Floor Statements

Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, November 1, 2007, at 9:30 a.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office

Building in order to conduct an oversight hearing on the Impact of the Flood Control Act of 1944 on Indian Tribes along the Missouri River.

Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 224-2251.

Mr. President, I had previously requested the right to speak for 30 minutes in morning business.

Mr. President, I wish to talk this morning about the President's request for $190-plus billion in emergency funding for the war in Iraq and for activities in Afghanistan.

Before I do that, however, I wish to mention the subject of Iran. I notice in the paper this morning, and I noticed the other day in a press conference by President Bush, he made a reference to world war III in a description of the issues with Iran. I am very concerned about what I hear from this administration. This administration has had a history of describing for us how they see the world. Many of us have spent a lot of time in classified, top-secret briefings with members of this administration, some of whom are now speaking out now about Iran. They include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, and others. We have had plenty of experience in top-secret briefings with them in which they described circumstances with respect to the country of Iraq.

It turns out what we were told in top-secret briefings about Iraq was not accurate. No one has done the in-depth investigation to find out why that was the case. It appears to me, in some cases that which was described to us by top-level folks in this administration about Iraq prior to the Iraq war--in some cases, it turns out they either should have known, and in some cases may have known, that what they were saying to the Congress and to the American people was not accurate.

My point is this. I think there is precious little credibility on the part of the administration on these issues. I do not--I would say most of my colleagues feel the same--do not want this administration moving off precipitously based on information they have, to take military action of any type against another country. They certainly cannot in my judgment do that without the consent of Congress. I believe they would have a very difficult time getting the consent the Congress, given the lack of credibility in this administration on many of these issues.

These are important issues. Preventing the country of Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is a very important mission, in my judgment. But we will best accomplish that through diplomatic means with other countries, particularly with the Europeans and the Russians and many others. I must say my own view is that the foreign policy of this administration--I regret to say it--has largely been an inept and a clumsy foreign policy at best. We face, as a result of it, very substantial challenges around the world. My hope is that we see much more action on diplomacy and negotiation and working to form alliances and much less front-page headlines by members of this administration.

Now I wish to talk about priorities. I wish to talk about the President's request for $196 billion in emergency funding, none of it paid for. But first I want to talk about this little girl. This little girl, her name is Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight. Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight is from the Crow Nation in Montana. She loved to dance, as you can see-- sparkling, beautiful eyes, 5 years old, loved to dance the Indian dances.

Ta'shon's grandmother testified at a hearing I held at the Crow Reservation in Montana, with my colleague, Senator Tester. Her grandmother told us a story about Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight. Ta'Shon died, by the way. This little girl with the bright eyes and the love of dancing isn't with us anymore. Ta'Shon had health problems. Last year she was taken, many times, to the Crow Indian Health Service clinic. They were treating her--after they had diagnosed various things--they were treating her for depression. It turned out this little girl didn't have

depression, this little girl had a cancerous tumor, terminal cancer.

At one point, her grandfather, who was with her at the clinic, pointed out the bulbous condition of her fingertips and toes and said to the health care folks that it appeared to him this reflected a lack of oxygen to the body and they ought to check on what was causing that. That concern was dismissed.

On another visit, her grandmother asked the doctor to eliminate the possibility that this child was suffering from cancer or leukemia, but the family's concerns went unheeded. In August of 2006, Ta'Shon was rushed from the Crow clinic to the St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, MT, airlifted to the Denver Children's Hospital, diagnosed with an untreatable, incurable form of cancer. Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight lived 3 more months after the tumor was discovered, in what the grandmother said was unmedicated pain, and then died.

I show you this picture of this beautiful young girl because her family said it was all right for me to use her image to describe the serious problem of health care on American Indian reservations. Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight didn't get the health care we would expect, and she died. We had, on the floor of the Senate, a bill that would have provided 3.8 million American kids who do not now have health insurance coverage--it would have provided them health insurance coverage. But the President says that is not the priority, so he vetoed the bill. I am trying to bring a bill to the floor of the Senate right now that extends and reauthorizes the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. It has been 8 years, and I am likely to have to have a cloture motion filed on the motion to proceed to it, because for some it may not be a priority, apparently.

This ought to be a priority. Yes, for this little girl, her memory, and the health of other children similar to her, it ought to be a priority in this country. I hope this Senate will make it a priority. We certainly did on the Children's Health Insurance Program, and we came up short in the House of being able to override the President's veto. But we will try again.

Isn't this something most of us believe represents an urgency? As I have said before, I don't know what is in second, third or fourth place in what is important in people's lives, but I know what is in first place. It is their children and their children's health.

Having said that about priorities and values and about someone looking at what we spend our money on 100 years from now, looking back, the historians, through the rearview mirror, will say: What was that group of people--what were they doing? What was their value system? What were they about? They said they didn't believe--at least some of them didn't believe covering children with health insurance was the most significant priority. They didn't believe that adequate funding for the Indian Health Service was the most significant priority. Nobody knew that Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight lived several months in unmedicated pain, lived many months before that in an undiagnosed condition, with a terminal illness; nobody knew that, so that wasn't a priority.

So let's look at the priorities. The President has proposed to us, in this year, that we spend $196 billion in emergency funding to continue in Iraq and Afghanistan. By my calculation, that is nearly $16 billion a month, $4 billion a week, and not one penny of it is paid for. The President said: I declare an emergency. Put it on top of the debt.

Then the President went to Arkansas, at exactly the same time, and held a press conference at a political rally and said: I am going to be the fiscally responsible President, and I am going to stop this profligate spending.

I don't know, maybe he thinks people are not paying attention, people are not reading what is going on. Here is what the Congressional Budget Office says. They estimate a $2.4 trillion long-term war cost.

The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers

a total of $2.4 trillion by 2017 when counting the huge

interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed

money, according to the . . . the nonpartisan Congressional

Budget Office.

We are borrowing the money because the President wants to spend the money, but he doesn't want to ask anybody to pay for it. Here is what this war is costing, all of it borrowed. The soldiers fight at the order of the Commander in Chief, and when they come back, they and their children can pay the bills. That is not a value system that makes much sense to me.

Now, the President says: I want another $196 billion, and, by the way, if you do not agree with that, you do not support the troops. He says: We will see who supports the troops.

Let me make another construct here. This is in some ways about supporting the troops, but it is much more than that. It is about supporting the contractors, because a substantial portion of this war is contracted out. I want to go through with my colleagues about whom we are supporting with this money as well, contractors for whom there is no oversight.

The Secretary of State was up here yesterday answering questions about that. I hope the Secretary of State is properly chastened, reading the stories and finally understanding what these contractors have been doing, with no oversight and virtually no accountability.

Let me go through a list of these contract issues so that people understand, and the President would understand. This is not just about ``are you supporting the troops,'' it is about are you supporting the contractors with virtually no oversight.

This is from September 21, 2007, the New York Times:

Military officials said that contracts worth $6 billion to

provide essential supplies to American troops in Kuwait, Iraq

and Afghanistan, including food, water and shelter were under

review by criminal investigators. In addition, $88 billion in

contracts and programs, including those for body armor for

American soldiers and material for Iraqi and Afghan security

forces, are being audited for financial irregularities.

So when the President says: Are you supporting the soldiers? My question is this: Are you watching the contractors? Because the American taxpayer is getting fleeced. This does not support soldiers, this undermines the soldiers. Of $6 billion in contracts reviewed, the Pentagon says: The Army reported that it had 78 cases of fraud and corruption under investigation, had obtained 20 criminal indictments, and had uncovered over $15 million in bribes. That is from the same article.

Contract abuse. Of the enormous expenditures of American and Iraqi money on the Iraq reconstruction program, at least $40 billion overall has been criticized for reasons that go well beyond the corruption cases that have been uncovered so far.

Weak oversight, poor planning, and endless security problems have contributed to many of the program's failures. Some $40 billion has been spent. No, this is not in support of troops. This is in support of the administration's mission by which they hire contractors and shovel the money in their direction.

Most of us have read the stories about this, but they are pretty unbelievable. We sent 185,000 AK-47s to Iraq; 185,000. They can only account for 75,000 of them, so 110,000 AK-47s, bought and paid for by the American taxpayers, are missing. Some undoubtedly will land in the hands of the insurgents being aimed at American troops. We sent 170,000 pistols; 80,000 of them are missing. That is unbelievably inept on the part of those whom we ought to expect to be accountable and to make certain the taxpayers' money is spent wisely, No. 1; No. 2, that if you are sending weapons to Iraq, they end up in the right hands, not the wrong hands.

It is unbelievable that we have a couple hundred thousand AK-47s and pistols that we sent to Iraq, we do not have the foggiest idea where they are, yet we know some of them end up in the wrong hands.

We have trained about 360,000 police and soldiers for security in the armed forces and the police forces. We have trained 360,000 of them. We believe there are somewhere around 180,000 to 273,000 still around, but no one knows. Absenteeism is up around 50 percent. There is no official document in the Federal Government that tells us how many exist in the security forces at the moment; and, by the way, today we are only training about one-third of the number of Iraqis as we were training before the surge. So we have reduced by two-thirds the number we are now training, even as we are losing a substantial portion of the 360,000 who have

already been trained for security, which begs the question: When we leave Iraq, and we will, is it up to the Iraqis to provide for their own security? After you have trained 360,000 people to do so, have you not trained enough Iraqis, so if the Iraqis have the will to provide for their own security, they can do that? One would expect so.

Between April of 2003 and June of 2004, $12 billion of U.S. currency was hauled to Iraq in C-130s on big pallets. It was disbursed by what was called the Coalition Provisional Authority, which we created.

At least $9 billion of that is missing. Some have said: So what? It does not matter. This money was Iraq's own money. This was the oil money we had for safekeeping. So if we lost the money that came from Iraq oil, so what?

Well, here is the ``so what.'' Retired ADM David Oliver, then the CPA's director of management and budget, when asked by a BBC reporter about the cash that they airlifted.

I have no idea. I can't tell you whether the money went to the right things or didn't, nor do I actually think it's important.

Tuesday, October 23, that is this week, an independent oversight agency said it could not complete an audit of a $1.2 billion contract to train Iraqi policemen because the records kept by the State Department and by DynCorp International, the contractor, were inaccurate and in disarray. . . . The documents were not sufficient in order for us to do an audit.

The Secretary of State is up here this week testifying. I do not know whether she was asked about this. But this is under her stewardship, her responsibility.

The State Department paid $43.8 million for manufacturing and temporary storage of a residential camp that has never been used. The State Department's payment of $36.4 million for weapons and equipment, including body armor, armored vehicles, and communications equipment could not be accounted for.

This week again: Among the problems identified before the audit was suspended were duplicate payments, the purchase of a never used $1.8 million x-ray scanner, and payments of $387,000 to DynCorp officials in hotels rather than other available accommodations.

I should have brought a towel that Henry Bunting brought to a hearing I held last year to show you symbolically what has been fundamentally wrong. Henry Bunting was a purchaser for Halliburton or Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton. He said: I worked in Kuwait. I was supposed to buy the equipment and so on. They wanted towels, hand towels for the troops. So I made out an order for hand towels, because Halliburton was furnishing the towels for the troops. My supervisor said: No, you cannot order that particular hand towel, you have to order a hand towel with a logo on it that was embroidered that says KBR. We want the logo of our company on the hand towel.

Bunting said: But it will triple the price. The supervisor said: It doesn't matter. The taxpayer is paying for this. This is a cost-plus contract. Then Bunting went on to tell us about $7,600 a month for leasing an SUV, about paying $40 or $45 a case for Coca-Cola. He went on to tell us all these stories: It does not matter, the taxpayer is paying for it. `

It is unbelievable, if you take the lid off this and smell a little bit about what is happening with these contracts.

