambling promoters, a group that generally includes deep-pocketed developers, prominent local attorneys or financial consultants, and, in some cases, powerful political colleagues. Armed with glowing economic impact studies, promoters set out to convince communities that casino gambling will provide a big boost to their economy. Journalists across the country who are asked to cover legalized casino gambling may find it a difficult and confusing assignment, for a variety of reasons. ``It doesn't fit easily within the framework of a beat that most newspapers have, and there is a certain amount of technical expertise needed,'' says Robert Franklin, who covers philanthropy and charitable gambling for the Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune. ``There is no place from which to gather a lot of information in a hurry,'' adds Steve Wiegand, who has covered gambling for The Sacramento Bee. ``And so many of the people I speak to are so self-serving it is hard to know how much of what they tell me is true.'' These and other problems and potential pitfalls were mentioned by several journalists who have come up against one of the biggest local stories of the decade. What follows, then, is something of a field map for reporters and editors who find themselves suddenly compelled to explore and explain a complicated piece of terrain. the proposal It promises a lot and has a strong marketing effort behind it. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, a city that recently emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Steve Wynn of Mirage Resorts promised 12,000 new jobs, four million visitors a year, and millions in tax revenues. And over the first half of 1993 he and other casino promoters spent more than $2 million on lobbying, the most ever in Connecticut, to gain approval of a casino bill. Legislators declined to act on the bill after the Mashantucket Pequots--a tribe that operates a huge and hugely successful casino on tribal lands in Ledyard, Connecticut-- agreed to pay the State $113 million, an amount equal to the State's budget shortfall for the fiscal year, out of slot machine profits. (Indian-owned casinos nationwide enjoy tax- free status; their success has spurred efforts to legalize corporate-owned casinos that would pay taxes.) Inevitably, casino proposals will promise lots of jobs and tax money, among other incentives, but the promises are just that, and the reality may not match the sales pitch. In Iowa, residents of Davenport--and the local media--were dazzled in 1989 by promises of a $76 million investment by a floating-casino developer, including the building of a fifteen-story hotel, a shopping center, and an office building. By last year it was estimated that less than $20 million had actually been spent, and nothing had been built. ``The city was looking for bricks and mortar, land-based development, and that's what we didn't get,'' says Clark Kauffman, a reporter for the Quad-City Times in Davenport. As a city or state reacts to a gambling plan with its own ideas about how the money might be spent, it's important to examine who will benefit. In many states, lottery revenues, for example, are supposed to contribute to education or services for the elderly. But in California and Illinois, among others, it's been shown that lottery funds have often just replaced legislative appropriations, not supplemented them, as many people thought they were intended to do. getting a variety of opinions It's never hard to find promoters eager to make the case for gambling. ``Reporters can expect to be showered with attention'' by gambling promoters, says Daniel Heneghan, who has covered gambling for the Atlantic City Press since 1979 and has been offered free trips to other gambling properties by casino owners. (He declined the offers.) Meanwhile, ``informed critics of the industry are very hard to find,'' says David Johnston, a writer and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and author of Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. To Win Control of the Casino Business. As a result, opposition presented in the media often comes from the religious community, which makes moralistic arguments against casinos--the kind of arguments many people don't take very seriously. Last August 20, The Washington Post ran a front-page story about gambling headed d.c. considering casino gambling: option viewed as economic booster. The only opponent quoted in the piece was an assistant pastor at a Baptist church, who said, ``We don't support gambling, because it's anti-Biblical and anti- Christ.'' Reporters can usually get a more cogent analysis from economists, planners, psychologists, and other professionals. Pauline Yoshihashi of The Wall Street Journal, for example, in researching a piece that appeared in the Journal last October, asked a cultural anthropologist to explain the lure of gambling, and an entertainment industry analyst from a brokerage house to talk about the effect gambling may have on other entertainment businesses. In a five-part series in The Boston Globe last September, reporters Mitchell Zuckoff and Doug Bailey turned to an architect and regional planner to discuss the government's promotion of legalized gambling, and to a professor of commerce and legal policy to address the parasitic nature of legalized gambling on the economy. looking out for financial conflicts ``Gambling interests suck up everybody,'' says Vicki Abt, a professor of sociology at Penn State University and author of The Business of Risk. Abt says that includes her co-author, Eugene Christiansen, who is often described as a ``gambling industry analyst,'' as he was in The Boston Globe's generally first-rate series on gambling. In fact, Christiansen is a consultant who makes about half of his income working for the gambling industry--a bit of background ``Reporters are much less interested in exploring my ties to the industry than they are in getting me to give the secret as to why gambling is bad.'' Christiansen says. His willingness to be critical of the spread of legalized gambling, it should be noted, does not conflict with the interests of some large casino companies that stand to lose revenue if rivals move in on their turf. Then there's I. Nelson Rose, a professor at the Whittier Law School in California, whose resume calls him the ``nation's leading authority on gambling and the law.'' But nowhere in his nine-page vita does Rose mention that for the past three years he has been a partner in a plan to develop a string of Indian-owned casinos in southern California. ``I have no trouble talking about it.'' says Rose when asked about his business ventures, but he doesn't always volunteer the information to reporters. (In the Globe series, Rose