Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up my amendment which is at the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Madam President, I wish to offer an amendment to create a workforce for sustainable energy and energy efficiency. We are building on what was in the bill originally. We have boilerplate language.

Fifteen minutes or so.

Yes.

Madam President, 15 or 20. I think I can do it in 15.

I thank the Senator.

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

Let me thank my friend from New Mexico for the opportunity to go forward.

Madam President, I rise to offer an amendment on behalf of myself, Senator Clinton, Senator Kerry, and Senator Biden.

Our amendment would strike section 277 of the Senate substitute, which is very broad language directing the Secretary of Labor to work with the Secretary of Energy to develop workforce training for the energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors, and replace it with a clearer directive regarding workforce development in those same areas.

Before I get too far along in the description of the amendment, I would like to thank Senators Bingaman and Domenici for including section 277 in the underlying bill. I think we all recognize the need to provide more workforce training in the areas of energy efficiency and renewable energy if we are to truly meet the challenge in front of us.

The amendment I offer today simply builds upon the language already included in the legislation we are considering, and so I hope it will receive the resounding support of this body. In other words, we had boilerplate language already in it, and we have built upon that. Up to this point, we have had strong bipartisan support.

This amendment would create a sustainable, comprehensive public program to provide quality training for jobs created through renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives--an area of our economy that is in tremendous need of expansion to meet the demand for a skilled workforce in these sectors.

Fundamentally, the amendment would do two basic things: One, expand our Nation's capacity to identify and track the new jobs and skills associated with the growing clean energy technology sector; secondly, develop national and State training programs to address skill shortages that have already begun to impair the expansion of clean energy and efficiency technologies.

More specifically, the amendment would authorize funding for national and State research on labor market trends in the energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors. Additionally, the amendment would provide competitive grants for national and State

training programs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency areas.

Entities eligible for grants are nonprofit partnerships that include equal participation of industry and labor groups, and there is explicit encouragement for the development of partnerships with other organizations such as community-based organizations, educational institutions, small businesses, cooperatives, State and local veterans agencies, and veterans service organizations.

Some of the target populations for the training programs include those who are veterans of the Armed Forces, those affected by national energy or environmental policies, those displaced by economic globalization, and those seeking pathways out of poverty and into economic self-sufficiency. The eligible industries include the energy- efficient building, construction, and retrofits industry; the renewable electric power industry; the energy-efficient and advanced drive train vehicle industry; the biofuels industry; and the deconstruction and materials use industries.

Some may ask whether we even have reason to believe we need training to increase the number of workers skilled in the areas targeted by this amendment. The answer is a resounding yes. We know the lack of trained workers is a significant barrier to the growth of the renewable and energy efficiency industries.

A 2006 study from the National Renewable Energy Lab identified the shortage of skills and training as a leading nontechnical barrier to renewable energy and energy efficiency growth. This same study identified a number of critical unmet training needs, including lack of reliable installation, maintenance, and inspection services, the shortage of key technical and manufacturing skills, and failure of the educational system to provide adequate training in new technologies.

All of those issues are addressed in this amendment. I can tell you from talking to the people on the ground, there is a real shortage of trained workers in these areas. In Vermont, if a family wants to retrofit and weatherize their home, it could take a very long time to make it happen because there are simply not enough workers out there trained to do the work. The same thing goes for installation of solar panels or wind turbines.

The widespread adoption of these technologies is being stopped in its tracks because we simply do not have enough people to do the jobs. But instead of talking about a study or listening to my experience from Vermont, let me actually offer testimonials from some of those who are most familiar with the need for the workforce development concepts I am proposing.

Let me quote Tim Michels, from Energy Solutions, Incorporated, from St. Louis, MO:

We have been saving energy for institutions for over 30

years. We typically find that we can reduce energy use 25+

percent with less than a 4 year payback, so it is very

economical and we have lots of case studies to prove it. The

limiting factor to our growth as an industry is lack of

qualified professionals to perform the analyses.

That is what we are trying to do: find the workers to do those types of efforts.

Lisa Mortensen, the CEO of Community Fuels, of Encinitas, CA, states:

Currently, we are constructing a 7.5 million gallon per

year biodiesel plant at Port of Stockton, California. As a

renewable energy start-up we have an intimate understanding

of the need for a high quality workforce. Skills in

mechanical operations, industrial hygiene and safety, quality

control and a wider understanding of energy production are

essential to a quality workforce. These skills are not easily

learned. With funding opportunities like the one proposed,

our company could work with local training institutions to

help develop a workforce prepared for the changing U.S.

landscape.

Christopher O'Brien, vice president for strategy & government relations, Sharp Electronics Corporation, of Mayway, NJ, writes:

Sharp Corporation is the world's leading producer of solar

photovoltaic equipment and has been the No. 1 producer since

2000. Sharp's solar manufacturing plant in Memphis is the

largest solar panel manufacturing facility in the U.S., with

annual production capacity of 64 Megawatts, comprised of

almost 400,000 solar panels. The 200 solar production workers

in Memphis are represented by IBEW Local 474. Sharp supports

the proposal for increased Federal funding for worker

training in solar and other renewable energy and energy

efficiency industries. . . . We have since 2003 trained and

certified over 1,681 workers. Additional Federal funding

support would help to accelerate the pace of this training

and would assure Sharp and other solar manufacturers that

there will be a reliable and professionally trained pool of

workers to deliver and install solar energy systems on

customers' homes and commercial buildings. . . .

Those are a few--just a few--of the testimonials that have come across my desk as I have worked on this amendment, but I do think they do a good job of making this issue real for those of us in the Senate.

Now, my colleagues may wonder why we need a specific program for training in energy efficiency and renewables. The answer is simple: While the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries use many skills that can be transferred from other industries, specific, additional skills are often needed to take maximum advantage of the newer energy technologies.

For instance, investments in training of building maintenance workers and building superintendents and engineers can improve the operation of today's heating and cooling systems by as much as 10 percent in large public and commercial buildings, according to the National Association of Energy Services Companies. Such training could save millions of dollars per year in energy costs in larger public or commercial buildings, not to mention reduce the emission of pollutants that add to global warming. Let me quote from two business leaders about the need for specific training in these areas.

Erik Larson, from Indie Energy, of Evanston, IL:

We are the first company in the Chicago area to develop

geothermal systems for commercial and residential

developments using in-house vertical drilling. . . . We

recognized right away that the skill sets required for a

geothermal operation were not available in current labor

markets.

Robert de Grasse, senior vice president of technical standards, AIMCO--America's largest owner of apartment complexes--of Denver, CO, writes:

I personally support the Energy Efficiency and Renewable

Energy Worker Training Program. AIMCO is expecting that

properly trained maintenance technicians will have

significant and measurable benefits; in particular with HVAC

systems and electric motors. Energy User News described the

energy and financial savings on HVAC for community colleges

in California was estimated from 6 percent to 19 percent of a

typical community college's energy bill; a direct result of

technical training.

There is no doubt in my mind this amendment could make a tremendous difference in our ability to implement concrete, on-the-ground strategies that help to address our energy challenges. Ensuring we have a workforce trained in the skills needed to implement bold energy efficiency and renewable energy policies will go a long way.

Before I yield the floor, I would like to read the long list of some of the organizations that support the Sanders-Clinton-Kerry-Biden amendment, and I ask unanimous consent that letters from the following groups be printed in the Record.

Some of those groups are the Apollo Alliance; the Renewable Fuels Association; Wider Opportunities for Women; the Union of Concerned Scientists; the AFL-CIO; the National Association of Energy Service Companies, which includes many businesses and utilities that we all have heard of--Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Trane, and Pacific Gas & Electric, to name a few--the Sierra Club; the Alliance to Save Energy; the Solar Energy Industries Association; Clean Water Action; the American Wind Energy Association; Earthjustice; the American Solar Energy Society; the American Council for an Energy- Efficient Economy; Public Citizen; the Center for American Progress Action Fund; and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

To conclude, this amendment has widespread support from the business community and from organized labor. It has support from the environmental community. What it says is if we are going to go forward in a bold way, breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, moving to energy efficiency, moving to sustainable energy, we are going to need a skilled workforce to help us move in that direction. I have always believed as we move to sustainable energy and energy efficiency, we have the capability of creating millions of new, good-paying jobs. This amendment is terribly important if, in fact, we are going to be able to do that.

I yield the floor and ask for support of this amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a fellow in my office, Charlie Garlow, be granted floor privileges for the duration of the Energy bill debate.

I thank the Chair.

In a moment, I want to talk about an amendment I will be offering with Senator Grassley to the immigration reform bill. That is amendment No. 1332. I should mention this amendment has been endorsed by the AFL- CIO. It was endorsed by the Programmers Guild and by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Before I speak about the amendment, it is important, as we debate the immigration bill, to talk about what is happening to the lives of Americans who live in the middle class and the working families of the country. I fear that in this long and complicated immigration bill, sometimes we lose track of the impact of this bill on the lives of American workers. This bill deals in a reasonable way in terms of dealing with the very serious problem of illegal immigration. It says we must strengthen our borders and not allow people to so easily come into the country. That is long overdue, and it is absolutely right. It says finally we must begin to hold employers accountable for the illegal immigrants they are hiring, something the Bush administration has been very reluctant to do. That is extremely important.

This bill also carves out a path to citizenship which, frankly, is the right thing to do. But also what this bill does not do is analyze effectively the impact of various aspects of this legislation--the guest worker program, H-1B program--on the lives of American workers. The basic premise under which this bill operates in those areas is a false one. What it says is there are

jobs out there, large numbers of jobs, that American workers won't take. I think that is true to some degree, but this bill grossly exaggerates that problem. Because the truth is, if employers paid living wages for jobs, we would be very surprised at the number of people in this country who would be delighted to hold those jobs. But if people are going to pay starvation wages and not provide health care or other benefits, yes, it is true American workers may not gravitate to those jobs.

The truth is, over the last many years, there has been a war going on in this country, and that is not the war in Iraq. It is not the war in Afghanistan. It is the war being waged against the American middle class, the American standard of living, and, indeed, the American dream itself. This is an issue, unfortunately, we do not discuss enough on the floor of the Senate. It is not discussed enough in the corporate media.

The American public understands that since President George Bush has been in office, over 5.4 million more Americans have slipped out of the middle class and into poverty. The American people understand that nearly 7 million more Americans have lost their health insurance, and we are now almost at the level of 47 million Americans without health insurance. The American people understand that for the average American family, their income has fallen by over $1,200 and 3 million more Americans have lost their pensions.

What does all of this have to do with the immigration bill? It has everything to do with the immigration bill, because we have to take a hard look at what various aspects of this bill do in terms of bringing workers into this country and what it means to people who are struggling on $8 or $9 an hour or, in fact, what it means to young people who someday aspire to hold a professional position. That is an issue we have not focused enough attention on.

Some people say: Yes, it is true, poverty is increasing. Yes, it is true, there are millions of people working at the minimum wage or near. But if you have a college degree, you don't have to worry. There are plenty of these good professional jobs out there that pay people good wages. The truth is, even college graduates in today's economy are not getting ahead. From the years 2000 through 2004, we have seen the wages of college graduates decline by 5 percent. According to a new study by researchers at MIT, earnings of the average American worker with an undergraduate degree have not kept up with gains in productivity over the last 25 years. In other words, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity over the past 30 years, millions of American workers, including college graduates, are working longer hours for lower wages. In America today, the personal savings rate is below zero. People are spending more than is coming in. That has not happened since the Great Depression. Home foreclosures are at their highest level in nearly four decades.

What I fear the most is if we keep going in the direction in which we are moving now economically, what we are going to see is our children are going to have a lower standard of living than we do. In fact, according to a recent joint study by the Pew Charitable Trust and Brookings Institute, men in their thirties earned on average 12 percent less in 2004 than their fathers did in 1974, after adjusting for inflation. Incredibly, men today are earning less than their fathers did despite a huge explosion in technology and worker productivity.

In addition, it is important to note that over the last 6 years, this country has lost more than 3 million good-paying manufacturing jobs.

Why do I raise that within the context of an immigration bill? I raise that because the argument of all the large corporations that are supporting this legislation is: My goodness, we have a crisis in America. It is that wages are going down. It is not that more and more Americans are losing their health care and their pensions. The crisis is, supposedly, there are all these jobs out there--jobs in teaching, psychology, nursing, hotels, restaurants--and we cannot find American workers to do those jobs.

Let me tell the business community: Raise wages, provide decent benefits, and you are going to have all kinds of people flocking to those jobs.

During the debate over NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China--which I participated in as a Member of the House of Representatives--we were told by all the corporate interests who pushed that legislation on the Congress not to worry about the blue-collar jobs we would lose. I remember it distinctly. They said: Well, yes, it is true. If we open up our markets, yes, it is true we are going to lose a lot of these factory jobs. They are going to go to China, Mexico, whatever. But don't worry because if your kid does well in school, becomes computer proficient, your kid is going to have a great job out there at good wages. That is the future of America. Don't worry about the blue-color jobs. You have all these white-color information technology jobs.