The President says: I want $196 billion in additional funding. I want it as an emergency. I do not want anybody to pay for it. I want to put it on top of the debt. That is almost $16 billion a month this year, $4 billion a week, and I do not want any questions about it, and we are going to see, he says, who supports American troops.

Well, that money is also going to support the same kind of incompetence in contracting that has been facing the American taxpayer now for about 4 years. I think hard questions need to be asked, yes, of the President, the Vice President, the heads of agencies who are responsible for this: How do you justify this? How do you justify insisting that this Congress come up with $196 billion and then tell us that we cannot afford, we do not have enough money to care for Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight? She died because the health care did not exist for her. That is not a priority for this administration. The President says we cannot afford it, despite the fact that the bill was fully paid for, Children's Health Insurance. We cannot afford sufficient money for the Indian health care system, so Ta'Shon died.

What is the value system here? What are the priorities? Once again the President says: Well, the priorities are we need the $196 billion. It is an emergency. If you do not support it, you do not support the troops. The fact is, this entire Senate supports our troops. We have demonstrated it time and time and time again. But it is also time for us to tell the President: We do not support a strategy that says: Let's keep spending money and not paying for it. We do not support a strategy that has us in the middle of a civil war, going door to door in Baghdad, when Osama bin Laden last week sent us another tape. Osama bin Laden is the one who boasted about attacking our country. He is the one who boasted about killing innocent Americans. Our National Intelligence Estimate of July of this year says the greatest threat to our country is al-Qaida and its leadership, and they are reconstituting themselves and developing new training camps, and rebuilding. They are in a ``secure'' or safe hideaway in northern Pakistan. There ought not be one acre of ground on this planet that is secure or safe for those who murdered innocent Americans. But instead of dealing with the greatest threat to this country, and that is eliminating the leadership of al- Qaida, this administration has us going door to door in Baghdad, in the middle of a civil war, and now says--they say they want $196 billion in additional funding, and they want it as emergency funding, $4 billion a week for the next year.

I think there is something horribly wrong with what is going on here. I think this Congress has to tell this President that change is on the way.

I want to mention something that relates to this, because I do not know what this Congress is going to do with all of these funding requests. But I know the next time we vote on emergency funding requests by the President, I am going to offer a couple of amendments. They may be out of order, they may be blue slipped, they may be whatever, but we are going to vote on them one way or the other. That is, we need to start paying for that which we are spending money on.

The President can go to a political rally down in Arkansas and say: This is a new George W. Bush, and now I am going to be fiscally conservative. But the fact is, he has recommended all of this spending, the highest amount of spending in the history of our country from this administration. He now suggests that we continue to spend but not pay for it.

I want to talk about a couple of pay-fors. My colleagues have often heard me speak about this, but I am going to offer this again the next time we have an emergency funding bill.

There is an enterprising reporter named David Evans from Bloomberg. David Evans went to the Cayman Islands, and he went to this little place on Church Street, a quiet little five-story building, and reported that there are 12,748 corporations living here in this little four-story white building.

They are not there. This is a legal fiction created by lawyers so companies could avoid paying taxes. Well, I have got some legislation that would stop that dead in its tracks. You cannot move an address for the purpose of not paying U.S. taxes you rightfully owe. If you are not doing your central business there, you cannot claim this is where you are; we tax you as if you never left. I intend to offer that as an amendment to what the President would suggest we spend money for, and not pay for. I would suggest that: Let's begin paying for some of this.

Runaway manufacturing plants, that is another one. I have a piece of legislation I have introduced on runaway manufacturing plants.

We actually pay somebody, if they close their American manufacturing plant, fire their workers, move the jobs to China, we say: Good for you. We want to give you a tax cut.

That is totally nuts. I have tried four times to close it down. There are over 50 Senators who actually support this perverse tax break. About 44 Senators

have supported me, and I am going to keep pushing this until we have a deep reservoir of common sense that says it is crazy for us to say, if you close your plant in our country and ship your jobs overseas to China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, we will give you a tax break for doing so. That makes no sense at all.

Third, I have a bill I have introduced ending benefits of abusive foreign cross-border leasing transaction. The most pernicious of all of the things going on is American companies buying foreign assets belonging to foreign governments. Let me give an example. Wachovia Bank, formerly First Union, one of the big banks, entered into a sale in-lease out transaction to purchase a sewer in Bochum, Germany. Why would an American bank want to buy a sewer--not a sewer in America, a German city sewer system? Because they want to take ownership and be able to get large depreciation on property that otherwise would not be depreciated because it is owned by a government. So they lease the sewer back to the city which will continue to use the sewer system as if they still own it, but that financial transaction turns out to be about a $175 million tax savings to an American bank. Of all of the unbelievably pernicious tax cuts that exist, this is it. The Finance Committee has taken some action. Good for them. They need to take more action. I testified a couple of weeks ago. I say shut it off, even retroactively. There is no sense supporting something that was fundamentally wrong. No one can justify this nonsense.

I am going to offer these three and several other provisions to anything we have on the floor of the Senate that calls for emergency funding. The emergency funding request in itself needs to be inspected carefully. Is there a change of course in Iraq? If not, why not? Is this support of the troops, or is it to support contractors?

A young woman named Bunnatine Greenhouse had the courage to give her job up because she was willing to stand up and say: This is the most blatant contract abuse I have witnessed as an employee of the Federal Government. She was the highest ranking civilian official in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They are the ones who monitor and approve the contracts. She stood up to the old boys network and said: What you are doing is wrong. It is the most blatant abuse. She is talking about contracts that were worth billions of dollars, many of them awarded sole source to Halliburton; Kellogg, Brown & Root; and other companies. She blew the whistle. She paid for it with her job. She was an outstanding public official. She had the courage that was necessary to speak out.

We need to have similar courage. We need to say to the President: This $196 billion is not about demonstrating whether one supports the troops. All of us support the troops. A substantial portion of this money is also going to go to contractors for which there has been no oversight. There is the greatest waste and fraud and abuse in the history of this country in recent years under this administration's contracting out virtually everything, much of it sole-source, very large, no-bid contracts. This Congress needs to weigh in on these issues.

With respect to the value system, the President says we can't afford to cover 3.8 more children who don't have health insurance with a bill that we fully pay for. He says: We can't do that. That is not important. I am not willing to sign that. I will veto it. I will stop it.

Then he goes to Arkansas and says: I am a fiscal conservative. I want to shape everybody up.

Then the next day he sends us a $196 billion request. Give me some emergency money, $16 billion a month, $4 billion a week, none of it paid for, piled on top of the debt.

That is not a fiscal conservative where I come from. That is not what they call those kinds of actions. All of us want this country to succeed. All of us want this country to do well. We need to put this country on track. Yes, we need fiscal responsibility, absolutely. We also need a foreign policy that makes sense. We need to change course in Iraq. We need to describe our values at home through the legislation we pass that represents the best of what America can do. Yes, that includes providing health insurance for children who don't have it, so that young girls such as Ta'Shon have a chance at life.

There is so much debate these days that is thoughtless rather than thoughtful at a time when we so desperately need thoughtful discussion about so many important issues that deal with America's future. My hope is that in the coming weeks, we can engage in some very thoughtful discussion about public policy and how to advance this country's interests. All of us want the same thing. We want this country to succeed, to provide expanded opportunity for people. But we face enormous challenges. Those challenges will not be met and resolved by the kind of sloganeering we hear too often these days and by chaining ourselves to certain public policies that we already know do not work. We must force change.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, 5 years ago today, our colleague Paul Wellstone and his wife Sheila Wellstone were killed in a plane crash in northern Minnesota. It hardly seems like 5 years.

I remember that morning I was on the road driving in a van to Grand Forks, ND, going to a meeting when I received a call that an airplane had gone down in northern Minnesota and it was the plane that Paul and his wife Sheila and some staff were on. They feared that the crash had taken their lives.

I was thinking as I was coming over here today that the day Paul and Sheila were killed was very much like today--a gray day with rain and moisture. Paul and his wife were on a plane

flying to a funeral in northern Minnesota. They lost their lives. They were in the final stages of a very aggressive Senate campaign, one I believe Paul would have won. I believe he would have retained his seat in the Senate. He cared deeply about his opportunities, his privilege, and his obligation as a Senator.

A couple weeks ago, I was on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I was walking across the commons of the campus and looked to my left and I saw a small memorial garden to Paul and Sheila Wellstone. I didn't know it, but I asked someone why that garden existed on the campus of the University of North Carolina. They said because it was where Paul Wellstone earned his PhD, where Paul Wellstone had been a college wrestler and, I believe, a college champion wrestler. I had not known that previously. Nonetheless, there is a tribute to Paul and Sheila Wellstone on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Last week, I was visited in my office by about eight people to present me with a framed plaque of sorts because of Paul Wellstone. I was thinking of that as I came to the floor as well. This was a group of people who represented the major automobile industry in this country, the large auto producers, and the independent shops around the country that do automobile repair. I had nearly forgotten about what had gone on as a result of this, but they asked to come and see me and they came in and said: You and Senator Paul Wellstone 6 years ago did something that made a big difference, and we wanted to recognize that work. I said: I am happy about that, but let me make sure you recognize and let me accept it for Paul Wellstone in his memory.

Paul sat in that desk right back there on the end. It was on the floor of the Senate that he came to me breathless--and he was usually breathless because he had so much energy and passion about things--and he said: I went to an automobile repair shop in Minnesota, a small family-owned auto repair shop. They told me they cannot get the codes for the new automobiles in order to be able to repair them because the automobile manufacturers have these codes in their computers and they won't provide them to the independent auto repair shops, which means when you buy a car at a dealership, you have to go back to the dealership to get it fixed. In order to get a diagnostic, you have to have the codes and they won't give the independents these codes.

He said: Byron, that is an outrage. I want you to hold a hearing on that.

I chaired the appropriate subcommittee in the Commerce Committee, and I said I would be glad to do that. Why don't you come and be a part of the hearing and sit on the dais. He was not on the Commerce Committee. I invited him to make a statement and ask questions. So we held a hearing in the Commerce Committee. The room was full of people representing the independent auto repair shops around the country. We had a lot of them travel to Washington, DC.

There was testimony by the automobile manufacturers and the folks running these little auto repair shops around the country. They had a big disagreement. I felt and Paul felt it was unfair to the independent auto repair dealers, the small shops, not to be able to get the codes so they could fix these automobiles that were in disrepair.

I remember Paul's statement at the hearing sticking up for the little guy, saying these folks running these automobile independent repair stations should not be disadvantaged like this; they ought to have an opportunity to do this as well.

As a result of that hearing, the automobile manufacturers and the independent repair shops decided they would work together and find a way to solve the problem. Last week, a group of them came to my office and presented me with something that said what you and Senator Wellstone did required us to sit down and negotiate, and we negotiated and solved the problem, and now we provide the codes to the independent auto repair shops. The folks from the independent shops were there and said we now have a good relationship with the auto manufacturers.

That issue got solved because Paul Wellstone was standing up for the little guy. He went to a repair shop in Minnesota and found out the independent owner of that shop was not being treated fairly, in his mind, and in my judgment. So he brought it to the Congress. We got together and held a hearing, and the result is this was solved. It was negotiated in a way that was good for the consumer, good for the folks who owned the automobile repair businesses and, frankly, good for the automobile manufacturers. They have admitted that as well. I thank all of them for negotiating that in the right way.

Mostly, I thank Paul Wellstone for the energy he had in the Senate to always stand up for the little guy. The interesting thing about Senator Wellstone, however, is that as he stood over by that back seat over there, on every single issue Paul Wellstone stood up and wanted to know how it would affect kids--especially poor children in this country, many of whom feel hopeless and helpless, many of whom feel they do not have the same opportunities. He was unrelenting in trying to make certain we pass legislation that gave America's kids a good opportunity to be successful.