was described as a professor ``who studies gambling law.'' The Quad-City Times called him ``one of the nation's top authorities on legalized gambling.'') It's worth noting that Christiansen and Rose are still good sources for gambling stories, says David Johnston, ``but you need to put them in the universe.'' Almost no source is safe, it seems. A reporter calling the National Council on Problem Gambling in New York City, for example, might expect to get an anti-gambling perspective, or at least a view that is cautious about the spread of legalized gambling. ``That's not what my board wants me to do,'' says Jean Falzon, the group's executive director. Instead, the council, whose board includes several gambling industry executives, focuses on raising money, often from the industry, for research about, and the education of, compulsive gamblers. What's a reporter to do?'' You flat out ask them'' if they make money off the industry, says The Wall Street Journal's Yoshihashi. (For the record, two of the experts quoted in this story, Goodman and Abt, say they take no money from the gambling industry.) evaluating the economic benefits A casino proposal will offer enough numbers to confuse even an experienced business reporter. And they're all soft. Nevertheless, exploring the economic side of casino development can offer some of the best stories about the issue. ``Many real economic issues are not being discussed by promoters or local politicians'' who are eager to get casinos open and generating money, says Yoshihashi. One of these issues involves how many of a projected casino's anticipated customers will come from outside the immediate area. If most of the gamblers are local, the dollars spent at the casino represent money not being spent on other things in the local economy, inevitably hurting some area businesses. Then, too, there's the issue of jobs, which are usually touted as skilled and high-paying. In reality, the skills are usually pretty minimal, as is the pay, which generally anticipates generous tips. There's also a history of racial discrimination and sexual harassment in the casino industry. Another issue centers around the likelihood that a casino will help a community turn its luck around. ``There can be a lot of false expectations about long-term economic development,'' says William Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada at Reno. ``It's all driven by a myopic perspective that all that matters is economic, which is bound to be disappointing.'' (Eadington, by the way, makes money off the industry, running training sessions for casino managers and sponsoring an international gambling conference that draws from industry and academia.) Lastly, despite regular denials from gambling promoters, there is abundant evidence that legalized gambling, especially state lotteries, is regressive, with poorer citizens gambling a disproportionate share of their income. Information on this often-scanted subject has come from the New Jersey Lottery Commission, The Heartland Institute in Chicago, and Duke University, among others. looking at the social costs Examining the social cost of gambling can be a fertile area for an enterprising journalist. ``There's absolutely been an explosion in the number of compulsive gamblers in Minnesota'' since casinos began opening on Native American reservations across the state, says Jim Kelly, assistant city editor of the Star Tribune in the Twin Cities. The paper has attempted to cover this issue, a notable example being a page-one November 12, 1992, piece that examined increases in crime related to compulsive gambling. Howard Shaffer, director of the Zinberg Center for Addiction Studies at Harvard University, says that between 3.5 and 5 percent of those adults exposed to gambling can be expected to develop into pathological gamblers. Even more disturbing, the percentage is higher (6 to 8.5 percent) for college and high school students, according to Shaffer's most recent research. ``It's like crack was to cocaine. It's becoming too easy to gamble,'' says Shaffer. New forms of legalized gambling may also contribute to an increase in crime, or at least increases in the cost of ensuring public safety. Meanwhile, there's the likelihood of more white-collar crime when gamblers who lose too much in the casinos try to make up their losses by stealing from employers or institutions. how will it be regulated? ``If you're going to have gambling as public policy, you have to have regulation,'' says Yoshihashi. The Wall Street Journal reporter suggests that communities consider imposing a waiting period between the time someone leaves the industry and the time the person can serve in a regulatory capacity, and vice versa. David Johnston of The Philadelphia Inquirer adds that reporters should find out, for example, whether a tax agent will be required to be on hand when money is counted, and how much casino operators will have to disclose about their business relationships with those in the community. He also suggests looking into whether the casino will permit credit gambling, which he says creates a host of problems, and whether there will be stiff penalties for casinos that permit underage patrons to gamble. Regulation is a particularly big issue at casinos on Indian reservations because their sovereign-nation status has put them into something of a regulatory limbo. A recent article in Gaming & Wagering Business, a trade magazine, raised allegations of misuse of funds, ties to organized crime, and sexual harassment at one reservation-based casino in Minnesota. Chris Ison, one of five reporters at the Star Tribune who cover gambling in an unusual team approach, says he is aware of the allegations, but has yet to explore them in depth. Ison has uncovered and reported on other forms of wrongdoing, some of which involve the regulators themselves. Last year, for example, he co-wrote a piece revealing that the area director of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs was receiving cash vouchers with which to gamble when he made regulatory visits to a casino. The bottom line In general, gambling needs to be covered like other economic development proposals--glitz and hype notwithstanding. Journalists should not forget that they may be the only ones able to cast a skeptical eye on plans to expand legalized gambling in their community. ``Remember, this is an industry that's in the business of selling illusion,'' says David Johnston. ``And it begins long before the casino ever opens.''