Well, guess what is happening. From January of 2001 to January of 2006, we have lost 644,000 information sector jobs. Alan Blinder, the former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has told us between 30 and 40 million jobs in this country are in danger of being shipped overseas.

The middle class of this country is being squeezed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

When Americans get up in the morning and they take their kids to daycare, they find the cost of childcare is unaffordable. That is certainly true in Vermont. It is true all over this country. Working families cannot afford quality childcare.

When they drive to work, and they stop at the gas station to fill up their gas tanks, what they are paying in Vermont now is $3.10 a gallon for gas, and in other parts of the country it is even higher. ExxonMobil earns record-breaking profits and manages to find $400 million for a retirement settlement for their former CEO.

When workers go to their jobs, they are being squeezed as often as not by their employer who is cutting back on their health care and pension benefits. Then, if workers stand up for their jobs, they want to form a union, they are told that those jobs could go to China: So take your cutbacks.

When workers come home, they open up their mailbox only to find that the interest on their mortgage payments and their credit cards in some cases is doubling or tripling. There are working people in this country who are paying--if you can believe it--27, 28, 29 percent in interest rates, while big banks are making record-breaking profits.

When Americans go to the hospital, they are told by their insurance companies their premiums and copays will be going up or, even worse, they are not covered for the medical procedures they need.

When they want to send their kids to college, they look at the cost of tuition, and they find colleges costing $30,000, $35,000, $40,000, $45,000 a year, and people are making $30,000 a year. We are seeing kids in this country now--low-income kids--not going to college and others coming out deeply in debt.

Now, in the midst of all of that, we have this immigration bill, a bill that would allow employers to hire hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers from other countries in both low-skilled jobs and high-skilled jobs.

It is important to note--and this point has not been made often enough, but it is important to note many of the same corporate groups that supported NAFTA, that supported PNTR with China, and other disastrous trade agreements, that these same businesses that fought against an increase in the minimum wage, saying: Hey, $5.15 an hour, we don't have to go higher than that; these same companies that have outsourced hundreds of thousands of jobs to China, to Mexico, to Vietnam, to India, to other low-wage countries, these same companies are supporting this legislation.

Let's understand that, and let us ask why that is the case. Why are companies that opposed the minimum wage, that oppose the right of workers to form unions, that oppose anything that makes sense for the American middle class supporting this legislation?

Some of those groups are the National Restaurant Association, the Business Roundtable, the American Hotel & Lodging Association. These are all groups that opposed raising the minimum wage above $5.15 an hour, and they are sitting here saying: Well, we think this immigration bill is a good bill for us.

High-tech companies that have sent hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas, they think this legislation is good. Why? Why do they think it is good legislation? Well, if you listen to them, they will tell you two things: First, in terms of low-skilled jobs, they say they need foreign workers to do the jobs Americans will not do. In terms of high- skilled jobs, they say they cannot find enough Americans who are smart enough, who are skilled enough, who are well educated enough to be engineers, to be scientists, to be mathematicians, et cetera.

In other words, corporate America tells us they need a new guest worker program because they cannot find any Americans for construction jobs, for manufacturing jobs, hotel jobs, restaurant jobs. Then they tell us they need more foreign agricultural workers because no American is willing to break their back working in the fields, picking strawberries or lettuce for poverty-level wages and no health care.

Then--this is what gets me--they tell us they need more H-1B visas because Americans are not smart enough to be computer professionals; engineers; university professors, they cannot find anybody to be a university professor; accountants--I guess Americans do not add very well--we cannot do that work; financial analysts; nurses, I guess we do not have the capability of producing nurses; psychologists, Americans, I guess, cannot do that; lawyers--lawyers--lawyers--my God, if there is anything the United States is capable of producing it is lawyers, but I guess we need more lawyers to come into this country; and elementary school teachers, I guess the young people who graduate from college in America are not quite qualified to be school teachers.

Now, if Americans will not take low-skilled jobs that pay poverty- level wages and, presumably, if they are not smart enough to do high- skilled jobs, I think the question we have to ask is: What kind of jobs are going to be available for the American people? Can't do low-skilled jobs; can't do high-skilled jobs. Hey, what is there for us?

I happen to think the Congress should be spending a lot more time discussing this issue and making it easier for us to create decent- paying jobs for American workers instead of allowing corporate interests to drive wages down by importing more and more people to do the work Americans should be doing and, conversely, exporting and outsourcing a lot of decent jobs.

As someone who, as a young man, worked in a hotel and worked in a restaurant, I can tell you the guest worker provisions, for the most part, have nothing to do with a shortage of workers but have everything to do with a concerted effort by corporate America to drive down wages for our people.

Now, one of the largest corporations that is involved in an association in support of this legislation is Wal-Mart. I made this point yesterday, but I think it is worth repeating. Wal-Mart says, being a part of this association, that apparently there is a shortage of Americans willing to work at Wal-Marts. Well, let's take a look at that.

Two years ago, when Wal-Mart announced the opening of a new store in Oakland, CA, 11,000 people filled out applications for 400 jobs. I think most Americans know that Wal-Mart is not a great employer. Wages are low. In many instances, they do not provide 40 hours a week; health care benefits are not particularly good.

Oakland, CA: For 400 jobs, 11,000 people filled out applications. More recently, in January of 2006, when Wal-Mart announced the opening of a store in Evergreen Park outside Chicago, over 24,000 people applied for 325 jobs at that store. What does that tell us? It tells us that even in low-paying jobs, such as at Wal-Mart, when given the opportunity, Americans want those jobs. They want to make a living for their families.

So the idea Wal-Mart and other similar-type companies would say: Gee, we can't find workers to do that work, is just plain wrong. What they want to do is have a surplus of workers coming into this country so wages do not go up. So instead of having to raise wages and benefits, in order to attract workers and retain workers, what you do is simply open the door and you bring in more and more cheap labor. That enables them to keep wages low.

Then we have the situation with high-skilled jobs, with our professional jobs. Again, we have associations and organizations made up of different corporate groups that are strongly supporting this immigration bill, and they include, among others, companies such as Motorola, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and Boeing, to name a few. These are corporations with a main argument that we cannot find Americans to do this work, and we need to go all over the world to bring in people.

Well, I find it interesting that many of these same companies that tell us they cannot find workers in the United States are exactly the same companies that have recently announced major layoffs of thousands of American workers: We can't find workers. Oh, by the way, you are fired. We need more workers from abroad. Five hundred workers are gone. We are laying you off. It does not make a whole lot of sense to me.

Let me give you a few examples. A few days ago, the Los Angeles Times reported Dell would be eliminating 10 percent of its workforce, slashing 8,800 jobs. But Dell, last year, applied for nearly 400 H-1B visas to bring people into this country--at the same time they lay off 8,800 workers. Maybe they might want to retrain some of those 8,800 workers for these new positions, if possible, rather than simply bringing in new employees from abroad.

Dell is not alone. The Financial Times, on May 31, reported Motorola would be cutting 4,000 jobs, on top of an earlier 3,500 job reduction, designed to generate savings of $400 million. Yet last year, Motorola received 760 H-1B visas. The list goes on and on. It is IBM. It is Citigroup--companies bringing in foreign professional workers at the same time they are laying off American workers.

So we have a situation where, on one hand, these companies say they cannot find highly skilled American workers while, on the other hand, they are eliminating thousands of American jobs.

What upsets me is how our young people feel about this situation. These are kids who go to school--sometimes they borrow a lot of money to go to college--they work hard, and what they are looking forward to, whether through a BA or a BS or an MA or a Ph.D., is a good, secure, challenging, meaningful job with a decent income. What they are seeing is companies saying: We do not want you. We want somebody from abroad who will work at lower wages than you. I think that must be very discouraging for so many of our young people.

Madam President, the amendment I am offering today, along with Senator Grassley, is a pretty simple amendment. What it would do is it would prohibit companies that have announced mass layoffs from receiving new visas of any kind, unless these companies could prove that overall employment at their companies would not be reduced by these layoffs. In other words, we are calling their bluff, and we are saying: You can't lay off large numbers of American workers and then tell us you desperately need workers, professionals from abroad. Those companies which are truly experiencing labor shortages would not be impacted by this amendment and could continue to receive increases in foreign workers, but companies that are reducing their U.S. workforce by laying off thousands of Americans would be prevented from importing workers from abroad.

The bottom line is, the companies that are laying off thousands of Americans shouldn't be allowed to import workers from overseas. Let us stand up for the American people. Let us stand up for American workers. Let us support this amendment.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Kennedy for yielding me time.

As I think we all know, this is a long and complicated bill. An important part of this bill deals with illegal immigration--how do we make sure we stop the flow of illegal immigrants into this country; how do we finally begin to deal with employers who are knowingly hiring illegal immigrants; what do we do with 12 million people who are in this country who, in my view, we are not going to simply, in the middle of the night, throw out of this country. These are difficult and important issues.

On those issues I am in general agreement with the thrust of this legislation. But, Mr. President, I wish to tell you there are areas in this bill where I have strong disagreement, and one is the issue of legal immigration, what we are doing in terms of bringing people into this country who, in my view, will end up lowering wages for American workers right now.

Senator Kennedy a moment ago made a very important point. He talked about the truth that in our country today we have the highest rate of child poverty of any major country on Earth. That is a national disgrace. But on top of that, we have the highest rate of poverty of any major country on Earth. In fact, since President Bush has been in office, 5 million more Americans have slipped into poverty.

Today, in our country, as many people know, the middle class is shrinking. Millions of American workers are working longer hours for lower wages. In my State of Vermont, it is not uncommon for people to work two jobs, even three jobs, to make enough income to pay their bills. According to a recent Pew-Brookings Institute study, men in their 30s earned, on average, 12 percent less in 2004 than their fathers did in 1974, after adjusting for inflation. In other words, in America, we are moving in the wrong direction. Our standard of living, in many ways, is going down. If we don't reverse trends, our kids will have a lower standard of living than we have.

Now, in the midst of all of that, we are finding many large corporations, both those who employ skilled workers--professional workers--and those who employ low-wage workers, that are coming to this body and are saying, my goodness, yes, we are outsourcing millions of decent-paying jobs; yes, we have opposed vigorously raising the minimum wage; yes, we have done everything we can to make sure workers can't form unions, but what we want to do now, because we love the American people so much and we are so concerned about the American worker, what we want to do now is bring millions of new workers into this country, both low-wage workers and professional workers.

The argument there is Americans don't want to do the work. They say: We can't find American workers to do the work. That is a crock, in many instances. It is not true. One of the groups that has come to Congress to tell us how much they are concerned about the need to find workers because they can't find Americans to do the jobs is our old friends at Wal-Mart.

As many Americans know, Wal-Mart pays low wages. They often hire people for 30 hours a week rather than 40 hours a week, and they provide minimal health care benefits. Yet Wal-Mart has come in and said: Well, we can't find the workers. Bring us in more low-wage workers.

Well, guess what. Two years ago, when Wal-Mart announced the opening of a new store in Oakland, CA, guess how many people showed up for that job in Oakland, CA, at a Wal-Mart. Eleven thousand people showed up-- 11,000 people showed up in Oakland--filled out applications for a job when only 400 jobs were available. Eleven thousand people for 400 jobs.

Wal-Mart says they need more low-wage workers coming in from around the world because they can't find workers. Well, that was a couple of years ago. So you might say: Well, that doesn't happen today. In January of 2006, when Wal-Mart announced the opening of a store in Evergreen Park, just outside of Chicago, in your home State, Mr. President, 24,500 people applied for 2,325 jobs. Yet Wal-Mart and their friends are coming in here saying we can't find Americans who want to work.

Let us be clear. Wal-Mart does not provide good wages, does not provide good benefits, does not provide good health care, yet we are finding many people who want to do that because

people in this country are desperate, because people in this country want to work at almost any job.

Some of the people at the other end of the economic spectrum, the people who are hiring professionals, make the same argument. There are organizations out there, including companies such as Motorola, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and Boeing, that say the same thing: We can't find professionals to do the jobs. I find it interesting that while these companies claim they can't find workers in the United States, some of these very same companies have recently announced major layoffs of thousands of American workers.

Let me repeat that. These companies are saying we desperately need to bring workers from other countries into America because we can't find people in the United States to do these skilled jobs. Yet, at the same time, they are laying off tens of thousands of American workers.

Let me give a few examples. A few days ago, the Los Angeles Times reported Dell would be eliminating 10 percent of its workforce, slashing 8,800 jobs. Dell is part of the group saying we need to bring more professionals into America. Meanwhile, as Dell has eliminated decent-paying jobs in the U.S., it applied for nearly 400 H-1B visas last year.