The other issue for which all of us remember Paul Wellstone--and my colleague, Senator Domenici, surely will because he was Senator Domenici's partner--is parity for mental health care because mental health care has not been treated the same way in most insurance policies, and still is not in many insurance policies, as other health care one might get. If one breaks an arm or a leg or has a disease, one gets health care treatment, and it gets covered by their insurance policy. But mental health has been treated differently.

Paul devoted much of his time in the Senate saying we ought to be fair and have parity as to how mental health is treated in health insurance policies in this country.

I came to the floor to observe, as others have today, that it is 5 years to the day we lost a good friend. He was one of those who said: Here is what I am; here is who I am. I am not trimming my sails to make things sound better for anybody. I am just going to fight as hard as I can fight for issues I care about and issues I believe are right for Minnesota and our country. I have always admired that spirit.

Those of us who were privileged to be Paul's friend also know Paul Wellstone was a team. It was Paul and Sheila Wellstone. Most of us in the Senate who had the privilege of serving with Paul and knowing Sheila and Paul as a team continue to miss them a great deal.

I wanted simply today to celebrate the memory of Paul Wellstone and Sheila Wellstone and talk about the contributions they made in this country and the contributions through public service to their country.

Mr. President, would the Senator yield 3 minutes to me?

I appreciate the courtesy.

Mr. President, how could something so wrong sound so good? Well, the answer is the label doesn't describe the problem. This label says it is going to be fine, but the product says: Let's get rid of rail passenger service in this country, except for Boston to Florida, the eastern corridor.

Let me describe it in the context of the Empire Builder, a wonderful train that goes up through my part of the country. One hundred thousand North Dakotans rode the Empire Builder last year. That train has a great history, it has a past, and it also has a great future in my judgment.

But there are those who come to this Chamber time after time after time and want to get rid of long-distance train service in this country. Why? Because they believe the country is crowded on the east coast and they ought to have good train service on the east coast and the rest of it doesn't quite match up. Look: Every country in the world virtually that has rail service, rail passenger service, has some subsidy for it. We subsidize most transportation services in this country. I don't have a problem with doing that.

I think a national rail passenger system contributes to this country in a very significant way. Somehow, to suggest that our rail passenger system in the future should look like this: You have rail passenger opportunities from Boston down to Florida on the east coast, and the rest of it, you know, you don't need it--to suggest that is to ignore a significant part of this country.

I support Amtrak. Can it work better? Sure. My colleagues, Senator Lautenberg and Senator Lott, have been great stewards in trying to put together legislation that accomplishes that. But I would say this: I think this country is strengthened and is a better country and has a transportation system that is a better system because we have a national rail passenger system.

This is not a new amendment, I say to my colleagues. We have had this amendment around before. It has had different titles, but it is an amendment that says: Let's get rid of long-distance train service because there are people who have never liked Amtrak very much. Well, people probably will want to have train service, passenger rail service from Boston to Florida forever because that income stream of the large population center sustains it. The question is: should we have a national rail passenger system? Our country long ago answered that question and said: Yes, we should. That is why we have a national system.

My colleague says: Well, there wouldn't be much consequence if we pass this amendment. Oh, yes, there would. Most of the long-distance rail system would cease to exist. That is what this product is. It doesn't say that on the label, but that is what the product is. I don't disparage my colleague for suggesting it. We come from different parts of the country. He apparently believes that only the eastern corridor should end up with a rail passenger system. I think it enriches our country, across the country from East to West to have a national rail passenger system that works well. It works well for my State. One hundred thousand people a year board that Amtrak system. They like that service. I hope the Senate will decide to weigh in, in opposition to this amendment.

I yield the floor.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 3342

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, I commend the chairman and ranking member for rejecting the President's proposal to slash funding for rural health programs by more than 90 percent. The President proposed eliminating practically every rural health program except for the Federal and State offices of rural health. If enacted, these cuts would have a devastating effect on communities in North Dakota and all across rural America. Although one-fifth of the Nation's population lives in rural areas, 70 percent of all underserved areas in the country are rural. I thank the chairman and ranking member for restoring funding for the rural health programs in this bill.

One of the big problems in rural areas is recruiting and retaining health professionals. More than 80 percent of North Dakota's counties are designated as Federal health professional shortage areas. Although recruiting and retaining health professionals is a major challenge in rural communities, it is also a problem in some urban settings. In fact, more than one of every four counties in the United States is designated as a health professional shortage area. Residents who live in these areas frequently have to drive long distances or wait to access the care they need. One of the ways Congress has sought to reduce the number of shortage areas is by supporting a program called the National Health Service Corps, which provides full-cost scholarships or sizable loan repayment to clinicians who agree to serve in a shortage area. I was disappointed that the President proposed cutting funding for the National Health Service Corps by $9 million in fiscal year 2008. I appreciate that the chairman and ranking member were able to restore funding to the fiscal year 2007 level. However, I believe that we must ramp up our investment in this program as well as consider other initiatives to reduce the number of health professional shortage areas.

When this funding bill gets to conference, I encourage the chairman and ranking member to support the funding level proposed by the House for the National Health Service Corps. The House bill would provide a $5.8 million increase for the National Health Service Corps for fiscal year 2008.

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

Mr. President, I have an amendment I have offered, and it is pending, I believe. It may well have been set aside; nonetheless, it is pending to the underlying bill. It is the simplest of amendments. It is amendment No. 3345, to be modified by amendment No. 3429, and it is a request of the Department of Labor to do a study which is fairly innocuous.

Senators Brown, Stabenow, and Casey and I--also, I ask unanimous consent to add Senator Sanders as a cosponsor.

With this amendment, I am requiring the Labor Department to perform a study to determine the number and the types of jobs that were lost by the North American Free Trade Agreement. That agreement was done a long while ago, but we are now in the process of considering additional trade agreements--one with Peru, one with Panama, one with South Korea, and one with Colombia. As we bring another group of free- trade agreements--so-called free-trade agreements--to the floor of the Senate, I would like to remind our colleagues there is very little information about what has happened to previous trade agreements except that we know they didn't work out very well, and so we are going to do more of the same.

NAFTA, for example--the North American Free Trade Agreement--at the time we did it, we had a modest trade deficit with Canada. Now that has turned into a very large trade deficit with Canada. At the time we did NAFTA, we had a modest surplus, a very small surplus in trade with Mexico. Now we have turned that into a very large trade deficit with Mexico. So we are moving in exactly the wrong direction. Despite that, we still have folks who huff and puff here about the need to do more of the same.

I want there to be a study that talks about what are the types of jobs we have lost as a result of these trade agreements--how many jobs have we lost, in what sectors have we lost those jobs.

On October 4 in the Wall Street Journal, this month, the Wall Street Journal said: ``Republicans grow skeptical on free trade.'' It was talk about Republicans, but actually the skepticism among non-Republicans is greater. It turns out the dissatisfaction with our trade strategy is bipartisan. The poll found that 59 percent of polled Republican voters agreed with the following statement:

Foreign trade has been bad for the U.S. economy, because

imports from abroad have reduced demand for American-made

goods, cost jobs here at home, and produced potentially

unsafe products.

It is not surprising that people are concerned about this free trade strategy. Free trade is a mantra, a moniker that doesn't mean very much. I like trade. I am for plenty of trade. I come from a State that produces a lot of agricultural product, and we need to find a foreign home for more than half of what we produce, so I don't come to the floor of the Senate saying let's not trade. I say let's do trade agreements that are good for this country, not bad for this country.

We passed the North American Free Trade Agreement and we were told-- by the way, this is an agreement that started under George Bush I, it was completed by President Clinton. I opposed President Clinton and George Bush I, President Bush. But we were told that if we completed NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, we would have 200,000 new American jobs created in this country as a result. Two economists, Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott--Hufbauer/Schott they called the study--said, actually, 170,000 new jobs in a couple of years. The supporters of this trade agreement rounded it up to 200,000 new jobs.

Let me tell you what has happened since that time. I told you we turned a very modest trade surplus with Mexico, about $1.5 billion, into a very large trade deficit, now somewhere around $60 or $70 billion a year.

We have a little program in the Labor Department that requires companies to certify jobs that are lost because the jobs went to Mexico. Then you get trade adjustment assistance for the workers. So what we know is 412,000 U.S. jobs have been certified as lost because of NAFTA under one program at the Department of Labor.

In the 10 years after NAFTA had been approved, I commissioned a study from the Congressional Research Service, and they identified the top 100 companies that laid off U.S. workers as a result of NAFTA during that first 10 years. To come up with that, they turned to the Department of Labor. They have this Trade Adjustment Assistance Program. It says these top 100 companies accounted for 201,000 jobs they certified were lost due to NAFTA. If you look at all the companies, that is 412,000 jobs.

Let's look at this list, a few of the names. We passed NAFTA-- Hufbauer/Schott--all the political supporters, including those in the Senate, thumbing their suspenders, talking about what a wonderful deal this is going to be for the United States, knowing nobody who wears a blue suit in this Chamber is going to lose their job. It will be somebody else.

Let's look at what happens. Levi Strauss, 15,676 jobs lost due to NAFTA. Does that mean people aren't wearing Levis? No, you can find some. Go outside the door, you can find Levis. They are still buying them. You can find places where they are selling them, a popular American jean. Except you will not find a pair of Levis made in this country. That is gone, 15,676--that is a big number.

What about just one of them? What about one person--follow that person home from work one day, and that person had to tell their spouse: You know what, I lost my job today.

The spouse says: What happened?

I don't know, I have done a good job, I worked for them for 15 years. But they told me I lost my job. They are moving the job to Mexico.

Why?

Because I make too much money, that is why. I get paid $6, $8, $10, $11 an hour, and that is way too much money. You can hire people for much less money than that in Mexico, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka.

Kraft Foods is on this list. Kraft Foods decided they were going to move their Fig Newton cookies to Mexico, Monterrey, Mexico. If somebody says to you someday: Let's go out for some Mexican food, go to the store and buy some Fig Newton cookies. That is Mexican food.

All those folks who made Fig Newton cookies in New Jersey, they say some of them had to shovel fig paste with a scoop shovel, but they made too much money in New Jersey. Is there a better scoop shovel in Mexico or is there somebody who will shovel that fig paste for much less money per hour? Or is there some natural fig advantage in Mexico? Probably not. It is that Kraft, similar to Levis, decided: this trade agreement gives us the opportunity to move these jobs to Mexico.

Fruit of the Loom--5,352 U.S. workers in Texas alone. Have people stopped wearing underwear? I don't think so. People still wear underwear. They just don't wear underwear made in this country. Fruit of the Loom is gone, and I suppose there are people who made a career out of Fruit of the Loom and probably enjoyed it. Maybe their neighbors kidded them a little bit: you work down at the Fruit of the Loom place. But I bet they enjoyed those careers. But they are gone because those jobs are moved in search of cheap labor.

Barbie playhouses that Mattel made in a Kentucky plant, they shifted that factory to Mexico.

The list goes on and on. You can see the list here, the corporations that certify to the Department of Labor that we moved our jobs. These companies moved the jobs as a result of the NAFTA trade agreement.

My feeling about trade agreements is this. When you sign a trade agreement with another country, it ought to be mutually beneficial to us and them. I came from a meeting 5 minutes ago about the issue of automobiles--nothing to do with trade, it had to do with CAFE standards, better gas mileage for vehicles. Somebody was talking about we are going to have Chinese cars coming into this country. We are going to see an import of cars into this country because China is ramping up a very aggressive automobile export industry, and we will very soon see small, efficient cars on the streets of this country coming from China.