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, last month my colleague Senator Murkowski and I made a factfinding trip to several Asian countries, including North and South Korea. In both Pyongyang and Seoul we naturally focused much of our attention on the Agreed Framework recently concluded between the United States and North Korea. According to that document, North Korea is to dismantle its nuclear weapons production capability in exchange for assistance--primarily from South Korea and Japan--in reconfiguring its energy sector. I know that some in this chamber have serious misgivings about our deal with North Korea. I understand that; given Pyongyang's record, it would be a mistake to treat that government's ``commitments'' with anything less than a very healthy skepticism. But I believe that the more one looks at the Agreed Framework with North Korea the more one sees that the agreement does not depend on trusting Pyongyang. Rather, the United States has crafted an agreement that gives us and our partners, South Korea and Japan, new levers over North Korea. If the North Koreans don't live up to their commitments, they lose out, and we're the ones who decide if those obligations are being met. When I was in Seoul our talented and hard-working Ambassador there, James T. Laney, gave me a memo that spells out very cogently just how much we and the South Koreans stand to gain from the Agreed Framework with North Korea. The memo does have a shortcoming: like many documents produced within the U.S. Government, it is full of acronyms. Let me spell some of those out. The DPRK is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea--North Korea--and the ROK is the Republic of Korea--South Korea. The ROKG is the Republic of Korea Government. An LWR is a Light Water Reactor, the NPT is the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and the IAEA is the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ambassador Laney also gave me a very interesting statement describing the evolving South Korean reaction to the Agreed Framework. No country looks more warily at North Korea than South Korea does. So it's worth noting that, as details about the agreement became known, the Seoul stock market went up more than 20 percent. That's not the reaction of a business community that thinks its country has been left more vulnerable. I respectfully request that Ambassador Laney's memo, ``What the U.S.- DPRK Agreed Framework Means for Korea,'' and his statement, ``Seoul's Second Thoughts,'' be inserted into the Record. The material follows: What the U.S.-DPRK Agreed Framework Means for Korea South Koreans are nobody's fools when it comes to trusting North Korea. They don't. They are watching like hawks for the first sign of DPRK backsliding or nonperformance regarding the Geneva Agreed Framework. We drew heavily on the ROK's experience and advice to design a Framework that avoids the mistakes of past agreements with the DPRK. The Framework was designed to compel the DPRK to take measurable steps in compliance before getting significant benefits. Determined not to be cut out of the game, the South Koreans are trying to promote inter-Korean dialogue. Equally determined to hobble ROK influence (and perhaps unwilling to talk before the succession is completed in Pyongyang), the North Koreans are unfreeze private commercial projects in the North was a clever first step which, in tandem with pressure from the U.S., may move Pyongyang back towards substantive dialogue with Seoul. Inter-Korean dialogue is essential because many of Korea's problems can only be solved by the Koreans and because the absence of dialogue generates ROK public fears about progress in U.S.-DPRK relations. origin of the u.s. ``concessions'' LWR's: When North Korea floated the idea of converting from gas-graphite (GGMR) to the light water system (LWR), U.S. arms-control experts were intrigued. However, we declined its request that we supply LWR's because the DPRK could not pay for them. In mid-1994, the Kim Young-Sam administration indicated that it wished to provide an LWR to the DPRK as an investment in Korea, by Korea, and as an important inducement to the North to settle the nuclear issue on our terms. The LWR ultimately became the centerpiece of the settlement. We refused to allow the offer of an LWR project to serve as a reward for North Korea belatedly complying with the NPT. Only on the condition that the DPRK would obtain a clean bill of health from the IAEA before getting any significant components did we use the ROK offer to induce the DPRK to go beyond the requirements of the Treaty and give up its entire graphite-based nuclear program permanently. The South's unique willingness to sponsor a LWR project denies this proposal any precedential value, and North Korea's unenviable position in the world makes it an unlikely role model for would be proliferators. Heavy Oil: The second ``trade-off'' was designed to bring the DPRK even further beyond its NPT obligations--to freeze its nuclear program immediately and to dismantle it before the LWR project was even finished. We persuaded the DPRK to stop building and operating nuclear facilities (as was its right under the NPT) and instead take heavy oil (which the North cannot refine into gasoline) for generating substitute electricity. The DPRK renounced all nuclear activity, civilian or military, until the LWR project is completed in the next decade, to be verified by IAEA monitoring. south korean perspective War against Non-Proliferation: The U.S. and ROK shared the goal of ending the North Korean nuclear threat and agreed on strategy for accomplishing that. South Korea's overriding concern in dealing with the DPRK nuclear threat was to avoid turning the Korean peninsula into a battlefield. The conventional military threat--unabated despite the Geneva Framework--was a more immediate danger than the nuclear threat in the eyes of many Koreans. During negotiations, we systematically but quietly upgraded our deterrent posture and today the U.S. is in the strongest position militarily that it has ever been with regard to the DPRK. Further South Korean objectives were that a settlement also promote inter- Korean relations by engaging North and South in a joint project that will bring about--indeed compel--cooperation (while rendering the North increasingly dependent on the South); give the North nothing of possible detriment to the U.S. security presence or the U.S.-ROK alliance (such as the bilateral Peace Treaty that the DPRK had sought as a first step towards withdrawal of U.S. forces) and avoid giving the DPRK a legally-binding inter-Governmental agreement (but instead describe the unilateral steps the U.S. would take in response to DPRK fulfillments of its commitments). The ROK got what it wanted. what south koreans don't like about the settlement Zero-Sum Approach: A large and influential minority of Koreans who fled south during the war has traditionally dictated a ``zero-sum'' approach to North Korea. During U.S.