But Dell is not alone. On May 31, the Financial Times reported Motorola would be cutting 4,000 jobs on top of an earlier 3,500-job reduction designed to generate savings of some $400 million. This is nothing new. Motorola has cut jobs in this country year after year after year. But guess what. Motorola, part of a group saying they can't find American workers, recently received 760 H-1B visas. That was last year.

On May 30, Reuters reported IBM would be laying off more than 1,500 American workers, bringing total layoffs to that company of 3,700 last year. In April, CBS MarketWatch reported Citigroup announced it would be laying off 17,000 workers, yet Citigroup received over 330 H-1B visas.

Here is the point, and this is not a complicated point. Many of the largest corporations in this country are supporting this legislation. And you know why? It is not because they are staying up late at night worrying about some Mexican kid in Detroit or Chicago and what will be the future of that kid. They are not worrying about that. What they want to see is a continued influx into this country of cheap labor. They are not content with outsourcing millions of good-paying jobs. They are not content with fighting against working people who want to form unions. They are not content with their opposition, successful until recently, of keeping the minimum wage at $5.15 an hour for 10 years. That is not good enough. Now they are saying: Gee, we can't move Wal-Mart from America to China, we can't move hotels to China, we can't move restaurants to China, so what is the best way to continue keeping wages low for those workers?

When I was a kid, I worked in a hotel. I was a busboy. There is nothing wrong with that job. Millions of people do that job. I resent very much the fact that many of these large corporations are continuing their war against the middle class and against the American worker. I think it is high time the Senate begins to stand up for the American worker rather than the large multinational corporations who have so much sway over what we do in this body. I would hope before an immigration bill is passed, it will respect the rights of American workers, both low-wage workers and professional workers, and say that is our major responsibility, to make sure our kids----

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute to yield to my friend.

Reclaiming my time, Mr. President, the Senator makes an important point, and that is we have all been educated that economics is about supply and demand. If you don't get the workers you want, you raise wages and you raise benefits. You don't simply open the door and bring in other workers at low wages.

The Senator makes an important point.

I thank the Chair.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment. I have an amendment at the desk and I ask for its immediate consideration.

Madam President, I will begin by quoting from an article today in Congress Daily by Bruce Stokes. He sets up in one paragraph pretty much what we are going to talk about in this amendment:

The immigration deal under consideration in the Senate

raises the number of H-1B visas, a long-sought boon for the

high-tech industry that will provide Silicon Valley firms

with skilled workers at rock-bottom salaries, who will

bolster company profits.

This amendment I am offering now is supported by the AFL-CIO. I will read the few paragraphs of the letter they sent today:

Dear Senator Sanders:

On behalf of the AFL-CIO, I am writing to offer strong

support for your amendment to the Secure Borders, Economic

Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act.

Your amendment would provide scholarships in math, science,

engineering, and nursing for our domestic workforce by

increasing fees on H-1B employers.

The last paragraph, signed by William Samuel, director of

the Department of Legislation for the AFL-CIO, writes this:

It is completely irresponsible for Congress to increase yet

again the total annual number of available H-1B visas without

addressing the myriad well-documented problems associated

with the H-1B program, or considering long-term solutions

involving access to training and educational opportunities

for domestic workers.

That is William Samuel, director of the Department of Legislation for the AFL-CIO.

The amendment I am offering today also has the support of the Teamsters, the Programmers Guild, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.

The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act is a long and complicated bill. It touches on a number of very important issues, and some of those issues I strongly agree with, no question. The time is long overdue that we control our borders. No question, the time is long overdue that we begin to hold employers--those people who are hiring illegal immigrants--accountable. Those items are long overdue, and we have to deal with them. This legislation does that. I support that.

In my view, this bill is also responsible in how it deals with the very contentious and difficult issue of how we respond to the reality that there are some 12 million illegal immigrants in this country today. This bill carves out a path which eventually leads to citizenship, and that is something I also support.

But--and here is the but: There are a number of provisions in this bill I do not support, that I think are going to be very harmful to the middle-class and working families of this country.

The amendment I am offering right now concentrates on only one aspect of this very long bill and of that problem. That point centers on the state of the economy for working people in our country and the negative impact this legislation will have for millions of workers--low-income workers and professional workers as well.

The fact is there is a war going on in America today. I am not talking about the war in Iraq and I am not talking about the war in Afghanistan; I am talking about the war against the American middle class, the American standard of living and, indeed, the American dream itself.

The American people understand very well that since George W. Bush has become President, an additional 5.4 million Americans have slipped into poverty out of the middle class--5.4 million people who are poor. Nearly 7 million Americans have lost their health insurance. Income for the average American family has fallen by over $1,200 since President Bush has been President, and some 3 million Americans have lost their pensions.

All over this country, from Vermont to California, people get up in the morning and they are working incredibly long hours. People need two incomes in a family to try to make ends meet. Yet, at the end of the day, they are falling further and further behind. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I think this bill, and what this bill proposes to do, is part of the problem.

During the debate over NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China, we were told by President Clinton and many others that, well, yes, globalization and unfettered free trade, such as our trade relations with China, yes, they will cost us blue-collar factory jobs, and the result is that because of our trade agreements, we have lost millions of good-paying blue-collar factory jobs and, in fact, today there are fewer people working in manufacturing than since President Kennedy was in office in the early 1960s.

Yes, we have lost millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs, but what people told us is: Look, don't worry about that. Yes, we are going to lose blue-collar manufacturing jobs, but not to worry because your kids are going to become very sophisticated in terms of using computers, and the future for them is white-collar information technology jobs. We don't need those factory jobs anymore; we have white-collar information technology jobs, and those are the kinds of jobs which are going to be growing. Unfortunately, that has not quite occurred. From January 2001 to January 2006, we lost over 600,000 information technology jobs.

Alan Blinder, the former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, has told us that between 30 and 40 million jobs in this country are in danger of being shipped overseas. In other words, what we are looking at right now is not just the loss of blue-collar manufacturing jobs, but we are looking at the loss of significant numbers of white-color information technology jobs. I know that in my State--and I expect in Senator Kennedy's State and all over this country--we have seen white-collar information technology jobs heading off to India and other countries. There is nothing more painful than to see people in my State--I have gone through this experience--having to train people to do their jobs as those people return to India.

Some of the leading CEOs and information technology companies have told us point blank--this is not a secret--that the new location for high-tech jobs is going to be India and China; it is not going to be the United States of America.

John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, has said:

China will become the IT center of the world, and we can

have a healthy discussion about whether that's in 2020 or

2040. What we're [in Cisco] trying to do is outline an entire

strategy of becoming a Chinese company.

The founder of Intel predicted in the Wall Street Journal that the bulk of our information technology jobs will go to China and India over the next decade. That is the reality. That is what the heads of the information technology industry are telling us.

Over the last few days, a number of us have expressed the concern about the impact of bringing low-wage workers into this country and what that

would mean to Americans at the lower end of the economic ladder. Today, I wish to address a concern I have about what language in this bill could do to the middle class and, indeed, the upper middle class, people who hold professional jobs and who often earn a very good income.

The bill we are discussing today substantially increases the number of well-educated professionals coming into the United States from overseas. This bill, in fact, would allow 115,000 new professionals to come into this country each year, and that number could go up to 180,000.

This program which allows well-educated professionals to come into our country is called the H-1B program. It is currently capped at 65,000 visas a year. Under the language in this bill, the number would increase at least by 50,000 and by as much as 115,000.

The argument that corporate America is using in supporting this increase is that there are just not enough highly educated, highly skilled Americans to fill available job openings in the high-tech industry and in various science fields. Proponents of the H-1B visa program also say it allows us to bring in the ``best and the brightest'' from around the world to help America's competitiveness position. That sounds good on its face, and it may also have the benefit of being true in some cases, but there are those in this Chamber and across the country who are very concerned that in many instances the H-1B program is being used not to supplement American high-tech workers when they might be needed but instead is being used to replace them with foreign workers who are willing to work for substantially lower wages.

First, we should be clear that H-1B visas are not being used only in the high-tech and highly specialized technology and science fields. That is the argument often made, but it is really not true. The reality is that a whole host of jobs in various categories are going to H-1B visa holders.

Let's take a look at some of the jobs that corporate America is telling us that there are just not enough Americans who are smart enough, who are educated enough to perform. Here they are: information technology computer professionals--I guess we can't do that kind of work; university professors--oh, my word, I guess we just don't have enough people to be university professors; engineers, health care workers, accountants, financial analysts, management consultants, lawyers--lawyers, I love that one. Is there anyone in America who doesn't think we have too many lawyers? I guess we need to bring some lawyers in as well. Architects, nurses, physicians, surgeons, dentists, scientists, journalists and editors, foreign law advisers, psychologists, market research analysts, fashion models--Madam President, fashion models--teachers in elementary or secondary schools. In America, we do not have enough people to become teachers in elementary or secondary school. Does anyone really believe that we cannot, with proper salary inducements, bring people into secondary and primary education?

Given that we all know there are many Americans who have college degrees and advanced degrees in these fields who cannot find work, why is it that we need to bring in more and more professional workers from abroad? For those who believe that the law of supply and demand applies to labor costs, the evidence shows there is no shortage of college- educated workers in America. What we learn in economics 101 is if you cannot attract people for certain jobs, you pay them higher wages and you give them better benefits. Unfortunately, in America today, from 2000 to 2004, we have seen the wages of college graduates decline by 5 percent. So on one hand, corporate America says: Oh, my goodness, we can't find people as professionals to fill these jobs, but amazingly enough, wages have gone down for college graduates from 2000 to 2004 by 5 percent. Maybe somebody is not trying hard enough to find American workers to fill these jobs.

In truth, what many of us have come to understand is that these H-1B visas are not being used to supplement the American workforce where we have shortages but, rather, H-1B visas are being used to replace American workers with lower cost foreign workers.

There are studies which conclude that H-1B workers earn less than what U.S. workers make in similar jobs at similar locations. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, wages for H-1B workers average $12,000 a year below the median wage for U.S. workers in computer fields. Another study by Programmers Guild found that foreign tech workers who came to the United States with H-1B visas are paid about $25,000 a year less than American workers with the same skill.

According to the GAO:

Some employers said that they hired H-1B workers in part

because these workers would often accept lower salaries than

similarly qualified U.S. workers.

What is very important to mention here is that some in corporate America are giving the impression that most of the jobs within the H-1B program are for highly specialized technical work which just can't be found in the United States. The truth is that most of the H-1B visas go to people who do not have a Ph.D., who do not have a master's degree, but only have a bachelor's degree, a plain old college degree.

In today's Congress Daily, there is a very insightful article on H-1B visas which is relevant to this debate:

As Ron Hira, a professor at Rochester Institute of

Technology, points out . . . the Labor Department

acknowledges that ``H-1B workers may be hired even when a

qualified U.S. worker wants the job, and a U.S. worker can be

displaced from the job in favor of a foreign worker.''

The article goes on to state:

The median wage for new H-1B computing professionals was

$50,000 in 2005, far below the median for U.S. computing

professionals, according to the annual report of U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services.

These findings are extremely troubling given the promises made to the American people that the future for our economy was with high-skilled, high-paying, high-tech jobs. What we have found is that in the last 4 years, wages for college graduates are going down, and we are finding that people from abroad are coming in and doing jobs American professionals can do and they are doing them for lower wages.

To bolster their argument for increased H-1B visas, proponents point to a study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics about the jobs of the future. That is what it is entitled, ``Jobs of the Future.'' According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the next decade, 2 million jobs will be created in mathematics, engineering, computer science, and physical science. That equates to about 200,000 jobs a year times 10--2 million jobs. Under this legislation, the number of H-1B visas would increase to as many as 180,000 a year. That means virtually every job-- about 90 percent--that will be created in the high-tech sector over the next 10 years could conceivably be taken by a H-1B visa holder. What sense does that make? What are we telling our young people? We are saying: Go to college, get the best education you can, and we have all kinds of jobs available to you, except those jobs in a significant way are going to be taken by people from another country.

We would hope that companies in the United States would have just enough patriotism, maybe just a little bit of patriotism so they would work to hire qualified American workers. But if you look at the statements and conduct of some of these companies, you realize that patriotism, love of country is becoming a dated concept for those who are pushing extreme globalization.

Let me take one case study, and that is Microsoft. In 2003, Microsoft's vice president for Windows engineering was quoted in Business Week as saying:

It is definitely a cultural change to use foreign workers.

But if I can save a dollar, hallelujah.

The CEO of Microsoft, Steven Anthony Ballmer, has said, and this is an interesting quote, very relevant to today's discussion:

Lower the pay of U.S. professionals to $50,000, and it

won't make sense for employers to put up with the hassle of

doing business in developing countries.