Guess what. We did a trade agreement with China a while back, a bilateral agreement. Here is what we agreed to, with China, a country we have a giant trade deficit with--$230 billion a year. We said this: China, when you sell your cars in the United States, we will impose a 2.5 percent tariff on your cars. And, by the way, we agree that when we sell U.S. cars, U.S. cars made in the United States, in China, you can impose a 25-percent tariff. So a country we have a huge trade imbalance with, the biggest in human history, we said to them: it is OK for you to impose a tariff that is 10 times higher than we would impose on bilateral automobile trade.

It doesn't make any sense. In my judgment, it undermines our country's economic interests and it undermines our country's jobs. Yet this country does that.

We are going to have, as a group of bills on the floor, Peru, Colombia, Panama, South Korea. Among that group of bills, the free trade agreements have already been done, will be South Korea. Let me mention automobiles in South Korea. Last year, they shipped us close to 700,000 cars, put them on ships and sent them to this country to be sold in America and 700,000 cars made in Korea sent here to be sold to American customers. We were able to send 5,000 American cars to South Korea. Why the imbalance, 700,000 this way, 5,000 that way? Because that is the way South Korea wants it; 99 percent of the cars on the streets in South Korea are made in South Korea and that is the way they want it. They don't want our cars sold in South Korea, they want the jobs there, they want to make the cars there and sell them there. Why would our country allow that to be the case?

This agreement that is going to be brought to the Senate, the trade agreement with South Korea, does not address that issue.

I could, and I have, spoken at great length about trade on a wide range of issues. But at some point we need to reconcile what we are doing with these agreements and we need to stop this bad habit of negotiating bad agreements for this country. We don't know who negotiates this. But the person who said to China it is OK for you to impose a 10 times higher tariff on U.S. cars than we would impose on Chinese cars, that person obviously doesn't understand whom he or she is working for. I have threatened, from time to time, that these trade negotiators should go out and negotiate--in secret, presumably, on behalf of our country, should begin to wear jerseys such as they wear in the Olympics, so occasionally they could look down and try to remember for whom they work. These trade agreements undermine this country's basic economic strength.

People say it is fine these jobs migrate.

It is not fine. A country without a strong, vibrant manufacturing base is not destined to long be a world economic power, and we have to understand that. I am not talking about protectionism or building walls, I am talking about trade, and plenty of it, but trade in circumstances where the rules are fair and where this country insists on fair rules.

I know my colleague, Senator Harkin, the chairman of the committee, is here and perhaps is about to make a presentation. I do wish to say I have filed this amendment. It is the most innocuous. It says let's at least go back and take a snapshot of this one trade agreement, NAFTA, and find out what happened. What happened with jobs? How many did we lose? What kind? Where from? But apparently even this is controversial.

Why? Because maybe we will learn something. Maybe we will learn that these one-way trade agreements are not in this country's interests and that we ought to be smart, shrewd, and tough negotiators, standing up for our country's economic interests, standing up for our jobs.

One final point. In a century we lifted this country's standards; expanded the middle class. We said you have to have a safe workplace. You have to have child labor laws, minimum wages, the right to organize--a whole series of rules that lifted America. Now we are saying let's compete with others and allow them to diminish those standards. I am not very interested in doing that.

I know the people who made Huffy bicycles couldn't compete for 20 or 30 cents an hour. They made $11 in Ohio. They all lost their jobs because they couldn't compete with people who made bicycles for 20 or 30 cents an hour, so every Huffy bicycle is made in China. None are made in Ohio. I know you can't compete with that, but I don't think that should be the standard of competition because I think by its nature it diminishes economic opportunity in this country.

I am going to ask, if we can't clear this amendment, that we have a vote on this amendment. I appreciate the work the chairman of the subcommittee has done. I support his bill and am pleased to speak in favor of the bill, generally, which I have done on a previous occasion. My hope is he will support the amendment I have offered as well.

I yield the floor.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, I commend Chairman Harkin and Ranking Member Specter for putting together a funding bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education that reflects our Nation's priorities making college more affordable, increasing our investment in medical research at the National Institutes of Health, restoring funding for critical rural health programs, and increasing our investment in a number of proven education programs.

I was pleased that the bill includes a $2 million increase for the Division of Transplantation at the Health Resources and Services Administration to implement the Organ Donation and Recovery Act. There are currently more than 97,000 Americans on the organ transplant waiting list. Unfortunately, nearly 6,000 people on the list die every year while waiting for a transplant.

More than two-thirds of those on the waiting list suffer from end stage renal disease and are in need of a kidney transplant. The good news is that patients with end stage renal disease who require a kidney transplant no longer need to wait for a kidney from a deceased donor or from a blood relative. Advances in medical science now make it possible for friends and spouses to donate a kidney to a patient in need. The $2 million increase provided in the bill for the Organ Donation and Recovery Act will help increase the number of donations from living donors by reimbursing travel and subsistence expenses for donors who could not otherwise afford to donate.

This modest investment will save lives. It also makes economic sense. Patients with end stage renal disease require dialysis, which is covered by Medicare. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Medicare spends about $55,000 per patient per year for dialysis. On average, patients with end stage renal disease wait four years before receiving a kidney transplant. This means that every kidney donation made from a living donor has the potential to reduce the number of people on the waiting list and save the government as much as $220,000.

I hope the chairman and ranking member will continue to support this important program in conference and support maintaining the Senate funding level.

I appreciate the Senators' support, and I look forward to working with them to support this program and other initiatives to increase the number of organ donors.

Mr. President, has the Senator provided his amendment?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for as much time as I may consume.

Mr. President, I listened to just a bit of the debate a few minutes ago by my colleagues. My colleagues are good Members of the Senate, and they offer interesting ideas on the floor of the Senate. I wish to point out, however, the issue of ``earmarks'' which they discuss and describe a lot is really legislative-directed funding, which is a very small percentage, in many cases, in bills. It is 1 or 2 or 3 percent of the funding. The rest of it goes downtown to some agency, and the folks in the agency make a decision where to spend their money.

We have changed substantially the legislative-directed funding which exists. We are reducing almost in half legislative-directed funding. We have made it all transparent.

The implication in the discussion I heard, and I have heard it many times, is there is no virtue and there is certainly no value in having any legislative-directed funding; let the agency downtown determine how every dollar is spent.

The power of the purse in the Constitution rests with the United States Congress. We are responsible and accountable for how taxpayers' dollars are spent. Let me give one example which I think is important.

We just finished in this country something called the Human Genome Project. A lot of people would not know what that means, perhaps, but it is an unbelievable success story. We unlocked the mystery of the genes. We now have for the first time in the history of the human race an owner's manual for the human body. For the first time, we have an owner's manual for the human body in the Human Genome Project.

The Human Genome Project is done. It is going to dramatically change the way we treat diseases. It will, in many cases, allow us to determine how we prevent dread diseases. Already we are seeing substantial results from it.

We had a briefing by Dr. Francis Collins recently, and he had just come from a meeting in Cambridge, England, where all the folks are using the breakdown of the genetic codes which have come from the Human Genome Project. He describes treatment for leukemia and other diseases that are breathtaking as a result of the Human Genome Project that creates the breakdown of the genetic code of the human body and provides us the first owner's manual for the human body.

Guess what. Yes, that came from an earmark on the floor of the Senate. That is how the Human Genome Project started because someone in the United States Congress decided this approach had merit and should be done. No, it didn't come from some decision by some GS-13 or GS-15 downtown in some agency. It came from the United States Senate in legislative-directed spending.

I say this only to point out that this pejorative term ``earmark'' is suggesting this is all a waste and it is all pork and so on. That is not the case. But I recognize, and we recognize, it got out of hand, so we cut it way back and made it all transparent.

The point is, there are some good ideas coming from the Congress, and have been for a long time. One of them was the Human Genome Project, which started with an earmark or legislative-directed funding in the United States Congress. That is just one, but it is one that will affect the lives of virtually every American, perhaps everybody on this Earth, who in the future has one of the dread diseases or whose health is challenged. I wanted to make that point.

I commend those who pointed out some of this legislative-directed funding ought to be cut back. We have cut it back very substantially, but that which remains, in most cases, represents good investment, and investment that complements what is done in the Federal agencies as well.

I might also observe that the proposal today to increase the health insurance coverage for children, I believe, was 170,000 children. We just had a vote on increasing health care for children who are not covered by health care at this point for 3.8 million American children, and that failed. We passed it in the Senate, and it was passed in the House. It failed because the President vetoed it.

Interestingly enough, now we have people coming to the floor of the Senate saying: Let's cover more children. We had a chance to cover 3.8 million more children, and it was fully paid for, but we couldn't get that done because the President vetoed it. It wasn't his priority, and he had sufficient support in the Congress for his position.

I suppose we will see a lot of proposals that say we should cover more children, just far fewer. I respect my colleagues. I believe we should cover children. We certainly should perhaps revisit this vote and see if those 3.8 million children who are going to be left without coverage if the President and those who support him won't rethink their position and think that represents a priority.

I don't know, as I have said often, what is in second, third, or fourth place in most people's lives. I know what is in first place, their kids. I know what is most important in people's lives--their children and their children's health. If that is not a priority, I don't understand.

I have said often, in 100 years we will all be dead. Historians can take a look at what our value system was by determining on what we spent our money. What was our priority? What was our value system? What did we think was important?

I hope they will look back at the Federal budget and how we voted on these appropriations bills and say: We are proud their priority was kids, providing health care coverage for children.

What on Earth is wrong with a political system that doesn't believe that is the No. 1 priority?

Indian Health Care

I wish to talk about children's health care, but I want to focus mostly on Indian children, and I am going to talk about Indian health care, generally. The reason I am doing this, I am chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee in the Senate, and Senator Reid indicated we will have on the floor of the Senate, perhaps in a week or perhaps 2 weeks, for the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. It has been 15 years since that Act has been debated on the floor of the Senate, the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.

Why separate categories, Indian health care? Why separate? We have a trust responsibility. This country promised through treaty, through other obligations, this country said to the Indian people: We have a trust responsibility to provide for your health care. It is not something that the Native Americans, the first Americans, said: We want you to give this to us; we insist upon it. It was an agreement, a treaty agreement by this country to say--in many cases, a treaty, in other cases, just a solemn promise--we will provide health care coverage to American Indians as part of our trust responsibility.

The Indian Health Care Improvement Act expired in the year 2000 and has not been reauthorized. It is 7 years later. It doesn't mean there is no Indian health care. There is some, but it is horribly inadequate. In any event, we should reauthorize that Act and modernize it.

With respect to Native Americans, we have fallen tragically short of what our responsibilities insist we do.

Let me describe what we are spending and how well we are doing with respect to health care.

With Medicare, we spend $6,700 per Medicare patient; Indian health care, $2,100 per capita. We spend twice as much on health care for Federal prisoners whom we incarcerate as we do for American Indians for whom we have a trust responsibility for health care. Someone incarcerated gets twice as much spent on their health care as American Indians for whom we have a responsibility. I am talking about children, I am talking about elders, and I will talk about some of them in just a moment.

We can see ranging from Medicare to the VA to Medicaid to Federal prisons, all the way down, and here is the lowest, and the lowest is the per capita expenditure of health care for American Indians for whom we have a trust responsibility.

American Indians die at a much higher rate than other Americans from tuberculosis, a 600-percent higher rate from tuberculosis; diabetes, 189 percent, but in some parts of the country, it is 400 percent and 800 percent higher than Americans. Alcoholism, 500 percent higher.

The fact is, we have grim statistics coming from Indian reservations with respect to the health of the first Americans. The rate of sudden infant death syndrome among Native Americans is the highest of any population group in the United States and more than double of non- Indians. Indian youth suicide on the Northern Great Plains, where I am from, is 10 times the national average.

Last night, I received a letter from a constituent on an Indian reservation. This constituent has had diabetes since she was 11 years old. Earlier this year, she received a kidney and pancreas transplant. She needs an anti-rejection medication to stay alive. When she went to the reservation clinic to get her medicine yesterday, she was told by the doctor: There goes our budget. There are two other tribal members who receive this medication, and when the funding is gone, there will be no more medication.

