Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I will just take a few minutes. Later this afternoon, at 5:45, we have ordered a vote on the nomination of Dr. Lester Crawford to be Commissioner of the FDA. I had intended to come and speak prior to that vote. My understanding is that there is only a 30-minute time period for debate, equally divided, just prior to the vote on that nomination, so I will take a couple of minutes now to explain why I am going to vote against this nomination.

I have spent most of my time in the Senate voting for nominees sent to us by Presidents, Republicans and Democrats alike, because I believe those who win the Presidency largely have the right to select their own team and to have their own advisers. So I have, in most cases, voted for the nominees who have come before the Senate to serve in the President's Cabinet and other important positions in the administration.

This position is the head of the Food and Drug Administration, a very important agency--one, incidentally, that

has had a substantial amount of controversy in recent years. I have been particularly interested in the FDA because we--myself along with others in the Senate--have spent a lot of time working to try to see if we can put some downward pressure on prescription drug prices.

Much to our chagrin--to those of us on both the Democratic side and the Republican side who have been working toward this end--the opposition, in many cases, has come from the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA has alleged safety issues where, in fact, there are no safety issues at all. It has been the Food and Drug Administration that has been shaking the pom-poms for and cheerleading with the pharmaceutical industry on these issues.

Let me describe the issue just for a moment.

The American consumer pays the highest prices in the world for brand- name prescription drugs. Consumers who purchase those prescription drugs are charged much higher prices in the United States than elsewhere around the world. The pharmaceutical industry says it charges these prices because it can. I held a hearing on this issue when I chaired a subcommittee some years ago. The result is, the drug industry said: Well, we can charge that amount here in the United States, but we can't charge it in other countries because other countries have price controls on prescription drugs.

Yet I notice--because of a sweetheart little tax provision that was put in law about a year ago--that the drug industry has made substantial profits overseas. The sweetheart deal allows those companies that have started enterprises overseas and are earning profits overseas to now pay taxes at a 5.25-percent rate for the income they repatriate to this country, quite a deal for big companies that move their jobs overseas. According to newspaper reports, the pharmaceutical industry now has as much as $75 billion in profits they have made in other countries that they are set to repatriate to this country for a 5.25-percent income tax rate.

Interesting. They tell us they have to charge higher prices to the American consumers for prescription drugs, and they charge lower prices elsewhere because they are required by pricing policies in those countries to do so. They say they do not make much money in those countries, yet now they have $75 billion in profits from overseas sales in countries in which they have charged dramatically lower prices. So, obviously, they are making substantial profits in their sales in other countries even though the consumers in those other countries enjoy lower prescription drug prices.

Mr. President, let me, by unanimous consent, show two pill bottles, if I might.

Mr. President, this is a medicine called Celebrex, made by Pfizer. These bottles are large containers that happen to be empty. It would contain 500 capsules; 200 milligrams, the usual adult dosage, it says. As you can see, this other bottle is also Celebrex. It is the same pill, made by the same company, put in the same bottle. The only difference in these bottles is the color on the labels is a bit different, but the pills that were inside were the same. This one bottle is sold in the United States and the other is sold in Canada.

What is the difference? Well, the U.S. consumer pays $2.93 per capsule out of this bottle. The Canadian consumer pays $1.32 out of the other bottle. So the one costs almost $3, the other just over $1. The American consumer is charged double the price of the Canadian consumer. It is the same pill, put in the same bottle, made by the same company, at an FDA-approved plant, sent to two different places, and the American consumers pay two and a half times more than the Canadian consumer.

Why is that the case? Well, the drug industry says they charge that price in the United States because they can and because they must in order to gather the funds for research and development. But, of course, the record shows that is not the case either. The drug industry actually spends more money on marketing and advertising than they do on research and development. And they actually spend about the same amount on research and development in Europe that they do in the United States when, in fact, in Europe they charge lower prices for exactly the same prescription drugs.

So what does all of this have to do with Dr. Crawford and the FDA? Well, for those of us who are working to allow for the importation of FDA-approved drugs from other countries--notably from Canada and Europe--one of the most significant areas of opposition has been from the FDA.

Dr. Mark McClellan was the head of the FDA for a while. He was an aggressive advocate on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry could not have had a better cheerleader than Dr. McClellan. And during that time, Dr. Crawford has also been at the FDA serving as deputy. He has been there as acting commissioner for much of this administration, both before and now after Dr. McClellan. And during that time, the FDA has continued to be a roadblock to try to get lower prices on prescription drugs for American consumers.

The problem is that there is a law on the books that says the only entity that can import a prescription drug from another country is the manufacturer of that prescription drug. So a licensed pharmacist in Minot, ND, cannot go to Regina, Canada, for example, and buy an FDA- approved prescription drug, even one made in the United States and shipped to Canada. A licensed U.S. pharmacist cannot go to a licensed pharmacist in Canada, buy the FDA-approved drug at half or a third of the price and bring it back and pass the savings along to the customer.

Why is that the case? Well, because once again there is a sweetheart deal. Under this deal, trade should apparently only work for everybody but the little guy, the consumer. One would think, with free trade and the opportunity to cross boundaries, that if you are talking about FDA- approved medicines, that American consumers, particularly American pharmacists, would be able to also take advantage of the global marketplace, but they cannot.

So I, along with a bipartisan group of colleagues, have been trying to change the law. We are not proposing price controls but instead competition. Very simple: Allow an American pharmacist, a main street drugstore owner to access the identical prescription drug in Canada or Europe at a fraction of the price and bring it back and pass the savings along to the consumer. We are told that American consumers could save as much as $38 billion--that is with a ``B''--a year if that were to happen.

As a point of fact, if we were able to get our legislation passed, we would not have people shopping in Canada for prescription drugs. But the very fact that they could would force the repricing of prescription drugs based on market forces here in the United States. Unfortunately, we have been thwarted in our efforts. Senator Olympia Snowe, John McCain, myself, Senator Kennedy, Senator Grassley, Senator Stabenow, and many others have all worked on this for a long, long time. The first bill I introduced on this was in 1999, and still drug importation has not been allowed because it has been blocked.

Opponents have said there would be safety issues. Well, let me give you an example of the safety issue. In Europe, what we propose is done every single day: cross-border trading in prescription drugs. A pharmacist in Germany wants to buy a prescription drug from Spain, that is not a problem. If you are a pharmacy in England and want to buy a prescription drug from France, that is no problem either because they have something called parallel trading. In fact, we had the person who headed the parallel trading association come and testify before a U.S. Congressional committee. That person said there are no safety issues. But it opens the market, so consumers see lower drug prices as a result of it. But in this country, we are told we apparently cannot do it. It does not take rocket science to understand there is no safety issue.

Let me talk about Canada just for a moment. Canada has nearly an identical chain of custody for the prescription drug that comes from the manufacturer that goes to the consumer. The Canadian system is nearly identical to ours. So if an American licensed pharmacist were to buy a lower

priced FDA-approved drug from a licensed Canadian pharmacist, how on Earth could there be any kind of safety issue? There simply is not.

This is not about safety. It is about profits for the pharmaceutical industry. Now, I understand that issue. If the pharmaceutical industry were represented by people here--rather than serving in the Senate, they served the pharmaceutical industry--I would understand why you would make the case you want maximum profits. But that is not the way our economic system works. It works best for consumers when you have competition and open borders and an opportunity to trade. That is what we have been trying to do.

It is disappointing that over 6 years now we have found a lot of opposition to something that is so filled with common sense. The opposition comes from the pharmaceutical industry, from allies of the pharmaceutical industry here in this Chamber in the Senate, and from the FDA. Now, the FDA is supposed to regulate, not represent. The FDA is to regulate the pharmaceutical industry, not represent the pharmaceutical industry.

These are, in many cases, lifesaving drugs. I don't diminish the importance of prescription drugs. They provide miracles in many cases. But miracle drugs offer no miracles to those who cannot pay for them. We have all heard from people who go to the grocery store and go to the pharmacy in the back of the store first to buy the pharmaceuticals in order to understand how much money they have left for groceries. We also know that senior citizens are especially hard hit. They make up 12 percent of America's population, yet they consume one-third of the prescription drugs. It is not unusual to talk to a senior citizen who is taking 5, 7, 12 different prescription drugs every single day. Many of them simply can't afford it. America's most vulnerable population represents those who are hardest hit by prescription drugs prices.

I was at a farm in North Dakota last summer, as I was touring around. One fellow, who was about 85 years old, and his wife, who was in her mid 80s, sat on a hay bale and told me their story. He said: My wife has been fighting breast cancer for 4 years. For 4 years we have driven to the Canadian border to buy Tamoxifen because you can buy Tamoxifen at 80-percent less cost in Canada than in the United States. He talked about the number of trips they made. The only reason they could afford Tamoxifen was because they could drive to the border and get it. A small supply of drugs for personal use, a 3-month supply, has been allowed to come across the border for individuals. But very few Americans can reach that Canadian border and, on a routine basis, find a way to buy their FDA-approved drugs from Canada.

I took a group of American retired folks to Canada in a bus. We went to a little, one-room drugstore in Emerson, Canada. I saw person to person the prescription drugs they had to buy and the savings with each of them. You should have seen the look of surprise on their faces when they found out what the price was in Canada versus what they had been paying here in the U.S. This is unfair pricing. We need to do something about it. But the cavalier attitude at the FDA, the attitude of representing the drug companies rather than regulating the drug companies, means that we will continue to have to battle the FDA. Having to battle the FDA to do something that is so filled with common sense is a frustrating thing for those of us who have been working on this for years and years.

Incidentally, there are some other issues with this Commissioner, and I will not spend my time talking about those.

My colleagues, including Senator Kennedy, with whom I spoke the other day, will make the point eloquently that we need an FDA Commissioner. It is unbelievable that we have gone all this time without having an FDA Commissioner. We have had someone who is acting for the bulk of this administration. I don't disagree with that notion. It doesn't make any sense that we have not had a full-time, permanent FDA Commissioner filling that term. But that doesn't mean that Dr. Crawford is the right person. He is not in my judgment. I wish I could vote for him, but I don't intend to.

My hope is that in the coming months, we will persuade the majority leader and others, to get a vote on drug importation legislation. If necessary, we will offer amendments at the right time and on the right bills that forces the hand of those who oppose the work we are trying to do.

My hope is at the end of the day, we will get a vote. If we get a vote allowing the reimportation of prescription drugs, there is no question it is going to pass the Senate. It will get 60-65 or more votes in the Senate. The question is getting the vote. We thought we had a commitment in the last Congress for a vote. The Senate majority leader and I had a disagreement about what the commitment said, and so we didn't get the vote. What has happened is, the majority has successfully blocked it, and the White House that stands with the pharmaceutical industry has successfully blocked it. There is now a very strong bipartisan group of Senators. I mentioned Senator Snowe, Senators Vitter, McCain, Stabenow, Kennedy, and many others. We have over 30 Senators who have now joined as cosponsors of this legislation. One way or another we are going to prevail. When it is passed, we will see reasonable and competitive prices for prescription drugs.

I regret to say that I will vote against Dr. Crawford's nomination when the vote occurs. I wish I could come to the floor and say I will vote for the nominee. But I don't want to put further roadblocks in the way of those of us who are trying to get fair prescription drug pricing for American citizens. I believe it is critically important that we understand prescription drugs are something different, something unusual. Most countries have already understood that. If you need a prescription drug, a lifesaving drug that can either save your life or keep you out of an acute care hospital bed, you don't have a choice. You have to try and buy it, at prices that are double, triple and, in some cases, 10 times the cost for the identical drug in other countries. That is unfair to the American consumer.

Some day we will force enough people on the floor of this Senate to stand up and vote. When we do, we will have sufficient votes to move this through the Senate. I will say this: I doubt whether it will be with anything other than the obstruction of Dr. Crawford. He and Dr. McClellan before him have run the play called by the pharmaceutical industry. I really regret that is the way it is going.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I am going to be filing an amendment and also noticing an intention to suspend the rules for such an amendment. I want to preserve the right to address it on this piece of legislation. This is an amendment that would prohibit the sale of Unocal, an American oil company, to CNOOC, a Chinese Government- controlled and owned oil company.

I mentioned Friday that I think that this is a fairly simple proposition. The Chinese Government would never, ever allow an American company, let alone an American oil company, to buy a Chinese oil company. The Chinese oil companies are controlled by the Chinese Government. What we have here is a proposal by CNOOC, which is a Chinese oil company controlled by the Government, wishing to purchase an American oil company. You don't have reciprocal capabilities.

They say: Let the free market deal with this. Let's let the marketplace decide.

There is no free market or marketplace in a circumstance where the Chinese Government controls a company and the controlled company, through deeply subsidized Government loans, wishes to buy an American company, especially in something as strategic as oil.

I don't bear any ill will toward the Chinese. They are a big and growing country with a significant impact around the world. They will be a significant part of our future. But we do

have an extraordinary trade deficit with China which is dangerous for us. It is headed to over $200 billion this year. That is completely unsustainable. It is dangerous for us. Our relationship with the Chinese should and must be mutually beneficial, especially in the area of trade. Regrettably, it is not.

We are a cash cow for the hard currency needs of China. They continue to ratchet up these deficits in a significant way. In many cases, the Chinese markets are closed to our country. We also find on the streets of China a substantial amount of counterfeit and pirated goods that come from intellectual property in this country. The Chinese say they have trouble controlling all that. They don't have trouble controlling it. In fact, the logo now that belongs to the Chinese Government for the Olympic games, the minute that showed up on the streets in China under counterfeiting, the Chinese Government took immediate action, and you can't find it any more because the Chinese Government had an interest in stopping counterfeit and piracy when it came to the logo for the Chinese Olympic games.

We have a lot of issues with the Chinese--counterfeiting, piracy, trade deficit, many more. This issue is simple; should we allow a Chinese-controlled and largely Chinese-owned oil company to purchase an American oil company, especially in circumstances where they would not allow that same transaction to take place?

My answer to that is no. I don't think it makes sense for this country's strategic or economic future, and it does not make sense from the standpoint of national security. I don't believe it makes sense from the standpoint of reciprocal trade opportunities, and I don't believe those who say this is some sort of marketplace transaction. There is not a marketplace when you have government control of both the industry and the companies in the industry trying to buy American businesses.

I am filing the amendment and noticing along with it an intent to suspend the rules which would be required for me to do when I offer such an amendment. I mentioned that I also likely would offer a funding limitation amendment in the Appropriations Committee, and the House of Representatives has done the same. The funding limitation would apply to the Treasury Department, where approval for such a transaction would be required to take place.

This is not a reflection of whether I think the Chinese country is trying to do harm to our economy or anything of the sort. China is a large and growing country with 1.3 billion people, an economy that is growing by leaps and bounds. I have been to China a couple of times, and it is quite a remarkable place. But with respect to our relationship with China, that relationship must be mutually beneficial, especially in the area of international trade. It is not now mutually beneficial. There is one-way trade going on, and we are up to our neck in trade debt to the Chinese.

This transaction does not advance our interest. It might advance the Chinese interest by giving them more access to oil, but it does not advance America's interest. I hope that it is viewed through the prism of what advances our country's interests. What is it that represents the best policy choice for our country?