In other words, if we lower wages for professionals in this country, maybe our companies won't outsource and go to India or China.

The economic benefit of H-1B visas, though, is not limited to American companies. The truth is, as my colleagues, Senator Durbin and Senator Grassley, have pointed out, the top companies applying for H-1B visas are actually outsourcing firms from India, known in the industry as ``body shops.'' According to a February 7, 2007, article in BusinessWeek:

Data for the fiscal year 2006, which ended last September,

showed that 7 of the top 10 applicants for H-1B visas are

Indian companies. Giants Infosys Technologies and Wipro took

the top two spots, with 22,600 and 19,400 applications

respectively.

In fact, 30 percent of the H-1B visas approved last year went to nine Indian outsourcing firms. In other words, the very same companies that are involved in the H-1B program of supplying American companies with cheap foreign labor are exactly the same corporations that are involved in outsourcing, providing cheap labor to these very same companies when they move to India. Two sides of the same coin.

In my view, the H-1B system is working against the best interests of the American middle class. It is displacing skilled American workers, it is lowering our wages, and it is part of the process by which the middle class of this country continues to shrink. Meanwhile, it is creating huge profits for foreign companies that traffic in H-1B visas.

I do wish to commend Senators Durbin and Grassley for their work to reform the H-1B program and their efforts to include in the substitute some provisions that strengthen protection for American workers. But as important as these strengthened protections are, the H-1B program, which will be increased from 65,000 slots to 115,000 slots, and potentially even 180,000 slots, continues to pose a threat to American jobs and American wages.

The question is: Where do we go from here? What is our response to this problem? I could certainly offer an amendment to remove the increase in H-1B visas or even to restrict them below the current 65,000 level. But that amendment would be defeated. So where do we go? What is the sensible thing to do? How do we bring people together around this issue?

I think the author of the Congress Daily article I referred to earlier said it quite well when he wrote:

More importantly for the American taxpayer, the current

allocation system for H-1B visas conveys a valuable

resource--access to talented workers who add value to a

company's bottom line--at almost no cost. This is a subsidy

in violation of market principles for firms that are too

quick to appeal to market forces when they are fighting

Washington over export controls or other issues.

The amendment I am offering has two goals. First, raising the H-1B visa fee from $1,500 to $10,000 will go a long way in telling corporate America they are not going to be able to save money by bringing foreign professionals into this country, and they may want to look at the United States of America to find the workers that they need. If they have to pay $10,000, that will cut back on their margin.

Secondly, to the degree it is true that the United States does not have a significant number of skilled workers in certain categories--and in certain categories that may well be true--this new revenue will be dedicated toward providing scholarships to students who are studying in areas where we currently lack professionals.

Specifically, my amendment would create a new American Competitive Scholarship program at the National Science Foundation that would provide merit-based scholarships of up to $15,000 a year, and which are renewable for up to 4 years, to students pursuing degrees in math, science, engineering, medicine, nursing, other health care fields, and other extremely important fields vital to the competitiveness of this Nation. These new scholarships would create the incentive for the best and the brightest of American students to enter these fields where there is reputedly a shortage.

In other words, we have the absurd situation today where we are bringing people from all over the world into this country to do this job, yet we have large numbers of middle-class, working-class families who can't afford to send their kids to college or to graduate school. Well, maybe we ought to pay attention to American workers and American families first.

How will this program be paid for? Under current law, companies applying for H-1B visas pay a $1,500 fee. That fee is split up in a number of ways, with some of it going to scholarships and retraining programs. Unfortunately, it is too small to effectively create a scholarship program of the scale needed to address the claimed shortage in math, science, and technology specialists. This amendment imposes an $8,500 surcharge on those companies seeking H-1B visas. This fee would only apply to those who are required to pay the current $1,500 fee. Therefore, universities and schools would be exempt, as they are under current law. Companies with less than 25 employees would pay only half the fee.

I am sure corporate America will tell us this $8,500 fee is too expensive; that they can't afford it. After all, many of these people are the same exact people who opposed raising the minimum wage above $5.15 an hour. However, this fee represents a very small amount compared to the incredible economic benefits that companies realize from bringing in foreign H-1B visa workers.

H-1B visas are valid for 3 years. So the $8,500 surcharge on an annual basis is only $2,800. Compared to the median $50,000 wage of a new H-1B computing professional, it is only about 5.5 percent of that wage. For this small fee, what would be the benefit to American students and our families? If there are 115,000 H-1B visas issued for which fees are paid, we could provide over 65,000 scholarships each year to our students--65,000. If the number of H-1B visas goes to 180,000, we could provide scholarships to over 100,000 American students.

If the Members of this body believe we need H-1B visas to compensate for a shortage of skilled American professionals, this amendment will attract tens of thousands of America's best and brightest to those fields.

One of the reasons I am offering this amendment, which will provide much needed scholarships for the American middle class, is I was very interested in reading an article that appeared in BusinessWeek on April 19, 2004. In that article, BusinessWeek reported that:

To win favor in China, Microsoft has pledged to spend more

than $750 million on cooperative research, technology for

schools, and other investments.

If Microsoft and other corporations have billions of dollars to invest in technology for schools, research, and other needs in China and other countries, these same companies should have enough money to provide scholarships for middle-class kids in the United States of America.

Another major supporter of the H-1B program is IBM. Last year, IBM made $9.5 billion in profits. Meanwhile, IBM has announced it will be investing $6 billion in India by 2009 and--get this--IBM has also signed deals to train 100,000 software specialists. Where? In Massachusetts? In Vermont? In California? No, in China, according to an August 4, 2003, article in BusinessWeek.

Other major supporters of increasing H-1B workers include Intel, which made $5 billion in profits last year; Bank of America, Caterpillar, General Electric, Boeing, and Lehman Brothers. All of these companies, making billions and billions of dollars in profit, can't afford to pay American workers the wages they need. Well, if they can't do that, at least let them contribute to an important scholarship program.

Let me conclude by saying a vote for this amendment is a vote for preserving American competitiveness in the 21st century, it is a vote for giving our children a brighter future, and it is a vote-- unfortunately all too rare--to help middle-income families in this country who are struggling so hard to make sure their kids can have the education they need.

Madam President, I am not quite sure of the proper legislative approach, but on this amendment, I will be calling for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I have a modification of my amendment at the desk.

Mr. President, I will be very brief. I thank Senator Durbin and Senator Kennedy for their support. This amendment has been modified. The H-1B program would increase from $1,500 to $5,000, a $3,500 increase. The new revenue, as I mentioned earlier, would be used to establish a scholarship program so we can begin to see young Americans get the education they need for these professions so that we do not have to go abroad to bring people in to do the jobs that American workers should be doing.

I would appreciate support for this amendment.

Mr. President, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act we are debating right now is a long and complicated bill that touches on a number of important issues. It addresses the concerns I believe all of us have about securing our borders, something I strongly support, and that is long overdue. It addresses the need to hold employers accountable when they knowingly hire illegal immigrants, something which certainly under the Bush administration has not been the case.

This bill addresses the very contentious and difficult issue of how we respond to the reality that there are some 12 million illegal immigrants in this country today, and how we can carve out a path which eventually leads to citizenship, which is something I support.

But today I want to concentrate on one major aspect in this comprehensive bill, and that deals with the Dorgan amendment and the whole issue of guest laborers. That point centers around the state of the economy for working people in the United States and, in my view, my strong view, the negative impact this overall legislation will have for millions of Americans.

Let me begin by pointing to this quote, this quote right here, from Mr. Randel K. Johnson, the vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which was reported in the New York Times on May 21, the other day. This is what Mr. Johnson said:

We do not have enough workers to support a growing economy.

We have members who pay good wages but face worker shortages

every day.

Mr. President, let me suggest that Mr. Johnson and many of the other big business organizations and multinational corporations that have helped craft this legislation are not being quite accurate when they make statements such as this. The major economic problem facing our country today is not that we do not have enough workers to fill good- paying jobs. Rather, the problem is we do not have enough good-paying, livable wage jobs for the American people, and that situation is getting worse. Over the last 6 years, 5.4 million more Americans have slipped into poverty, with the national minimum wage remaining at a disgraceful $5.15 an hour.

By the way, Mr. Johnson's organization, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, opposes raising the minimum wage.

With over 5 million more Americans slipping into poverty, where are all those good-paying jobs these workers can't seem to find? Over the last 6 years, nearly 7 million more Americans have lost their health insurance. Where are all those good jobs that provide benefits such as a strong health insurance package? Where are all those good jobs Mr. Johnson talks about when millions of Americans are losing their health insurance completely or are asked to pay substantially more for inferior coverage?

In the last 6 years since President Bush has been in office, some 3 million American workers have lost their pensions. If all of these good jobs are out there, why are more and more Americans slipping into poverty, more and more Americans losing their health insurance, and more and more Americans losing their pensions?

From the year 2000 to 2005, median household income declined by $1,273. For 5 consecutive years, median household income for working age families has gone down. In other words, despite Mr. Johnson's assertion about all of the good-wage, good-paying jobs that are out there waiting for the American worker, the reality is, all over our country people are desperately looking for jobs that pay a livable wage. The real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers has declined steadily from $27,060 in 1979 to $25,646 in 2005. While women have done somewhat better in recent years, real median weekly earnings for males has actually gone down since 1979. Despite Mr. Johnson's assertion, the economic reality facing our country is that the middle class is shrinking, poverty is increasing, and the gap between the very rich and everybody else is growing wider and wider.

I am assuming most Members of the Senate took economics 101 in college. One of the major tenets of free market economics is the law of supply and demand. Under that basic economic proposition, if an employer is having a difficult time finding a worker--and Mr. Randel Johnson tells us that is the case--then the solution to that problem on the part of the employer is to provide higher wages and better benefits. That is what the free market economy is supposed to be about. That is what supply and demand is all about. If you are having a difficult time attracting workers, you pay them higher wages and better benefits, and they will come. I wonder how it could be that with a supposed scarcity of workers out there, wages and benefits are going down. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If Mr. Johnson were right, you would expect that wages would be going up, benefits would be going up. In fact, the opposite is true.

What this legislation is not about is addressing the real needs of American workers. It is not about raising wages or improving benefits. What it is about is bringing into this country over a period of years millions of low-wage temporary workers with the result that wages and benefits in this country, which are already going down, will go down even further.

Let's talk about what really is going on in our economy today. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a document entitled ``May 2005 Occupational Wages and Estimates'' which comes from the State of Vermont Department of Labor. That is the latest such report available.

Let me discuss the 10 largest categories of employment in my State of Vermont and the wages workers earn who do that work. We will talk on some of them, not all 10. The occupation in Vermont with the most employment is that of being a cashier. Those are people who obviously work at retail stores and who take in money, make change. The average wage for this category of worker 2 years ago--these are the latest figures we have seen--was $8.71 an hour. Many of those workers have inadequate or no health care at all. That is $8.71 for that category of work in which more Vermonters perform than any other. Are these the good wages to which the Chamber of Commerce is referring?

In that same survey, the second largest job category in Vermont is that of retail salespersons. That mean hourly wage was, as of 2 years ago, $11.88 an hour. That is better than cashiers earn but less than $26,000 a year.

On and on it goes: bookkeepers in Vermont, $14.14 an hour; waiters and waitresses, $8.97; secretaries, $12.91; office clerks, $11.17 an hour; janitors and cleaners, $10.51 an hour.

I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record a list of jobs available today in northern Vermont and in the Littleton, NH, area as posted by the Vermont Department of Labor.

These are the jobs which are available today. If any Member of the Senate wanted to retire today and they wanted to run up to northern Vermont or to the Littleton, NH, area, these are the jobs which are available today, posted by the Vermont Department of Labor: If you wanted to be a flagger, you can make $10 an hour; if you want to be a dispatcher, $11 an hour; home care attendants, thousands of home care attendants taking care of the elderly and the frail make all of $7.53; store clerk, $8 an hour; construction laborer, $11 an hour; receptionist, $8 to $10 an hour; shipping, $11 an hour; machine operator, $8 to $10 an hour. On and on it goes. Those are the jobs available today in northern Vermont, what we call the Northeast Kingdom, and the Littleton, NH, area.

Over the years in Vermont and throughout this country, people have been trying to understand a very important concept: How much money does an individual and a family need in order to survive economically with dignity? That means having an adequate home, having a car that works, paying your electric bill on time, having some health insurance, having childcare for a child if that is what you need. That whole concept is called a livable wage--the means by which an American citizen can live in dignity.

For a single person living alone in the State of Vermont, that wage is $14.26 an hour. That is substantially more than the wage being paid in Vermont for a cashier, which is what more people do than anything else. If you are a single parent with one child, that livable wage is $21.40 an hour; single parent with two children, $20.59 an hour; two parents, two children, and one wage-earner, $24.89.