The stories are pretty unbelievable. This is a picture of a young girl named Avis Little Wind. I have described the tragedy of this young girl previously. Avis Little Wind is 14 years old. Avis is dead. She took her own life. Mental health treatment wasn't available for Avis. She lay in her bed in a fetal position for 3 months, and no one seemed alarmed by that, before she finally took her life. She wasn't in school, though she was supposed to have been. Her sister committed suicide, her father died by his own hands, and this 14-year-old girl is gone because, I presume, she felt that she was hopeless and helpless.

Those on the Indian reservation dealing with mental health issues, including suicide. For suicide prevention, they have virtually no resources. A young lady on this Indian reservation, who testified at a hearing I held once, said she had a stack of files on the floor of her office dealing with abuse and health issues. She said: ``We don't have any resources to even investigate the files. We would have to beg to borrow a car to take one of these kids to a clinic someplace.'' Then she broke down weeping. About a month later, she resigned.

The fact is people are dying. Avis Little Wind died of suicide because mental health treatment wasn't available on that Indian reservation.

I was in Montana recently with Senator Tester, and a grandmother held up a picture of this beautiful young girl. She is 5 years old. Her grandmother described the picture of her granddaughter, named Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight. Ta'Shon Rain Littlelight loved to dance, and she danced in this regalia at all the pow-wows from the time she was able to walk a beautiful little girl with a sparkle in her eye. Well, Ta'Shon is gone. Ta'Shon lost her battle, as well.

Between May and August of last year, she was taken many times to the Crow Indian Health Service Clinic for health services. They diagnosed the problem and they began to treat it. They said it was depression. A 5-year-old was depressed. Well, during one of the clinic visits her grandfather said: ``But there is something else going on. Take a look at the condition of her fingertips and her toes. There is something happening in this little girl's body.'' It suggests, the grandfather said, a lack of oxygen. Something is going on. But that concern was dismissed, and finally the grandmother asked a doctor to try to eliminate the possibility of cancer or leukemia, or something of that nature. But those concerns were dismissed.

In August, this young girl was rushed from the Crow clinic to St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, MT. They airlifted her to Denver Children's Hospital where she was diagnosed with incurable, untreatable cancer. She lived for another 3 months after the tumor was discovered, in unmedicated pain. She died in September. The grandmother asked at our field hearing if Ta'Shon's cancer had been detected earlier, would it have made a difference? Would this little 5-year-old girl be alive? None of us knows, but the question of the quality of health care is a life-or-death issue. It was for Ta'Shon.

Recently, on a Wednesday morning in my State, a young child on an Indian reservation was burned, severely burned, and rushed by the mother to the Indian Health Service clinic on the reservation, only to be told that the clinic was closed for the morning for administrative purposes. Even after the frantic pleas by the mother, this boy was refused care. So in her desperation, she contacted a doctor from another town outside of the reservation for assistance. They directed her to bring her young son immediately. She did. Thankfully, that young boy received treatment and has survived those severe burns. She didn't get the needed health care for him at the Indian Health Service clinic. Following the treatment she did receive off the reservation, after a frantic drive in an automobile, the Indian Health Service clinic refused to cover the costs of the young boy's treatment. So the mother is now faced with a substantial medical bill, a mother who should never have been placed in this situation and a mother who doesn't have the resources to pay it.

When we held a hearing in the Indian Affairs Committee about methamphetamine, the intersection of methamphetamine and health care was pretty obvious. It was a courageous tribal leader who came to our hearing, Kathy Wesley-Kitcheyan, the chairwoman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona. She said she was embarrassed to talk about some of the things on her reservation, because they are not very positive and she said it was like airing her family's dirty laundry but, she said, I must. She talked about her 22-year-old son and her warning to him about the catastrophic effect of alcoholism and substance abuse. And she talked about losing her grandson. She broke down talking about her wonderful grandson, a rodeo champion who had won 26 belt buckles and 6 saddles as a rodeo rider, who made the wrong choices with drugs and drinking and lost his life. She talked about the methamphetamine problem.

That is where it intersects so quickly, in a devastating way, with health care. She said on their reservation, in 1 year, out of 256 babies born on that Indian reservation, 64 out of 256 babies were born addicted to methamphetamine. Let me say that again. Of 256 children born on that Indian reservation, 64 were born addicted to methamphetamine. At the San Carlos emergency room, in 1 year, 25 percent of the patients who came to the emergency room tested positive for methamphetamine. And on it goes.

I am describing circumstances that one would perhaps attribute to a Third World country, where health care doesn't exist. Yet these stories, in many ways, are even more heartbreaking because they happen here in this country. They happen too often to people who are living in Third World conditions on Indian reservations with inadequate health care--health care which was promised to them as a trust responsibility, but nonetheless inadequate health care.

I recently learned of a young boy named Nicholas from the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, who had a very rough start. He, like a high percentage of American Indian babies, was born premature--3 months premature. He weighed 2\1/2\ pounds. For the first 3 months of his life, he struggled in intensive care to stay alive. As part of a significant effort by his family, his doctors at the IHS facility and traditional health care practices, he persevered.

As a young man, he was forced to face another health care challenge: adult onset diabetes. While this type of diabetes usually strikes Americans in mid life, it is showing up now in American Indians and Alaska Native youth at an increasingly younger age. In fact, there is a 77-percent increase in diabetes in Native children and youth under 15 years of age.

Fortunately, this young man from the Menominee Tribe is receiving services from the tribal health facility and early screening at the tribal school, and has been able to control his blood sugar, which will prevent complications, one hopes.

David Whitetail, with the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota, was not so fortunate. He was diagnosed with type II diabetes at 17. He didn't receive the necessary care, and now he

is 39 years old and a dialysis patient awaiting a kidney transplant, but is finally, at long last, beginning to get the care he needs.

A couple of years back, a young woman--I guess she would like me to call her a young woman; she probably is a bit above a young woman in age--whose name is Lida Bearstail, went to the clinic in Mandaree, ND, because of knee pain. The cartilage had worn away and bone was rubbing against bone, causing her great, great pain. If that were to happen in this Chamber to any one of us or our families, we would, of course, get a knee transplant or get a new knee. But Mrs. Bearstail was denied this treatment because it was not deemed ``priority 1''--life or limb. If it is not life or limb, and you have run out of contract health money, you are out of luck.

In fact, what happened to this woman, Ardel Hale Baker, is that she had chest pain that wouldn't end, and her blood pressure was very high, and so she was diagnosed at the IHS clinic as having a heart attack. She needed to be hospitalized immediately. They stuck her in an ambulance and rushed her to a hospital off the reservation, but they didn't have any contract health care money left to pay for anything, so the Indian Health Service taped an envelope to this woman's leg with a piece of tape. She was hauled in on a gurney to the hospital with an envelope taped with masking tape to her thigh, and as they unloaded her in the emergency room, the folks who unloaded her took a look at what was taped to her leg. They opened it up and it said--and I have a chart, I believe, of what it said. It said this patient is not going to be covered because there is no contract health money available.

What they were saying was this patient is having a heart attack. They were saying to the patient and to the hospital, if this patient is admitted, understand there is no money. There is no money here. So they admitted her, she survived, but it is kind of a tragic thing to tell a story about a woman who is hauled into a hospital with a piece of paper taped to her leg that says, by the way, if you admit this woman, you are on your own because Indian Health Service contract care is out of money.

I have had tribes tell me that contract health care was out of money after the first 3 months of the year. On one reservation they say: Don't get sick after June, because there is no contract health care money. If you are going to get sick, it has to be before June, otherwise this may happen to you. If you have a heart attack and go to a hospital, they might haul you in and there might be a note attached to your arm or leg that says, by the way, if you admit this patient, you might have some difficulty because there is no money available.

This last woman, Ms. Baker, survived and then received a bill for $10,000. She doesn't have $10,000. So what happens when they run out of contract health care, they warn the hospital you are on your own if you take them. Then when the patient is released from the hospital, their credit rating is ruined because they get a bill they can't pay. This is the result of our failure to meet our trust responsibility.

That is a long description of why we need to reauthorize the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. That Act will come to the floor in the next week or two, according to Senator Reid. We have written that bill in the Indian Affairs Committee. The vice chair of the Committee, Senator Murkowski from Alaska, and I, and many other members of the Committee have written a bill we think advances the interests of Indian health care.

My colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Coburn, who is on the Indian Affairs Committee with us, is a valuable member and a constructive member. He is a doctor, and that is extraordinarily helpful in terms of his knowledge. He will make the point that we need much broader reform, and I will agree with him when we have this discussion. We need much broader reform, and this is a step, a step in the right direction. Is it a step as broad as I would like to make? No. There is a reform step that is much broader that we need to take, and we will. And I will work for that when we move this bill, but at least we ought to move this legislation.

I will work with Senator Coburn and others for much more substantial reform, but at least we need to start. This is since 2000, and 7 years later we need at least to move this legislation, but it has been 15 years since we last debated the issue of Indian health care on the floor of the Senate. So it is long past the time for us to do what we are required and have promised to do, and that is meet our responsibilities for health care for American Indians.

I want us to do this in a way that makes us proud. After all, it is our responsibility. We made this promise long ago, and we need to keep it.

We are a good country and a good society. We spend a lot of time on the floor of the Senate talking about what doesn't work. There is a lot that works in this country. We are blessed to live here and blessed to be a part of this great place. But we continue as a country to always look to find out what we can do to fix things that are broken, to improve things that don't work quite as well as we would like. That is what we are trying to do with this issue of Indian health care.

I have described the failures. There are successes. There are folks working in Indian health care around the country who get up every day and work long hours and do a remarkable job. There are others who do not. I can tell you about a woman who has excruciating knee pain and goes to a doctor at the Indian Health Service, and she is told to wrap your knee in cabbage leaves for 4 days and it will be fine. It is unbelievable, but that sort of thing happens. I can tell you of other patients who go to an Indian Health Service doctor and get very good care.

There are not enough resources. We need to respond, as we have done, to the issue of the cluster of teen suicides that exist on Indian reservations. There are so many things we need to do.

Let me make the final point. These are the first Americans. These are not visitors. They were here first. Around the culture of Native Americans we have built quite a country. But Native Americans need to share in the great benefits bestowed upon the American people, and that includes opportunities for health care, opportunities for good jobs, opportunities for housing, and a decent education. We fall short in many of those areas. We fall short in many of them.

I have not spoken about education today or housing, but those issues themselves are pretty unbelievable when you take a look at the conditions on many American Indian reservations.

I look forward, in the next week or two, to having an opportunity to debate the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. It is long past the time for us to do this. This will advance the interests of Indian health care, and then, in addition, we will not be completed. We will need to do reform, reform in a significant way beyond this bill. But this bill is an awfully good first start in the right direction.

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

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 3321

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

Mr. President, I am going to offer an amendment in a few moments. First, I would like to spend a couple minutes talking about the amendment that was offered by Senator Vitter. I have a copy of the amendment. The amendment deals with the issue of drug reimportation. It says:

None of the funds appropriated in this Act may be used to

prevent an individual not in the business of importing a

prescription drug from importing a prescription drug from

Canada that complies with sections 501, 502, and 505 of the

FDA Cosmetic Act.

I don't have any particular problem with this amendment. It says that the FDA can't do what it is not doing. So that is largely irrelevant to me. It has an appearance of doing something, but it doesn't do anything. At the moment, if you are in Grafton, ND, and you go across the border to Winnipeg, Canada, and buy prescription drugs and bring them across, if you bring across a 90-day supply of prescription drugs for yourself, you are not going to have a problem. They allow a personal reimportation of prescription drugs because very few Americans have the opportunity to drive to Canada to access that. The one area where the Vitter amendment would allow reimportation where there needs to be some safety attached is with respect to Internet sites. But the fact is, those who are now accessing certain Internet sites are doing so, and the FDA is not intervening because they don't have the capability to intervene.