- DPRK talks there was discomfort at having the ROK's ally engaged in dialogue with its adversary ``over ROK heads''. Exaggerated (and largely uninformed) reports of U.S. ``concessions'' to the North during negotiations generated criticism of the U.S. and heightened unjustified fears. Nevertheless, all Koreans seemed to agree that only the U.S. could negotiate a peaceful settlement with the DPRK. The ROK was unable to sustain its own its own bilateral talks with the North, and flatly opposed the idea of a multilateral approach such as the Russians suggested or the older idea of a U.S.-DPRK-ROK ``trialogue.'' While the sensitive details were withheld from the public, the ROKG was briefed every step of the way in the course of negotiations. Special Inspections: When the Geneva Framework was signed, initial South Korean complaints centered around the length of time before Special Inspections, which had become a symbol of DPRK non-compliance. Yet most ROK analysts had judged that Pyongyang would never provide access to the disputed sites which were tangled in DPRK national pride and had become an important source of its negotiating leverage. The ROKG agreed with us that the right of IAEA access was non-negotiable, but the timing could be adjusted because freezing the DPRK's current program took precedence over uncovering more details about its past activities. In the end, the DPRK agreed to permit IAEA access to the disputed (and any other) site by the mid-point in the LWR project. No turning back: South Korea has already shifted from analyzing the framework to implementing it. No critic of the agreement believes it is renegotiable or that we would be better off without it. In fact, the Koreans are worried that U.S. domestic debate on the Framework could inadvertently lead to results that threaten their interests. ROK analysts point out that the perceived threat the U.S. might renege on the deal only encourages the North to retain and strengthen its leverage to forestall us. And in the event of any U.S. retreat from the Framework, they fear the DPRK might stop cooperation with the IAEA, expel the inspectors, restart plutonium production, and reprocess its accumulated spent fuel--returning us to the situation that prevailed this summer. Six months ago U.S. pressure: We veered as close to armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula in 1994 as at any point since the 1953 Armistice. The U.S. attacked DPRK non-compliance to IAEA requirements in the UNSC and mobilized support for economic sanctions. We took a firm line and--to the great discomfort of many South Koreans--came close to an exodus of U.S. citizens and a massive augmentation to U.S. military forces. DPRK defiance: The North Koreans remained intransigent. There was no sign they would capitulate; instead, Pyongyang began to speed up its nuclear program. Experts believed the DPRK could withstand economic sanctions for some time, particularly with Chinese help. The ROK feared that North Korea would lash out in response to sanctions. Predictions included provocations on the DMZ; punitive military attacks on Seoul by commandos, artillery, missiles, and possibly even chemical weapons; terrorist acts in Seoul, Tokyo and Washington; or the extreme scenario of a full-fledged suicidal attack on the ROK. Only when we found a way to return to negotiations did the DPRK begin to reverse its hardline positions. Strains on the Alliance: Anti-U.S. feelings were evident in South Korea during this period. A misperception took root that the U.S. was baiting a wounded but dangerous animal-- gambling with Korean lives and property in defense of its global non-proliferation policy or, less flatteringly, U.S. business interests. Six months from now In the Region: The U.S.-ROK alliance is stronger than ever and we are working as partners to see the Framework to a successful conclusion. The DPRK nuclear threat gave birth to a three-way partnership: the U.S.-ROK-Japan trilateral alliance. North Korean efforts to find a seam to exploit have been frustrated. At the same time, China has been prevented from wielding influence without responsibility or reaping benefits without investment in the settlement. Prospects: By mid-1995, KEDO should be operating under U.S. leadership, investing Japanese capital, and overseeing a ROK contractor who will build the LWR project in the DPRK. The ROKG is satisfied with its central role in KEDO and the LWR project. Seoul is encouraged by early DPRK cooperation with the IAEA and the U.S. technical delegation negotiating the stabilization and shipment of the spent fuel. While sensitive to the risk that the opening of U.S.-DPRK liaison offices will reawaken anxieties in the South, the ROKG has taken a constructive position, recognizing that liaison offices will be critical in settling problems during the process of implementing North Korea's agreements. Prying loose the shutters: In the weeks since the agreement we have acquired a great deal of information about North Korea and stand to uncover more. U.S. nuclear experts have visited its nuclear installation. IAEA inspectors have gathered significant new information of direct value in evaluating DPRK nuclear capability in the event that Pyongyang decided to abrogate the agreement. DPRK diplomats and negotiators have been exposed to the U.S. and have revealed information about their system and its problems that gives us important clues. Americans are entering the DPRK for a first-hand look. In the process, we are loosening the hermetic seals that have kept out foreign ideas and influences, and bringing that country closer to freedom. For South Korea: Since talk of UN sanctions gave way to U.S.-DPRK talks in Geneva, the Korean stock market has shot up: adding some $30-plus billions of wealth to the Korean economy and aiding U.S. investors and businessmen. The South Korean focus has measurably shifted away from a cold war fixation on beating the North--a mindset that spawned anti- democratic laws and policies that the U.S. has worked to erase. Instead, the ROKG has adopted measures to spur economic intercourse with the North, promoting trade and investment as a means to reduce tensions on the peninsula and accelerate reform in the DPRK. The South's interest now is in developing the North's resources and integrating it into this prosperous region. Not only can that strategy benefit the U.S. economy, it also gives North Korea a stake in the game that works to our advantage: something to lose from misbehavior. Maintaining U.S. Leadership Like us, the ROKG is watching the DPRK's performance and is keeping its powder dry. Seoul is not about to let North Korea evade the terms of the settlement, which the ROKG has embraced as a blueprint for solving the nuclear threat and for transforming the DPRK. The leaders of the U.S., the ROK, and promised to make the Framework succeed. The UN Security Council formally welcomed and endorsed it. The IAEA has blessed it and has begun performing its part. For the U.S. to abrogate that settlement would precipitate a crisis, not only with the DPRK, but a crisis of confidence in U.S. leadership throughout Asia. It would compound the difficulty of any effort by the U.S. to employ UNSC sanctions against the North in response to the renewed DPRK nuclear activity that would surely follow. If, on the other hand, the DPRK balks at living up to its commitment, the U.S. retains the full range of options in deterring, coercing, or punishing the North Koreans. Implementation of the terms of the Framework, as the North Koreans repeatedly pointed out, will compel the DPRK systematically to strip itself of a nuclear capability. But far from achieving its major objective--normalization and an end to the U.S. embargo--North Korea faces precisely the same set of requirements that has confronted it for years. Pyongyang must make significant progress in accounting for and returning MIA remains, towards ending weapons and ballistic missile sales to the Middle East, in reducing the conventional military threat, in improving human rights practices, and the rest of the broad agenda of U.S. concerns. The South Koreans, who share these concerns and have many more of their own, believe that the significant leverage the U.S. retains will be an important tool for influencing DPRK behavior in the non-nuclear area.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, one of the people who has been calling for justice in the field of health care in this Nation for many years is Dr. Quentin Young. Recently, he was interviewed by the Christian Century, and that interview was published. It contains so much common sense that I hope some of my colleagues will read what he has to say. I ask to insert his comments at the end of my remarks. A person does not have to agree with everything that he mentions in his interview to recognize that we should be doing much better and that our friends in Canada are doing much better. My conversations with Canadian Members of Parliament suggest that there are some improvements that we could make on the Canadian system, if we were to adopt a similar system. To suggest, as have so many in our country, that the Canadian system is a failure, is an outright falsehood. It is of interest that not a single Canadian Member of Parliament has introduced legislation to repeal the Canadian system. The article follows: Health Reform and Civic Survival: An Interview With Quentin D. Young (Since his days as a medical student at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Dr. Quentin D. Young has been engaged professionally and politically in issues of public health. Currently clinical professor of preventive medicine at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago, Young is also national president of Physicians for a National Health Program. He has been a leading and tireless spokesman for health care reform. We spoke with him recently about the fate of the Clinton health care proposal and the alternative of a single-payer insurance system like Canada's.) A year ago many people had high hopes for health care reform. It was at the top of President Clinton's agenda and it seemed to have widespread public support. Now the issue is dead, and perhaps a crucial political opportunity has been lost. What went wrong? President Clinton produced an enormously complicated proposal, which left him vulnerable to attacks from across the spectrum. Those of us who support a single-payer plan thought that if the reform had been enacted the way he proposed, it would have been a dreadful disappointment and a step backward. By going the route he did, he was forced to rely on the whole insurance infrastructure and a real nightmare of managed competition. All these huge bureaus he proposed--they invited ridicule and defeat. From his public and private comments it is clear that he understands the redundancy and the parasitic role of the insurance industry: it adds nothing to the product and subtracts mightily. (Basically insurance agencies and conglomerates are in the business of finding reasons not to give care.) So in light of that, his proposal showed a lack of courage. Another form of cowardice was that he didn't come right out and call his mandated premium--which had all the force of law--a tax. So that's the President's contribution to the failure of reform. The decisive factor was the appalling undermining of the democratic process that took place in Congress. At least $150 million were spent on lobbying, on polls, on onslaughts from small business groups and others. In the face of this pressure, Congress became impotent. I think that viewing this activity intensified people's dislike of the political process. And I also think that there's a little bit of concern by those involved that perhaps the lobbyists engaged in overkill--that they created a sense of futility among the public. And power elites usually don't like to see a sense of futility among the public. Nor is it wholesome from the point of view of a reformer. The conventional wisdom was--probably still is--that a single-payer plan is politically unfeasible. Well, the route Clinton tried was politically unfeasible. His proposal couldn't have done any worse than it did. And winning isn't the whole thing. The big changes that have occurred in American politics--the abolition of slavery, the adoption of unemployment insurance and social security--did not happen in one swift action. There was a buildup of popular pressure and finally a breakthrough. clearly defined the issues, as is happening in the debate over the referendum on universal coverage in California. They are having a huge David-and-Goliath fight against the same forces that defeated the Clinton plan, because those forces know that if California should miraculously pass such legislation, then the game is over. In Canada in 1967 Saskatchewan passed health insurance legislation, and two years later Alberta did. In '71 the Tory Parliament in Ottawa voted unanimously for Medicare, which is what they call their national single-payer system. And, of course, the rest is history. It's clear that you regard Canadian experience as a success story. Canada has a humane, fair, extremely popular system. It does better than we do in longevity and infant mortality and most other health indices. Its achievement in cost containment is very simply summarized. Twenty-three years ago, before Canada initiated its reform, the U.S. and Canada were both spending 7.1 percent of their respective GDPs on health care. Now Canada's spending has risen to 9.5 percent-- not a tiny rise, but nothing like our rise to about 15 or 16 percent, with no end in sight. Whenever we talk about implementing a single-payer plan like Canada's that aims both to offer universal coverage and to cut costs, don't we have to talk also about putting limits on services? And that's what scares people. We don't like the thought of needing a heart bypass operation and being 315th on the list. There has been an inordinate amount of Canada-bashing and exploitation of fear on this topic. The short answer is that that kind of denial of care can't possibly happen in the short run. We're spending about a trillion dollars per year now on health care, and the figure is rising. That's a per capita expenditure that's 40 percent higher than Canada's--so in terms of funding we would have 40 percent more available if we were to adopt their system. If you suddenly were to give the Canadian system a thousand dollars more per capita, then any problems of rationing would be solved. In the U.S. under single-payer you'd immediately get a minimum of $100 billion available for health care by eliminating the waste in the insurance system. That's what Canada experienced when it initiated its reform. Canadians used to devote 11 percent of health costs to health insurance administration--which is what we spend. Now Canada spends less than 1 percent on insurance administration. Add to that the benefits of negotiated fees with doctors. Many billions of dollars are truly squandered on excessive fees, breathtaking fees--a half hour's work is rewarded with $2,000 or $4,000. That's ridiculous. The problems of the Canadian system, compared to ours, are trivial. More to the point, whatever problems it has involve a relative shortage in the area of high technology. That's precisely the area in which we have too much--literally too much equipment and too many specialists. This is a burden on the system. No reform will work until we rectify this problem: 75 to 80 percent of our physicians are specialists, only 20 to 25 percent are in primary care. The ratio should be 50-50, possibly 60-40 primary care. Those are the kinds of problems the marketplace gives us. Specialties offer the higher rewards. A third source of savings with single-payer is that you could really control the laissez-faire medicine that is supposedly controlled by managed competition. I'm speaking, for example, about unnecessary surgery. About a third of hysterectomies performed in the U.S. were unneeded. There's thousands of dollars and harm to patients that could be saved. We're doing twice as many Caesareans as needed. At least 20 percent of coronary bypasses shouldn't have been done. So I don't think we have to ration yet if we eliminate these problems. In the year 2010 it may be different. People are living longer. There is no question about the correlation of age with medical utilization. And scientists keep coming up with more and more complicated things that we can do to help people, which always adds big costs. But on the other end of the spectrum, you wouldn't have to treat some people at all because you've immunized all the kids and you will have early detection of breast cancer, and so on. One often hears reports that wealthy Canadians come to the U.S. for treatment--the implication being that care here is quicker and better. I'm sure Canadians went to the Mayo Clinic and to Johns Hopkins before there was mass health reform and they probably do now. Many Americans are going to Canada for care. But the crucial thing is that 99 percent of the health care the Canadians receive is under the system, which maintains high standards of research and training. One of the very important characteristics of single-payer as it's played out in Canada, which I concede is due to its parliamentary system of government, is the fact that every week in each of the provinces and in Ottawa the minister of health has to face questions and complaints--``Mrs. Jones spent six hours in the emergency room'' and so on. Also, it is illegal in Canada, as it would need to be under single-payer legislation here, for a private insurer to offer a benefit that is covered under the plan. If you allow that, you begin to undermine the system. You have to have everybody in it--particularly the elites. They will guarantee the product. They will see that by and large there's equity, there's high quality, there's a way to correct incompetence. This point came home to me when I was on a radio show with an Anglican archbishop from Canada. He talked about the danger of Canada's being torn apart by the Anglophile- Francophile issue, and how a survey was conducted to see what makes Canadians feel patriotic, what brings them together in the midst of division. And way up at the top in the poll, for Canadians of all stripes--including those in Quebec--was the national health system. Here's a civic adventure that has brought people together. Compare that to the U.S. system of tooth and claw, of fear and bankruptcy and denial. One of the reasons physicians and patients in the U.S. are wary about government-run health insurance is that they suspect it will mean an unreasonable limit on physicians' autonomy. One of the benefits of single-payer is that, with everything going through the same computer, as it were, you can easily create a physician profile, noting frequency and interval of patient visits, number of ECGs prescribed, and so on. With this profile you can easily begin to see the doctor who is off the charts--who's doing three times the average number of ECGs, for example. That's a place to look for saving resources without oppressing physicians. U.S. doctors already face scrutiny, but of a different kind: we doctors have an insurance person at the other end of the line from whom we have to get permission to practice medicine. Sometimes the line is busy, sometimes you're put on hold, and finally when you talk to the person she needs to have you spell the diagnosis that you're getting permission to treat. Not a happy scene. Do that three or four times in an afternoon and you wonder why you went into machine. The insurance system has transformed doctors into technicians and given them some incredible restrictions. HMOs sometimes forbid doctors from discussing treatment options that aren't available under the plan. That violates the principle of informed consent, central to any real patient- doctor relationship. I can give myself as an example of the need for appropriate scrutiny. I was trained at Cook County Hospital in the late 1940s and '50s when one-third of the hospital beds were dedicated to TB. We used to do X-rays on these patients every week--it was the only guide to how someone was doing. And