What is my point? My point is a simple one: Despite the Chamber of Commerce assertion that there are all these great-paying jobs out there and the major problem facing our economy is that we just can't find the workers to do them, I can tell you, in the Vermont-New Hampshire area, there are thousands and thousands of decent, hard-working people making 10 bucks an hour, 11 bucks an hour, 12 bucks an hour, less than that, and many of those workers have no health insurance. Many of those workers are having a hard time making ends meet.

Here is my concern about this legislation. At a time when millions of Americans are working longer hours for low wages and have seen real cuts in their wages and benefits, this legislation would, over a period of years, bring millions of low-wage workers from other countries into the United States. If wages are already this low in

Vermont and throughout the country, what happens when more and more people are forced to compete for these jobs? Sadly, in our country today--and this is a real tragedy--over 25 percent of our children drop out of high school. In some minority neighborhoods, that number is even higher. What kind of jobs will be available for those young people?

This is not legislation designed to create jobs, raise wages, and strengthen our economy. Quite the contrary. This immigration bill is legislation which will lower wages and is designed to increase corporate profits. That is wrong, and that is not an approach we should accept.

Today, corporate leaders are telling us why they want more and more foreign workers to come into this country to compete with American workers. I find it interesting that just a few years ago, during the debate over our trade policy, this is what these same people had to say. Let me quote. According to an Associated Press article of July 1, 2004, Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was quoted as saying that he ``urged American companies to send jobs overseas'' and that ``Americans affected by off shoring should stop whining.'' Then he told the Commonwealth Club of California that ``one job sent overseas, if it happens to be my job, is one too many. But the benefits of [outsourcing] jobs outweigh the cost.'' That was from an AP story, July 1, 2004.

Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, said in January of 2004: ``There's no job that is America's God-given right anymore,'' as her company Hewlett-Packard has shipped over 5,000 jobs to India, outsourced almost all of their notebook PC designs, production, and logistics to Taiwan, and manufactures much of their product in China. Ms. Fiorina may have had a point. A few years ago, she lost her job as CEO due to poor performance. But unlike the thousands of jobs she was responsible for shipping overseas, Ms. Fiorina walked away with a $21 million golden parachute.

I should add that Hewlett-Packard, among many other corporate leaders in outsourcing, just coincidentally happens to be one of those corporations most active in the immigration debate. In other words, if these large corporations are not shutting down plants in the United States, throwing American workers out on the streets, moving to China, where they pay people 50 cents an hour, what they are doing is developing and pushing legislation which displaces American workers and lowers wages in this country by bringing low-wage workers from abroad into America.

Mr. President, I yield.

Mr. President, I agree with my friend from North Dakota. But he will remember something else. Doesn't this argument about passing legislation that will stop illegal immigration ring a bell in terms of the debate we had over NAFTA? Does my friend from North Dakota remember that one of the reasons we had to pass NAFTA was to improve the economy in Mexico so workers there would not be coming into this country?

It sounds to me as if it is the same old tired argument. It certainly has not worked with regard to NAFTA. Since NAFTA has passed, among many other things, there has been a huge increase in illegal immigration. The point the Senator makes is quite right.

Mr. President, that is exactly right.

I know the Senator from North Dakota has been very strong on this issue. We are looking at two sides of the same coin, with the result that the middle class gets squeezed and workers are forced to work for lower wages. That is, on one hand, a trade policy which corporate America pushed through the House and the Senate that says we can shut down plants in America, run to China, pay people there pennies an hour, and bring those products back into America. They have laid off millions of American workers. On the other side of the economy, we still have service jobs in this country, some of which may pay a living wage. Many of them do not. American corporations and companies say: We need to be able to make more profits, so if we cannot shut down restaurants and McDonald's in America and take them to China, well then, I guess what we have to do is bring those workers back into the United States. But as the Senator from North Dakota just indicated, the end result is the same: more and more workers experiencing cuts in their wages, poverty in America increasing, and the middle class shrinking.

Let's not forget--I think a lot of people do not know this, and the media does not necessarily make this point--behind a lot of this immigration legislation stands the largest corporations in America, one of them being Microsoft, having played a very active role in this debate. Here is what the vice president of Microsoft said, as quoted in BusinessWeek in 2003:

It's definitely a cultural change to use foreign workers,

but if I can save a dollar, hallelujah.

Four years ago, Brian Valentine, Microsoft's senior vice president, urged his managers to ``pick something to move offshore today.''

The CEO of Microsoft has said--this is Steve Ballmer; this is relevant to this debate--``Lower the pay of U.S. professionals to $50,000 and it won't make sense for employers to put up with the hassle of doing business in developing countries.

Lower the pay of professionals in America.

What I find interesting about corporate America's support for this type of legislation is their arguments now distinctly contradict the arguments they made when they told us how good outsourcing is for this country and how good our trade policies such as NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China would be. What hypocrisy. One day they shut down plants with high-skilled, well-paid American workers and move to China. That is one day. On the next day, after having shut down a plant with highly skilled workers, they have the nerve to come to the Congress and tell us they cannot find skilled workers to do the jobs they have. Give me a break.

I think we all know what is going on here. Greed rather than love of country has become the driving force behind corporate decisions. While corporate profits are at their highest share of gross domestic product since 1960--up more than 90 percent since President Bush took office-- median earnings are at their lowest share since 1947. In other words, as a result of all of these policies, people on top--corporate

America--are doing very well. The middle class is struggling. While millions of workers are working longer hours for lower wages, the CEOs of major corporations are now earning 400 times what their employees make.

Today, in America, the top 300,000 Americans earn nearly as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans combined. Today, in America, the richest 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, and we now have the most uneven distribution of wealth and income of any major nation on Earth. That is the reality, and these immigration policies, these trade policies, are directly causing this disparity of wealth and income.

We hear over and over again from large multinational corporations that there are jobs Americans just will not do and that we need foreign workers to fill those jobs. Well, that is really not quite accurate. If you pay an American or any person good wages and good benefits, they will do the work.

In June 2005, Toyota, in San Antonio, TX, announced the opening of a plant. That plant received, in a 2-week period, 63,000 applications for 2,000 jobs. That story has been repeated all over this country. If you are going to pay decent wages, they will come and they will do the work. Yes, it will be difficult to attract an American worker to work in, say, a meatpacking house if the pay is 24 percent lower today than it was in 1983--24 percent lower. But guess what. In 1980, when the wages of meatpacking workers were 17 percent higher than the average manufacturing sector wage--because they had a strong union--American workers were prepared to do that difficult and dirty job. They did it because they were paid well. They had a union. They had dignity.

I have talked about the crisis in terms of low-wage jobs. Now let me say a few words about the problems facing our country in terms of higher wage jobs.

While our corporate friends bemoan the lack of skilled professionals and want to bring hundreds of thousands of more employees into this country with a bachelor's degree, an M.A., or a Ph.D., earnings--while this process goes on--of college graduates were 5 percent lower in 2004 than they were in 2000, according to White House economists. In other words, for college graduates, their earnings are also in decline. But what this legislation does is expand the opportunity for people with M.A.s and Ph.D.s and B.A.s and B.S.s to come into this country. When it comes to the H-1B visa, our corporate friends tell us Americans cannot do it. We cannot do that work. We are either too dumb or just not willing to do the following jobs.

Let me for a moment mention some of the eligible occupations for H-1B visas that Americans are, apparently, too dumb to be able to do: information technology/computer professionals, university professors, engineers, health care workers, accountants, financial analysts, management consultants, lawyers--my God, if there is one thing in this country, one area where we have too many, it is lawyers; I am not sure there is a pressing need to bring more lawyers into this country-- architects, nurses, physicians, surgeons, dentists, scientists, journalists and editors, foreign law advisers, psychologists, technical publication writers, market research analysts, fashion models--fashion models--and teachers in elementary or secondary schools. I just did not know we were incapable of providing teachers in our elementary or secondary schools.

Having said that, I do recognize we do have a serious problem in terms of labor shortages in some areas. That is true. But, in my view, our major strategy must be to educate our own students in these areas so they can benefit from these good-paying jobs. These are the jobs which are paying people good wages. Rather than bringing people from all over the world to fill them, I would rather our kids and grandchildren were able to do these kinds of jobs.

Let me give you one example. Right now, it is absolutely true that we have a major shortage of nurses in this country. That is true. But at the same time as we have a major shortage of nurses, some 50,000 Americans last year applied to nursing schools, and they could not get into those schools because we do not have the faculty to educate Americans to become nurses. How absurd is that? So it seems to me, before we deplete the Philippines and other countries of their stock of nurses--doing very serious harm to their health care systems--maybe, just maybe we might want to provide educators in this country for our nurses. The same thing is true of dentists. It is a very serious problem with regard to shortages of dentists. Yet in dental schools all over this country we lack faculty to educate people to become dentists. While there is a dispute as to whether we do have a shortage in information technology jobs, there is no doubt we should make sure that enough Americans--far more Americans--are better educated in math and computer science than we are currently doing.

The bottom line is we need to take a very hard look at our educational system and, among other things, make college education affordable to every American while we increase our focus on math and science. How absurd it is that hundreds of thousands of low-income kids no longer are able to go to college because they cannot afford it, and then we say: Well, we don't have the professionals we need in this country; we have to bring them in from abroad. So the long-term solution is making sure college is affordable and improving our public schools so our people can fill these jobs.

As this debate on this bill continues, I am going to do everything I can to make sure any immigration reform legislation passed by this body has the result of lifting wages up and expanding the middle class, rather than doing the contrary.

Mr. President, thank you very much.

Several Senators addressed the Chair.

Mr. President, would the Senator yield for about 3 minutes?

I would like to ask the Senator a question. Let me begin by thanking him as the chairman of the Budget Committee for his excellent work on the budget resolution. This conference report, despite what some may have heard, is a major achievement for our Nation's veterans, for children without health insurance, for the middle class, and for millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet. None of these achievements would have been possible without the strong work of Senator Conrad, and I commend him as a member of the Budget Committee for all of his efforts.

As my colleagues know, one of the major issues I have been working on has been to expand federally qualified health centers in this country, and on that subject I would just like to ask the chairman the following question: Does the conference report accompanying the budget resolution assume that $2.6 billion in Federal funding would be provided for federally qualified health centers in fiscal year 2008--$536 million more than the 2007 level adjusted for inflation and $575 million more than the President's request?

Mr. President, I just want to thank the chairman very much, and I concur with everything he

has said. For 40 years, federally qualified health centers have provided high quality primary health care for millions of Americans, regardless of their income, and as the chairman just indicated, they do that in a very cost-effective way. If the Appropriations Committee provides this funding, at least 4 million more Americans would gain access to the high-quality, affordable primary care available in our Nation's health centers in a very short period of time, with millions more getting access as the new centers get up and running. I thank the chairman again, and I look forward to working with him and my colleagues to make this a reality.

Mr. President, today I am introducing the Comprehensive Veterans Benefits Improvements Act of 2007.

The purpose of this bill is to address many of the long-standing benefit and other policy issues that are a priority to the national veteran service organizations and millions of their members all across our country. The legislation tracks many of the recommendations made in the Independent Budget, IB, for fiscal year 2008. The IB, as it is known, is ``the collaborative effort of a united veteran and health advocacy community that presents policy and budget recommendations on programs administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Labor.'' It is a guide for how this country should treat its veterans. It is written jointly by AMVETS, Disabled American Veterans, Paralyzed Veterans of America, and Veterans of Foreign Wars and supported by over 50 other prominent organizations. I am very happy to have consulted extensively with the Independent Budget authors to craft this legislation.

For too many years veterans' needs have been sent to the back of the line in Congress behind tax cuts for the rich and corporate welfare for multinational corporations. This legislation is one step forward in correcting the shortcomings of the way our current system treats veterans. Instead of turning a blind eye to our veterans' needs as has happened often in recent years, this bill begins to say ``thank you'' with real action.

The Comprehensive Veterans Benefits Improvements Act makes more than 25 separate changes to veterans' programs ranging from disability payments, to insurance premiums, to grants for disabled veterans to adapt their cars to make them easier to use.

We also try to make progress on long standing injustices in the VA and DoD benefit and retirement systems that veterans and their families have fought to correct for years. Among them are:

Category 8 Veterans: In January of 2003 the VA announced that it would no longer allow Category 8 veterans to enroll into the VA health care system. The Administration justified this move on the grounds that these are ``higher income'' veterans. The truth, however, is that these veterans can make as little as $27,000 a year. VA estimates that more than 1.5 million category 8 veterans will have been denied enrollment in the VA health care system by fiscal year 2008. This legislation repeals that ban.