We do have a piece of legislation that is bipartisan. Senator Snowe, Senator Kennedy, Senator McCain, Senator Grassley and myself, many of us, helped write the legislation that would allow the reimportation of prescription drugs on a much broader basis, in a manner that is determined to be safe, where we would actually require Internet sites to be registered and inspected. But let me talk about that in just a moment.

Mr. President, I have kept in my desk here in the Senate something I want to show by consent. These are a couple of bottles of Lipitor. Lipitor is, I think, the most common and perhaps the most popular cholesterol-lowering drug. These two bottles contain 20-milligram tablets of Lipitor. As you can see, the bottles of Lipitor are identical, with the exception of the color--one is blue and one is red on the label. Both of these bottles of Lipitor tablets were made in Ireland. They put some in this bottle, they put some in this bottle, and then they start sending them around. They sent this bottle to the United States, and they sent this bottle to Canada.

Now, understand this: This is an FDA-approved drug, produced in an FDA-approved plant in Ireland, sent to our country, sent to Canada--the same pill, put in the same bottle, made in the same place, FDA- approved. Difference? Well, one has a red label, one has a blue label. And there is another very big difference: one costs twice as much. There is a 96-percent higher price on the one the Americans get to purchase. Difference? Well, no difference in the pill, no difference in the bottle; it is just the American consumer gets to pay twice as much. Now, why is that the case? Well, I could hold up a dozen bottles of medicine and describe many popular brand names and tell you exactly the same thing.

In fact, I will tell you a story. Sitting on a bale of straw once at the farmstead in central North Dakota on a Sunday afternoon, visiting with a group of people, was an 82-, 84-year-old farmer. I was in the farmyard visiting with some farmers at an afternoon stop, and this old codger, a wonderful old guy, said: ``One of the problems me and the Mrs. have had--yes, that is what he said--``One of the problems me and the Mrs. have had is being able to afford prescription drugs. My wife has been fighting breast cancer for a long time. For the last 3 or 4 years, she has been fighting breast cancer. And do you know what? Every 3 months we have had to drive to Canada to buy Tamoxifen to fight her breast cancer. Why do we do that? Because we save 80 percent on the cost, and that is the only way we can afford to buy the medicine, the Tamoxifen for my wife to fight her breast cancer.''

Isn't that something? This guy sitting on a bale of straw, talking to me about what he has to do every 3 months to be able to afford the medicine his wife needs to fight breast cancer.

Now, that is Tamoxifen. We pay, in some cases, 2 times more or 3 times more for the same medicine, so we then have a woman fighting cancer and then fighting the issue of having to pay 2 or 3 times as much for the medicine.

Now, first of all, this is unfair. There is no circumstance under which we ought to ask the American people to pay the highest drug prices in the world for FDA-approved drugs. It is not fair, and it should not happen.

Now, how does it happen that they can enforce this, the pharmaceutical industry can enforce this? Well, they have a law that says the only ability to import drugs into this country is by the pharmaceutical manufacturer itself, the company itself. They are the ones who are able to import. Now, I just mention to you that as a matter of practice, they allow a personal supply of drugs to come across the border for about 90 days' worth of drugs. They do that. But, otherwise, if you are a licensed pharmacist or a wholesaler and you buy an FDA-approved drug, you cannot bring it into this country.

By contrast, let me just describe this: 40 percent of the active ingredients in prescription drugs in this country come from China and India. Forty percent of the active ingredients in our prescription drugs come from China and India.

Let me tell you another statistic that I think is interesting. In this country, we had 1,200-plus inspections of pharmaceutical plants that are producing medicines for the American people--1,200 inspections. Forty percent of the active ingredients for our prescription drugs comes from China

and India, and we have had, in 2006, 16 inspections in China and 62 inspections in India--1,222 inspections in the United States. Isn't that interesting?

I tell you all that as a bit of history just to say this issue of prescription drugs is not new. A bipartisan group of us has worked for a long while on this issue, and we are going to win this issue. It has taken us longer than we had hoped, but we are going to win this issue because it is not fair for the American people to be charged the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

We have so far not been able to prevail, not because someone comes to the floor of the Senate and thumbs their suspender and tugs in their trousers and puffs out like a puff adder and says: I stand up here for the pharmaceutical industry; the American people ought to be charged the highest price in the world. Nobody has ever done that. There are other ways to try to derail legislation like this. But, ultimately, I think we will win. We have a wide bipartisan group of Senators who believe we must fix this. Now, how do we fix it? We fix it in a way that allows the reimportation of prescription drugs only from FDA- approved plants, only in circumstances where we apply pedigrees and lot numbers so you can track it back. For example, you could not import from an Internet site unless that Internet site had been inspected and certified to make sure this is a safe source from which to order prescription drugs.

We have a piece of legislation we believe--and almost everyone who has testified in hearings believes--solves all of those problems, including dramatically increasing the security of all the other issues that are now being complained about with respect to counterfeit drugs. How does it happen we have counterfeit drugs? Well, it happens because we do not have enough inspections. We do not have enough attention to these things. We do not have a pedigree requirement. There are a number of things our legislation would require. But at that point, we would allow the American people to have access to this market and be able to shop for an FDA-approved drug from a country in which they pay one- half, one-fourth, and in some cases one-tenth the price the American consumer is charged.

So let me say, I do not object to the Vitter amendment. I would hope they would just take it. It has been offered to other issues. I would just say, however, that it really does not do much because it is saying to the agency: Don't do what you are not doing. I do not have objection to that. But I do want to say this: There is a serious approach with respect to prescription drug issues that we need to get about the business of dealing with, and we are trying very hard to get it to the floor and get it passed. We will get that done at some point soon, in my judgment.

Having said that, I would like to offer an amendment to the underlying bill. Before I do, I think this is not only an obligation but an opportunity for me to say to Senator Harkin and Senator Specter and others who have worked on the legislation that I think they have done an awfully good job in putting together legislation that invests in people's lives and invests in the health of this country, and I appreciate their work a lot. So I just want to say thanks. This is a big piece of legislation. It is hard to put together. It is not an easy job to carry this to the floor of the Senate, so thanks for what they have done.

Amendment No. 3335 to Amendment No. 3325

Mr. President, if there is an amendment pending, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside so I might send an amendment to the desk.

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

Mr. President, this issue is not a large issue in the context of the bill that has been brought to the floor of the Senate-- it deals with $5 million of resources--but I want to talk just for a few moments about it. It deals with the issue of heart disease and stroke.

There is no one in this Chamber, I expect, who has not been affected by heart disease in dramatic ways. I lost a beautiful young daughter to heart surgery, and I think of her every day. I have dedicated a lot of my time and interest in working with the American Heart Association and many others to find the resources to continue to invest in the research and unlock the mysteries of this terrible disease.

It is estimated that about 80 million American adults--1 in 3 males and females--suffer from heart disease. It is estimated that an American dies from cardiovascular disease every 35 seconds in this country. It has a very steep price tag. I know it. My family knows it. Perhaps, I would guess, every Member of the Senate knows it from having lost a friend, an acquaintance, a family member. The medical expenses attributable to heart disease in this country are about $430 billion a year, including lost productivity. But the good news is that this is one of those diseases where we have made substantial progress. In the past 50 years, the fight against heart disease and stroke has been pretty remarkable.

I recall Senator Harkin, and myself, and Senator Specter--I think there were five or six or seven of us who decided we were going to double the investment in the National Institutes of Health. As I recall, about then we were funding it at around $12 billion a year. A group of us decided: What better investment in this country's future than to decide to double the amount of money at the National Institutes of Health to research and to discover opportunities to cure these terrible diseases and treat these awful diseases. I am so proud of what has been done. It is pretty remarkable.

I heard this morning at a hearing over in the Commerce Committee something I have heard so often that I am so sick and tired of. One of our colleagues said there is nothing the Federal Government does that is really worth anything, nothing the Federal Government manages that ever works out.

Well, let me tell you something. Dr. Francis Collins is one of the significant people who engaged in something that, by the way, came from earmarked funding, started here in the U.S. Congress, right here in the U.S. Senate, the Human Genome Project. Do you know that? As a result of the Human Genome Project, we now have unlocked the mysteries of the genetic code. We now, for the first time, have an owner's manual for the human body. Do you know what that means? Well, not a lot of people understand it every day, but every single day, scientists and researchers are understanding those genetic codes and making giant strides in beginning to find cures for diseases.

Dr. Francis Collins came back from Cambridge, England, about, oh, maybe 2 months ago, and I saw him at Dulles Airport when he landed. He had gone for a conference in England about how the researchers were using the genetic information from the Human Genome Project. He said: I thought it was going to take much, much longer. What is going on now is breathtaking in using the Human Genome Project to find the opportunity to treat and to cure some of these diseases. He said it is breathtaking.

That is the Federal Government. This is a civil servant, by the way. As to the research that is going on at NIH, these are people on the Federal payroll. So to my colleagues who think nothing works, let me just tell you something: There is only one place on Earth where the Human Genome Project reached success. And, yes, it was a collaboration, but we did it. It is going to improve lives, and it is going to unlock

the mysteries of terrible diseases. It was a good thing to do.

But my point is, Senator Harkin and Senator Specter were two--and I think Senator Feinstein--and I was one who decided we were going to double the research funding at the National Institutes of Health. Guess what that has done for this country. It allows me to stand here and say we are making great progress on heart disease. We really are. The survival rates for cancer are up. So we are making progress.

The reason I wanted to offer this amendment is this amendment deals with heart disease and stroke. We know the risk factors for heart disease and stroke. We know if you understand the risk factors, you can substantially reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke--by not smoking, by maintaining a healthy weight, and avoiding diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. We know you can do that. In fact, by taking these steps, individuals often can add 10 years to their lives. So we have made some progress by making investments. There is a long way to go. We have 105 million Americans who have high cholesterol and 72 million Americans have high blood pressure, so we have to do a much better job of educating the public about cardiovascular disease. That is the goal of what is called the State Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention Program at CDC.

What I have offered, very simply, as I close, is a $5 million addition to the State Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention Program at CDC. It is a program that works. We know it works. It needs this additional funding to make it more widely available. This initiative will help States create the programs, the private-public sector partnerships, that will help individuals in controlling blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, and learning the signs and symptoms of heart disease and stroke.

This is a program that we know works. I am hoping that finding an offset, which I have suggested in my amendment, would allow us to accept the amendment. I did not intend to take quite this length of time, but I needed only to say to Senator Harkin and Senator Specter how much I appreciate their work, and my hope is that having highly complimented them, they will be motivated to accept this amendment. I compliment them even if they do not accept it, but I have high hopes.

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

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

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

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

Mr. President, I offer this amendment on behalf of myself, Senator Brown, Senator Stabenow, and Senator Casey.

Mr. President, this amendment calls for a study and a report, and I want to describe the purpose of it and why I am offering it today. It requires the Department of Labor to determine in a study and report to the Congress the number of jobs lost to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the number of jobs created due to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Now, it is interesting. In an October 4 Wall Street Journal article, there was a story, front page, with the headline ``Republicans Grow Skeptical of Free Trade.'' Republicans grow skeptical of free trade. Actually, the story described skepticism by everybody about what is called free trade, but it was talking about the politics of it, and so the story described a poll which found that by a 2-to-1 margin Republican voters believed free trade deals have been bad for this country's economy. It turns out that the dissatisfaction with the current trade strategy is bipartisan, not just Republican.

The poll found that 59 percent of polled Republican voters agreed with this statement: Foreign trade has been bad for the U.S. economy because imports from abroad have reduced demand for American-made goods and it has cost jobs here at home and produced potentially unsafe products.

The poll also describes that all voters essentially feel this way; it is not just Republican voters. But as I indicated, it was trying to take a political look at an issue that is very important.

We are going to have a number of free trade agreements come to the floor of the Senate soon. We will have one from Peru, Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. It is interesting that the Wall Street Journal describes how the American people feel about these trade agreements. I think it is not the case that people feel trade is not important. I believe in trade, and plenty of it. I just insist that trade be fair.

I want to go back with this amendment to the North American Free Trade Agreement because that free trade agreement dates back almost-- well, it is over a decade now, and we have had substantial experience with it. Those who negotiated it--and, incidentally, it was negotiated beginning under the first President Bush, concluding under President Clinton. He sent it to this Senate, and I, at that point, was one of the leaders waging a fight against it. But when it was debated in Congress, it was alleged by economists and virtually everybody that it would result in the creation of 200,000 new jobs for our country. If we would pass this new trade agreement, 200,000 jobs would be created in our country.

Well, what has happened with the trade agreement? Let me describe what has happened, and I will describe it in a way that the administration and the Commerce Department and Labor Department would describe it. They would say what an unbelievable success this trade agreement has been. How on Earth would you be critical of a trade agreement that has increased our exports from the United States to Mexico? It has increased our exports to Mexico. And it has. It sure has. But it has increased our imports from Mexico much, much, much more. What started prior to the North American Free Trade Agreement as a $1.5 billion surplus with Mexico--a trade surplus with Mexico--has now become nearly a $60 billion, close to $70 billion trade deficit. So it's a trade surplus converted to a big trade deficit.

Now, I didn't take a lot of higher math, but I understand if you turn a trade surplus into a big trade deficit, that is not a positive outcome for your country. That is a negative approach, and it means lost jobs. It means you are going to have to repay that trade debt with a lower standard of living someday.

In fact, the proponents of NAFTA some years ago relied on a study by Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott. It was called the Hufbauer/ Schott, and it was the one cited by everybody. They actually said it is going to create 170,000 new jobs in our country--net new jobs. That was rounded up by the proponents to 200,000. That was going to be nirvana. We would pass this trade agreement and get 200,000 net new jobs. That was how it would work. Except that we passed it and we went from a $1.5 billion trade surplus with Mexico to a nearly $70 billion trade deficit. Now, that is headed in the wrong direction, and that means lost jobs.

I took a look at this, and I asked some while ago, 10 years after NAFTA had been approved, to commission a study from the Congressional Research Service to identify the top 100 American companies that had laid off U.S. workers as a result of NAFTA between 1994 and 2002, and here is the list of the top 100 companies. The list totals about 412,000 U.S. jobs that have been certified as lost. Now, this is not some speculation. This is a program at the Department of Labor that a company has to actually certify to in order to get some help for their employees--trade adjustment assistance. They certify that because of NAFTA these jobs are gone.

The Congressional Research Service turned to the Department of Labor, which has this program, and they said: Can you give us this information? They gave us the information. This means we can directly attribute these job losses to NAFTA, because that is the certification. Of the roughly 412,000 jobs that have been certified, actually of the top 100 companies, 201,000 jobs are attributable to these 100 names.

But if you look at the companies, it is very interesting. Levi Strauss is No. 2. Levi Strauss. I mean, you know, slip on a pair of Levis. Anything more all American than putting on a pair of Levis? There is not one pair of Levis made in the United States of America, not one. We passed NAFTA and Levis go south. We still wear them, all right. They are just shipped north so we can slip them on. So Levi Strauss: 15,676 people, some were proud, I bet, going to work in the morning to make a pair of Levis. But no more. I understand there is not one pair of Levis made in America.

Kraft Foods. Kraft Foods is on the list. Kraft Foods decided they were going to shut down their cookie plant in Fair Lawn, NJ. They made Fig Newton cookies. So they moved Fig Newton cookies to Monterrey, Mexico, and 955 jobs were certified as lost. Fig Newton. Now, I don't know whether there is some inherent capability in Mexico to shovel fig paste in a more expeditious manner than exists in New Jersey. I doubt it. My guess is, just as Levi went south in search of cheap labor, so too did Fig Newton cookies.

So the next time somebody says let's go out and buy some Mexican food, buy Fig Newton cookies. They left New Jersey and ended up in Monterrey, Mexico. Mexican food.

What about Fruit of the Loom underwear? We all understand it; some wear it. Fruit of the Loom underwear--5,352 workers in Texas were certified and thousands more in Louisiana were certified to the Labor Department as having lost their jobs due to NAFTA. Actually, when that happened it was pretty big news around the country, because Fruit of the Loom laid off a lot of people, and I came to the floor and said: It is one thing to lose your shirt--and then I stopped, because I realized we shouldn't joke about jobs lost with Fruit of the Loom.

But these were people who made underwear--probably, I am sure, very proud of their jobs. They probably worked for a career. Is there no market for underwear any more? People stopped wearing them? I don't think so. The underwear is made, it is just not made in America. Fruit of the Loom is gone, and it was certified to have gone and the jobs are lost.

Mattel's western Kentucky plant, making Barbie playhouses and battery-powered pickup trucks for nearly 30 years, 980 employees went from a job in Kentucky to being unemployed. The plant went to Mexico to produce Mattel toys.

John Deere, 1150 employees, lawn mowers and chain saws, jobs gone to Mexico.

Well, all of these are just numbers. You know, you could pick any one of them. Nokia, 1,980. Make it 1,979 and talk about the person, the one person who came home one night and said: Honey, I lost my job. They called me in and they told me my job was gone. Well, was it because you weren't a good employee? No, I am a good employee. They just said we are moving the jobs to Mexico.

I have described other cases on the floor of the Senate of American workers who worked for careers and were making $11 an hour plus benefits. They all got fired in search of cheaper labor

by a company that moved their jobs. In that case, the jobs went to China. But the reason I told the story previously is that all of those workers who lost their jobs because they made $11 an hour--and that was way too much money--on the last day of work, as they pulled out of their driving spaces in the parking lot where their car used to park at a job they cared about, they all left a pair of empty shoes. It was a plaintive way for the employees of that company to send a message to the owners of that company who shipped their jobs overseas. It was a way of saying: You can move our jobs to China, but, by God, you are not going to fill our shoes. It was a message from the employees who cared about their jobs and cared about their work.

Well, Hufbauer/Schott and all the others who gave us those hifalutin estimates of new jobs with NAFTA, they said: By the way, there will be some jobs that will move south. But they will be low-skilled, low-wage jobs. But don't worry.

Well, guess what. The three largest imports to the United States today from Mexico are automobiles, automobile parts, and electronics, all the product of high-skilled jobs. Now, that is completely at odds with what was represented to the Congress and the American people.

I started this by saying the Wall Street Journal does a front-page feature story saying that Republicans don't believe free trade has been good for our country. They were doing a political story. But they needn't have said Republicans. Actually, the American people don't believe the so-called free trade agreements have been good for our country. Why is that? Because they are the ones who know. They are the ones who know, not the economists, not the folks who put on three-piece blue suits and suspenders every day and puff about what is going on in the world. It is the people who are working who lose their jobs and are facing downward pressure on income from these kinds of trade agreements.

Now, I am not suggesting, and would not ever suggest, that we shouldn't trade. I believe we ought to trade. I believe trade is important, and plenty of it. I just insist that it be fair. Whether it is Mexico, or China--the bilateral agreement with China--or South Korea or any number of trade agreements, I can point to the examples of what has happened that undermines the support of the American people for these agreements. Let me give you a couple.

South Korea. There is an agreement coming to the Senate Chamber dealing with South Korea. We have done other trade agreements with South Korea, and they have never met the commitments they made in those agreements, but nonetheless, an agreement with South Korea. Well, South Korea last year sent us roughly 700,000 automobiles. They put them on ships, sailed them across the ocean, and they offloaded them onto American docks and put them for sale in this country. We were able to sell about 5,000 vehicles in South Korea.

So 700,000 one way, 5,000 the other way. Why? Is that consumer preference? It is because in Korea 99 percent of the cars on Korean roads are made in Korea, and that is the way they want it. They do not want American cars sold in Korea. They have all kinds of devices to keep them out. We open our market. One-way trade. The American people understand that, and they do not support that.

I am going to mention one other thing. I have mentioned the bilateral agreement with China, with whom we have a giant trade deficit--$230 billion a year trade deficit. Not many people know that in the latest bilateral agreement with China--a country that is ramping up a very significant powerful automobile export industry. You will see Chinese cars on the streets in this country soon. They are aggressively ramping up an automobile export industry. Here is what our country decided to do with a country with which we have a very large deficit. We said to China: When you export your cars to the United States, we will impose a 2.5 percent tariff on cars you sell here, and it is okay for you, on any American cars we sell in China, to impose a tariff 10 times higher, at 25 percent. That is what we said to China.

That is unbelievably ignorant of our own economic interests. Is it surprising the Wall Street Journal does a poll that says the American people don't believe in this nonsense? They are living it. They lose their jobs. There is not one person in the Congress who has lost his or her job due to a bad trade agreement. It is the other folks out there who go to work in the morning and care about their job, who are doing the best they can and are told, by the way, you have to compete with Monterrey, or Chihuahua, or someone in Shenzhen, or Beijing who is willing to work for 30 cents an hour. And if you can't compete with them, we are sorry.

The result has been downward pressure on wages, fewer benefits, and problems for American workers. That is a very long description of why I wanted to offer an amendment. Finally, at long last, I wish to see a real evaluation done of what has been the net result of NAFTA, because we still have these folks running around here saying NAFTA has been a great success. I mean, I don't know if they are on their feet when they look at something and say it is successful or not, but you cannot take a sober look at this and say it is successful. Exports have grown, yes, but imports have grown much faster. The evidence is here. We have roughly 412,000 jobs that have been certified as having been lost to Mexico, certified by the Department of Labor as having been lost, because of the trade agreement--or at least been lost from the time the trade agreement was negotiated.

What I have asked for is a study, a real study to determine the number and types of jobs lost due to NAFTA and the number and types of jobs created due to NAFTA.

One final point. This administration has no problem figuring out how great trade deals will be for other countries. In fact, Wendy Cutler, Assistant U.S. Trade Representative, was touting the benefits that our trade agreement with Korea would offer to Korea. Let me quote her:

An FTA with the United States is predicted to produce

economic benefits for the Korean economy, increasing Korea's

real GDP by as much as 2 percent, establishing a foundation

to achieve per capita income to as high as $30,000, boosting

exports to the United States by 15 percent, and creating

100,000 new jobs.

That is what the USTR is saying, here is the nirvana that is going to exist if we can simply do this trade agreement: Here is what is going to exist for Korea.

Ask them, what will exist for our country? What will be the consequences for our country? What are the comparable numbers for the United States? They make no similar projection.

In fact, the Korean agreement comes to us now, not having addressed the issue of the imbalance in the bilateral automobile trade with Korea.

Anyway, it is a case where I hope, perhaps, repetition will someday breed success. It is a case where I believe we should trade. I believe our country should be a leader in trade. I believe our leadership ought to say we aspire to lift others up in the world, not push our workers down. We spent 100 years creating standards--safe workplace, child labor law, minimum wage, a whole series of standards that we ought to be proud of.

I believe in our trade agreements we ought to aspire to lift others up rather than push ourselves down, push our standards down. That has regrettably not been the case with NAFTA. It has not been the case with a number of other trade agreements and will likely not be the case with the next four agreements that will be brought to the Senate.

My colleagues and I, several of us, will be proposing establishing benchmarks and accountability at long last attached to trade agreements. We ought to have benchmarks and some accountability attached to those benchmarks to find out what has happened. You can't go on forever with a bad trade agreement. You can't go on forever with one that doesn't work. When we are awash in debt, as we are, over $700 billion a year in trade deficit--which inevitably will be repaid with a lower standard of living in the United States--then we are headed for trouble. We need a better trade strategy, one that encourages trade but one that demands and insists on fair trade for our own economic interests.