My sense of that is that we ought to prohibit this sale. The amendment is very simple. It doesn't beat around the bush. It is very short. It is an amendment that would prohibit the sale of an American oil company to a Government-controlled and deeply subsidized oil company in the country of China.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend paragraph 4 of rule XVI for the purpose of proposing to the bill H.R. 3057 the following amendment:

Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend paragraph 4 of rule XVI for the purpose of proposing to the bill H.R. 3057 the following amendment:

Mr. President, I point out an amendment I will offer to the Foreign Operations appropriations bill. Let me show a picture of something called Fat Albert. Fat Albert is an aerostat balloon. It is on a tether far up in the sky. The purpose of Fat Albert is to broadcast television signals into the country of Cuba to tell the citizens of Cuba that life under Castro, life in communism in Cuba, is a pretty awful life and you ought to aspire toward a democracy and here are all the good things democracy has to offer.

The fact is, the Cubans already know all that. That is why they get on rafts and risk their lives trying to leave. In any event, if they don't know that, they can tune into a Miami radio station 90 miles away. If they choose not to tune in to a Miami radio station, they can tune in to Radio Marti. That does work. It sends signals to the country of Cuba and people listen to it. But TV Mart does not work.

TV Marti doesn't get into the Cuban marketplace. The Cuban people can't see it, because the Castro regime jams the signals. We have now spent $189 million on TV Marti. We send television signals the Cuban people can't see. We spend $189 million. Apparently, someone feels better because we have wasted this money.

I had an amendment earlier this year to shut this down. Strangely enough, this Senate turned it down. I will give them the chance again on the Foreign Operations bill. I am going to take the money out of that bill, and we will vote on it again.

Why do the Cubans not see these signals? Because Castro jams them. The President is asking for $21 million more to send television signals to Cuba. They used to use Fat Albert. Fat Albert got loose at one point, meandered over into the Everglades. They had to find some grapple hooks to rescue him. But that wasn't enough.

Incidentally, for most of the time they have broadcast these signals, they broadcast them from 3:30 a.m. until 8:30 a.m. All were jammed. They decided to change that on May 20, 2002, and then they began to broadcast in prime time. An administration official from the State Department said this: We don't have any official evidence that the audience has increased due to the broadcast schedule change.

Chris Coursen, former chairman of the President's board of advisors on broadcasting to Cuba, says until 6 years ago, TV Marti used to do exit interviews with Cubans coming to the United States on rafts and so on to determine whether Cubans, in fact, watched TV Marti. It was clear from those interviews no one was seeing TV Marti in Cuba because Castro was jamming it. We get people coming off a raft. We say: Have you watched Television Marti? No, we can't see it. It gets jammed. What do we do? We keep spending money anyway. And they stopped doing exit interviews with Cubans coming here, because they didn't want to document the fact that nobody could watch TV Marti.

It is now not enough to do it by an aerostat balloon. We now have a specially equipped airplane flying once a week, a C-130, Commando Solo, which is a very special airplane designed for communications strategies in warfare. We have taken an Air National Guard Commando Solo, put it up 4 hours a week, and it still cannot overcome the jammers in Cuba. We went from spending money we don't have on things we don't need to send television signals to people who can't receive them, and then we went to airplanes.

Now the President wants to buy an airplane just for this purpose, buy a new one. The President wants to spend $21 million more sending a television signal no one can see. It is unbelievable. I want to see somebody vote to continue this funding and then go home and thumb their suspenders and crow about how they oppose Government waste. I want to see one person do that. If ever there was a demonstrated waste in Government, this is it. Everybody in this Chamber knows it. We will see whether finally this Senate will decide to shut down money that is spent that unwisely.

Mr. President, I am going to offer one other amendment on the Foreign Operations appropriations bill. I will offer it on every appropriations bill I get the chance to offer it on. It is legislating on appropriations, but it is important to do.

We have held hearing after hearing on the subject of Halliburton and other contractors in Iraq. There is massive waste of the taxpayers' money. The most recent hearing talked about a whistleblower who worked for Halliburton in a food service enterprise in a supervisory capacity in Iraq. He said: We were serving food to American troops that had expired and outdated stamps on it by as much as a year. We were told to feed it to the troops. There was food in convoys that came under fire, and the food was contaminated with bullets and shrapnel. We were told to take out the bullets and shrapnel, and feed the food to the troops anyway.

He also said--with respect to when he worked for Halliburton we were told if we spoke to a government auditor who came to our base, we would be fired or sent to an area to work where there is an active fire zone. And this in fact happened to him.

This isn't just this hearing. It is not just feeding outdated food to the troops. It is about people who have testified, whistleblowers who have testified at previous hearings and said: We drove $85,000 new trucks, and we left them on the side of the road. If they had a flat tire or a plugged fuel pump, they got torched. We would just leave them behind. It was a cost plus contract, so there was no need to fix these little problems. Just buy new trucks, and make a nice little profit on the new purchase.

The stories of waste and fraud and abuse are unbelievable, and nobody cares.

Anybody hear of any oversight hearings by the oversight committees of jurisdiction in the U.S. Senate? None, zero. That is why we are holding the hearings I am chairing in the Policy Committee, because no one here cares.

I just sent a letter to Secretary Rumsfeld to say please at least look into this question of whether we are sending men and women in America's uniform to Iraq to fight and serving food that is outdated by as much as a year. Unbelievable.

Bunny Greenhouse testified at the hearing. She is the highest ranking civilian official in the Corps of Engineers, and is responsible for approving large contracts. She always got excellent scores on her performance evaluations. But they didn't like her much when she began to interfere with the

sweetheart deals given to Halliburton--no bid--under circumstances she objected to. She said:

I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to

contracts awarded to KBR [Halliburton] represents the most

blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during

the course of my professional career.

Will someone investigate? Who will investigate? The answer is no one. So I am going to propose, as I have previously, a Truman-type committee. Harry Truman, a Democratic Senator from Missouri, when we had a Democrat in the White House, said: I am going to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse in the military. And he found it.

We need an investigation here, and we should have a special committee of the type of the Truman committee. I will offer that amendment once again.

We cannot sit idly by and suggest nothing wrong is happening. This is serious. It ought to be taken seriously. It undermines, in my judgment, those who fight the wars, the men and women who wear America's uniform and go, when asked by the Government, to fight. The least we can do is make certain they are not being fed outdated food, that contractors are not shortchanging them in a range of ways, and make sure the taxpayer isn't being bilked.

We have had testimony about how we paid to put an air conditioner in a building in Iraq, and then it goes to a subcontractor, and eventually goes to another subcontractor, and another one, and pretty soon that room gets a fan and we get charged for an air conditioner. The American taxpayer just gets shafted, and our troops are ill served.

There is so much waste, fraud, and abuse that it is unbelievable.

I will offer these amendments: on the issue of the Truman committee, on the issue TV Marti, and also I may offer my amendment on the issue of the purchase of Unocal by CNOOC.

Mr. President, I want to mention an issue dealing with sexual predators. We are now hearing, as I did this morning on the news, more information about Mr. Joseph Duncan. He is a violent sexual predator. He raped a young boy at gunpoint and went to prison for 20 years for that crime. He was then released, and went to live in North Dakota. Duncan has now been charged in Idaho with multiple counts of murder and with the abusing of two young children that he kidnapped.

This is a man who, just some months ago, in the month of April, was hauled into an American court in the State of Minnesota, charged with molesting a 6-year-old boy, having had the record of violently raping at gunpoint a teenage boy some long while before. But we are told that the judge in Minnesota did not know this person's previous history. So after walking into a Minnesota courtroom, being charged with molesting a 6-year-old, despite his previous history, Mr. Duncan was allowed to post $15,000 bail and was gone. Now children have been abused and kidnapped by this violent sexual predator. People are dead.

I have introduced a bill called Dru's law. I will put up a picture of this beautiful, young woman, Dru Sjodin. She walked outside of a shopping center in Grand Forks, ND, one night and, similarly, a violent sexual predator, Mr. Rodriguez, allegedly abducted her and murdered her.

Let me tell you about Mr. Rodriguez. Mr. Rodriguez is a man who served 23 years in prison for a violent sexual crime. When released, he was judged by the psychiatrist and psychologist to be at the highest risk for reoffending. He was let out of prison after 23 years. No monitoring at all. At the prison door, it is: So long, see you, hope you do well.

Within 6 months, this man allegedly abducted and murdered this wonderful young woman, a student at the University of North Dakota.

Now, Martha Stewart went to prison, and when she was let out, she was required to wear an electronic bracelet around her ankle so that they knew her whereabouts. I believe she still wears an electronic bracelet. But Joseph Duncan didn't wear an electronic devise. And Mr. Rodriguez didn't wear an electronic device.

What is happening in this country--especially with violent sexual predators--is just shameful. We know what causes this, who does it. In most cases, they have been in the hands of law enforcement and the criminal justice system and they have been let out. We know also that over 70 percent of the violent sexual predators will reoffend and, in most cases, will reoffend more violently.

As a result of that, some long while ago, I introduced Dru's law, named after this young woman, Dru Sjodin. It would do three things: One, establish a national registry of sexual predators. There is not now one. There are State registries, but there is no national registry that you can search to find out who lives near you, regardless of state lines.

Second, if a high-risk sex offender is about to be released from prison, there must be notification of the local State attorneys so they can, if they wish, seek additional civil commitment and incarceration.

Third, if a high-risk offender is, in fact released, they must have high-level monitoring upon release. We just cannot allow these people-- the violent sexual predators--to end their term, or to come into court on a new charge and to walk back out on the sidewalks to terrorize other innocent Americans.

The Senate passed Dru's law last fall. It didn't get through the House, so I have to start over. I am proud to tell you that Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is a cosponsor, and Orrin Hatch, the previous chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has been very supportive of this bill. We have bipartisan cosponsorship. I hope next week we will, by consent, move Dru's law through the Senate again and send it to the House. We must address these issues.

In April, I held a town meeting about the issue of sexual predators in Fargo, ND, which, coincidentally, is where Mr. Duncan was living. I called up on the North Dakota Registry of Sexual Predators for the names of these people living within 2 miles of where I was having the meeting. I told the people at the meeting I want to know that there is this violent offender within blocks of where we are holding this meeting. Here is what I had. I had this piece of paper. I told them about this sexual predator, and his rape of a 14-year-old boy at gunpoint and the burning of his victim.

The fact is, this man was not some stranger with no record.

Then Mr. Duncan went to court on the charge of molesting a 6-year-old boy in another state, and was allowed to post $15,000 bail because the judge apparently wasn't aware of his record. The judge should certainly have been apprised of his record.

In fact, we cannot any longer--from California, to Texas, to Florida, to Idaho, to North Dakota--continue to see violent sexual predators let out of prison in circumstances that are so much more lenient than that which was required of Martha Stewart when she finished her incarceration. That makes no sense.

Mr. President, I hope that next week perhaps we will have the opportunity by consent to move the legislation, with the support and active cosponsorship of Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and also with the support of Senator Hatch, Senator Leahy, and many others. If we do this, I think we will send hope to all of those who have asked this Congress to take action to do the right thing. I hope that perhaps by this day next week, I am able to say we have been successful in moving that legislation and, hopefully, we can move it to the House and get the President to sign this very important piece of legislation.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I am introducing a piece of legislation that deals with the issue of a Chinese oil company called CNOOC, a state-owned corporation that has proposed to acquire a United States oil company called Unocal.

The purpose of my legislation--and I may well also offer it as an amendment to the Foreign Operations appropriations bill we will consider today and next week--is to prohibit the sale of Unocal Corporation to CNOOC. The legislation provides that notwithstanding any other provision in the law, the merger, acquisition, or takeover of Unocal Corporation by CNOOC is prohibited. Let me explain why I am introducing.

I bear no ill will toward the Chinese. China is an extraordinarily large country. The Chinese have an extraordinary rate of economic growth. They are very involved in the world economy. We have a large trade deficit, regrettably, with the Chinese. That has to do with a range of unfair trade practices and other things. We had a $162 billion trade deficit with the Chinese in the past year. This year it is on track to top $200 billion.

I understand what the Chinese are trying to do. They are trying to meet their future energy needs. They have four large state-owned energy companies. Their companies, including CNOOC, are attempting to acquire in many different ways opportunities to satisfy their energy needs. In attempting to acquire Unocal, they are attempting to acquire a U.S. corporation with substantial strategically important oil assets for our country.

The reason I believe we ought to prohibit the sale of an American oil company to a Chinese state-owned oil company is this: There is not and would not be reciprocal treatment. If a United States oil company or a United States company wanted to buy a Chinese oil company, it wouldn't happen. The Chinese Government wouldn't approve it. The four large oil companies in China are all state controlled, and as

a practical matter, the Chinese government is not about to approve that any of those companies be purchased by a foreign government or foreign company. There is no reciprocal opportunity for a United States corporation to acquire an oil company in China.

The Chinese Government is a Communist government. Its economy is emerging as market-driven economy under the umbrella of the Chinese Government. That causes a lot of tensions and interesting circumstances. The Chinese have joined the WTO. They have made all kinds of representations about opening their marketplace. But the fact is, once again, the largest oil companies, like most other major enterprises in China, are state controlled. It makes no sense that we would allow a Chinese state-controlled oil company to acquire, in this case Unocal, a United States oil company at a time when we would not be able to reciprocate and we would be prevented from acquiring a Chinese oil company if we wished to do so.

I don't know what the administration's position would be on this. They have a review process. To the extent that the review process takes place, I believe that review process ought to be expanded. But I hope we can avoid all of that by simply deciding as a Congress this is not something that meets our national interest. Our strategic, security, and economic national interest is not served by allowing this to happen.

I am introducing this legislation today, and I know that there are many Members of Congress who share my view that this is not a transaction that meets the strategic, security, and economic interests of this country. We must trade with China. China is an emerging nation with a very substantial imprint on the world economy. The free flow of commerce and market capital is important. I understand that. This legislation that I am offering is not in any way an attempt to send a message that we do not want good trade relations with China. But it is very much intended to send this message: reciprocal opportunities ought to exist in these transactions, and they would not and do not in this case involving CNOOC and Unocal.

It is also important to point out that the money with which CNOOC, a Chinese state-controlled oil company, would purchase a United States oil corporation would be in many ways attributable to deep subsidies by the Government of China for a state-owned enterprise in China that wishes to acquire a United States oil company.

For that reason I will introduce this bill today. I may well also offer it as an amendment to the appropriations bill on Monday.

Mr. President, today I am introducing a piece of legislation that deals with the issue of a Chinese oil company called CNOOC, a state-owned corporation that has proposed to acquire a United States oil company called Unocal.

The purpose of my legislation--and I may well also offer it as an amendment to the Foreign Operations appropriations bill we will consider today and next week--is to prohibit the sale of Unocal Corporation to CNOOC. The legislation provides that notwithstanding any other provision in the law, the merger, acquisition, or takeover of Unocal Corporation by CNOOC is prohibited. Let me explain why I am introducing.

I bear no ill will toward the Chinese. China is an extraordinarily large country. The Chinese have an extraordinary rate of economic growth. They are very involved in the world economy. We have a large trade deficit, regrettably, with the Chinese. That has to do with a range of unfair trade practices and other things. We had a $162 billion trade deficit with the Chinese in the past year. This year it is on track to top $200 billion.

I understand what the Chinese are trying to do. They are trying to meet their future energy needs. They have four large state-owned energy companies. Their companies, including CNOOC, are attempting to acquire in many different ways opportunities to satisfy their energy needs. In attempting to acquire Unocal, they are attempting to acquire a U.S. corporation with substantial strategically important oil assets for our country.

The reason I believe we ought to prohibit the sale of an American oil company to a Chinese state-owned oil company is this: There is not and would not be reciprocal treatment. If a United States oil company or a United States company wanted to buy a Chinese oil company, it wouldn't happen. The Chinese Government wouldn't approve it. The four large oil companies in China are all state controlled, and as

a practical matter, the Chinese government is not about to approve that any of those companies be purchased by a foreign government or foreign company. There is no reciprocal opportunity for a United States corporation to acquire an oil company in China.