Concurrent Receipt: As the Military Officers Association of America explains, the Concurrent Receipt or Disabled Veterans' Tax issue exists because of a ``19th century law that required a dollar-for-dollar offset of military retired pay for disability compensation received from the VA . . . Retired pay is earned for a career of uniformed service and VA disability compensation is recompense for pain, suffering and lost future earning power due to service-connected disabilities.'' For that reason veterans should receive both payments and not have one offset the other. This legislation would allow veterans to receive both compensation/pension benefits and retired or retirement pay.

Dependency and Indemnity Compensation-Survivor Benefit Plan Offset: Under current law, the survivors of veterans who die as a result of service-connected causes are entitled to compensation known as dependency and indemnity compensation, DIC. In addition, military retirees can have money deducted from their pay to purchase a survivors annuity. This is called the Survivor Benefit Plan, SBP. However, if the military retirees dies from service-connected causes his or her survivors will receive a SBP payment offset dollar for dollar by the amount of the DIC payment they receive. Like the offset between military retiree pay and VA disability payments, this SBP/DIC offset unfairly denies beneficiaries the full amount of 2 programs that are meant to compensate for different loses. This legislation repeals the offset between dependency and indemnity compensation and the Survivor Benefit Plan.

Veterans' Claims: We also take a new approach to improving the system for rating claims by creating an agency dedicated to electronically sharing clinical information between the VA and the DoD.

For too long these issues have been ignored by the Congress. It is time for that attitude to change.

This legislation also amends other benefit programs important to veterans.

Over time, Congress and the Department of Veterans Affairs have added many benefits and assistance programs for our Nation's veterans and their families. As with many programs, the benefits did not meet all the needs of our veterans and others also have not been updated in many years rendering many of their benefits much less useful. For example, the IB notes the low level of grants the VA gives severely disabled veterans for adapting their cars:

In 1946 the $1,600 allowance represented 85 percent of

average retail cost and a sufficient amount to pay the full

cost of automobiles in the `low-price field.' By contrast, in

1997 the allowance was $5,500, and the average retail cost of

new automobiles, according to the National Automobile Dealers

Association, was $21,750. Currently, the $11,000 automobile

allowance represents only about 39 percent of the average

cost of a new automobile, which is $28,105.

This legislation increases this car grant amount to $22,484 and adjusts this amount automatically each year using an average retail car cost index established by the Secretary.

This is not the only example of a veterans' benefit being chipped away by inflation. When we look at assistance family members get for burying a loved one we find that the current benefits have not kept up with inflation. As a result, the current benefit of $300 only pays for a small fraction of the costs of a burial. The legislation I am introducing today increases the plot allowance from $300 to $745 and expands the eligibility for the plot allowance for all veterans who would be eligible for burial in a national cemetery, not just those who served during wartime. This section also contains a provision to adjust these payments annually.

This legislation contains many other similar corrections and updates, bringing benefits into the 21st Century so that these programs are meaningful again.

These are not controversial proposals. These changes are the least we can do to show our appreciation for those who sacrifice for their country.

This legislation is attempting to strengthen the current VA system so that it can fully provide for those veterans already in the system and those thousands more returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and all over the world that will soon come to the VA for care.

This is just the beginning; one part of a larger effort to honor our veterans and their service. We here in Congress have so much more to do to care for our veterans such as improving mental health care for veterans, Traumatic Brain Injury treatment, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder treatment, transition assistance, polytrauma care, caring for homeless veterans, and eliminating the waiting lines and claims backlogs at the VA. As a parent of a fallen soldier told our Committee, these veterans have survived the war, now ``[w]e've got to help them survive the peace.''

We have much work to do in the Veterans Affairs Committee and I look forward to working under the leadership of Chairman Akaka and the other colleagues on our Committee and in the Senate to make sure that meaningful and substantial veterans' legislation is passed this year.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, today I am introducing the Comprehensive Veterans Benefits Improvements Act of 2007.

The purpose of this bill is to address many of the long-standing benefit and other policy issues that are a priority to the national veteran service organizations and millions of their members all across our country. The legislation tracks many of the recommendations made in the Independent Budget, IB, for fiscal year 2008. The IB, as it is known, is ``the collaborative effort of a united veteran and health advocacy community that presents policy and budget recommendations on programs administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Labor.'' It is a guide for how this country should treat its veterans. It is written jointly by AMVETS, Disabled American Veterans, Paralyzed Veterans of America, and Veterans of Foreign Wars and supported by over 50 other prominent organizations. I am very happy to have consulted extensively with the Independent Budget authors to craft this legislation.

For too many years veterans' needs have been sent to the back of the line in Congress behind tax cuts for the rich and corporate welfare for multinational corporations. This legislation is one step forward in correcting the shortcomings of the way our current system treats veterans. Instead of turning a blind eye to our veterans' needs as has happened often in recent years, this bill begins to say ``thank you'' with real action.

The Comprehensive Veterans Benefits Improvements Act makes more than 25 separate changes to veterans' programs ranging from disability payments, to insurance premiums, to grants for disabled veterans to adapt their cars to make them easier to use.

We also try to make progress on long standing injustices in the VA and DoD benefit and retirement systems that veterans and their families have fought to correct for years. Among them are:

Category 8 Veterans: In January of 2003 the VA announced that it would no longer allow Category 8 veterans to enroll into the VA health care system. The Administration justified this move on the grounds that these are ``higher income'' veterans. The truth, however, is that these veterans can make as little as $27,000 a year. VA estimates that more than 1.5 million category 8 veterans will have been denied enrollment in the VA health care system by fiscal year 2008. This legislation repeals that ban.

Concurrent Receipt: As the Military Officers Association of America explains, the Concurrent Receipt or Disabled Veterans' Tax issue exists because of a ``19th century law that required a dollar-for-dollar offset of military retired pay for disability compensation received from the VA . . . Retired pay is earned for a career of uniformed service and VA disability compensation is recompense for pain, suffering and lost future earning power due to service-connected disabilities.'' For that reason veterans should receive both payments and not have one offset the other. This legislation would allow veterans to receive both compensation/pension benefits and retired or retirement pay.

Dependency and Indemnity Compensation-Survivor Benefit Plan Offset: Under current law, the survivors of veterans who die as a result of service-connected causes are entitled to compensation known as dependency and indemnity compensation, DIC. In addition, military retirees can have money deducted from their pay to purchase a survivors annuity. This is called the Survivor Benefit Plan, SBP. However, if the military retirees dies from service-connected causes his or her survivors will receive a SBP payment offset dollar for dollar by the amount of the DIC payment they receive. Like the offset between military retiree pay and VA disability payments, this SBP/DIC offset unfairly denies beneficiaries the full amount of 2 programs that are meant to compensate for different loses. This legislation repeals the offset between dependency and indemnity compensation and the Survivor Benefit Plan.

Veterans' Claims: We also take a new approach to improving the system for rating claims by creating an agency dedicated to electronically sharing clinical information between the VA and the DoD.

For too long these issues have been ignored by the Congress. It is time for that attitude to change.

This legislation also amends other benefit programs important to veterans.

Over time, Congress and the Department of Veterans Affairs have added many benefits and assistance programs for our Nation's veterans and their families. As with many programs, the benefits did not meet all the needs of our veterans and others also have not been updated in many years rendering many of their benefits much less useful. For example, the IB notes the low level of grants the VA gives severely disabled veterans for adapting their cars:

In 1946 the $1,600 allowance represented 85 percent of

average retail cost and a sufficient amount to pay the full

cost of automobiles in the `low-price field.' By contrast, in

1997 the allowance was $5,500, and the average retail cost of

new automobiles, according to the National Automobile Dealers

Association, was $21,750. Currently, the $11,000 automobile

allowance represents only about 39 percent of the average

cost of a new automobile, which is $28,105.

This legislation increases this car grant amount to $22,484 and adjusts this amount automatically each year using an average retail car cost index established by the Secretary.

This is not the only example of a veterans' benefit being chipped away by inflation. When we look at assistance family members get for burying a loved one we find that the current benefits have not kept up with inflation. As a result, the current benefit of $300 only pays for a small fraction of the costs of a burial. The legislation I am introducing today increases the plot allowance from $300 to $745 and expands the eligibility for the plot allowance for all veterans who would be eligible for burial in a national cemetery, not just those who served during wartime. This section also contains a provision to adjust these payments annually.

This legislation contains many other similar corrections and updates, bringing benefits into the 21st Century so that these programs are meaningful again.

These are not controversial proposals. These changes are the least we can do to show our appreciation for those who sacrifice for their country.

This legislation is attempting to strengthen the current VA system so that it can fully provide for those veterans already in the system and those thousands more returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and all over the world that will soon come to the VA for care.

This is just the beginning; one part of a larger effort to honor our veterans and their service. We here in Congress have so much more to do to care for our veterans such as improving mental health care for veterans, Traumatic Brain Injury treatment, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder treatment, transition assistance, polytrauma care, caring for homeless veterans, and eliminating the waiting lines and claims backlogs at the VA. As a parent of a fallen soldier told our Committee, these veterans have survived the war, now ``[w]e've got to help them survive the peace.''

We have much work to do in the Veterans Affairs Committee and I look forward to working under the leadership of Chairman Akaka and the other colleagues on our Committee and in the Senate to make sure that meaningful and substantial veterans' legislation is passed this year.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Ten minutes would be fine.

Yes.

Yes.

I thank the Senator.

Mr. President, let me congratulate the Senator for his outstanding leadership on this issue. Let me just pick up right from where he left off. He and I and Senator Snowe and a number of us have been dealing with this issue for many years. My involvement came in 1999, when I took a busload of Vermonters, including many women who were struggling for their lives with breast cancer.

Many of those women did not have a lot of money, and they also went across the Canadian border. They also purchased Tamoxifen. In those days, the price they paid was one-tenth the price, one-tenth the price compared to what they were paying in the United States. Here you have women struggling for their lives, who do not have a lot of money, and were paying one-tenth the price.

This amendment is a big deal. This amendment will mean that Americans from one end of our country to the other, people with chronic illnesses, senior citizens who run into the doughnut hole, so-called doughnut hole on Medicare Part D, that finally these Americans, our Americans, our people, will no longer continue to be ripped off by the pharmaceutical industry and be forced to pay by far the highest prices in the industrialized world for the same exact medicine which people in Canada, people in Germany, people all over Europe receive at far lower prices--the same medicines, same companies, same factory, except we pay far higher prices.

There is very strong support for this legislation. Millions of Americans are already supporting this legislation by getting into their cars and going over the Canadian border. The AARP and other senior organizations support this amendment. My understanding is that the AARP intends to note on their scorecard that a vote for the Cochran amendment--which is clearly a poison pill--is a vote against reimportation.

I would urge my colleagues, if you disagree with reimportation, vote no. But a vote for the Cochran amendment is, in fact, a vote no.

You have heard from Senator Snowe. You have heard from Senator Dorgan. The arguments over safety are just not accurate. This bill details in great length an entire regimen as to how we can make sure all of the prescription drugs reimported into the United States are safe and FDA approved.

I always find it remarkable that every day, huge amounts of imported food are coming into this country. I do not hear a hue and cry about whether that food is inspected.

Let me quote from the May 1st New York Times:

More than 135 countries ship food items to the United

States. Canada, Mexico and China have led the way with China

shipping nearly five times as much in food items to the

United States as it did in 1996.

China is importing more and more food into the United States. Where are the FDA inspectors? Are they all over the farms in China making sure these products are safe? I have not heard one word about that issue. This legislation has built in the strongest prescription drug safety regimen we have ever seen.

Let me tell you what this debate is really about. It is not about prescription drug safety. It is about the power of the pharmaceutical industry, which in a city that has enormously powerful special interests, we have the pharmaceutical industry standing uniquely alone as the most important, if you will, and, in my view, greedy lobby in the entire United States of America. Here it is. Do you want to know what the issue is? Here it is: pharmaceutical industry lobbying.

From 1998 to 2006 they spent $1.1 billion for lobbying; 1998 to 2006, $1.1 billion in lobbying.

The pharmaceutical industry has over 1,000 well-paid lobbyists right here on Capitol Hill: former heads of the Republican Party, former leaders in the Democratic Party. Whenever anybody stands up for justice, whenever anybody stands up to try to lower the cost of prescription drugs in this country so that the American people can afford these lifesaving medicines, these lobbyists descend like locusts on all of our offices in the Senate, in the House. That is what they do.

It is not just the amount of money they spend on lobbying. They spend a substantial amount of money on campaign contributions: From 1990 to 2006, $139 million in campaign contributions; 2006 alone, $19 million. That is power. What this debate is about is not just the need to lower the cost of prescription drugs in America, as important as that is. What this debate is more significantly about is whether the Congress of the United States has the courage to stand up to the greediest, most powerful special interests in this country.

In November the American people went to the polls. They said they want a change in the direction in which this country is moving. Clearly, that election had a lot to do with Iraq. It certainly did. It had a lot to do with global warming, I believe. But it also, in any view, had a lot to do with the understanding that year after year wealthy and powerful special interests have dictated the terms of the debate, have paid for the legislation which has come through the Senate and through the House.