I yield the floor.

The town of Bryan, OH, was enormously proud of its product. It was the product that defined Bryan, OH. It was Etch A Sketch; every little kid played with Etch A Sketch. The folks in Bryan, OH, made Etch A Sketch and every kid played with them. Etch A Sketch is gone. They couldn't compete with China. And the Radio Flyer Little Red Wagon was made in Chicago for 110 years. It was made by an immigrant who started the company. Why was it called Radio Flyer, the Little Red Wagon? This immigrant was fascinated with two things. He liked Marconi, so he named it Radio, and he loved airplanes. So he decided to name it, the Little Red Wagon he crafted in Chicago, IL, as Radio Flyer, and virtually every kid in this country has ridden on Radio Flyer wagons.

They were here for 110 years but no more. Now they are made in China. We could go on at some length. Some people will say: Don't you understand, you two, the world has changed, for God's sake, the world has changed and they are going to make these things where you can pay 20 or 30 cents an hour.

My question to them is this: If that is where the jobs are, who is going to buy the products? In this country, it seems we built standards for a century to provide good wages and working conditions for the American worker and that is what provided the income and development and expansion of the middle class and gave them the earning power to buy products. I know the Senator agrees with me. He agrees with trade.

We come from agricultural States. We need to find a foreign market for what we produce, but trade has to be fair.

How much time remains in morning business?

Mr. President, the front page of a recent New York Times article and front page of a Wall Street Journal issue said: ``Ethanol's Boom Stalling As Glut Depresses Price.'' Wall Street Journal article says: ``Ethanol Boom Is Running Out of Gas.'' Last night on ``NBC Nightly News,'' featured a piece about the closing of ethanol plants and the problem with the production of ethanol as a substitute for oil.

Mr. President, I want to talk a moment about that because we are unbelievably dependent on foreign oil. If anybody thinks they should nap through this or sleep through this vulnerability, they are dead wrong because 60 percent of the oil we need in this country and use every day we get from outside of our country. We stick little straws in this planet of ours and suck oil out. We suck out about 84 million barrels of oil every single day. We use one-fourth of that in this country every day, or about 21 to 22 million barrels of oil. So of all the oil we suck out of this planet every day, we use one fourth of it just in this little space called the United States of America.

The problem with using one fourth of it is that 60 percent of that oil which we use comes from other countries, much of it from troubled parts of the world, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Venezuela. Well, if tomorrow, God forbid, somehow the import of oil into this country were interrupted, we would be flat on our back economically.

We get up in the morning and just take it all for granted. We get up, we get out of bed and rub our eyes, then flick a switch, and the lights go on. We get in the car, turn the key, and the engine starts. We take it all for granted. But what happens at some point if we shut off the petroleum, shut off the electricity, and see what life is like, see what our economy is like?

So we decided to do something about that. If we are unbelievably dependent on and vulnerable when it comes to foreign oil, what do we do? We begin to produce energy in our farm fields.

We produce biofuels. That is not a new thing. It has been around over a century. I was at a biodiesel plant the other day. It was a grand opening. I pointed out there that the first known use of vegetable oil as fuel for a diesel engine was a demonstration at the World's Fair in the year 1900. Rudolf

Diesel later experimented with fuel made from peanut oil or biodiesel for engines he was developing. So this is not new.

All of a sudden our country has decided we should produce biofuels-- ethanol, for example--and we have begun to do that. Oil companies don't like it very much. The OPEC countries don't like it very much. The last thing they want to see is for us to begin to produce not only the fossil fuels in our country, including oil and natural gas, but also biofuels and the renewable energy that can grow in our farm fields. We can take a kernel of corn, and from that kernel of corn with various processes produce fuel that will substitute for fuel oil we now get from troubled parts of the world. That makes a lot of sense to me.

We use about 140 billion gallons or 145 billion gallons of fuel a year. If every single gallon of fuel were blended with ethanol, our total market for ethanol would be about 14.5 billion gallons. The President says let's go to 35 billion gallons. I agree with that. So do most of my colleagues. The Senate has already voted on a bill to produce 36 billion gallons. But how are we going to use 36 billion gallons if we are only blending ethanol at 10 percent? We have to have the E85 pumps. They are producing flex-fuel vehicles in Detroit now, and they have said they are going to get to 50 percent of all the vehicles they produce being flex-fuel vehicles so we can run a fuel that is 85 percent ethanol. E85 they call it.

You might have a flex-fuel vehicle right now--in my State there are about 16,000 to 18,000 flex-fuel vehicles--and there are 23 places in the entire State where you can pull up to a pump and get E85.

In California there are over 270,000 flex-fuel vehicles, and there is one reported gasoline pump in the entire State of California that pumps E85. Think of that, one pump.

Let me describe what some of the obstacles are. I have long been concerned if we are going to produce ethanol--and we should and we must--we have to not only produce it, we have to market it. We have to produce it, then we have to run it through the carburetors and fuel injectors of vehicles. If we don't have the market, that whole industry collapses.

Let me give some examples of why we don't have more E85 pumps. No. 1, we have some folks in here who want to produce ethanol and support all that, but they don't support any kind of mandate that would require that we have an infrastructure out there to actually use the ethanol. We are now starting to see the results of that. Let me describe that with an article in the Wall Street Journal: ``Fill Up With Ethanol? One Obstacle Is Big Oil.'' April 2, this year:

Oil companies employ a variety of tactics that help keep

the E85 fuel out of the stations that bear the company name.

For instance, franchisees are sometimes required to purchase

all the fuel they will sell from the oil company. Since oil

companies generally don't sell E85

That is, 85 percent ethanol that you would use in a flex fuel vehicle--

the station can't either.

Let me describe some of the ways the major brand retailers are trying to prevent the widespread marketing of ethanol. ExxonMobil and BP require their franchise stations--and this is directly from the Wall Street Journal article--require their franchise stations to buy fuel exclusively from them. Neither company offers E85. So the station owners must apply for an exception if they wish to sell E85, or 85 percent ethanol.

A ConocoPhillips memo to franchisees says the company

doesn't allow E85 sales on the primary island, under the

covered canopy where gasoline is sold. Stations must find

another spot. As a result, it isn't quite as simple for a

driver to decide on the spur of the moment to fill up with

I don't have enough time, but I want to show my colleagues something I find absolutely fascinating. Let me suggest on a different subject I will consume the 3.5 minutes.

This is the Nail House. This house is in the middle of a whole dug- out excavation area. This is in China. The Chinese Government, the developers, decided we are going to go in, and we are clearing this whole place out. One family said: No, you can't do that to me. It is not legal. It is not fair. We are not going to move. So they came in and excavated around the entire house. Here is the little house in China.

I tell you that because we just released, last week, the Congress Executive Commission on China Annual Report. It is the 2007 annual report. I am a cochairman, Sandy Levin, Congressman Sandy Levin, is the chairman. I am the cochairman of the Congressional Executive Commission on China. This describes a whole series of things on China, those who are in prison today in China as a result of advocating for human rights and other related issues.

I will tell this story about the Nail House. They call it the Nail House because it is stuck right up out of the excavation. The story did not have such a happy ending for the Nail House. The Chinese, eventually--they must have thought this was funny, the Chinese authorities, by digging around this fellow's house--but they eventually came in and tore the whole thing down and this property was lost. It is pretty hard to take on the Chinese Government.

But one of the things in this report we talk about is what is happening with technology in China, and the ability, outside of the purview of the Communist Government, to control everything; the ability of people to communicate.

Now, the Chinese have thousands of thought police trying to figure out who is visiting the Internet and trying to prevent them from visiting certain sites on the Internet. But there is a trend that is going on in China that is very interesting. Internet use rose from 620,000 in the last 10 years, 620,000, to 160 million Internet users.

Mobile phone ownership went from 3 million to 500 million in the last 12 years, 500 million. China has an estimated 20 million blogs, where people are talking among bloggers' personalized Web pages. In the entire year of 2003, about 4 years ago, the Chinese people sent 137 billion text messages.

Now, I tell you all of that because I think it is going to change things in China. Part of this China Executive Commission is trying to understand what is happening in China. What does that mean for our future? But there are some striking examples of citizen activism these days which are very interesting. This is one, the ``nail house,'' this family, that did not end so well.

But the local officials ignored the mass complaints. But what happened was this picture was on all of the blogs in China, it stirred up a hornet's nest of people willing to demonstrate in the streets on behalf of this family.

But there is one other issue, chemical factory protests in the southeast corner of Xiamen. The local government planned to build a hazardous chemical plant near the center of town. They publicized the information on Web sites and blogs, and citizens responded by overwhelming the local Chinese officials with a million text messages. Later they used blogs and text messages. They organized massive protests and marches that attracted thousands, and finally the local officials suspended the building of a chemical factory in the middle of Xiamen.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 2 additional minutes.

Another use of the Internet in China was on a slave labor scandal. In May and June of this year, citizen activists broke open a scandal that rocked China. Thousands of brick kilns were using kidnaped slave labor. They were men, boys, mentally ill, forced to work under heavy guard, often with no pay and very little food.

Parents looking for their missing sons organized on the Internet in China, and they were pleading for Government assistance. They were forced to cover the story in the Chinese press because there was such a mass uprising here. Finally, the Chinese Prime Minister ordered an investigation. Five hundred workers were freed. One hundred sixty people who ran the kilns were arrested. Very few party officials were seriously punished.

But the point is, things are changing. The technology is changing in China. The Burmese monks protest, the activism continues right up to today. While the Chinese Government is attempting to shut down this open and free communications with the thought police, they have got thousands of people trying to regulate Internet use, the fact is, it is not working, and technology and communications are having a profound impact and I believe will continue to have a significant impact in

the future. But I would say to my colleagues, we have some very skilled people who have worked with Congressman Levin and myself on the Congressional Executive Commission on China, the Annual Report, 2007.

We have the most complete list of those who are being held prisoner in China, particularly as a result of human rights issues. This booklet, if you have a chance to read it, is a great description put together by some very skilled people on exactly what is happening in China.

There is some progress, and there are areas that are of great concern. We continue to monitor and work on these issues.

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

Mr. President, I wonder if the Senator would yield for a question.

Mr. President, I listened to the Senator's presentation. I have indicated to my colleague from South Dakota that I share his instinct and we need better law enforcement on Indian reservations. I do not think there is any question about it.

I appreciate the fact that Senator Mikulski and Senator Shelby added back funds that had been eliminated in the President's budget. But we have a long way to go and we have talked about that here. The instinct is right to try to provide more funding so we are able to deal with those issues.

I held a hearing last week. A report shows that 34 percent of Indian women will be raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetime. That is unbelievable. We have serious law enforcement problems.

But I must vote against this amendment for the following reason: I cannot support an amendment, even though it adds money we need, that we will pay for by eliminating--by reducing funding for legal services, precisely because, as the Senator from Iowa says, legal services are the access to the legal system for low-income folks. It is the only opportunity they have, in many cases, for them to access the legal system.

That budget has been cut, and cut repeatedly. Now we are trying to add some back. To cut it now would be the wrong thing.

I appreciate the Senator yielding to me. I am very interested, I know the Senator from Iowa is very interested, in working with Senator Thune and others, Senators Shelby and Mikulski. I have talked to them to try to find ways to add back to these accounts in the future. We must do that. It has been partially restored in some of these areas by Senators Mikulski and Shelby.

I thank the Senator from Iowa for allowing me to weigh in. I say I certainly support his presentation. I support the instinct of the Senator from South Dakota in wanting to try to improve this area of funding. But we cannot do it by taking away from such important funding as Legal Services.

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