it became an article of faith that one had to do a chest X-ray of every new patient, certainly of every over-40 urban dweller. About five years ago a younger colleague told me that there's no medical justification for doing this. Routine chest X-rays of people who have no symptoms are simply not an effective diagnostic tool anymore. I was acting out of my experience and training. But my old-fashioned approach had ceased to be good medicine. You mentioned your own medical training. As you look back, do you recall any particular experience that galvanized your concern for reforming the way health care is delivered? Well, certainly training at Cook County was part of it. It's a big public hospital that deals with an endless sea of patients--1,500 a day come through the doors in every state of malady: end-stage Alzheimer's, gunshot wounds, bad colds, gallbladder problems, cancer. Whatever there was, County had. And you see the most disenfranchised, the most impoverished, the wretched of the earth. I was just a middle-class, kind of liberal person, but it became clear that a doctor at County could adopt one of two philosophies--and the staff was about evenly divided along these lines. About half the doctors felt that they were witnessing divine justice, a heavenly--or Darwinian--retribution for evil ways, for excesses in drugs, in booze and everything else. Patients came to the hospital with their breath laden with alcohol, with needle marks on their arms, their babies illegitimate and all the rest. The other half decided that here was the congealed oppression of our society--people whose skin color, economic position, place of birth, family size, you name it--operated to give them a very short stick. When you saw them medically and psychologically in that broken, oppressed state, it was clear that you had to address issues of justice, not just medical treatment. I had to decide which of these value systems was fair and just, and which one I could live with. It seemed to me the first approach is judgmental and harsh and simplistic. Taking the alternative view gave me a shot at being a part of the human race. And taking that view also accounts for my optimism. While we are not a noble species, I've seen evidence that when people are given the opportunity they can be very noble. People get bigger than themselves, take risks, are altruistic. I've been privileged to be in a few of those moments, like the civil rights movement. That little kernel of altruism, which may account for .002 percent of everyday behavior, at times expands to be 100 percent for that day, or that week. My notion, both as a doctor and as a citizen, is that you have to expand that altruistic fraction. When we interviewed former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop about health reform, he said at one point that a central issue is the simple question, ``Am I my brother's keeper?'' Is it fair to say the American public, or a large section of it, has basically said no to that question? saying that Americans want universal care. They even say health care is a human right, which of course it isn't. It is, at best, an implied right the way privacy is. There's a dialectic to being one's brother's keeper. It isn't simply, ``Christ asserted it and therefore it's right.'' It's a living thing. I don't have the credentials to be theological, but I do think that the act of taking care of everybody in our health care system will make us our brother's keeper. It will emancipate us to attack the other enormous problems that we must solve. We can't have people hungry every night. We can't have children uneducated. But we do. We have to stop that. We won't survive otherwise. And nowhere is it written that every society survives. It's written somewhere that they all perish. And we've got all the credentials to go down the road to oblivion--not tomorrow or the next day, but not necessarily very much later. Time is running out. You are putting health care reform in the context of a much larger moral crisis. I do see health care reform as crucial to national civic survival. Consider some of the huge problems we have: air pollution, waste disposal, failed schools, homelessness, crime in the streets, hunger. The common denominator is that there are no resources available to solve these problems beyond what's already out there. Then consider health care, which is the biggest problem, and one that affects everybody. Homelessness affects those who have to live around the homeless, and it affects some sensitive people, but otherwise the problem belongs to the people who are homeless--and so on with all the problems I mentioned. But when you get to health, it's everybody's problem--if not today, then tomorrow. And it's the only social problem that we can fix using the resources--manpower, facilities, expenditures--we already have in place. I don't want to be apocalyptic, but I think the case can be made in terms of the national mood--the polarization, the hate, the despair, the dissatisfaction with the political process--that health care reform offers us our last best chance to restore a sense of civic life and civic responsibility.

Mr. SIMON

Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, recently, I read in the news of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, a speech by Ambassador Harry Gilmore, the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia. Because it has insights into the problems faced in Armenia, I am asking to insert it into the Congressional Record at the end of these brief remarks. The United States must exert every effort to see that Armenia and her neighbors, Turkey and Azerbaijan, can live together in peace. This is in the best interests of Armenia and is in the best interests of Turkey and Azerbaijan. But there are emotional barriers to achieving this. While those emotional barriers remain, the people of Armenia struggle. This speech was given in Los Angeles, on June 14, 1994, to guests attending a fundraising banquet for the American University of Armenia, which I have had the privilege of visiting in Armenia. The speech follows: Harry Gilmore--United States Ambassador to the Republic of Armenia Distinguished friends and guests of the American University of Armenia, I bring you a story tonight of darkness and light. The darkness you know. Armenia is going through perhaps the most difficult period it has endured since the end of first Republic of Armenia in 1920. The people of Armenia have been living without heat and light, beset by war and economic hardship. But in the middle of the darkness there are some islands of light--and one of those is the American University of Armenia. Tonight I want to tell you some of my experiences as the first Ambassador of the United States to the Republic of Armenia. I want to tell you something about what the United States Government is doing in Armenia. And I want to tell you why I believe in the future of Armenia. Our Embassy in Yerevan, the first foreign Embassy in Armenia, opened in February 1992, in the Hrazdan Hotel. Now we are in the building that once was home of the Young Communist League. We have about fifteen Americans working in our Embassy from the Department of State, USAID, USIA, and the Peace Corps, and about sixty Armenian employees. Plus there are 25 Peace Corps Volunteers in Armenia, with more to come in July. As you may know, in August 1992 I was first nominated to be Ambassador by President Bush. After the 1992 elections, President Clinton re-nominated me. I was finally confirmed by the Senate in May 1993. I arrived in Yerevan with my wife Carol that same month, one year ago. I found our diplomats in Yerevan were living, much like the residents of Yerevan, frequently without electricity, heat, or water. There was, and often still is, only about one or two hours of electricity each day. During the first winter, our diplomats often wrote their cables by the light of butane lanterns. One diplomat found that his laptop computer wouldn't start unless he heated it up first on top of his wood stove. Now we are fortunate to have generators and kerosene heaters in our homes and at the Embassy. Most Armenians are not so lucky. Nuclear physicists are working by candlelight. A factory that used to produce microprocessors is making kerosene stoves. One daily newspaper, The Voice of Armenia is being printed on ice-cream wrapping paper. The winter before I arrived, the temperature inside school classrooms was often below freezing. Some classes consisted of little more than jumping up and down to stay warm. I decided from the beginning that our Embassy should have three goals: first, to help Armenia survive, emphasizing humanitarian assistance; second, to try to help Armenia achieve peace, and an end to its economic isolation; and third, to help Armenia build a democratic government and new free market economy that will allow Armenians to control their own destiny, and guarantee their own future. helping armenia survive: humanitarian assistance Our first job has been to help provide humanitarian aid, so Armenia can survive the economic crises caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the war. The Armenian- American community, the Armenian Church and other private donor organizations have been extremely active in these efforts. Soon after the Embassy opened, the U.S. Agency for International Development located its regional office for the Caucasus in Yerevan, and our government got involved in a major way. Much of our time has been taken up by the logistics of getting wheat and fuel moving to Armenia. I now know more about the Georgian railway system than I ever wanted to know. When U.S. government wheat was stranded in Batumi, in Georgia, because there was no electricity to run the Georgian railways, we chartered diesel locomotives, and provided fuel for them. When there was a shortage of wheat in Armenia, because the trains in Georgia weren't running, we obtained money to buy kerosene and diesel fuel to trade to the Armenian farmers for wheat. States government has brought in medicine, flour, and other necessities of life, purchased by the government or donated by private organizations in the U.S. Thanks largely to the lobbying efforts of the Armenian-American community, a winter airlift brought in over eighty thousand kerosene heaters, and trains of tank cars brought thousands of tons of kerosene to Armenia, so schools and homes of the elderly, one-parent families, and other people sitting at home in the cold could have heat. The winter of 1992-93 all the schools closed in Armenia. It was too cold to study. This winter was different. In February I visited a working class school in the Charbakh district outside Yerevan. You could see through a crack in the wall caused by the 1988 earthquake. The temperature in the hallways was freezing, and the students and teachers wore winter coats, hats, scarves and mittens inside but because of the heaters and kerosene we and a French organization named Forum had furnished, classes were going on, and students were learning. With great pride, they sang Armenian songs and recited Armenian poetry for me. So I can tell you first hand that our help is getting there, and is getting to the people who need it most. But humanitarian aid, though it takes much of our time and efforts, is only a temporary measure, not a long-term answer. The real answer lies in finding an end to the conflict in Artsakh. ending the war Helping the parties to find an end to the war is the most important, and the most difficult, of our objectives. Without peace--and I mean a just peace--there cannot be any end to economic isolation, no development, no trade. The war is taking the resources of Armenia, and the lives of some of its best young men. I see the new graves in the cemeteries, the faces in the newspapers, the memorial shrines in the schools. The war is a very heavy burden for the people of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh. Some people think that the war could be ended by a few telephone calls. I wish it were so simple, Hatred and distrust have built up over the decades, and have often been used by politicians for their own purposes. It may take a long time for the hatred to die down, and the people of Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan will have to live again as neighbors. Our job is to encourage and facilitate an end to the fighting, and then to get the participants to sit down together, talking instead of shooting. We believe the best way to do this is through the international efforts of the so-called ``Minsk Group'' of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a process which includes all the countries in the region, except Iran, and which allows the people of Nagorno-Karabakh to be heard. The Russian Government is also working to achieve a settlement. We are trying to encourage the Russians to combine their efforts with those of the CSCE. It is difficult and frustrating process. At this point, the leaders of Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh say they want to talk. But so far the kind of compromise which would end the fighting and launch a negotiating process has been elusive. We are trying, step by step, to find common ground and build trust. It will demand compromise from both sides. The compromises may be painful. But the only alternative to compromise is an endless war. I don't believe that anyone in Armenia wants to see the children of the next generation fighting the same endless war.