The drug companies have managed to do something rather amazing. Virtually all of the Members of the Senate and the House look at economic issues through two lenses. No. 1, in order to protect consumers, we say: Let there be free market competition. That is the way to lower the costs of the product. And there is truth to that.

The other way that we can protect consumers is through Government regulation. There is certainly truth to that. What the pharmaceutical industry has managed to do is tell us we cannot regulate the pharmaceutical companies. We cannot have Medicare negotiating lower prices with the drug companies. We cannot do that. They have given us all kinds of reasons we cannot do that.

Then they have told us, well, we also cannot do free market competition: No,

you cannot have the local druggist going out and purchasing the product at the best price that he can get, maybe in Canada, maybe Europe. You can't do that. You cannot have regulation. You cannot have free market competition.

Then, on top of all of that, what the drug companies have managed to do is get many billions of dollars in corporate welfare, so the taxpayers of this country subsidize the research and development of many of the most important drugs, while the consumers, the American consumers, get no reasonable pricing despite the many billions of dollars that go into research and development that were paid for by them.

The drug companies get it all. That is what they get. At the end of the day, year after year after year, they are one of the most profitable industries in this country. They are very profitable, and elderly people and working people all over this country find it harder and harder to pay for the prescription drugs they desperately need.

Let us stand with the people. Let's defeat the Cochran amendment and pass the Dorgan amendment.

Mr. President, I congratulate my colleague from North Dakota for the extraordinary and comprehensive outline of this issue that he has made not only today but in the past.

Mr. President, every single day in this Congress, and throughout America, people sit down and eat their lettuce and tomato and their salads. Their tomatoes come from Mexico, Latin America, and their lettuce comes from Latin America. Other foods they eat come from as far away as China. Billions of dollars of food imports come into this country, but I don't hear anybody in this body standing up and saying, oh, we have a problem about food safety or food coming from other countries. They come in.

There is a problem--and I don't hear it too often here, but somehow the U.S. Government, with the FDA, cannot regulate a small number of drug companies so that we can safely bring in prescription drugs from Canada and other industrialized countries so that, as a result, we can substantially lower the cost of medicine for millions and millions of Americans. This is absurd. Of course, we can safely regulate the flow of medicine coming into this country.

The real issue is not the safety of medicine. The real issue is the power of the pharmaceutical industry, the most powerful industry in terms of lobbying impact in the United States of America. If you think the oil companies are powerful, take a look at the drug companies. If you think the banks are powerful, take a look at the drug companies. Today, we are living under a Medicare Part D prescription drug program that was written by the drug companies, for the drug companies. Today, billions of dollars of taxpayer money goes into research and development for new medicines that go to benefit the drug companies, while the American people do not get reasonable prices for the products they help to produce.

Mr. President, since 1998, the pharmaceutical industry has spent over $900 million on lobbying activity--$900 million. That is more than any other industry. Today, there are over 1,200 prescription drug lobbyists right here on Capitol Hill and throughout this country. Do you know what their job is? Their job is to make sure in the United States of America we continue to pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for the medicine we use.

If you have a chronic illness, there is a strong likelihood you will be paying two times as much for the same medicine as our friends in Canada or Europe pay. Why is it that the same medicine, manufactured in the same factory, costs us, in some cases two times, and in some cases three times, as much money as it costs our Canadian and European friends?

The answer is pretty simple. It has everything to do with the power of the pharmaceutical industry and the enormous amounts of money they spend on lobbying, on campaign contributions, on advertising, and the pressure they put on Members of the United States Congress.

Mr. President, I have been involved in this issue for a number of years. I have been involved in it in an emotional way because I was the first Member of Congress to take constituents over the Canadian border to purchase, in that case Tamoxifen, which is a widely prescribed breast cancer drug that ended up costing Vermont women one-tenth the price they had to pay in the United States.

In our country today, there are people struggling very hard with terrible illnesses who have no health insurance and who need their prescription drugs. Some of them simply cannot purchase their prescription drugs. Some are taking money out of their food budget to buy their prescription drugs. We are a great nation in many respects. But the time is long overdue for Members of the Senate, for Members of the House, to reclaim this institution from the powerful special interests.

Today is a day of reckoning. This is very important legislation. This can drive the price of prescription drugs down by 25 to 50 percent. Let's stand together and, for those Members who are wavering on the issue, who think they cannot vote for it, I hope at least they will support cloture to allow us to continue this debate and to finally lower the cost of prescription drugs for the American people.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I rise in strong opposition to the Cochran amendment. We should be very clear. For anybody who is interested in prescription drug reimportation, for anybody who is interested in lowering the cost of prescription drugs in this country from 25 to 50 percent, for anybody who is interested in standing up for the working families of this country who are getting ripped off every day by outrageously high prescription drug costs, the Cochran amendment is a poison pill. To vote for the Cochran amendment is to vote against prescription drug reimportation; it is to kill the Dorgan amendment.

The idea of asking permission from the Secretary of Health and Human Services, from the Bush administration, who have already gone on record rather firmly and decisively in opposition to reimportation, is to simply mask your vote. The Bush administration represents the pharmaceutical industry. They will kill prescription drug reimportation. To ask their permission to go forward is simply to kill prescription drug reimportation. So anyone who is serious about lowering the cost of prescription drugs will not be supporting the Cochran amendment.

The unfortunate reality is, in the United States of America we continue to pay, by far--it is not even close--the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. Because of the escalating cost of medicines, many of our fellow Americans, many working people, many people with chronic health problems, simply do not get their prescriptions filled. I am sure in Montana the experience is the same as it is in Vermont. People tell me they walk into the drugstore and cannot believe

the prices they are being charged. They can't afford those prices. I have talked to pharmacists, as I suspect the Chair has as well, who have been embarrassed. They have seen tears coming out of people's eyes when they have told them the cost of their medicine.

Meanwhile, as a result of the power of the pharmaceutical industry, we have the highest prices in the world, and those prices are rising every single day. In fact, tomorrow, if an American walks into a pharmacy and the pharmacist says to that person: I am sorry to have to tell you this, but the cost of your medicine went up 50 percent, or 75 percent, we can do nothing about it. Unlike the rest of the industrialized world--Canada, Europe--where they understand prescription drugs are an integral part of a whole strategy regarding health care, we let the drug companies do anything they want to do.

As the first Member of Congress to take constituents across the Canadian border to enable them to pay substantially lower prices than they were paying in the United States, I have seen firsthand what it means to people's lives when they get the drugs they need at a price they can afford. I will never forget--never forget--when in 1999 I brought a busload of Vermonters over the Canadian border. Many of the women there were struggling with breast cancer, fighting for their lives, and they didn't have a whole lot of money. They went to Montreal and purchased Tamoxifen, a widely prescribed breast cancer drug, which at that time--at that time--was one-tenth the price they were paying in the United States. Imagine that. Fighting for your life, not having a lot of money, and needing a drug. Suddenly, they looked at the price they were paying and they literally could not believe it.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a chart which compares prices in the year 2005--so the prices may be different today, but as of April 2005, a price comparison between United States prices and Canadian prices, and United States prices and German prices.

Mr. President, let me talk about a few of the drugs.

Actos is a drug for diabetes. As of 2005, in the United States, the price of that drug was $116. For the same number of pills and the same milligrams, it was $50.62 in Germany. Twice the price--same product, same company, same factory, but less than half the price in Germany.

For Celexa, a drug for depression, it was $85 in the United States and $35 in Germany. Same company, same product. Clarinex was $77 in the United States and $38 in Germany. On and on it goes--sometimes more, sometimes less but often half the price in Germany, and different prices in Canada but often the same end result.

The very simple question the Members of the Senate have to ask themselves is: Why is it that in the United States we have to pay the highest prices in the world for our medicine? Why is it that at a moment in history when we are eating food products from farms in Mexico and in Latin America, produced in China, and they are coming to our kitchen tables today, why is it that anybody here can say with a straight face it is OK for products all over the world to come into this country from tens of thousands of farms, but in terms of a handful of major drug companies, somehow we cannot regulate the flow of those medicines from Canada, for goodness' sake, into the United States?

Give me a break. That argument is so totally absurd as to be almost beyond the laugh test. This debate has nothing to do with drug safety. All of us are concerned about drug safety, and the Dorgan amendment has page after page after page of regulations making sure the FDA-approved medicines that come into our country will be safe.

What saddens me very much is that in many ways the American people have given up on this issue in terms of the ability of their own government to act, and they have taken matters into their own hands. I don't know what goes on in Montana, but in the State of Vermont thousands of people in our State go over the Canadian border. They go to the Canadian drugstores and buy the products they need. It is not a big deal, and they save substantial sums of money.

There was an estimate a few years ago, and I don't know what those numbers are today, but there was an estimate several years ago that about 2 million Americans were buying their medicine in Canada. What the Dorgan amendment is about is simply saying that it is a little bit absurd for Americans to have to get in their cars and drive to Canada to get the drugs they need; that it might make more sense for our pharmacists to be able to purchase that medicine, our prescription drug distributors to be able to purchase that medicine so, in fact, Americans could take advantage of the lower prices at their own local drugstore.

That is what we want to do. We don't want all of America to have to go to Canada or Germany to buy reasonably priced medicine. We want those products sold in this country at an affordable price.

I think many Americans are wondering: Well, how does it happen that a product made by an American drug

company--at a time when the taxpayers of this country, by the way, spend billions of dollars in research and development for drugs that go to the drug companies--that in the midst of all this, how does it happen that we pay two or three times as much as our neighbors in Canada or our friends in Germany or throughout Europe? How does that happen?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. The answer is pretty simple. The answer has everything to do with the way we do politics in this country and the enormous power of large multinational corporations and the enormous power of lobbyists who represent those corporations. Let me quote from a Washington Post article of Friday, January 12, 2007. It is a front page article. This is what it says. This is January 12, 2007:

This month alone [i.e. January] the Pharmaceutical Research

and Manufacturers of America [PhRMA] spent more than $1

million on full-page newspaper ads touting the success of the

existing Medicare drug system.

Drug companies spent more on lobbying than any other

industry between 1998 and 2005--$900 million, according to

the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. They donated

a total of $89.9 million in the same period to Federal

candidates and party committees, nearly three-quarters of it

to Republicans.

``You can hardly swing a cat by the tail in Washington

without hitting a pharmaceutical lobbyist,'' said Senator

Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, a key sponsor of the

2003 legislation that created the current program.

That is what we are dealing with today, and we should not kid ourselves. The pharmaceutical industry, year after year, turns out to be one of the more financially successful industries in our country. According to Fortune magazine, the top 19 pharmaceutical companies in 2005 made $42.1 billion in profit; in 2004 the profit margin was almost 16 percent, three times higher than the average Fortune 500 company.

That is what you have. We have a situation where millions of Americans are struggling to pay their prescription drug costs. We have a situation where many Americans simply cannot afford the medicine they desperately need. We have a pharmaceutical industry which, year after year, enjoys some of the highest profits of any industry in this country. We have an industry which pays its CEOs very exorbitant salaries. We have an industry which has an estimated 1,200 paid lobbyists in this country, many of them former leaders of the Republican and Democratic Parties. We have an industry that makes huge amounts of campaign contributions. We end up with a situation in which we pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

Senator Dorgan quoted a study from the CBO, I believe it was, that suggests we could save some $50 billion over a 5-year period if we move to prescription drug reimportation. In this body we have people who get up every day and tell us how wonderful they perceive unfettered free trade to be. It is not a problem when American workers are thrown out on the street because factories are moved to China where people are paid 30 cents an hour; hey, that is part of the global economy. No problem there. There is no problem when food comes into this country from China and our farmers lose money. No problem. That is part of the global economy.

But somehow, amazingly enough, when an aspect of free trade works for the average American and not for a large multinational corporation, suddenly we do not like unfettered free trade. Suddenly we cannot reimport prescription drugs from Canada--from Canada, which neighbors us, obviously--from a handful of drug companies. We cannot do that. I think that argument is very absurd.

Let me conclude. A vote for the Cochran amendment is a vote to kill prescription drug reimportation, pure and simple. The Bush administration has said they will not go forward with reimportation. Let us defeat the Cochran amendment. Let us pass the Dorgan amendment. Let us lower prescription drug costs in this country by 25 percent to 50 percent. Perhaps even more important, let us show the American people that the Congress has the courage to stand up to the most wealthy and powerful lobby on Capitol Hill.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, the debate we are now having is an extraordinarily important debate; in fact, it will be one of the most important votes we will be casting this year.

This vote is about whether we stand with the American people, millions of whom are having a very difficult time paying their prescription drug bills or whether we stand with the most powerful and greedy lobby on Capitol Hill, and that is the pharmaceutical industry which has spent extraordinary sums of money to make sure the American people pay outrageously high prices for the medicine they desperately need.