The Chinese Government is a Communist government. Its economy is emerging as market-driven economy under the umbrella of the Chinese Government. That causes a lot of tensions and interesting circumstances. The Chinese have joined the WTO. They have made all kinds of representations about opening their marketplace. But the fact is, once again, the largest oil companies, like most other major enterprises in China, are state controlled. It makes no sense that we would allow a Chinese state-controlled oil company to acquire, in this case Unocal, a United States oil company at a time when we would not be able to reciprocate and we would be prevented from acquiring a Chinese oil company if we wished to do so.

I don't know what the administration's position would be on this. They have a review process. To the extent that the review process takes place, I believe that review process ought to be expanded. But I hope we can avoid all of that by simply deciding as a Congress this is not something that meets our national interest. Our strategic, security, and economic national interest is not served by allowing this to happen.

I am introducing this legislation today, and I know that there are many Members of Congress who share my view that this is not a transaction that meets the strategic, security, and economic interests of this country. We must trade with China. China is an emerging nation with a very substantial imprint on the world economy. The free flow of commerce and market capital is important. I understand that. This legislation that I am offering is not in any way an attempt to send a message that we do not want good trade relations with China. But it is very much intended to send this message: reciprocal opportunities ought to exist in these transactions, and they would not and do not in this case involving CNOOC and Unocal.

It is also important to point out that the money with which CNOOC, a Chinese state-controlled oil company, would purchase a United States oil corporation would be in many ways attributable to deep subsidies by the Government of China for a state-owned enterprise in China that wishes to acquire a United States oil company.

For that reason I will introduce this bill today. I may well also offer it as an amendment to the appropriations bill on Monday.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1111 and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, I know the manager of the bill and the ranking member are asking for amendments to be offered and considered. I wanted to do that.

Very quickly, this amendment deals with the issue of whether to require passports for everyone entering and leaving this country at our borders.

We have a common border with the country of Canada, over 4,000 miles. In my State of North Dakota, we have people moving back and forth across the border all the time. We have people who farm on both sides of the border, people with families on both sides of the border. At the Pembina port of entry, we have 100,000 people a month crossing the border.

To require a passport for that is, in my judgment, far too burdensome. A passport now costs a $55 fee, a $12 security surcharge, and a $30 execution charge--a total of $97 to obtain a passport.

I believe very strongly we do need border security, no question about that. That is important. But I think, especially with respect to day travel and common tourist and business practices across, for example, the United States-Canadian border, with which I am familiar, to require a passport for moving across that border is enormously burdensome. I hope we will not do that.

The President, when asked about it, spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and said: When I first read that in the newspaper, about the need to have passports particularly for day crossing--he is talking about the border--I said, what's going on here? I thought there was a better way to expedite the whole flow of traffic and people.

I think the President is right, and I know that since the President said that, the folks in Homeland Security have been reconsidering this issue, but I am very worried that they still may proceed with their regulations at some point, and I hope this Congress would weigh in on the question of whether we think everyone who moves back and forth across the Canadian border should have a passport. I don't believe the requirement for a passport is practical. I think it is overly burdensome. I believe that we ought to send that message to the Department of Homeland Security.

I am not suggesting we don't care about security. We do. We care deeply about border security. But there must be other ways in which we can accomplish that task. And so my amendment will address that.

I thank my colleague from New Hampshire for giving me the opportunity, just a few minutes, to at least get the amendment offered, to be talking about it, and have it considered.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 10 minutes.

Mr. President, I will speak at a later point about the underlying bill, the Homeland Security appropriations bill. It is an important piece of legislation. I say to the manager that I just checked with the cloakrooms, and there is nobody coming to speak, so I wanted to speak in morning business. I will have an amendment dealing with the proposed passport requirements between the United States and Canada, and I will address that later.

(The remarks of Mr. Dorgan are printed in today's Record under ``Morning Business.'')

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, I understand from my colleague from New Hampshire that we will be voting on a resolution at 5:30 this evening, expressing our condolences to our allies and friends who had to bear the brunt of a terrorist attack, an aggressive terrorist attack, in London. It is heartbreaking to see the results of these horrible attacks against innocent people committed by terrorists who apparently are determined to kill innocent people, as many as is possible, to make their point, whatever their point is.

That attack reminds all of us again of how vulnerable we are and how important homeland security is, and I think it underscores the importance of this appropriations bill. Homeland security is critically important. It means we have to have reasonable border security. It means we have to have port security and a range of other issues. I want to mention two things.

We have spent a lot of money and a lot of time dealing with security of air travel, particularly commercial airlines. Now when you go through the lines at the airports, they are searching for tweezers and all those items that might be used as weapons. Sometimes there are long lines. I know it is frustrating. We have devoted a lot of time and effort in this country dealing with the last terror attack in which 15 of the 19 terrorists were Saudi citizens. Nineteen terrorists drove jet airplanes loaded with fuel into buildings to be used as missiles, and we are dealing with that a lot. We are spending a lot of money dealing with this issue of airport security and aviation security.

My colleagues, and particularly one of my colleagues who departed the Senate, Senator Hollings, have talked a lot about port security. We have about 9 million containers coming in on container ships in this country in a year--9 million containers in a year. A relatively small percentage of those containers are inspected. If, God forbid, terrorists should get a hold of a small nuclear weapon, the size of a grapefruit or a basketball, and detonate a small nuclear weapon at one of our docks in a container on a container ship, it could obliterate an American city. Yet we have not spent nearly as much time dealing with port security or, for that matter, rail security as we have dealing with the issue of security at airports and security in commercial air travel. We must do a much better job with respect to ports.

When we have that many containers coming into our ports with so few being inspected, it leaves our country vulnerable.

I recall visiting a port one day. I come from a State without ports. We do not have a water boundary. I was interested so I toured a port in a major city. I asked: What is in that container on that ship?

That is frozen broccoli, they said.

Is it full of bags of frozen broccoli?

Yes, it is full of 100-pound bags of frozen broccoli.

How do you know that? Do you know what is in the middle of that big old container?

No, we just know that is what it says on the bill of lading, frozen broccoli.

What if, God forbid, somehow terrorists acquire a nuclear weapon and put that in a refrigerated container on a container ship or any container on a container ship destined for one of our country's major port cities and detonate that nuclear weapon at the docks in the middle of one of America's port cities?

We must find ways to address those issues, and we have not spent nearly the resources necessary to give us adequate security at America's ports. We have not spent nearly the resources necessary to provide the security with this country's rail system.

We haul every day, all across this country, toxic material, dangerous material all across America. If terrorists were to find a way to deal with that and manipulate a terrorist attack in our rail system with the kinds of materials that move on our rail system, we would be in a very difficult situation.

As we review this legislation today and tomorrow, we need to continue to rethink how do we improve, how do we make the adjustments necessary to devote more resources for port security, especially port security and rail security.

I did indicate we do need to control our borders. There is no question we need to do that. But I think even the President expressed surprise at the suggestion of the Department of Homeland Security that with regard to the 4,000-plus-mile common border with Canada, we are going to require every person moving back and forth through that common border to have a passport.

In my judgment, that is an impractical way to provide security at America's borders. As the President suggested, I hope the Homeland Security Agency will rethink that. In our part of the country we have a long and common border with Canada. Every day there is a substantial amount of commerce coming back and forth. People farm on both sides. People work on both sides, do business on both sides. To require a passport in both directions would make no sense at all.

When I began talking about this before 9/11/2001, we had ports of entry at the northern border ports that when they closed in the evening security consisted only of an orange rubber cone put in the middle of the road. The polite ones actually stopped and removed the cone before they came across the border. Those who were not so polite would run over it at 60 miles an hour.

So we have made improvements in those areas but much remains to be done. I hope as we construct, talk about, and consider amendments to this bill, we will finally understand that security means security in every area, not just in aviation or commercial airports. The tragic attack in London tells us once again how vulnerable some of these areas are and I mentioned two today: our rail system, No. 1, and especially No. 2, our port system, which renders much of our major and largest port cities in this country very vulnerable to a devastating terrorist attack. We must and we can and we will do better.

I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, this is a poster that shows what I discovered on the Internet in North Dakota. I discovered this in the month of April. I was going to have a meeting in Fargo and, just out of curiosity, I called up the North Dakota registry of sex offenders, to find out who was living within 2 miles of where I was having the meeting, at city hall in Fargo, ND. In the briefing book I had, I described this fellow to the people who came. His name is Joseph Duncan. The entire country knows of Joseph Duncan now. When I described Mr. Duncan, many people in the area didn't know him.

This sheet from the North Dakota Attorney General's Office, Bureau of Criminal Investigation, shows that Joseph Duncan was living in Fargo, ND. He was a sexual predator, and he had served a 20-year prison sentence for a first-degree rape. In 1980, he raped a 14-year-old boy at gunpoint, burned the victim, and made the victim believe he was going to be killed by firing the gun twice on empty chambers. And he went to prison.

In 2000, he was released from prison. He completed his full sentence, and was released without probation or parole. He went to live in North Dakota.

Again, I mentioned him in April of this year at a meeting simply because his name came up on an inquiry I did about who was living in Fargo, ND.

What I didn't know in April, when I mentioned Mr. Duncan, was that 1 month earlier he had been charged with molesting a 6-year-old boy at a playground in Detroit Lakes, MN. He appeared in court April 5 on those charges, a county judge set the bail at $15,000, and Joseph Duncan was released, promising to stay in touch. Of course, he didn't. He promptly disappeared.

As we know from substantial media coverage in recent weeks, Joseph Duncan was subsequently arrested in Idaho for kidnapping 8-year-old Shasta Groene. Her brother, 9-year-old Dylan, was missing. Their family was murdered upon the abduction of these two young children. The remains of Dylan have now been located. Duncan has been charged with abducting and molesting both children and is also under investigation for the murder of Dylan and the parents.

It is so frustrating to be here talking about this. It is a breakdown in common sense. Martha Stewart was let out of a minimum security prison and was required to wear an electronic bracelet and, apparently, she still wears one at her home under the disposition of the court. But we have known violent sexual predators walking around this country with no such level of supervision.

I have been on the Senate floor many times talking about a bill I introduced called Dru's law. I have shown colleagues a picture of a young woman named Dru Sjodin, who was brutally murdered and whose alleged assailant is a man named Mr. Rodriguez.

Mr. Rodriguez was in prison for 23 years. He is a violent sexual predator. He was let out, even when he was judged to be a high risk for reoffending. We know that 70 percent of the time high-risk sexual predators are going to reoffend. In most cases, their next offense will be more violent. Mr. Rodriguez allegedly murdered Dru Sjodin. The evidence is very substantial. He was walking around with not much more than a ``see you later'' at the prison door, much like Joseph Duncan. Mr. Duncan had been convicted previously of violent sexual offenses, and then he was accused in April of molesting a 6-year-old boy. What happens to him? He goes through a revolving door in the criminal justice system to be let out at $15,000 bail. Martha Stewart is wearing that bracelet and this fellow is turned back out on $15,000. Then this young girl named Shasta Groene is kidnapped with her brother Dylan and they were sexually molested. People are dead.

Dru's law, which I introduced well over a year ago, has been passed by the Senate once and didn't get through the House. Senator Specter and I and others have introduced it again, and my hope is very much that in the month of July we can get it through this Chamber and through the House and get it to the President for signature. It has three simple provisions: One, there should be a national registry of sex offenders, a national registry of sexual predators. This isn't rocket science. Somebody like this who rapes a 16-year-old boy at gunpoint needs to go on a sexual predator registry, and no matter where this person showed up in the criminal justice system, regardless of state lines, the public should be able to know that he is out there. We need a national registry of sexual predators.

Two, before a high-risk sexual predator is about to be released from prison, the local State's attorney must be notified in the event that they believe this person is so dangerous that they need to seek additional civil commitment. That must be the case.

And three, if, in fact, a high-risk sexual predator is released at the end of his term, there must be intensive monitoring by local governments. Once again, electronic monitoring bracelets are not just meant for Martha Stewart. They ought to be meant for very violent offenders like this who abduct and brutalize young children at gunpoint.

We can do much better. It is not only about Dylan and Shasta and Dru Sjodin; month after month, we read these stories.

Jessica Lunsford, 9 years old, Mark Lunsford's daughter, was abducted in February from her bedroom in her Florida home, and they found her body a month later. The crime was committed by a 46-year-old convicted sex offender with a 30-year history.

We know who these people are. They have been in the system before.

Sarah Michelle Lunde disappeared April 9 in Ruskin, south of Tampa, FL. David Onstott, a convicted sex offender who once had a relationship with the girl's mother, has confessed to killing her.

Jetseta Gage, of Cedar Rapids, IA, was abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered. Roger Paul Bentley has been arrested for that crime. He is a convicted sex offender on Iowa's sex offender registry.

This has to stop. We know who these people are. Statistics tell us that over 70 percent of the violent sexual predators, when let out of prison, are going to reoffend. I am talking about type 3 sex offenders, judged to be at highest risk, as Mr. Rodriguez was when he was let out of prison and then within 6 months allegedly murdered Dru Sjodin.

When psychologists and psychiatrists evaluate sexual predators to be the highest risk, we cannot any longer say goodbye, so long, good luck at the prison door. We cannot let that happen again. We have to begin protecting innocent people. There are too many children whose lives are being lost.

Again, this is not rocket science. We know what is happening here, and we know how to stop it. Mark Lunsford wrote to me after his daughter was murdered. He said:

If my daughter's death is going to have any meaning, it

will be through your efforts strengthening existing laws, by

making our streets safe for all children. My heart continues

to break as I mourn the loss of my beautiful little girl. I

do not want other families to suffer as mine has, and I

believe your efforts will go far toward that important goal.

My hope is that Senator Specter and many others who have cosponsored this bill that I have introduced will help to pass Dru's Law once again through the Senate, and then work hard to get it through the House and to the President's desk for signature. It is long past the time this country has a national registry of sexual predators, violent sexual predators who all too often are getting away with murder.

Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I use.

Mr. President, if ever there was a triumph of hope over experience, it is bringing this bill to the floor of this Senate: a new trade agreement with the background of failed trade agreement after failed trade agreement, lost jobs after lost jobs, higher deficits every year, believing this new chapter of the same failed book of trade strategy will produce a different result. It is unbelievable to me.

But before I begin, let me ask a question. There is a substantial lack of opportunity to ask questions on the floor because very few will attend this debate. But I was wondering whether in this trade agreement there is anything that has to do with exotic dancers or strip clubs. I wonder if anyone could respond to that.

Let me tell you the reason I ask the question----

Let me say to the Presiding Officer, it is a fair point. I have not directed questions to other Members of the Senate. I ask a rhetorical question, and perhaps the Presiding Officer, in his capacity as a Senator from New Hampshire, would respond. But I ask the question, is there anything in this trade agreement that deals with exotic dancers or strip clubs? And if any of my colleagues would like to come to the floor to respond to that today, I would be glad to hear it.

Let me tell you why I ask the question. We debated something called NAFTA on the floor of the Senate some years ago. It did not turn out very well--huge trade deficits, American jobs rushing off to Mexico. It did not turn out well at all. But now I discovered, going to the computer last night, using a Google search, that NAFTA had something in it about ``special skills.'' Let me read this to you. This is from my Google search last evening on the computer: ``Claiming a shortage of homegrown talent, strip clubs in Canada have used NAFTA to find new recruits in Mexico.''

I thought, well, that is interesting. NAFTA had something that allows strip clubs in Canada to search for dancers from Mexico? Well, I found out what that was with a little further Google search: Employment authorizations based on NAFTA agreements were available for professionals, company transferees, traders, investors, and people with special knowledge: exotic dancers, et cetera--apparently, under this ``special skills'' category. Quite remarkable, isn't it?

Did anybody know that existed in NAFTA before it was voted on? Does anybody want to claim credit, I ask rhetorically? Does anybody want to claim credit for a provision in NAFTA that allows Canadian strip clubs to recruit exotic dancers from Mexico? Oh, probably not. Probably no one wants to claim credit for that today. But, apparently, that opportunity existed in NAFTA. It sure did.

Is there anything in this trade agreement we ought to know about? Is there anything in this trade agreement that will probably persuade me to come to the floor of the Senate 5 years from now, 2 years from now, and say: Did you know about this? We probably will not learn that today, either. Let me tell you what we should learn today. Here, as shown on this chart, are our trade deficits. These are our trade deficits--year after year after year. I have always wondered what ``reeducation'' means as a term--``reeducation.'' It is quite clear to me there is no reeducation anywhere near this 50 or 60 square miles of ground because we are about, today, in the Senate to pass another trade agreement which is exactly the same kind of trade agreement that has caused a massive trade deficit year after year after year, a gathering trade debt that is dangerous to this country.

On these red lines on this chart there are no names. But I can give you some names. And I will today. These are the people who lost their jobs, the people who came home one night after work and said: ``Honey, I have been fired. I worked at my plant for 19 years. I was a good worker. I loved my job. But I got fired today. Do you know why? Oh, they are going to still make the products I made, but they are going to make them in China. They shipped my job to China because they found somebody who can do it for 30 cents an hour.''

Every one of these lines has tens of thousands--hundreds of thousands--of names of American workers who have lost their jobs.

And so in the first 4 months of this year, our trade debt is up another 20 percent. Last year it was a record. It is up another 20, 22 percent. We are headed in exactly the wrong direction.

What is the response of this Congress? What is the response of the President? Well, let's do some more of what we have been doing. This is the law of holes: Create a hole and just keep digging, according to these people.

Let me make a couple of other opening observations. This bill should not be on the floor of the Senate. It does not comport with the Constitution of the United States. I think everyone in this Chamber knows that. This is a tariff bill. My colleague from Iowa described in great detail the tariff provisions in the bill. This is a tariff bill. A tariff bill, by the U.S. Constitution, cannot originate here. It cannot. It must originate in the House of Representatives.

This bill is improperly on the floor of the Senate and I may today make a constitutional point of order. Every Senator knows it is not here in accordance with the Constitution, and yet we all put on our dark suits and come to the Chamber and vent for hours, acting as if nothing has changed, nothing is wrong, we have not read the Constitution. Tariff bills must originate in the House, not in the Senate.

So we will pass this today, I am told. I am told the votes exist to pass this failed trade agreement. And then what will happen is the House will take it up, take up their version of it, and at some point it will be sent over here to be exchanged for the version we have already completed in the Senate. The problem is, I would say to the leaders, then there will be another 20 hours under fast track, 20 hours of debate to which we are entitled. Perhaps this will not work out so well after all.

I find it interesting. I must say to the majority leader, I apologize for being irritated last night, but that irritation hasn't abated this morning. I knew what was going to happen with CAFTA. It was negotiated over a year ago. It was signed over a year ago and has never been brought to this Chamber. Why? Because they don't know if they have the votes in the House. So over a year it languished. I knew at some point they were going to try to fold it up into a tight, little package and sort of stick it through the keyhole before some kind of congressional recess. Sure enough, that is exactly what they have done. Lord knows, you don't want to have a long debate on the floor of the Senate about trade strategy.

Having, for example, a debate of 3, 4, 5 days on one of the most significant problems we face is not something the majority party wants, not something the President wants. Do an agreement. Sign it up. Wait for a year. Buy off the votes with roads, bridges and dams and perhaps some refrigerators. I don't mean ``buy up'' votes; I mean persuade people by saying we will support your project--that was not a sensitive thing to say--persuade people who would have voted against you to decide they will vote for you, if you can get 3 or 4 miles of road somewhere near the hometown. You get enough votes, and then, a year later, fit this into this little crevice before the July recess. Then all the dust settles over the Fourth of July recess, and we come back and act as if there are no trade issues.

So here we are. Some of my colleagues will speak about an issue that I care a lot about as well--sugar. This is the first step in the direction of deciding to take the sugar program apart and to devastate, particularly in our region of the country, the beet growers--beet growers in the Red River Valley of North Dakota--because they can't compete with this kind of dump-price sugar that comes from these regions. This agreement, in itself, will not ruin the sugar industry, but it is going to hurt it. It is the first step in a direction, a strategy, that will ruin the industry in which a lot of beet growers out there, working on the farm, who got up this morning hoping they could continue to make a living,

are going to be mighty concerned about where this heads. The next agreement that will come after this is the Free Trade Area of the Americas with Brazil and others. It is an ominous direction and is a disservice to the one farm program that does work in this country.

I would like to read a couple things. Most of you probably know Puff Daddy. Actually, Sean Combs is his name. He changed his name to P. Diddy. I never understood why somebody named Puff Daddy would change their name to P. Diddy. He is an artist, a musician. He also makes clothing, or at least he has someone make clothing with his name in the label.

So I held a hearing one day. We had workers, from Honduras, working in a plant in Honduras. Their job was to sew the sleeves on the shirts that were the Sean John label rather than Puff Daddy or P. Diddy. It seems to me--I am not in the shirt business--that Puff Daddy or P. Diddy might have been a better label, but they chose Sean John. So they contracted out for shirts to be produced in a plant in Honduras.

I have been there. I have watched. I have been to Honduras. I have watched people make cigars and various things. We had three employees of the plant in Honduras that makes these shirts come and testify. I invited Sean Combs to come and testify. He chose not to. Let me describe what was said at this hearing. It is directly related to signing up to a trade agreement with these kind of economies and the allegation that will be made by my colleagues that there are no labor standards that are enforceable or are enforced in these countries.

Let me read this. This was from Lydda Eli Gonzalez. In her report to us, she talks about her job. She says:

I get up at 5 a.m.--

She is a young woman--

to go to work at 6:45. I take two buses. When I get to the

factory, I have a tortilla with beans. I buy the cheapest

lunch I can, just a small piece of chicken, rice, beans and

water.

And she describes the cost of that. And then she describes her day at the factory:

My job is attaching sleeves to the shirt. There are

different styles of Sean Jean shirts, but for long-sleeved

shirts, a production line of 20 workers has to sew 190 dozens

shirts a day--that's 2,280 shirts. Management demands we

reach this goal, but it is impossible.

And she goes on:

They call us filthy names--you can't answer--like

``bitch,'' ``Maldito,'' ``donkey.'' You can't answer the

supervisors or they will fire you. It is very hot in the

factory. You are sweating all day. There is a lot of dust in

the air. I breathe it in. You go into the factory with black

hair. You come out with hair that is white or red or whatever

the color of the shirts we are working on. It is forbidden to

talk. You have to ask permission to use the bathroom. We have

to get a pass from the supervisor and give it to the guard in

front of the bathroom who also searches us before we go in.

You can go once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

Also they watch the time, and if you are gone more than three

or four minutes, they call you on the loudspeaker. Another

thing, the bathrooms are very dirty. There is almost never

any toilet paper or soap. They don't permit us to get up to

get water. If the worker next to you goes, you try to take

some advantage and see if they can bring just a bit of water

to you. You have to focus, work as fast as you can, to

complete the production goals, always under pressure.

She talks about being fired. She was one of 20 workers who were fired. All the new employees are required to take a pregnancy test. If it comes out positive, they are fired. ``Older workers suffer harassment and discrimination because the management prefers workers between 17 and 25 years old. When a woman gets to be 30, she can't work in these factories. And if she can get to work and if she is working, often she is harassed and sent to worse positions to try to make her quit.''

She says:

They search us physically when we enter the plant. If one

of us has candy, gum or lipstick, they take it away because

they think it could stain the clothing. They search them in

the bathroom.

The point is this, this young woman, with 20 others, decided they really needed to try to organize to see if they could improve their lot. And 15 of them began to organize, and they were fired. You can't organize. Workers can't get together to try to organize to negotiate with management. They are fired--out of luck, out of a job.

These countries say to us: We have labor standards. Sure they do. They have labor standards on the books, totally unenforced. This is what we are signing up to.

This was Sean Combs. You remember the stories about Kathy Gifford and others. Sean Combs, I believe, to his credit, said he did not know this contracted labor was occurring, and I believe that he quickly took action to deal with that and moved this kind of production away from that plant.

But let me ask the question: Does anybody think this is the competition for American workers that we ought to sign up for? Shouldn't we be doing trade agreements with countries that have labor standards? Shouldn't we decide, on behalf of American workers, that we care first and foremost about American workers and, second, we also care about the workers in the country with whom we are going to do a trade agreement? What does it say about us, about our value system, to suggest it doesn't matter?

This is about money. This isn't about workers. It is about companies being able to access cheap labor, working under any labor conditions, in order to boost and fatten profits.

I am well aware that there are those who take a look at those of us who don't support these trade agreements and they say: You are just a bunch of xenophobic isolationist stooges. You don't understand it. You probably don't have the capacity to understand it. We are describing a new world order. It is a global economy. Don't you get it?

I wonder when things changed in this country to decide that we should not stand up for our economic interests. When did that happen? When did it happen that it was OK to decide those who stood up for America's economic interests--that is, for the demand that when we have a trade agreement, there would be fair labor standards, fair standards with respect to the environment, that we want to keep jobs in America--when did it become fashionable to say: You're a protectionist. You don't get it. You are sort of an economic nationalist. You are one of these America-first types. Shame on you.

It seems to me the first goal of every trade agreement should be to recognize, from our standpoint, that we are interested in standing up for our economic interests, for our jobs. But that is not the case.

I would like anybody to explain to me these dramatic and deepening trade deficits--which Warren Buffett, not necessarily a shrinking violet, says is heading us toward becoming sharecroppers, and that is exactly the case--I would like anybody to explain to me how, with this background, the decision is made that we ought to do more of it. We are told over and over and over again what we are doing with this next trade agreement is we are opening foreign markets for American products. That is absolutely nonsense. Give us a break. We have been through this.

Later today, I will talk specifically about China because we did a bilateral on China. We have had a lot of trade relationships with China. The fact is, what we are doing with these trade agreements is not opening foreign markets, to any great degree, to American goods. I would love to take my time--and I have 5 hours allotted to me--to go through a debate. Others probably have different views. They believe it is fine, for example, for the country of Korea to ship us 680,000 cars a year on boats that land on the shores of the United States so American consumers can buy Korean cars. And then we only get 3,800 cars from the United States into Korea. That is fine, some people might think. I would love to debate that. Perhaps we have somebody who wants to stand up later today during my time and have a real discussion about that. I would be happy to do that. I don't need three people. I would just like one person to say: ``Boy, I like the way this is going. This sure looks good for America. And I sure like what is going to happen with China and bilateral automobile trade, and I sure like what happened in the bilateral with China by which we are allowed to charge a tariff that is one-tenth the tariff charged by the Chinese in bilateral automobile trade or I sure like the notion of what happened post-NAFTA.''

Let me do this for a moment. I think it is important for people to understand. We passed NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. When we did, we had a very slight trade surplus with Mexico and a modest deficit

with Canada. We very quickly turned a slight trade surplus with Mexico into a very large deficit, and we turned a modest deficit with Canada into a very large deficit.

The promises for NAFTA were grand promises about massive new numbers of American jobs and so on. None of that was accurate. There were those who stood on this floor and said, with respect to NAFTA: What that means is, we are going to get the product of unskilled labor coming in from Mexico. That is what that means. And so what are the three biggest imports from Mexico now? Automobiles, automobile parts, and electronics--all the product of high-skilled labor. They were all wrong. No one, of course, will stand on the floor and say: I admit that. But they have all been wrong. All we have seen is an exodus of American jobs. This chart is a certification to the U.S. Government of companies laying off U.S. workers due to NAFTA. We know that because they are required to certify to the Department of Labor in order for their workers to be available for trade adjustment assistance. Trade adjustment assistance is a melodic, soft-tone that says: When you fire your workers because of a trade agreement, you are able to get the Federal Government to pay your workers a little something. It is like extra unemployment.

So we know these companies have said: Because of NAFTA, we are laying off workers. We want them to be eligible for trade adjustment assistance.

Let's go down the list a bit. Fruit of the Loom. I can see the title on the book: ``When America Lost its Shorts.'' I remember the day that Fruit of the Loom announced that it was going to move its production out of this country. It was headline news, going to get rid of all the workers. Doesn't mean they are not going to make shirts and shorts any more. They are going to make them elsewhere, Mexico and China.

Levis, 15,676 workers making Levis. There is not much more all- American than Levis.

What a great American brand, Levi. Everybody likes them. I wear Levis. Levis are gone. There is not one pair made in the United States--not one. And, furthermore, the company that made Levis has certified to the Federal Government that due to NAFTA, 15,676 employees should be eligible for trade adjustment assistance. I will say that in English. It means that because we passed the NAFTA trade agreement, this company decided to get rid of 15,676 workers, and they want, under trade adjustment assistance, to be eligible to get extra money from the Federal Government.

Is there anybody in the Senate who knows the name of a worker that made Levis and lost their job? I am guessing not. I am guessing that almost every one of these 15,676 people were like every other worker in this country--proud to get up in the morning, put on some clothes, go to work, and feel as though they had a sense of self worth to provide for their family and to do a job. Some probably worked 25, 30 years for that company and did the best they could. And they had to come home and say to their spouse: ``Honey, I have lost my job. It doesn't mean they are not going to make Levis anymore. They are just going to make them in Mexico or China or Indonesia or Sri Lanka or Bangladesh--you name it. They say I make too much money.''

I have told this story repeatedly, and I will do it again even if it bores people. Huffy bicycles is the classic one. It is the easiest to understand. I believe Huffy has about 20 percent of the American marketplace. You buy them at Wal-Mart, Sears, and K-Mart. Huffy bicycles used to be made in Ohio in this country by workers who, by one account, made $11 an hour plus benefits. Huffy wrote to me and said it was more than that. So whatever it is--it could have been $15 or $18 an hour plus benefits--they made a good bicycle. They had a decal of the American flag on the front of them. They fired the workers who made Huffy bicycles. Those workers are gone. In fact, the last job they performed was to take the American flag decal from the bicycle and replace it with a decal of the globe. All Huffys are now made in China by people who work for 30 cents an hour, 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day. The folks in Ohio are told they cannot compete with that. I can understand why. Should you be expected to compete with people who make 30 cents an hour?

So American workers lose their jobs. Do you think some people from Huffy Bicycle, who were proud to make them for many years, and came home to tell their families: ``I lost my job because they found somebody in another part of the world--halfway around the world--who will work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, and they can pay them 30 cents an hour--and they can hire kids, by the way.'' Does anybody in this Chamber know the names of these people who worked for Levi's or Huffy Bicycle or Fig Newton Cookies? Does anybody know the names of the people who worked for the company called Radio Flyer, which makes little red wagons? They are gone from America.

I can stand here for an hour and talk about those kinds of issues. On this chart are the 100 largest companies certifying to the Department of Labor jobs lost due to these trade agreements. Let me tell you something else. You cannot get these numbers anymore. They are not available. Do you know why? The Department of Labor won't make them available. This chart says ``The Labor Department withheld trade reports.'' Let me quote from this article: ``The Labor Department has kept secret for more than a year, studies that supported Democratic opponents of the Bush administration's new Central American trade deal.''

There was a report paid for by public funds that documented the working conditions in CAFTA and the Central American countries of the type I just described, and, of course, that document was covered up, kept secret. The official Government document from the Department of Labor that would have provided numbers of how many jobs were lost, as a result of certifications by companies that were going to get rid of their workers--this information doesn't exist anymore either.

I have called the Secretary of Labor and said: You are collecting this data and you are choosing now not to make it public. Why? She says: I will look into it.

I placed a second call yesterday, but I have not heard back. In fact, you cannot get this information anymore. If there is bad news, cover it up, I guess. Don't let bad news out.

Madam President, let me just read for a moment from something written by someone I deeply admire. I like Warren Buffet a lot. I don't know him well, but I consider him a friend. I have met him a good number of times. He is the second richest man in our country, or probably in the world. He is remarkably successful. He doesn't walk the talk or sound like somebody with billions and billions of dollars. He is just a wonderful, remarkable guy with a great spirit. He wrote a piece to the shareholders of his company, Berkshire-Hathaway, that was very interesting to me. I called Warren about his speech. He said this about the trade deficit, the current account deficit:

Large and persistent current account deficits produce an

entirely different result. As time passes and as claims

against us grow, we own less and less of what we produce.

He means that we have a trade deficit of almost $2 billion every day, 7 days a week, and it means foreign governments or foreigners have assets in the form of American dollars, American stock, and are buying American real estate. That is why you saw that China wants to buy a big oil company. They have the money to do it.

With respect to the trade deficit we have with China or the trade surplus they have with us, he says:

Should we continue to run current account deficits

comparable to those now prevailing, the net ownership of the

United States by other countries and their citizens a decade

from now will amount to roughly $11 trillion. And if foreign

investors were to earn only 5 percent on that net holding, we

would need to send a net of one-half billion dollars in

goods and services abroad every year just to service the

U.S. investments then held by foreigners.

A country that is now aspiring to be an ownership society

will not find happiness in a sharecropper society. Yet, that

is precisely where our trade policies, supported by Democrats

and Republicans alike, are taking us.

Perhaps there are some in this Chamber who think this is not the case, that these trade policies are just wonderful, that this red ink is just another innocent color, that these trade agreements have really worked well for America. That is probably because nobody in this Chamber has ever lost their job to

a bad trade agreement. No journalist has either, for that matter.

We have an interesting situation in this country. We have now, for about the last 30 years, seen a dramatic change in the economies of our country and others. It is described as a global economy. It has galloped forward in a very aggressive way, but the rules have not kept pace. So the largest international corporations--many of them American--have defined the new economy in their own image. They want to produce where it is cheap and sell into our marketplace. They want to be able to produce, for example, in China and Indonesia and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and be able to sell that product to Des Moines, IA; Fargo, ND; Denver; Chicago; or Los Angeles. That is quite a strategy about fattening profits: Produce where it is cheap, where you can hire kids, where you can build a factory and not worry about having a safe workplace, where you can dump chemicals into the air and water, and especially where you can decide if your workers want to form a union, you can fire them just like that. If you produce there, you can produce for pennies, take that product and sell it into the established marketplace in the United States, and you can fatten your profits. Pretty good deal--if you are one of the companies who wants to do it.

But the rules for this globalized economy have not kept pace at all. There have been virtually no rules. Everyone in this Chamber knows that we have signed up to trade agreements with countries that say to companies: You can fire your workers if they try to unionize. Now, that is not a comparative advantage--going back to Ricardo. Ricardo described the doctrine of comparative advantage, which says it is easier to raise sheep and produce wool in England and easier to grow grapes and produce wine in Portugal; so each should do what is in its own best interest and what it does best and then trade. So you raise sheep, you share the sheep, get the wool in England, grow the grapes and stomp the grapes and produce wine in Portugal, and the English trade their wool to Portugal, and the Portuguese send wine to the English. That is the doctrine of comparative advantage--doing what is most beneficial and efficient for each. There is no doctrine of comparative advantage when you have a country deciding they are going to have 30-cent labor because we will fire people who try to unionize because we will not enforce restrictions with respect to the requirement that you have safe workplaces. We will have cheap labor because we will let you hire 12-year-old kids, work them 12 hours a day, and pay 12 cents an hour, and we will turn the other way. That is a political advantage. That is a decision by a government to continue to repress its workers.

Our trade agreements, historically, rather than lifting others up, which we ought to do in trade agreements, have had the effect of pushing American workers down. That can work for a while, but it cannot work for a long while because, ultimately, the question is going to be this: Who is going to buy those products made with 30-cent labor in China? Will it be the people who lost their jobs in the United States? Will it perhaps be one of these hundreds of thousands of people, each just a number, but each represented by a family? Will they buy those products when they are out of a job? You may say unemployment is not so high here and many of these people have been rehired. Yes, many have-- at lower wages. That is the way this global economy has been working.

In my judgment, this does not work for our country. It is just not working. My colleague from Iowa made the point--a fair point--should we not want to lower tariffs in other countries? Absolutely. Can I remind my colleagues, and others, that we are so ham-handed and fundamentally incompetent in negotiating trade agreements, using beef as an example-- let's go back for a moment prior to the discovery of a Canadian cow that had mad cow disease in the United States. Prior to that time, we were 15 years away from a beef agreement we made with Japan in the late 1980s. Fifteen years later, after a beef agreement with Japan, a country with whom we have had a very large deficit always--and still do--there was a 50-percent tariff on every pound of American beef going into Japan. What a miserable failure that is. It happens to us in virtually every circumstance.

I will mention one additional thing. Our trade negotiators do such a terrible job on behalf of this country. I assume they do it on behalf of whoever sends them out with instructions. Let me ask, if during the discussion today--and we will be here for some hours--I would like one Senator--if we can find somebody who knows the answer to this--to tell me, in the bilateral trade agreement with China, a country with whom we have a giant trade deficit, an alarming and dangerous trade deficit, how it is justified that China shall impose a 25-percent tariff on any U.S. automobiles we sell in China, and we will impose a 2.5-percent tariff on Chinese automobiles sold in the United States?

How is it that we have a bilateral agreement that imposes a tariff 10 times higher on U.S. cars that we sell in China than Chinese cars sold in the United States? I want one person--I have asked this question for years--I want one person to tell me how that happened because the Chinese are now gearing up an automobile export industry. In fact, General Motors has gone to court to sue the Chinese because they say the Chinese have stolen the entire production line blueprints for a car called the QQ. General Motors said they stole the production line blueprints of a General Motors car. This company is called Chery, C-H- E-R-Y, which is interesting; it is one letter away from Chevy, C-H-E-V- Y. This Chinese company called Chery is producing a QQ car that General Motors says is the stolen production line blueprints of a car they have. They are doing that, and all the press says they are gearing up for a substantial Chinese automobile export market.

Guess what. When they do that, they will find a very friendly tariff in our country that is one-tenth the tariff that now exists in China by virtue of acceptance of a trade agreement we have with China. It is unbelievable to me, the incompetence of having that sort of thing happen.

I will not go on at length. We do not make any automobiles in North Dakota, so I am not representing the automobile manufacturers. I am just telling my colleagues that it does not matter whether it is automobiles or textiles or farm products.

My colleague from Iowa cares a lot, I am sure, about agricultural products. We work together on a lot of agricultural issues. I know he cares a lot about family farmers. Interestingly enough, when we did the bilateral agreement with China, we had a provision in that agreement about the number of million metric tons of wheat that China would be expected to allow in duty free. Right after that was done, of course, the Chinese Agriculture Minister went down to the southern part of China and said to the South Asia Post: ``That doesn't mean anything; that doesn't mean we are actually going to import that wheat from America. That is just something in writing.'' Indeed, they have not. When will we understand that promises not kept are not promises at all?

I suppose you can make a case to hook up in a trade agreement with almost any region in the world. Somebody said to me: How on Earth can you suggest these small countries would threaten our country? I am not suggesting that. I am just saying when you are doing something wrong, stop doing it, change it, and do it right. That is not rocket science.

This trade agreement, with its pathetic provisions dealing with labor and its pathetic provisions protecting the environment, is exactly the same as all the other trade agreements. You can say the environmental provisions do not matter. Don't they really? We inhabit this Earth. There are 6 billion of us. We have 6 billion neighbors on this little planet called Earth. We circle the Sun. Somehow we end up here in the United States--just in this place--and there is no place like it on the face of the Earth. We are living in a fishbowl. We can clean up our part of the fishbowl, but if somebody on the other side is pumping in sludge, we are all breathing it. So environmental standards and labor standards matter a lot.

This trade agreement is exactly like the others. It hooks up the countries--and I already read the description--

that do not enforce their standards at all. Second, it decides we will have another loophole by which you can transship goods through these countries into the United States.

One of my colleagues said to me: So what, it is coming in anyway from China. So what? The fact is, if anybody in this Chamber were one of these statistics--and there are about 200,000 of them on this sheet--if anyone in this Chamber were one of these statistics, nobody would say ``so what.''

``So what'' is we are losing jobs in this country. There is no social program we work on in this Chamber that is as important as a good job that pays well and allows people to take care of their families. There is no social program as good as that. I am telling you, in case after case, we are seeing good jobs leaving our country because others will do them for less under conditions we would never accept in this country.

I have said many times that we had people die in the streets of this country fighting to organize as workers. People were literally killed in the streets of America for that purpose. We had people who went to the streets for America demanding the opportunity to work in a safe workplace. We have been through this for a century, describing the conditions of production in this country that were fair. And in a moment, some companies can pole-vault over all those impediments and say: I don't like them, never liked them; they represent regulations, they represent things we don't support, and we are going to move our jobs to China; and by the way, when we get there, we don't have to worry about unions, we can fire them if they try to unionize, and if we don't fire them, the Chinese Government will take care of them.

What is happening is wrong. I am not saying we should build walls around our country. I am not saying we should retreat from the global economy. I am saying we ought to recognize there has to be a set of fair rules to represent this country's economic interest. If we do not have that set of fair rules, then we cannot possibly succeed.

Some say the Americans can compete anywhere, we can win anywhere. We can compete if the rules are fair. But post-Second World War, in the last 50 years, some very shrewd economic competitors have developed in this world.

These trade deficits I have shown describe a circumstance in which we cannot compete with one arm tied behind our back. We cannot compete if it is unfair. We cannot ask American families to decide if $10- or $15- an-hour wages is something of which they should be ashamed because it is so much more than would be paid to workers hired in Bangladesh or China. We cannot do that to American workers without in the longer term dramatically changing the standard of living in this country.

Others will say: You are talking about manufacturing. You should understand that we are going to create new jobs; we are creating new jobs. Take a look at what is happening with software engineers, with white-collar jobs. Pick up the New York Times from last week on IBM and then go to India and go to China and find out what kind of jobs are coming in addition to factory jobs. It is not just factory workers. It is white-collar jobs. It is engineers.

Every young person in this country who is in earshot of this debate should understand their future is going to be affected by what we are doing. Their opportunity for good jobs will be affected by what we are doing.

I, obviously, have additional comments and additional time in which to do it later today. We have colleagues who have been waiting. I apologize for taking as much time as I did. This is a very important issue. I regret very much that we are doing it this way, just sticking it in a little keyhole crack between now and when we get out of here for the July Fourth week. I knew this was going to happen. One year ago, this bill got done. We did not hear about it for a year. I knew one day we would find it stuck in a little keyhole, hoping we would not have a real debate about trade on the floor of the Senate.

I guess now we are on autopilot. They are going to finish this maybe late tonight, and they have accomplished their purpose, but they have done America no service. It is no service to America to avoid facing straight in the eye a serious problem facing this country.

Once again, to all those listening who call this protectionism, you are just wrong. This is not about protecting in the sense of being a protectionist and wanting to build walls around our country. It is about standing up for American interests. It is about trade agreements that should be mutually beneficial, not one-way trade agreements, and it is about finally suggesting that we be hardheaded and make trade agreements economic policies, not softheaded foreign policy down at the State Department.

I could talk later about, for example, it is recommended we take action against China on this and that for trade, but the State Department says: You can't do that; that is all foreign policy. So our country walks around half hunched over worried about lost jobs and not willing to talk about it. And what do we do? We negotiate another trade agreement of the same type. Is anybody thinking? Let's hope through this debate perhaps we can begin to think through some of these issues and turn a corner.

Let me also say it was probably impolitic of me at the start of this discussion to ask about exotic dancers in strip clubs. I will ask again just because it probably is impolitic if there is anything in this trade agreement about exotic dancers in strip clubs. The reason I ask is because in the NAFTA agreement that passed the Congress, according to what I have found doing a Google search, Canadian strip clubs have used NAFTA to find dancers from Mexico under the extended visas and employment applications in NAFTA--exotic dancers were part of the provision dealing with special skills. I am just guessing that there is no one in the Chamber of the Senate who voted on NAFTA who would have guessed it would have application to exotic dancers having special skills. Maybe I am wrong.

I ask the question: Is there anything in this trade agreement that we should know about that perhaps I will come to the floor of the Senate and talk about several years from now, such as this?

The point I am making is, most people do not understand what is in these trade agreements. They do not understand the circumstances and the consequences of the trade agreements. All we hear is just more tired-sounding platitudes about reducing tariffs.

By the way, when we passed NAFTA, as my colleagues know, NAFTA reevaluated the peso, meaning it obliterated everything under NAFTA with respect to tariffs almost immediately.

I will cover additional material at a later point today. I yield the floor.

Mr. President, might we at this point find out what time remains of the three allocations of time on this bill? You can proceed with the unanimous consent and then perhaps give us the time remaining.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

As to the question is all this a good thing, has it strengthened our country, or is this just gloom and doom by those who oppose the current trade strategy, my colleague is quite right, this is not a strategy that is just the George W. Bush strategy. This strategy has developed over about 25 years, although I must say that this administration is the most helpful to corporate interests that I have seen. But it is not just a strategy of the last year or two.

But it is hard--very hard--to take a look at these devastatingly dangerous trade deficits that get worse and worse and worse, and then hear some people say it is getting better and better and better for us. It is, of course, not getting better for us.

Ronald Reagan used to tell that old story about the young boy who would look at the pile of manure and insist there must be a Shetland pony someplace. The fact is, there is no Shetland pony here. This is bad news. And the quicker we decide to confront it, look it square in the eye and decide as a country to do something about it, the better for our country.

The question is about freedom. I agree with that. It is about freedom, freedom for the American consumer, also freedom for American workers to be able to reasonably expect in this great country they will be able to find a decent job that pays well with benefits. That is freedom that is important as well.

When American workers are told on a Monday or a Friday--most characteristically a Friday--by Maytag or by Levi's or by Fruit of the Loom or by Fig Newton cookies or by Huffy bicycles or by Schwinn--and I could go on--that their job no longer exists because their employer has the freedom to get rid of them and hire somebody for 30 cents an hour-- that is freedom. Yes, that is freedom.

What does it do to the country we built? This country was built on a debate in this Chamber about a wide range of critically important issues: Should you have the right to organize as workers? Should you have the right to expect to be able to work in a safe workplace? Should you have child labor laws? Should you prevent dumping pollution into the skies and the streams of this country and this world? We fought that battle for 100 years.

Now those who want to avoid those onerous restrictions pole vault over all of them and say: My jobs are going to China. And you American workers? Sayonara. See you later. Goodbye. So long. It doesn't matter. You were just tools. You were like a wrench or a pair of pliers, ready to be thrown away when we were done with you.

I have a lot to talk about this afternoon and a fair amount of time in which to do it. I yield to my colleague from Colorado, Senator Salazar, 15 minutes.

Mr. President, I compliment my colleague from Colorado. These have not been easy issues for him. I appreciate his position and understand it fully. I think he has represented that position well in the comments he offered today. We share--perhaps in some cases for different reasons--a feeling that this trade agreement is not a good one for our country.

I yield 10 minutes to my colleague from Michigan, Senator Stabenow.

Mr. President, I yield such time as I may consume from my allocation.

There has been some discussion today about the U.S. International Trade Commission report on the CAFTA agreement. One of the complaints although not stated directly, is that this is an independent agency. Funny thing, independent agencies seem to be the most reliable agencies, at least, they are around this town. We do not get material from them that is colored one way or the other. It is an independent analysis.

This probably is the most devastating critique of CAFTA. We have all of these people who load up their saddlebags and rush to the floor of the Senate telling us how wonderful this is going to be. They pull out all the goodies and say how terrific this trade agreement is for America. The problem is it is at odds with the independent analysis from the U.S. International Trade Commission.

They say effects of tariff removal under this agreement are likely to result in virtually no benefit to our country. They say there will be little or no benefit to U.S. consumers. It says little or no change in U.S. production in distinct industry sectors, with one exception; the largest decrease in production is for manufactured sugar and sugar crops, of which the output of both will decrease.

Then it says this will increase our trade deficit by $100 million. I don't know, maybe it is confusing to throw facts into this discussion about theology and economics and trade and all the things that are going on here. But here is a set of facts that is pretty hard for people to refute. They say, I have heard: ``You have to read the entire ITC report.'' I don't know, maybe so. I have looked at this report. I am reading the summary and the sector results, and it says if we sign on to this trade agreement, there is really no benefit to American consumers, virtually no benefit to American consumers, but a detriment to sugar producers and an increase in the trade deficit by $100 million.

I went to a really small school, but I learned in a small school that this would add up to a net deficit for our country. I do not understand how someone looks at this and says: ``All right, I have looked at this. It says this is bad for our country, but I think it is good for our country. And the problem is this is an independent agency.''

That is a problem having an independent analysis on issues such as this that take off the rosy glasses and say: Look, here is what you are dealing with.

Let me put a few charts up to show a few of the facts. I have said many times that everyone is entitled to their own opinion on this floor, but not everybody is entitled to their own set of facts. Facts are stubborn things. Let's talk about them.

Since NAFTA began in 1994--that is the North American Free Trade Agreement--that is when we hooked Mexico and Canada with our trade. At that point, we had a slight trade surplus with Mexico. We have been able to ratchet that up to a huge deficit through this trade agreement. We had a modest trade deficit with Canada, and that has now become a huge trade deficit through this agreement.

We have lost about 71,000 family farms. We have had a drop in agricultural trade surplus with Mexico and Canada by 71 percent. There have been 900,000 manufacturing jobs lost. There has been a drop in net farm income of 22 percent.

I have told my colleagues, and I will tell them again, one day I drove to the Canadian border with a farmer named Earl Jensen. We got up to that border with a 12-year-old orange truck. This little old orange truck had about 150 bushels of durum wheat on it. So in an old orange truck, we pull up to the Canadian border. All the way to the United States-Canadian border, we had been meeting trucks hauling Canadian wheat into our country at secret prices which had been set by the Canadian Wheat Board, a sanctioned state monopoly in Canada that would be illegal in our country. All the way to our border we met these 18 wheelers hauling Canadian grain into our country.

Earl Jensen and I, with our little orange truck, get to the border, and they would not let us through. You cannot take American durum into Canada. It was not just us with the orange truck. There was a woman from Bowman, ND, who married a Canadian. She went to Canada for Thanksgiving. She got some wheat, put it in a paper sack and put it in the car because she wanted to use that to grind up and produce whole wheat bread. ``You cannot do that,'' they said, when she got to the border. ``You have to dump out that sack of wheat.'' At the same time, we were flooded with Canadian durum coming into our country.

Fair trade? Of course not. It is absurdly unfair. Nobody is willing to do a thing about it. It all came about because of NAFTA. We had a written agreement from Clayton Yeutter, who said representations of good faith in NAFTA are there will not be a substantial increase of grain trade across the border. In fact, that happened immediately by the Canadian Wheat Board--as I said, a sanctioned monopoly that would be illegal in this country--shipping into this country at secret prices a massive quantity of grain, taking money right out of the pockets of American farmers.

Earl Jensen can probably be excused, at the Canadian border stop that afternoon, wondering how on Earth our Government policy allows Canadian grain to flood into our marketplace, and he and I cannot drive a 12- year-old orange truck into Canada with just a small amount of U.S. wheat.

The answer is quite simple. These trade agreements are incompetently negotiated, No. 1, and, No. 2, they are not enforced. That is where we are. That is what has happened since NAFTA. All bad news: A drop in the trade surplus in agricultural goods with Mexico and Canada; massive lost jobs in agriculture; 71,000 family farms lost.

But it is not all bad news. It is bad news for the little guy. Corporate agribusiness profits are up 175 percent. Pretty good for them. The trade deficit with Mexico and Canada increased 266 percent. There is $4.3 billion in agricultural trade deficits with these two countries.

The point is not everybody lost. You see, the corporate agribusiness profits went up when we lost farms and jobs. The little bee sucks the blossom, the big bee gets the honey; the little guy picks the cotton, the big guy gets the money. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys sang that 70 years ago and it still applies today and it applies in these trade agreements.

The U.S. Government estimates that CAFTA will increase the trade deficit by $100 million. That is the ITC report I just described.

I don't know how anyone can come to the floor of the Senate and say: I have my own set of glasses. I haven't cleaned them for a long time, but when I look through these glasses, I see nothing but nirvana, nothing but good news, when, in fact, no matter what glasses you wear around here, here is the ITC report which says this trade agreement we are about to sign onto will increase this country's deficit.

This trade agreement, of course, is one more bit of the circular economic winds. This chart shows CAFTA will

allow transshipment of foreign textiles through Central American markets from China, from Canada, down through the CAFTA countries into the United States.

Somebody said today to me: ``So what. It happens anyway.'' Are we all giving up on helping American jobs remain viable? I don't understand that.

Let me talk for a moment about sugar. There has been a lot of discussion about sugar. Sugar is an interesting commodity. I happen to like sugar. We produce sugar beets in the Red River Valley. All of us can be excused for liking something quite as wonderful as sugar. It, in fact, is organic. You plant a beet in the ground, watch that green stuff come up, and then see the growth and then pull that beet out of the ground during the beet harvest, run it through a plant, slice it, dice it, squash it, and get the juice out of it. It doesn't smell so hot in that plant when they are processing it, but pretty soon you have sugar, and most sugar in this world is traded country to country on long-term contracts. That is the way most sugar is traded in the world, country to country, in long-term contracts.

The sugar that is outside of that, the sugar that is left over or in surplus is what is called dump sugar. It moves around the world at very low prices, just pennies a pound, very low prices. That is what our colleagues who know nothing about sugar, except the taste, come to the floor and lecture us about: ``Well, the world price of sugar is a nickel or 6 cents.'' Sorry, that is not the world price, that is the dump price for sugar. You cannot raise sugar for that. You cannot grow sugar beets for that. Most of the sugar is traded at higher prices than that on long-term contracts.

We have a sugar industry in this country, and we have a sugar program in this country. Some do not like it, especially those who produce candy bars do not like it. The last time we had a debate on the floor of the Senate about sugar, I held up a Baby Ruth candy bar and read the ingredients. Oh, man, it is a long bunch of ingredients. Most of the things in candy bars you cannot pronounce. But there is a lot of sugar in candy bars, and that is what the debate has been about regarding the sugar program.

Those who use sugar for their confections and candy bars do not want a sugar program; they want to buy dump sugar. The sugar program has been a good program to help stabilize prices in the country, yes, for producers and consumers. We have had times when sugar spiked way up, and then sugar prices came back down. Did you see a change in the cost of a can of pop or soda, a can of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or Sprite? Did you ever see their prices come down when the price of sugar came down from a high spike? No, it didn't happen.

This sugar debate has always been about those who use a lot of sugar in candy, soft drinks, and so on. They want to buy dump sugar at dump prices, and they would like to get rid of the sugar program.

This sugar program is one part of the farm program that has worked consistently to provide consistent stability of income for American farmers. Yet a relentless urge in this Chamber is to take apart the one part of the farm program that has worked.

Let me talk about sugar and this trade agreement. This trade agreement provides an opportunity for the movement of additional foreign sugar from the CAFTA countries into our country. We know they can produce sugar dirt cheap in some of these CAFTA countries. We know when we turn to the next trade agreement under the Free Trade Area of the Americas, they can probably produce it less expensively in Brazil and massive quantities of it. If we are going to be the recipients of dump sugar and be like a cork on the waves of the price of sugar, we will be subjected to the price spikes up high and then sometimes cheaper sugar.

The fact is we will also destroy the current sugar producers in this country. In the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota, we have sugar beet growers. They go out in the morning and plow the fields, tend the crops, plant these beets. They are good people. They have a farm program that works called the sugar program. This is the first step in the direction of taking that sugar program apart, much to the glee of some because they never liked it. This is the first step of several steps because the next step in the Free Trade Area of the Americas will be the giant step.

It is very interesting when you listen to these discussions about sugar. The Agriculture Secretary says this will increase sugar imports by about 1\1/2\ teaspoons of sugar a week for every one of our nearly 300 million citizens. That is an interesting way to look at it. Another way to look at it would be that CAFTA will let in enough sugar to fill 5,389 semi-trucks. This is just the first step in the wrong direction.

This is just the first step in the wrong direction for trade. Through trade initiatives, we have done a lot of damage to our economy--good jobs leaving, jobs that pay well leaving, huge increased deficits. That means that it is the Chinese, it is the Japanese, the Europeans, the Mexicans, the Canadians who hold American dollars, American stock, American real estate in exchange for the trade deficit we have which grows by $2 billion-a-day--every day, 7 days a week.

I said this morning that Warren Buffett describes this as heading toward share cropper days because others in other parts of the world will own an increasing part of America. Piece by piece, day by day, they are buying part of our country.

I finish with the sugar program to say this: I am not bashful at all about supporting our economic interests in this country. I am just a little sick and tired of people who are so quick to negotiate away our economic interests. Every trade agreement we have seen in recent years has negotiated away the economic interests of our country. I believe trade agreements are beneficial if they become trade agreements that bestow mutual benefits on the trading partners, but that has not been the case.

Can anyone in this Chamber honestly look at the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the three countries combined, united in a trade agreement called NAFTA, and describe a manner in which this country won? Can anyone describe that honestly? They cannot. In each case, we ended up with a much larger trade deficit, and that trade deficit is a measurement of substantially greater imports into this country than exports from this country.

It also means, then, that we lost jobs, lots and lots of jobs. No one wearing their Senate blue suit ever lost his or her job as a result of this trade agreement. It is just other folks who lost their jobs, people who loved their jobs, worked hard at their jobs, cared about their jobs, often worked for 20, 25, 30 years, only to find out one Friday their job was over because we negotiated trade agreements that moved American jobs elsewhere.

When do we stop that? How much evidence does one need to decide it ought to stop, especially with respect to the issue of the sugar program and the sugar trade with Central America? Let us just instantly understand they can produce sugar much less expensively than we can, and I am going to go through some things and talk about the circumstances of labor in Central America and describe why they can produce sugar less expensively than we can. But they cannot produce a living wage for their workers in Central America. So let me go through some of those and connect it to the sugar program among other things.

Under the labor laws in El Salvador and Nicaragua, it is legal to fire workers who belong to a union. In Honduras, it is legal to fire workers who say they intend to organize. In Nicaragua, it is legal to prohibit strikes without government permission. Our country wants to sign up to a trade partnership in which our workers should compete with countries with those labor standards? Are we thinking clearly here? Who wants to do that? Does that not by its very definition denigrate standards in this country? I believe it does.

This is a chart that shows something about El Salvador. This was published some while ago:

Jesus Franco, 14, has scars crisscrossing his legs from his

ankles to his thighs and more on his small hands. For more

than half of his young life, he's spent long days cutting

sugarcane. He has the machete scars to prove it and so do his

four brothers and sisters, age 9 to 19, all of whom work in

the sweltering cane fields of El Salvador.

Jesus' story is repeated countless times across Latin

America where children even

younger than he is are found working in cane fields at

subsistence wages. More than 17 million children between the

ages of 5 and 14 are working in that region.

Sugarcane workers, including children, use machetes to cut

the hard, sharp stalks of thickly planted fields where there

is little room to maneuver. Children and family members said

cuts requiring stitches are common in the fields and many

more children suffer burns from the caustic fertilizer they

spread by hand.

Thirty-three percent of the sugarcane workers in the fields of El Salvador are under the age of 18. Many children in El Salvador start working in sugarcane fields between the ages of 10 and 13, and the number of children between the ages of 5 and 14 working in Central America is 17 million.

This is a young boy working in a sugarcane field in Central America. This is a picture of the living conditions for sugarcane workers in Guatemala. This is a picture of the type of injuries which children and adult workers sustain while cutting sugarcane. This photo is from Human Rights Watch.

I do not know how much more evidence is necessary to understand what we are trying to do. The majority who believe in this trade agreement are trying to hook this country into a competition with other countries that have decided they can fire workers who want to unionize, that have decided even if they have labor rules they do not need to enforce them, that have decided it is okay to have 9-, 10-, and 12-year-olds in the cane fields hacking away with machetes, and those are the conditions under which we compete. That is what the majority, many in this Chamber, will say when they vote for this trade agreement. They have said it before repeatedly with trade agreements, and they are going to say it again today. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, they are going to say it again today. It is unbelievable to me.

So last evening, when I got a little cranky and objected to unanimous consent requests and was walking around a little upset, I was upset because of this. This trade agreement, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, was negotiated over 1 year ago. It was not brought to the Senate floor, not brought to the floor of the House, not brought to the Congress at all. Do my colleagues know why? Because they did not think they had the votes in the House of Representatives. But I knew some day the President and the majority would say, ``We are going to vote on CAFTA,'' and they would wedge it in right in that little corner, right in that crevasse before we go home for a break.

Next week, we are not in session. There is a Fourth of July break. Sure enough, last night, that is exactly what the majority leader did. I am sure White House instructions were to get this done.

It has been over a year. We think we now have purchased enough votes, we have given up roads and bridges and dams, and we have enough people who are willing now to vote for this. So we are going to have this discussion, we are going to have it now, and it is going to be done before we go home for the Fourth of July recess, and we are not going to have a 2-day or 3-day discussion about real things that matter a lot.

We are going to have a discussion about flag burning, I guess, I am told probably in the month of July. The flag is very important in this country. It is a symbol of America's patriotism and freedom. I would not ever make light of that, but I would say this: As disgusting as it is, and it is disgusting to see anybody desecrate an American flag, one might well be hard-pressed to find someone who has burned an American flag. Look at the label. It might well be made in China because much of our textiles come from China these days. The people who used to make those textiles--shirts and trousers and, yes, flags--used to be American workers, but now they are foreign. They are gone because we have a trade strategy that says we want American workers to compete with workers in China, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Those workers will work pretty inexpensively. Those are workers who can work 7 days a week, and we can ask them to work 12 hours a day. We can pay them 30 cents an hour and that will be just fine, and American workers cannot compete with that--that is tough luck.

I happen to think that what we have built on this little planet called Earth, the only spot on Earth that is the United States of America, is extraordinary. One of the reasons it is extraordinary is we had the guts as a country, all of us did, both parties and people marching in the streets, to do what was right. We said there is a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. One has capital, labor, and all of these things that come together to produce. Both have rights, both ought to be protected, and so people chained themselves to the White House fence, people died in the streets of Detroit, people manifested a belief and a passion that workers have the right to organize, they have a right to work in a safe work plant, they ought to have child labor laws, and companies ought not be able to dump their sewage and chemicals into the streams and into the air. We made a lot of progress doing that, so we have a better country because of it. We use much more energy now than we did 25 years ago, and we have a cleaner country.

All of those things we have done to make this a better place in which to live, to allow jobs to be available that allow workers to provide for their families, are now being considered largely irrelevant because one does not have to bother with those things in production here at home. They can just produce elsewhere, and workers can be treated like a pair of pliers or a wrench: When you are done with it, just throw it away, just get rid of it, just leave it somewhere else. Do not worry about it because you can find another one 8,000 miles away. You can transfer the capital immediately, you can transfer the technology immediately and combine the capital and the technology with somebody who will work for 30 cents an hour. Do not worry about the consequences for the American workforce because if one is an international corporation interested in shareholder profits, they do not have to say the Pledge of Allegiance. So do not worry about that.

Those are the values we ought to be talking about when we talk about these trade agreements, values long forgotten, in my judgment, during these debates, values that no one wants to discuss much. That is why we are here for 1 day on the Senate floor on an issue this important, just wedging it right in between now and the Fourth of July recess.

As I close, I ask my colleagues to look at this one more time. This is a trade deficit chart that tracks the loss of American jobs and tracks the selling of America to foreign interests. Every single day, $2 billion of American cash, American assets, American real estate, ends up in the hands of foreign interests. It is what Warren Buffett means when he says that we as a country are headed toward a share cropper future. I defy anyone in the Senate to come to the floor and tell me this is moving in the right direction, tell me this is good news.

This is a disaster. This is dangerous for our country. This is evidence of a Congress that refuses to stand up, that does not have the backbone, the will, and the strength to stand up for this country's interests and is not willing to stand up and say: ``I want to protect America's interests.'' Why will they not say that? Because they are worried that somebody is going to call them protectionists. Well, sign me up, for God's sake. My interest in putting on a suit in the morning and coming to work is to protect the economic interests of this country. Yes, I think we have a global economy and, yes, I think trade can be beneficial, but if trade agreements are not mutually beneficial, then this country has no business signing up to trade agreements that cost this country jobs and economic strength and cost us an opportunity for a better future.

I will have more to say about a range of these issues later this afternoon, but I hope we will continue to hear from colleagues about the underlying premise of this set of failures and how we can turn it around. How do we turn it around? Every kid in this country who is now in school is going to have a future that is injured by this strategy unless we turn it around. Only we can do that. There is no one better able to do it than us, but we have to have the will to do it. I hope that perhaps at the end of the day, when we finally vote, we will find a will to quit moving in this direction and stand up for the economic interests of this country.

I yield the floor.

Might I inquire of the Senator from Idaho, my intention was to yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Idaho off our time. Is that the Senator's intention as well?

I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Idaho.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

How much time remains for the Senator from Montana and also on the majority side?

Mr. President, it would seem to me the Senator from Iowa would want to use some time at this point. I suggest the absence of a quorum and ask that the time run against the Senator from Iowa.

Mr. President, I shall not object, but I wonder if I might add to the unanimous consent request. Senator DeWine has asked for 10 minutes of Senator Grassley's time; we ask that Senator Byrd be recognized for 20 minutes from my time following the presentation by Senator DeWine; following that, Senator Burr be recognized for 10 minutes from Senator Grassley's time; following that, Senator Reid will be recognized for 10 minutes from Senator Baucus's time. I ask that by unanimous consent.

Senator Reid from Nevada.

Thank you. I apologize for interrupting my colleague.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I have great respect for all of my colleagues no matter what they decide to do on this vote. I think the vote is probably predetermined this evening. I must say there are a lot of promises I have heard on the floor the last day or so. There have been a lot of promises made downtown. I would only point out that I have seen the result of most of these promises after the votes are taken and most of them have not been worth the paper they are written on or the assurances given have not been valuable at all.

One might want to look at the side agreement dealing with sugar from Mexico; one can then go on to a sweetener agreement with Mexico; then can go on to a lot of these areas and understand that there are a lot of promises in order to get these bills passed, but by and large they do not amount to very much. They will not need anybody in this Senate after the ``yes'' votes are cast.

I start at the beginning, if I might. I know we are nearing the end of this debate. I do not want to go all the way back to the beginning, but let me go back a fair piece. It is when John Adams is in Europe as they are putting this new country together. He is in Europe representing our country. He writes back to his wife Abigail and asks Abigail the question: Where is the leadership going to come from? Where will the leadership emerge to help form this great country of ours, to help form a new government?

He plaintively kept asking, where will the leadership come from? Then in subsequent letters he would say to her, there is really only us. There is me. There is Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, George Washington, Madison, Mason. Of course, in the rearview mirror of history, the only ``us'' represents some of the greatest human talent ever assembled. They wrote a document that is the most remarkable document. It is a document called the U.S. Constitution that begins with ``we the people.'' That Constitution that begins with ``we the people'' provides mechanisms, the framework of our Government, the framework of a representative democracy.

Over many years, with that document providing the fabric of the growth of this great country, we have been a country that has been divinely blessed in many ways. We have built a place unlike any other place on the face of this Earth. There is no place like it. One can spin the globe and on this little planet called Earth, with 6 billion neighbors, there is no place quite like the United States of America.

We created an expanded set of opportunities for all Americans, through a lot of good decisions; for example, universal education. We as a country decided long ago every young child ought to be whatever their God-given talents allow them to be. We are not going to separate kids in our school system. They get to go to school and they get to become whatever their talents allow that child to become.

That universal education for all Americans has created a country that is unlike any other in the world. We went from the Colonies to the States. We survived a Civil War. We beat back a Depression. We resisted the oppression of Adolf Hitler, won a Second World War. We provided a GI bill, and when those soldiers came back from that war, they went to college. They got their college degrees. They came back to their communities. They built a home, got married, raised a family, built schools, built communities. What a remarkable country this has been.

It all comes back to this book, this Constitution. Other countries have constitutions, but none are quite like this Constitution. This Constitution says something about international trade and commerce. It describes the regulation of commerce and trade to the Congress. It is our responsibility, not the President's responsibility.

So over a number of years we have worked on and dealt with these issues and then we have had in many ways an almost breathtaking series of decades. We have split the atom, we have spliced genes, we have cloned animals, we invented plastics, nylon, the radar, the silicon chip. We cured polio, smallpox. We built airplanes, learned to fly them. We built rockets, flew to the Moon and walked on the Moon. We created telephones, television sets, computers. What a remarkable set of achievements for the men and women in this country who are the doers, the achievers, the inventors. We stand on each other's shoulders looking to the future.

So about three decades ago things began to change. This world became smaller. We started hearing about the global economy. We began to do more and travel more and have more connections with other parts of the world, and particularly large corporations which were developed because of economies of scale. Those large corporations began to be able to do business in more than one country. Then they defined for their own interests the opportunities by which they would do that business. It then became a global economy. In that global economy, we began to hear the term free trade, free trade, like a chant, almost like the hare krishna chanting on a street corner, wearing robes: Free trade.

Well, free trade is of little interest to me. I am very interested in expanded trade and fair trade, but free trade, there are a lot of things that are free.

This country built a place unlike any other on the face of this Earth and we need to be concerned about its continuation. So the question is what kind of trade gives us the opportunity to continue improving the standard of living in America, creating an economy that produces new jobs and new opportunities?

I am sure every single set of parents in this country wants things better for their kids. If there is something in second place, beyond the importance of their children, I guess I understand that, but everybody would believe, I expect, that what is most important in their lives is their children. We care about these things that affect our children. Are we sending our kids to good schools? Are we proud of these schools? Do we believe we are able to leave a world that is a better place in which to live than the one we found? Is that what we are going to do for our kids?

So as we confront this question of the new global economy and a new

global strategy, the galloping globalization of our economy, without a set of rules that has kept pace, the question for all of us is: What does it mean for our country? What does it mean for our future? What does it mean for our kids--especially our kids?

In the past decade, we have seen a very substantial loss of American jobs. Some people say, do not worry, be happy, ignore it. It is all part of the transition. What we will see is our low-skilled jobs move elsewhere, we will educate our children, and we will assume the role of high-skill, high-paying jobs; don't worry.

So we pass trade laws. They are called CAFTA and NAFTA and GATT, WTO. We do all of these things. Then somehow, at the end of this process, we look back and we see, you know, something fundamentally has changed. Somebody has pulled the rug out from under what are the basic strengths of this country--a good job that pays well, that provides benefits, that you can count on.

About 30 years ago the biggest corporation in America was General Motors. In most cases, people who went to work for General Motors expected to work there for a lifetime. They were paid well and they had benefits, health care and retirement. That was 30 years ago.

Now the largest corporation is Wal-Mart. They do not pay so well. Most people do not spend a lifetime at Wal-Mart. The average wage is much lower, and a fairly substantial number of their employees do not have benefits.

That is a very substantial change, really a dramatic change in our country. But the biggest change has been the development of a set of ideas by those who are able to influence thought in this country, particularly the largest corporations that have unlimited quantities of money, who convinced us that free trade, as a moniker, is a mechanism for success in our country.

So we pass trade agreements, the end of which means we lose American jobs, lose economic strength, and somehow believe that somewhere in the future things are going to get better.

I want to show a chart I have shown many times during this debate. It is a chart that shows what has happened with our trade deficit. This is a dangerous trend. Behind these red lines are lost jobs, families who lost their jobs, hundreds of them, thousands of them, and millions of them. Not many people in here know those people. No one in this Chamber lost his or her job because we all put a suit and necktie on and come to work. Nobody is going to get outsourced or offshored in the Senate. But all these folks did.

I have lists of companies and lists of names of people who just lost their job because of this new approach, a new defined approach in international trade that says in our country, we will be the leader that says go ahead and find, with the mechanism of production, the lowest cost production in the world. Get your Gulfstream, circle the globe and find out where you can produce for 30 cents an hour. Move that job to that area and, by the way, when you do, we will give you a tax cut. Let me say that again, because that is kind of a Byzantine proposition. When you close your American factory and fire your American workers, you get a tax cut from our Government. And, yes, I have tried twice to change that in the Senate and, yes, a majority of the Senate voted to keep a tax cut for workers who get fired and companies that move those jobs overseas. I will put in the Congressional Record their names. I really don't need to. A very easy Nexis-Lexis search will give you the names of who decided they should keep their tax cuts for companies that move their jobs overseas.

The point is, we are seeing this inevitable, relentless move to produce where it is cheap and then sell into the established marketplace. The problem is, this is unsustainable. This is a theory that is off track and it is a practice that injures this country.

Why do I say the theory is off track? Henry Ford decided, when he was going to make Fords, that he wanted to pay his production workers sufficient money so that they could buy the cars they were producing. That is pretty simple. That is simple economics. If you are paying your workers enough money so they can buy the products they are producing, you have a market and a consumer for the product. A pretty smart guy, Henry Ford.

Now it has changed. Now we should produce those shirts and those shoes and those trousers and all the trinkets where you can do it for 30 cents an hour and then ship it to Fargo and Toledo and Dayton and Los Angeles and New York and sell it there.

The question is, Who ultimately is going to buy that? Who ultimately will buy this?

We have a lot of dislocations that are dangerous. I have not talked at all about this, and I will not talk at length. A part of this, by the way, is oil. A part of this is oil. There are some on this globe who are lucky enough to have enough oil under the sands so if you stand in a depression in the sand with boots, your soles are going to look oily because some parts of this world are loaded with oil, particularly the Middle East. So the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Iraqis, and others have a lot of oil. We are desperately and hopelessly addicted to it. Our economy is addicted to it, and that is part of this. It also relates to jobs because, when you have the purchase of oil from these countries--Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and so on--they end up with American dollars, which means they want to buy American companies. They want to buy American stock. It is a way of buying part of our country.

In today's newspaper it says, ``China Tells U.S. Not To Meddle in the Bid for California Oil Giant.''

The story is the Chinese want to buy the ninth largest oil and gas company in the United States called Unocal.

Why would they want to buy Unocal? They are like everybody else. They want to control oil to the extent they can. The Chinese, I am told, now have 20 million cars. They have 1.3 billion people. By 15 years from now they are expected to have 120 million automobiles. They are going to need gas. They are going to need a lot of gas. The price of oil is not going to go down, it is going to go up. They want to buy an oil company. I don't think this should happen in a million years, by the way. I don't think we should have the Chinese buying American oil companies, but I will tell you why this is happening. It is happening because these trade deficits are putting massive amounts of money in the hands of Chinese, and it gives them the opportunity to purchase, on the open market, America's stocks, bonds, companies.

I mentioned previously that Warren Buffett, whom I like a lot--I think he is the second richest man in the world, but you would never know it. Warren is just a great guy. Warren Buffett described this problem as ``a country that is now aspiring to an ownership society will not find happiness in a sharecropper society.''

This is where we are heading, he says, a sharecropper society. He describes this is when every day, 7 days a week, you put $2 billion in the hands of foreigners. You are buying $2 billion more from foreigners than you are selling to them every day, 7 days a week. You are putting $2 billion more into hands of foreigners and foreign governments. That means each day they have more purchasing power to buy another part of America. That is where this comes from. The Chinese want to by Unocal. That is where the money comes from, the $140 billion trade deficit with China last year. That means they have our country's currency. They have the capability of buying our stocks and our companies.

The question is, Do we care about that? Does anybody here want to change the strategy or do you want to do some more of it?

The attitude in the Senate, as I think we will discover when the vote is taken tonight is that if you are digging yourself into a hole, what you need is more shovels and just dig a little harder. That makes no sense to me.

If there is one person in the U.S. Congress who does not understand the danger of this, then they are in the wrong business. This is trouble. This comes from CAFTA, it comes from GATT, it comes from incompetent trade negotiators and bad trade deal after bad trade deal. I just heard on the floor of the Senate today, I will bet you six people who talked about promises that have been made to them in order to get this trade deal through the Congress. These promises mean nothing. These are totally, completely empty promises.

Let me briefly describe this. I am going to use Warren Buffett to describe it because, again, I like Warren Buffett. He described it this way. Stay with me just for a moment.

To understand why, take a wildly fanciful trip with me to

two isolated, side-by-side islands of equal size,

Squanderville and Thriftville. Land is the only capital asset

on these islands, and their communities are primitive,

needing only food and producing only food. Working eight

hours a day, in fact, each inhabitant can produce enough food

to sustain himself or herself. And for a long time that's how

things go along. On each island everybody works the

prescribed eight hours a day, which means that each society

is self-sufficient.

Eventually, though, the industrious citizens of Thriftville

decide to do some serious saving and investing, and they

start to work 16 hours a day. In this mode they continue to

live off the food they produce in eight hours of work but

begin exporting an equal amount to their one and only trading

outlet, Squanderville.

The citizens of Squanderville are ecstatic about this turn

of events, since they can now live their lives free from toil

but eat as well as ever. Oh, yes, there's a quid pro quo--but

to the Squanders, it seems harmless: All that the Thrifts

want in exchange for their food is Squanderbonds (which are

denominated, naturally, in Squanderbucks).

Over time Thriftville accumulates an enormous amount of

these bonds, which at their core represent claim checks on

the future output of Squanderville. A few pundits in

Squanderville smell trouble coming. They foresee that for the

Squanders both to eat and to pay off--or simply service--the

debt they're piling up will eventually require them to work

more than eight hours a day. But the residents of

Squanderville are in no mood to listen to such doomsaying.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Thriftville begin to get

nervous. Just how good, they ask, are the IOUs of a shiftless

island? So the Thrifts change strategy: Though they continue

to hold some bonds, they sell most of them to Squanderville

residents for Squanderbucks and use the proceeds to buy

Squanderville land. And eventually the Thrifts own all of

Squanderville.

At that point, the Squanders are forced to deal with an

ugly equation: They must now not only return to working eight

hours a day in order to eat--they have nothing left to

trade--but must also work additional hours to service their

debt and pay Thriftville rent on the land so imprudently

sold. In effect, Squanderville has been colonized by purchase

rather than conquest.

That is my friend Warren Buffett's description of what is happening. And it is why, by the way, the Chinese have the money to buy Unocal. This is about Squanderville and Thriftville. The question he asks: Is anybody listening? Regrettably, the answer in the Senate is: Precious few.

I have spoken at great length about companies. I have not spoken previously about Pennsylvania House, which I will do just for a moment. I have talked about Huffy bicycles, Radio Flyer little red wagons, Fig Newton cookies--which, by the way, went to Monterrey, Mexico, so if you want some Mexican food, order Fig Newton cookies.

Let me tell you about Pennsylvania House Furniture, high-end furniture made with Pennsylvania wood, hardwood and cherry wood, high- end, terrific furniture, made for many decades in Pennsylvania and marketed as Pennsylvania Furniture.

Pennsylvania House Furniture was purchased by Lazy Boy Corporation about 4 years ago. Lazy Boy decided it is just too expensive to manufacture Pennsylvania House furniture in Pennsylvania, so we have to move it to China. Now Pennsylvania House furniture will be made in China. They will ship the wood from Pennsylvania to China, the hardwood, the cherry wood. They will put it together in China and ship the furniture back.

So it is for Robert Zechman. Robert Zechman worked for that company for 29 years. On December 21, four days from Christmas, he got his letter: You get $92-a-year severance for the service you have given this great company. Now we are shipping the wood and your job to China. They put the furniture together and ship it back. We will still call it Pennsylvania House Furniture, but the only Pennsylvania part of that furniture is the wood. The people are expendable.

The question is, Does anybody care about that? Does it matter to anybody? It mattered to Pennsylvania. Governor Rendell said: We have 500 people who work here. We would like to save these jobs. They put together an effort to save those jobs. Finally, we were told that Lazy Boy said: We are not interested in having competition domestically, so we are not going to sell. We are moving to China.

Same story with Huffy bicycles. Same story with dozens and dozens and dozens of companies.

I spoke last week about a refrigerator company that decided they will close their American plant, notify the workers: No jobs in this country for you anymore. Why? Because we are going to make those refrigerators in Mexico. And, by the way, just to rub salt in the wound, one part of the manufacturing plant with which they will manufacture those refrigerators in Mexico has an Ex-Im Bank loan. That is a loan subsidized by this Government to build a part of a plant in Mexico to house the jobs of the workers who were fired in this country to build some refrigerators.

Does it matter? Maybe not to some. It matters to me. Does it matter whether we make refrigerators? Does it matter whether we make fine furniture? Does it matter whether we have a manufacturing base? Will America remain a strong world-class economy if it gives its manufacturing sector away?

In the last 25 years, we have lost one-half of our manufacturing capacity. Is there anybody here who is having an apoplectic seizure about that? Not hardly. We snore our way through this. President after President gives us a new trade law to see if we can improve on this massive debt that keeps growing and growing and growing. In the meantime, Robert Zechman will probably ask his Congressman or his Senator: What is going on there? Are you standing up for America, standing up for jobs in this country? Absolutely, he will hear. You bet your life. We are all for American jobs. It is just that the trade agreements trade them away--quickly. The majority of the people in the House and the Senate are going to vote for these trade agreements.

America Online--December 2003--had just laid off 450 American employees, mostly design engineers and software engineers, in its California offices. Then those same engineers read that America Online was trying to hire software development teams and engineers in Bangalore, India. Does that mean you change your name to India Online, or is it still America Online that divests itself of U.S. employees and hires the engineers in Bangalore?

The list is endless. We come down, finally, to a choice, a choice this Senate will make once again on another trade agreement. The NAFTA trade agreement, called North American Free Trade Agreement, was negotiated between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It was just one more chapter of bad trade agreements. But before that trade agreement, we had a slight surplus in trade with Mexico. We had a modest deficit with Canada. Now we have had about 10 years of trade agreements called NAFTA, and now we have a very large trade deficit with Mexico and a larger trade deficit with Canada. One would wonder if somebody would stand up and scratch their head and say: Gee, I wonder if we didn't make a mistake here.

The economists, by the way, who most trumpeted the benefits of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, were two economists named Hufbauer and Schott. I am sure they are still practicing economists. I see the names Hufbauer and Schott.

I actually used to teach economics. Economics is just a little bit of psychology pumped up with a lot of helium. I taught it for a little while and was able to overcome that experience and still lead a productive life.

But these economists, Hufbauer and Schott, said: If you just pass NAFTA, we will promise you a remarkable future. What will happen is jobs will transpose. We will see low-income, low-skilled jobs being performed by Mexicans and high-skill, high-wage jobs now producing a product to be sold into an emerging middle class in Mexico, and those will be produced in America.

These people were totally, completely wrong about everything. Has anybody said, We were wrong? Of course not. In this debate on CAFTA, which is another acronym--NAFTA, CAFTA, SHAFTA, whatever it is--on this debate, we are now hearing NAFTA was really good. Boy, if we could just get some more of this spoiled trade agreement, somehow things would be better off. They would not be better.

Let me try to tell you what I believe our obligation is. Yes, I want a strong

economy. Yes, I want American companies to understand we support their interest in competing around the world.

But I believe that, first of all, in the boardrooms they ought to say the Pledge of Allegiance from time to time. If we charter American corporations as artificial people--and that is what a corporate charter is about. We say we are going to create you as an artificial person. We are going to give you a charter which gives you limited liability. You can sue and be sued, contract and be contracted with. You are, in fact, an artificial person. If that artificial person, by corporate charter, given by this country, is in America, then it ought to care just a bit about this country's interests. And, yes, maybe just a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, occasionally, in the boardroom might help.

When we hear people say, ``We want all the benefits for our corporation being American, except the responsibility for paying taxes is something we want to shed,'' I worry about loyalty and commitment to this country. And, yes, that is happening. We see what is called inversions, where corporations want to renounce their American citizenship to become citizens of the Bahamas. Why? Because they want to become Bahamian citizens? No. Because they want to avoid paying U.S. taxes. I have always said, if they want to do that, if they run into trouble, let them call out the Bahamian Navy. My understanding is, there are about 24 people in the Bahamian Navy. Let them call on the Bahamian Navy.

The point is, I think we ought to support American companies in competing around the world, but we ought to expect certain things from them as well. The same is true with respect to other countries. Whether it is China, Japan, Europe or Korea, we should not any longer sit idly by and roll our eyes at trade agreements that are unfair to our workers and unfair to our companies.

Let me again mention just one specific piece of information. I do not mean to pick on Korea for the sake of picking on Korea. I have spoken about the Chinese automobile trade previously. Korea, this year, if this year is similar to last year, will likely send us about 680,000 Korean cars, all on ships, to be delivered to the United States, and to be sold in the United States--680,000 cars produced in Korea, with Korean labor, to be shipped to the United States.

Do you know how many cars the United States will produce that we will be able to sell in Korea? Do you think it will be 680,000? No, 3,900. Do you know why? Because Korea does not want American cars sold in Korea. They had a little spurt once on the Dodge Dakota pickup, and they shut that down real quickly. So 680,000 cars coming this way; 3,900 cars going from the United States to Korea.

I think for us to put up with this stuff is unbelievable, just unbelievable, in its ignorance. I would say to the Koreans, with respect to that piece of bilateral trade, if that is what you want to do on bilateral automobile trade, then, for a while, why don't you sell your cars in Zambia? Just ship them to Zambia, and we hope you have a good commercial success with them. Very soon, they would understand they need the American marketplace, and in exchange for needing the American marketplace, to have their marketplace wide open to us.

We know, those of us who will vote against this, and especially those who speak as I do, we know that the Washington Post, which will largely not run any op-ed pieces from those of us who hold our view, they and the other institutional thinkers on this will say: Well, do you know what you are? We have just heard you speak, and you basically ignore the world as it is. You are willing to reject the global economy, despite the fact that it exists and is there. And what you are is a xenophobic, isolationist stooge that simply is incapable of seeing over the horizon. You don't have the breadth of thought we do. And because you don't, you have a basic level of ignorance. That is how they treat people who do not buy into the jingoism of free trade.

This country used to be known as a country of shrewd Yankee traders. We were good. Our country wants us to succeed. We should want us to succeed. And we want to help others succeed with trade relationships that help lift others up, not push us down. But I have described already what we have gone through in the last century.

Unlike almost any other country on Earth, in the last century we decided some pretty basics things. And there are some people who had a tough time forcing these things to happen. I do not have the names of the people who were killed on the streets of America who were demanding the right for labor to be able to organize, but they died. Those who fought for a safe workplace, they suffered. Those who demanded a fair part of the income stream in this country for those who work for a living, they too paid the price for that. Those who fought, who said, belching chemicals into the air and water out of our factories, it is poisoning where we live, and you have to stop it--and they forced Congress to put an end to it--they paid a price for that as well.

But we did all that. It made sense. And now all of a sudden we see that does not matter. What matters is to be able to pole-vault over all of those regulations and go set up a factory in Guangzhou and produce that commodity and send it to Pittsburgh. And the consumer may get a $25 lower bill for that commodity. The consumer probably lost their job to the worker in the factory in Guangzhou, but they are able to pay slightly less for that commodity. That is not a bargain for our country. It is a way for our country to lose economic strength and to lose its way.

Now, let me just conclude by saying I have great hope for this country. If I did not have hope, I would not serve here in the Senate. We come here from a quiltwork of interests around the country--some big States and some small States, some big towns, some small towns, ivy league colleges and State schools. I come from a town of 300 people. I think it is a thrill every day to go to work. I think it is a special privilege to be here. If I did not have hope, I would not keep coming here, I would not have run for reelection last fall.

I still have hope that, in the long run, we will understand that the path we are on cannot be sustained and there is a better path. And it is not a path that is selfish. It is not demanding ``us or nothing.'' It is just a path that understands our first responsibility is to nurture and strengthen and protect this country of ours and to do what we think is necessary to give our kids opportunities. We need to leave this place better than the way we found it. And that is not what is going to happen unless we change course.

So I am on the floor of the Senate, not to preach but just to try to play a role in seeing if we cannot finally make a U-turn on these issues and head in the right direction, in a direction that says to our trading partners--China, Korea, Africa, South America, CAFTA, Central America--it says to them: Yes, we care about this. We want to help you. We want to work with you. But we do not want to do that at the expense of taking the American economy apart. We do not want to do that at the expense of saying to American families: We are busy helping somebody else down there, and so we do not have time to worry about your job.

If this country says to the people who make bicycles, ``You are paid way too much. You are paid $11 an hour plus benefits. We cannot afford that. Those jobs go to China,'' there is destined, in my judgment, to be nothing but hopelessness for those who come after us. I do not believe we can allow that to be the case.

I started by saying John Adams used to write back to his wife, when he was helping put this great country together, and asked her plaintively: Where is the leadership? Who will be the leaders? Where will the leadership come from in this country? And the answer in every generation in America has been to provide that leadership. And that question is a loud question in this country, again. It begs for an answer. Who will be the leaders? Where will the leadership come from to put this country back on track, to put its economy back on track, so 5 years, 10 years, and 25 years from now we can see something that gives us some confidence and some faith this is going to be a better place for our children.

Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of my time and yield the floor.

U.S.-Dominican Republic, Central American Free Trade Agreement

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, how much time remains on my allocation?

Mr. President, let me reserve 5 minutes of that as well.

Mr. President, I believe the previous order had the Senator from Nevada going next.

I would sooner follow the Senator from Nevada by the accepted order.

Mr. President, we have an order that is established. My understanding is that the Senator from Nevada is to speak next; is that correct?

Mr. President, I wonder if you might want to further disclose what ``sleeping on one's rights'' means? Ignore the question. We will all assume the Senator from Nevada is awake, just not here.

I heard the discussions tonight about Central America. Earlier this evening, I heard about the need to help Central America. I have traveled to, I think, all the countries involved. I have a great affection for the people of Central America. I also have great affection for a Central America that I would define--North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa. We call that central America. I am very interested in Central America south of our border but most especially here. The question is, Will this advance the interests of Central America and America?

My colleague just described how this provides new opportunities. It is interesting, I have been here through all of the trade agreements, I believe, all the recent trade agreements in the last 15 years or so. I don't know that there are any new speeches, and that perhaps includes mine. They just dust off the old speeches: This means new opportunity. You show them it did not mean new opportunity, it meant less opportunity. They say: No, no, you don't understand, this means new opportunity. It is like a script--a bad script, to be sure, but a script. So away we go again.

I fear I know the results of the debate tonight. I have great respect for the Senate. The vote we will commence following all of the speakers I assume will provide, once again, a victory for the President's efforts to get this CAFTA agreement passed. The reason I know that is likely to be the case is because I have sat here and counted the number of times I heard my colleagues stand up and say: They promised, they promised, they promised me this, they promised me that, they promised me the other thing.

I am thinking we do not learn about promises, either. None of these promises mean a thing, not a whit. We heard them all, we have seen them all, and as soon as the vote is taken tonight, I say to those with their blue suits and their pride having extracted these wonderful promises, go to the front steps of the White House and then just speak into the wind and understand that you did not get anything. What you got was a vote. You were persuaded to vote for a trade agreement that is exactly as it is written. Side agreements mean nothing; promises mean nothing. They got your vote, they got the trade agreement, and it is one more chapter in a book of failed strategies. That is what happens.

I will remain hopeful, however, that one day sufficient numbers of this Congress and this Senate will decide that we are moving down the wrong road, we ought to turn around and change direction, and move in a way that expands opportunity for this country, cares a little bit about American jobs, sets up competition--yes, a competition with others that includes conditions that will raise others up rather than push us down. That will one day, in my judgment, be something the American people will demand of the Congress.

Apparently, not sufficient of them do so now, State after State, as represented by the votes that will be cast here later. But one day it will happen. If it is too late, at some point the strength will be sapped from this country, and we will not long remain a world economic power unless we have a strong, growing, vibrant manufacturing base. We lost half of that manufacturing base in the last 25 years. We are losing more of it as we speak. We face other challenges.

I just described this, which encapsulates a lot of the debate here: ``China now wants to buy the ninth largest oil company in the U.S.'' This encapsulates a whole series of issues about which we talked. I think one day soon the American people will say to the Congress: You have to wake up. You cannot be passing trade agreements that pull the rug out from under this country. Trade agreements must be mutually beneficial, and I have not yet seen one in the last two decades.

So, Mr. President, I am going to vote no. I hope as many of my colleagues who can will vote no. I hope one day soon those of us who feel as I do will prevail. Apparently, tonight will not be the night.

I yield the floor.