I wish to briefly examine a chart which talks about the very high profit margin of the pharmaceutical industry. One of the reasons why the pharmaceutical industry can spend so much money on lobbying, on campaign contributions, on advertising is because of the profits they make year after year.

In 2004, drug companies ranked as the third most profitable industry in the United States with a 15.8-percent profit margin, which is about three times higher than the profitability of a median Fortune 500 company, which is at about 5.3 percent. This is in 2004. This comes from the Kaiser Foundation.

What we can also see, and what this chart tells us, is the extraordinary profits the drug companies are making from particular drugs. Epogen is the drug. Amgen is the company with profits of $2.5 billion. Taxol is the drug; the firm is Bristol-Myers Squibb, $2.1 billion for one drug, and on it goes. They are profitable year after year. The pharmaceutical industry continues to be one of the most profitable industries in this country.

I have another chart. One of the issues I look forward to discussing with Members of the Senate is the fact that as taxpayers in our country, we contribute billions and billions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health, the universities, the foundations for the very noble and important purpose all of us support: to create drugs that will address the major illnesses facing us, whether it is cancer, diabetes, AIDS, whatever it may be. We have spent billions and billions of taxpayers' dollars in a sense subsidizing the drug companies and, in fact, taxpayers do not get any reasonable price returns from them. We just give them the money.

Here is an example. Taxol is a very important and widely used medicine. According to a 2003 GAO report, the NIH spent $484 million on research for Taxol, Bristol-Myers Squibb spent $1 billion and subsequently earned $9 billion in profits.

In other words, American taxpayers are paying twice: once in the form of underwriting pharmaceutical research and the second time in the form of monopoly prices.

When we talk about the drug companies, we should also deal with the issue they often bring up. PhRMA is a very powerful lobbying group, the most powerful trade group on Capitol Hill. What they tell us is they need these very

high prices, they need all of the taxpayers' money because they are putting all of that into research and development. Don't we all want new drugs for diabetes, cancer, AIDS, and a dozen other terrible illnesses? This chart tells us something a little bit different.

This chart tells us the pharmaceutical industry spends far more for marketing--and goodness knows we have seen their ads on television over and over again, and guess who is paying for those ads. We are, in terms of high prices for the drugs, far more for marketing than for research and development.

Let me get back to the thrust of what this debate is all about, and let me be very clear. As I mentioned a little while ago, the Cochran amendment is a poison pill. If anyone is serious about prescription drug reimportation, if people are serious about lowering the cost of prescription drugs from 25 to 50 percent, if people are serious about standing up for consumers in this country, they will vote against the Cochran amendment.

So that no Senator has any doubt about what is going on, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a Statement of Administration Policy, dated May 1, 2007, from the President's office, and I will quote from the bottom of page 2, where there it is in black and white. This is a two-page letter. It says:

As a result, if any such importation provision were

included in the final version of the bill presented to the

President, the President's senior advisers would recommend

that he veto the bill.

Mr. President, the first flaw Secretary Shalala identified was the lack of any requirement that the drug manufacturers give importers permission to use the FDA-approved labeling for imported medicines.

The Dorgan amendment addresses that concern.

The second flaw identified by Secretary Shalala was the lack of any ban on drug companies discriminating against foreign companies that export medicines to the United States.

The Dorgan amendment addresses that concern.

The third flaw identified by Secretary Shalala was the 5-year sunset in that version of the bill. That sunset would limit the public benefit from the investment the public would be making to put a safe reimportation system in place. In other words, she was saying, why should we go through all this effort if we are to only have a 5-year process.

The Dorgan amendment addresses that concern.

Finally, the Secretary noted the absence of a long-term income stream to fund enforcement of the reimportation system.

The Dorgan amendment addresses that concern.

In short, to characterize Secretary Shalala's letter as one that says reimportation is unsafe is to mischaracterize the essence of that letter. What Secretary Shalala was critical of was poison pills, what she called ``flaws and loopholes'' that were put in, or allowed to remain in the bill at the bidding of the pharmaceutical industry so they could defeat reimportation.

I have been involved in this issue for a long time, and that is what the drug companies do. Every day there is another reason why we can't go forward to lower the cost of prescription drugs. Every day there is another reason why we have to pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We have 1,200 lobbyists, no doubt many of them running around right now knocking on doors, to make sure our people continue to pay the highest prices in the world.

Secretary Shalala wrote in her letter that she, in fact, hoped Congress would fix the flaws and close the loopholes in that 2000 legislation of 7 years ago, and this is what she wrote to President Clinton:

Mr. President, the changes to the reimportation legislation

that we have proposed can and should be enacted by the

Congress next year.

In other words, in 2001. Let me repeat that. Secretary Shalala wrote to President Clinton:

Mr. President, the changes to the reimportation legislation

that we have proposed can and should be enacted by the

Congress next year.

Unfortunately, it has taken 7 years of work to bring us to where we are today. This should have been done years ago. Under the Republican leadership, there was no question we could not get to first base on reimportation. I hope things have changed now.

Let me conclude by saying that anyone who comes up here and says they are for reimportation but they are voting for the Cochran amendment is in fact not for reimportation. Anybody who comes up here and says, well, even the Clinton administration said we could not do that, I am afraid also that is not accurate and I think they are quoting Secretary Shalala, who was then Secretary of Health and Human Services, out of context.

As I have mentioned before, I have been through these battles with the

drug companies before. There is nothing the pharmaceutical industry will not do--nothing--in order to make sure they remain one of the most profitable industries in America. They will say anything, do anything, and put any kind of pressure they can on Members of the Senate or Members of the House.

Today, we have an opportunity to do something important. For many years there was growing concern in this country about a do-nothing Congress, about a Congress that was worried far more about the wealthy and the powerful than the needs of ordinary Americans. The elections in November have changed that. We have new leadership here. I hope very much that under this new leadership we will all summon up the courage to stand up to the drug companies, the most powerful, the most greedy lobby and industry right here on Capitol Hill, and that we will go forward and we will pass this legislation to lower the cost of prescription drugs for all Americans.

Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, there is not much I can add to the brilliant remarks made by Senator Dorgan. I think he, in a very comprehensive manner, made clear why the Senate and this country should move to prescription drug reimportation. I think he very ably answered the objections that we know are sure to come and made the case as well as could be made.

I want to touch on some personal reflections on this issue. Some years ago, as the Congressman then from the State of Vermont--and I live an hour and a half away from the Canadian border. My State borders Canada. Some years ago, I put together what, in fact, turns out to be the very first bus trip to take constituents over the Canadian border to buy low-cost prescription drugs.

All of us have days which are transformative where something happens we will never forget, and that is the day I will never forget. On that day we took a busload of Vermonters, mostly women, many of the women struggling with breast cancer. We went from St. Albans, VT, to Montreal, Canada. I will never forget the look on the faces of those women who were struggling for their lives when they bought breast cancer medicine at 10 percent of the cost they were paying in the State of Vermont. The drug was Tamoxifen, a widely prescribed drug for those people who are struggling with breast cancer.

These women walked in fighting for their lives, many of whom did not have a lot of money. They walked in there and they could not believe, literally could not believe, the cost of that medicine which they needed to keep them alive. At that moment some years ago--it may well have changed since then--the cost was one-tenth what it was in the United States of America.

The question is a very simple question: How do you have a drug manufactured by a company, manufactured in the same factory, put in the same bottles, sold in Canada, in some cases for one-tenth the price that same medicine is sold in the United States of America? How possibly can that happen?

Now, as it occurs, I am not a great fan of unfettered free trade. I have very serious concerns about what our trade policy is doing in terms of throwing American workers out on the street, moving plants to China and other low-wage countries. But I am always amazed that on the floor of Congress, when it comes to representing the interests of multinational corporations, people are always speaking about how great unfettered free trade is; it is not a problem; American workers going down the street; workers in China paid 30 cents an hour. That is okay. That is part of globalization.

Well, why isn't it part of globalization that prescription drug distributors and pharmacists can pick up FDA safety-approved medicine at a fraction of the price they are currently forced to pay, and lower the cost of prescription drugs in this country very substantially? Why is that not a process of globalization that every Member of the Senate should be supporting?

We should not kid ourselves as to what this debate is about. I think most Americans understand that large multinational corporations have enormous power over the Congress. You have big oil running up recordbreaking profits, receiving tax breaks and corporate welfare. You have credit card companies with tremendous power over what goes on in Congress, able to charge Americans 25, 28 percent usurious interest rates. You have insurance companies blocking national health care efforts so all of our American people can have health care as a right of citizenship. But at the top of the list of powerful, greedy special interests, at the top of that list, that very impressive list, stands the pharmaceutical industry. They are at the top.

So when you talk about powerful interests, look at the pharmaceutical industry and the impact and the power they have in terms of what goes on here in Congress. Since 1998, the pharmaceutical industry has spent over $900 million on lobbying activities; $900 million since 1998. That is more than any other industry in the United States of America.

It is hard to believe, but there are now over 1,200 prescription drug lobbyists right here in America, many of them right here on Capitol Hill. That amounts to more than two lobbyists for every Member of the House and the Senate. They have us well covered. These people are paid top dollar as lobbyists. These are former leaders of the Republican Party, former leaders of the Democratic Party.

Let me tell you, they are hard at work today. They will be hard at work tomorrow. What they have done successfully, year after year after year, is when an effort comes up in the House and an effort comes up in the Senate, they descend like locusts into the offices of Members of Congress and say: Don't vote for change. Keep the status quo alive. Make sure the American people continue to pay the highest prices for medicine in the entire world.

Since 2000--I don't know if you are supposed to talk about these things on the floor of the Senate. I will. Since the year 2000, the pharmaceutical companies have contributed almost $250 million in campaign contributions. Let me repeat that. Since the year 2000, the pharmaceutical companies have contributed almost $250 million in campaign contributions.

What this debate is about is not just whether we are going to lower the cost of medicine in this country and save billions and billions of dollars for the consumers of our country, for people with acute and chronic illnesses, for our seniors; it is also about whether the Congress of the United States is, in fact, prepared to stand up to the most powerful, the greediest special interest in the United States of America.

In my view, the time is long overdue for us to begin to make some fundamental changes in our prescription drug policies in this country. The time is long overdue for us to lower the price of medicine for our people, which not only will help people, of course, pay for their prescription drugs, it will lower the entire cost of health care in the United States.

We spend far more money per capita on health care than does any other country on Earth. If we lower the cost of prescription drugs, we will have an impact on that.

Tomorrow I will be speaking at greater length on this issue, but I think the arguments are so clear that prescription drug reimportation makes sense. The idea, as Senator Dorgan has mentioned, that somehow we can import tomatoes and lettuce from farms in Mexico and in Latin America, that is okay, but we cannot reimport prescription drugs from Canada with FDA regulations, that is impossible, makes sense to nobody at all. Food coming in from China, no problem; FDA-regulated prescription drugs coming from Canada, oh, my word, it can't be done. Give me a break. Of course, it can be done.

What this issue is about is not drug safety. What this issue is about is the profits of the pharmaceutical industry and the enormous power they have over Congress. Now is the time for us to say to the drug companies: You have dominated what goes on year after year after year. You, in the drug industry, wrote the prescription drug Medicare bill. You have resisted year after year every effort to reform how we price medicine in the United States.

Maybe the year 2007 might be the moment in which Members of Congress have the courage to stand up and say enough is enough. Let's support the men and women and children, the seniors of our country. Let's lower the cost of prescription drugs. Let's pass prescription drug reimportation.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Senator.

Mr. President, I intended to have considered an amendment I have offered, which is a very important amendment, which would provide assistance from the Department of Commerce to workers, to employees who want to move forward in terms of ESOPs, employee stock ownership plans.

At a time when we are losing millions of good-paying blue-collar manufacturing jobs, white-collar information technology jobs, it seems to me that the ESOP concept, the worker-ownership concept, is, in fact, an important model the U.S. Government should be exploring in terms of how we help those workers purchase their own companies and keep jobs in the United States of America.

I understand there is a problem with jurisdiction. The chairman and ranking member of the Banking Committee would like to work with me on this issue. I think we would like to go forward in terms of holding hearings and then coming forward with some legislation, which seems to me to be a sensible idea.

What I would like to do is, if I could, yield to the chairman of the Banking Committee, Mr. Dodd, and then maybe to Ranking Member Shelby.

Mr. President, if my friend will yield briefly, Senator Baucus is a cosponsor of this legislation, along with Senator Leahy and Senator Lincoln.

Mr. President, I yield back to the Senator.

Mr. President, I yield to my friend from Alabama.

Mr. President, I very much thank my friend from Alabama and my friend from Connecticut. We look forward to working with you.

Mr. President, at this time, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment.