Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I am going to talk briefly about an issue I think is really very important dealing with the country of India and nuclear weapons that are possessed by India and other countries around the world.

Yesterday, one of my colleagues in the Senate indicated that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. I guess he was referring to some inert artillery shells that were produced in the 1980s for the Iran-Iraq war. No one believes those are weapons of mass destruction. That is an absurd claim. I think it has been described as absurd by nearly everybody. But since the subject of weapons of mass destruction has been raised I want to make a few comments.

I have in my desk in the Senate a piece of metal. I ask unanimous consent to show it on the floor of the Senate.

This is from a Backfire bomber. It used to be part of a wing strut on a Soviet Backfire bomber. This bomber, presumably, carried nuclear weapons to threaten the United States at some point. The bomber doesn't exist anymore. The bomber's wings were sawed off and it was cut into small metal pieces. We paid for that under the Nunn- Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program in which we spend American taxpayers' money to dismantle former Soviet nuclear weapons and their delivery systems--missiles, bombers, submarines.

I also have in my desk some chewed-up copper from the electrical wiring from a submarine that once carried nuclear weapons aimed at the United States. We paid money to dismantle weapons of mass destruction in the arsenal of the Soviet Union. So we didn't shoot this airplane down. This piece of metal from a Soviet bomber was achieved because we paid for the saw that cut the wings off of the bomber. What a remarkably successful program to try to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons.

I think the threat of nuclear weapons is the greatest threat that we face. We have roughly 25,000 to 30,000 nuclear weapons on this Earth. The loss of one nuclear weapon to a terrorist and the detonation of one by a terrorist in a major American city will cause a catastrophe unlike any of us can imagine. There are roughly 25,000 to 30,000 nuclear weapons in this world. Where are they? Are they safeguarded? Will someone steal one? Who is building more? Who wants nuclear weapons? What are we doing about that? These are critically important questions.

A former Secretary of Defense says that he believes the question is not so much whether but when will a nuclear weapon be detonated in an American city? A former Secretary of Defense says he believes there is a 50-percent likelihood that within the next 10 years a nuclear weapon will be detonated in a major American city. I don't know whether that is true or not. I do know this: this world is full of nuclear weapons. More countries want to achieve the capability of possessing nuclear weapons. It is our responsibility--it falls to us as a world leader to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and begin to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. That is our job.

I am not very encouraged, frankly, by actions in the Congress in recent years, turning down the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, suggesting that we want to reserve the right to test nuclear weapons again. The discussion in the administration and even some in Congress is that what we really need are new nuclear weapons, designer nuclear weapons, earth-penetrating bunker buster nuclear weapons. There is a suggestion by some that nuclear weapons are perfectly usable. They are not.

The only success we can measure will be the success by which we prevent another nuclear weapon from ever being exploded in anger on this planet. That is the only success that can matter.

I want to talk a little about the nuclear agreement the Bush Administration has reached with India, which I think undermines our nonproliferation policy of many years. It also undermines the Non- Proliferation Treaty that we have signed, and many other countries have signed. India has not signed it. It stops the proliferation of nuclear weapons. At least it says it is our resolve to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

I want to talk about this new agreement that Secretary Rice, on behalf of the President and others, has negotiated with India, and what it means for the job we have of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. One of our major periodicals in this country described a story that was not reported much post-9/11. In the period post-9/11, my understanding from press reports was that our intelligence picked up some kind of a report from their sources that a nuclear weapon had been stolen by a terrorist organization from the Russian stockpile of nuclear weapons and was prepared to be detonated by terrorists, I believe they said either in New York City or Washington, DC--in any event, one of America's major cities. Those who picked up this rumor in the intelligence community were very concerned about it, very worried about it.

After some period of time it was determined that this was not a credible rumor, but in retrospect the analysts determined that it is perfectly plausible. It is not unthinkable that a terrorist organization could acquire a nuclear weapon, or steal one from an existing stockpile. It is not implausible that having stolen a nuclear weapon they could have detonated it in a major American city. That ought to cause an apoplectic seizure in this country about the need to safeguard against nuclear weapons, reduce the number of nuclear weapons that now exist, and stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

It is our responsibility to provide the leadership to do that. That doesn't fall to anyone else; it falls to us.

Let me describe how the nuclear deal with India fits into this. Many countries want to possess nuclear weapons. North Korea, we believe, is now building them, and perhaps has them. I believe the administration said they believe that North Korea has actually produced nuclear weapons. We understand that the country of Iran is doing things that would lead it to be able to produce a nuclear weapon at some point in the future. We are concerned about that. Our country and others have been trying to prevent that from happening.

Our country invaded Iraq because we believed it had weapons of mass destruction. I heard a radio show this morning, with the fellow running the show saying that wasn't the case; that we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. That is not true at all. Saddam Hussein is an evil man. We found him in a rat hole. He murdered people in his own country by the thousands, and he likely will, following trial, meet justice. I hope so. But we attacked Iraq because we believed, our intelligence community believed, and the American people were told, and the world community was told by Secretary Powell that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened the world and threatened us.

The point is that the threat of weapons of mass destruction is serious and real. It is serious and real because there are 25,000 or 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world. We have a lot of them. Russia has a lot of them. Other countries possess them. One of those countries is India.

Nowhere is the threat of nuclear war or nuclear terrorism, or the need to safeguard nuclear weapons more important than in South Asia, the home to al-Qaida, who seeks nuclear weapons. It is an area where relations among regional nuclear powers--China, India, Pakistan--have historically been tense. India and China fought a border war in 1962. India and Pakistan fought three major wars and had numerous smaller skirmishes. After both detonated nuclear weapons in 1998 and declared themselves nuclear powers, the

world held its breath as India and Pakistan fought a limited war in Kashmir. So this is a serious issue, one that is of great concern.

It is almost incomprehensible to me that the administration has agreed to a nuclear deal with India, a country that did not sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that will gut the nonproliferation treaty and allow New Dehli to dramatically expand its stockpile of nuclear weapons and possibly ignite another regional arms race of nuclear weapons. Giving legitimacy to the nuclear arsenal that India secretly developed is not going to help us convince other countries to give up their secret nuclear programs.

The nonproliferation treaty is a treaty that, if you describe it, puts people to sleep. ``Nonproliferation'' as a term doesn't even sound very exciting. But it is at the root of the determination of whether we will one day see nuclear weapons exploded in American cities.

We have to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. The nonproliferation treaty isn't perfect, but there are a host of countries in this world who have decided to forgo trying to acquire or build nuclear weapons because of it. They have done that so that they can get access to peaceful nuclear assistance for nuclear power that is allowed by the treaty because the treaty would not allow access to technology for nuclear power to build nuclear powerplants unless the country signed the nonproliferation treaty and agree to forego nuclear weapons. That treaty has worked--not perfectly--but it has worked well enough.

India, as I said, has never signed it. Instead, it secretly built nuclear weapons in the 1970s and 1980s, which they revealed only after the fact that Pakistan conducted its first test of nuclear weapons in 1998. India and Pakistan are both countries which are subject to U.S. laws--and international laws, for that matter--that prohibit sending nuclear fuel and technologies to states that are operating outside of the nonproliferation treaty. Because India has very little domestic uranium, the application of those laws has severely constrained its ability to expand its nuclear power industry, and it has restrained its ability to expand its stockpile of nuclear weapons as well.

During this past year, New Delhi has stepped up efforts to get the assistance of our country to obtain nuclear fuel and reactor components so it can deal with an impending energy crisis. I understand their interest and concern about their energy crisis, but this was an opportunity, I believe, to get India to abide by and to become a signatory to the nonproliferation treaty and to cap its nuclear weapons program. Instead, the administration decided that it would initial an agreement that legitimizes India's nuclear weapons and which will make it substantially easier for India to produce more weapons grade material for more nuclear weapons. I don't understand this at all.

I was dumbfounded to discover what the administration has done, in secret, with no consultation with Congress at all. But the fact is, I have here a copy of the legislation that the Administration wants Congress to pass so the treaty can be implemented even though the text of the agreement is not even complete. They have the skeleton of the agreement. They have decided we are going to say to India: It is OK that you have decided you are going to create nuclear weapons outside of the nonproliferation treaty, but we will not have you suffer the consequences of that so we will now begin to offer you technology and fuel so that you can have the ability to produce more nuclear powerplants for your own energy needs, and you will also be able to keep some of those behind the curtain and produce additional nuclear weapons. We have said they can do that.

The agreement has not been written in its final detail, but even though its detail isn't complete, we already have legislation introduced in the Congress to say: That is OK. That is good. We approve. God bless you all.

I don't understand this at all. The fact is, this is a huge step backwards for this country in providing leadership to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

Here is what the deal does. The final text, I am told, has not been finalized, but the substance is this: President Bush's plan will allow India to buy from the U.S. and other countries sensitive nuclear technologies that are now forbidden to India under the nonproliferation treaty. That includes nuclear fuel, nuclear reactors, and advanced nuclear technology. In return, India has agreed to allow IAEA inspections and safeguards at 14 of its 22 existing and planned nuclear reactors. So 14 of India's reactors will be off-limits for the production of plutonium for India's nuclear weapons program.

But the agreement allows India to keep 8 existing and planned reactors outside of the agreement and free from international safeguards. And it will allow New Delhi to decide entirely on its own which future reactors it will designate as civilian and therefore to submit to safeguards or not.

So the agreement allows India to keep at least eight nuclear reactors behind the curtain and use them to produce nuclear weapons.

So we have essentially said that unlimited amounts of fissile material for nuclear weapons can be produced at facilities not protected by these safeguards, and it is just fine with us.

Well, that is not fine with me. It does not meet our responsibility as a world leader to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. By seeking exception to the rules for a country with which the United States wishes to build a special friendship, this nuclear deal would reinforce the impression that our country's approach to nonproliferation has become selective, self-serving, inconsistent and unprincipled. This deal will send a signal that the United States--the country the world has always looked to as the leader in the global fight to stop the spread of nuclear weapons--is now deemphasizing nuclear nonproliferation and giving it a back seat to other foreign policy and other commercial concerns.

I think that is a huge mistake. If the United States is seen as changing or bending the rules when it suits us, others will want to follow suit. Pakistan has already said: Us, too. We would like some of that. We would like to seek comparable treatment. Not long after the United States-India deal was announced, China and Pakistan began discussing additional reactor sales. I believe the United States-India nuclear agreement very likely will reduce the constraints on other states that want to go nuclear.

In calculating whether to pursue nuclear weapons, a major factor for most countries is, how will the United States react? What will the sanctions be if we decide to produce nuclear weapons to become part of the club that possesses nuclear weapons? The sanctions, at least suggested by the India deal, is: Don't worry. If we want your friendship at some point, we might waive all of that and say that the nonproliferation issue is much less important than your friendship.

There is no question that what has happened is the administration, secretly--with Secretary Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Burns and others--has negotiated a deal with the President's blessing that will make it much easier for a country that did not sign the nonproliferation treaty to greatly expand its illegal nuclear arsenal. It will allow India to access fissile material from overseas, buy foreign technologies and create a curtain behind which eight nuclear reactors can produce additional nuclear weapons in that region of the world. That is a profound mistake, just a profound mistake.

I don't understand why this Congress will not decide that it has a voice as well. The Administration is asking us to rubberstamp the agreement even before the agreement is fully written. It is an insult. The legislation we are asked to approve is a rubberstamp. This Congress is being asked to say: Well, sign us up, yes, of course. Of course we agree. The geopolitics of this friendship is certainly more important than restraining the growth of nuclear weapons or the spread of nuclear weapons. Sign us up. It doesn't matter.

I am a little tired of a town in which you have one view and one political party--the White House and the Senate--saying: Sign us up. We are all there. We are all hitched up. Whichever way you want to go, we want to go.

I think this is the most significant mistake--and there have been very significant mistakes in recent years--but this is one of the most significant mistakes I can conceive of.

Let me go back to where I started a minute ago. A colleague of mine yesterday said they found weapons of mass

destruction in Iraq. Of course, they didn't. They didn't. But weapons of mass destruction, no matter where they are found in the future, ought to be of great concern to all of us. We just passed a Defense authorization bill that is going to spend about $10 billion on antimissile defense. Everyone is worried about North Korea testing a new long-range missile. So we are going to spend $10 billion on technology to try to hit a bullet with a bullet. If anyone looks at the threat meter--I don't think anybody does much anymore--they will understand one of the least likely threats our country will face is a rogue nation or a terrorist who acquires a nuclear warhead and puts it on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile and aims it at our country and shoots it at about 18,000 miles an hour at the United States.

By far, the most likely threat is the stealing of a nuclear weapon by a terrorist organization, putting it on a container, loading the container on a ship, and having that ship pull up to a dock in a major American city at 3 miles an hour--not 18,000 miles an hour--and detonating a nuclear weapon in the middle of an American city.

There are 25,000 to 30,000 nuclear weapons, we think, tactical and strategic, in this world, the loss of one of which will be catastrophic; the detonation of one of which in an American city will be catastrophic--one. I am not talking about 5 nuclear weapons or 10 or 30 or 100; I am talking about 1. In this new age of terrorism, our responsibility is to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, be a world leader in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, and reduce the number of nuclear weapons, trying to give teeth to the nonproliferation treaty.

Instead, we are off making deals with India. Yes, India is a fine country. I want India to be a friend of ours. But I am not willing to abrogate the nonproliferation treaty and say to India: It is all right what you did to secretly produce nuclear weapons outside of the nonproliferation treaty. That is not all right with us. It ought not be a signal we send to the rest of the world that it is all right with us. Yet that is exactly what the deal with India is signaling: We will give you the technology and the capability. You allow inspectors into 14 plants in the future, you can have 8 plants that you have behind the curtain to produce nuclear weapons, and that is fine with us because the geopolitics of this deal lead us to believe it is more important to give you this agreement.

I think that is just profoundly wrong, and it is going to injure this country's national security in a profound way.

So, Mr. President, my understanding is there are people here already working on this legislation to approve the deal--it is already introduced--saying: Yes, yes, yes.

There was a former Governor in a Southern State--I won't use names because most of my colleagues will recognize it--but he was put in place by a fellow who came to the Senate. But when he went back home on weekends he would kick the Governor out of the Governor's chair because he wanted the Governor's office and he wanted to tell him what to do, and the guy would say: OK, OK, OK. They named him Governor OK because that is all he ever said was OK. That is what is going on around here. Yes, even with the India deal. It is OK. It doesn't matter what you do, it is OK.

It is not OK with me. It is not OK with me that we have legislation introduced to approve a deal that hasn't yet been written in all of its detail, but the architecture of which we know enough of to understand, at least from my standpoint, that this is a serious breach of faith for our responsibility to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

So, Mr. President, I don't know when the President or when our committees will decide they want to take a break from amending the U.S. Constitution. I understand beginning next week we will have the second opportunity to express that this Congress thinks that the work of Washington and Franklin and Madison and Mason was a rough draft and we have a lot of ideas and we ought to change the Constitution. If we can take a break from amending the Constitution, I assume someone will try to bring to the floor of the Senate legislation that will give a big rubberstamp to the India deal.

I only wanted to be here today to say that when that happens, I will certainly do everything I can to slow it down. I prefer to stop it. I don't know if I can stop it. I will try to do that. If not, I will slow it down a lot, and we will have a long discussion about what the responsibility is of this country to stop nuclear weapons in this day and age of terrorism.

Some don't care very much about that. They think there are other things that are much more important. There is nothing much more important in the day of terrorism, in this new age of terrorism, than making certain that we never, ever have a nuclear weapon detonated in a major American city. How do you do that? You stop the spread of nuclear weapons. You reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons. And you make sure that we provide the aggressive, assertive leadership to try to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists and safeguard existing stocks even as we try to reduce the number. That is our responsibility. The world looks to us for that leadership. And this, in my judgment, is not providing the kind of leadership that gives me comfort.

For that reason, I will oppose the agreement that has been reached with India and that has been announced, much to the surprise of most of us; in fact, I think to the surprise of probably everyone in Congress who didn't know it was being negotiated.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the policy in Iraq is not working and must change. The current plan does not have incentives that encourage the Iraqis to take full responsibility for their own security or to make the difficult compromises necessary for a unity government to work.

We have been in Iraq fighting this war for more than 3 years. The United States has sent hundreds of thousands of our finest troops to liberate Iraq from a brutal dictator. More than 2,500 have died for Iraq's freedom and close to 20,000 have been wounded, many very seriously. America has also spent more than $300 billion fighting the war in Iraq.

Those sacrifices continue. We have about 130,000 troops in Iraq today and, regrettably, we will have more deaths and injuries before this war is over. We will also continue to spend tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars more in fighting this war.

I believe that we need a change and we need a change now. That change is the Levin-Reed amendment currently before us.

This amendment says that we will begin a phased redeployment of our troops by the end of 2006.

This will force the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own security and to do so soon. They will have to replace our redeployed troops with Iraqi troops. This will create incentives to build their own police and military because some time soon they will not be able to count on Americans doing those jobs. This will also encourage them to put aside their political differences and agree on a government that works.

This action will not come as a surprise to the Iraqis or anyone else. Last year, by a vote of 79 to 19, the United States Senate said 2006 ``should be a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty, with Iraqi security forces taking the lead for the security of a free and sovereign Iraq, thereby creating the conditions for the phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq.'' What we are now saying is it's time for the phased redeployment to happen.

The Levin-Reed amendment that I voted for says that ``the current open ended commitment of United States forces in Iraq is unsustainable and is a deterrent to the Iraqis making the political compromises and personnel and resource commitments that are needed for the stability and security of Iraq.''

Reducing the U.S. role in Iraq also reduces the arguments made by the insurgents and terrorists that they are fighting an occupying army. When Iraqis are in charge of security, they will be forced to decide if they are going to continue to fight their own government and their own military or work together to rebuild their own country.

We are not pulling out or abandoning the Iraqi people. We are moving to a support role while the Iraqis take the lead. That is what phased redeployment means.

It is time for the Iraqis to work together and build their future. We cannot do that for them. This amendment sets in place a plan to provide the conditions for them to do it themselves. We have done our part. They must do their part and they must do it soon

Mr. President, today I am joined by Senators Grassley, Durbin, DeWine and Collins in introducing legislation called the Restitution for Victims of Crime Act of 2006. This legislation will give Justice Department officials the tools they say are needed to help them do a better job of collecting court-ordered restitution and other federal criminal debt.

Over the past several years, the Government Accountability Office conducted at my request and the request of others a study of the amount of federal criminal debt owed victims and the reasons why much of it is still uncollected. The GAO's findings revealed what many victims already know, that the current system for collecting restitution and other federal criminal debt is failing those it is intended to help.

Let me describe what criminal debt is. You go to court. Someone is convicted of a crime, and a fine is levied. The question is, Is that fine being paid? Or you go to court and the judge assigns guilt to a defendant and says: You must make restitution. So that becomes a debt.

The problem is that the amount of uncollected restitution and other federal criminal debt has spiraled upward while the percentage of that debt ultimately recovered for crime victims has plummeted. The amount of uncollected federal criminal debt skyrocketed from $6 billion in 1996 to over $41 billion by the end of fiscal year 2005. That's a nearly sevenfold increase in uncollected criminal debt owed to the victims of federal crimes. Some $15 million in criminal debt ordered by federal courts in North Dakota remained uncollected at the end of 2005, according to information from the Justice Department.

The percentage of debt that is collected or recovered for crime victims in the form of restitution has fallen to embarrassingly low levels. According to the GAO, Federal criminal justice officials collected an average of just 4 cents on every dollar that has been ordered in restitution and other criminal debt. This is restitution ordered by the courts to be paid to crime victims from those who perpetrated the crime.

The victims of crime deserve better. At the very least, crime victims should not be concerned that their prospects for financial restitution are being diminished because criminal offenders are frittering away their ill-gotten gains on lavish lifestyles and the like.

There is plenty of blame to go around for our failure to aggressively tackle this criminal debt problem. Some of the Nation's top law enforcement officials did not pursue a number of major recommendations made by the GAO in 2001 and again in 2004 and 2005 to boost our embarrassingly low criminal debt collection rate. These officials only started to take this matter seriously after I added language to an omnibus spending bill that required the Attorney General to establish a joint federal task force to develop a strategic plan for improving federal criminal debt collection. Second, Congress has not yet held extensive hearings about the federal government's recent track record on criminal debt collection and the related GAO reports.

I understand that criminal debt collection can be a tough job. It may be impossible to collect the full amount of restitution owed to victims in some cases. Clearly criminal debt collections may be more difficult in cases where convicted criminals are in prison, ill-gotten gains are already gone or these criminals are without any other financial means to pay their full restitution. However, GAO's work also made clear that more financial assets could be recovered.

Let me tell you why I and my colleagues have introduced this legislation. I had the GAO review a number of

white-collar financial fraud cases and report what is happening with respect to these cases.

I will cite some examples.

One offender, someone who was judged to be guilty criminally in the Federal court system, and his immediate family owned and resided at property that was worth millions of dollars. Yet he was not making the full restitution that had been ordered by the court to the victim.

Two offenders in Federal court cases who were ordered to make restitution to victims took overseas trips while on supervised release but had not made restitution to the victims.

One offender and his family established trusts, foundations, and corporations for their assets about the same time that they closed many of their bank and brokerage accounts and had not paid restitution to the victims of their crime.

Over the course of several years, one offender converted to personal use hundreds of millions of dollars obtained through illegal white- collar business schemes.

Several years prior to one judgment, one offender's minor child, who is now an adult, was given the offender's entire company. As of the completion of the GAO's work, that company had employed the offender. Restitution still had not been paid to the victim.

One offender and his family rented a very lavishly furnished residence--which they had previously owned--from a relative. The offender still had not made restitution he was ordered to pay.

Again, unpaid restitution and other criminal debt has gone from $6 billion to $41 billion over the last decade. We think that is an outrage. We have worked with the Justice Department as a result of the three GAO reports, and because of that, we have put together a bipartisan piece of legislation. The legislation is comprised of the comprehensive package of recommendations by the Justice Department that stem in large part from the work of the Task Force on Improving the Collection of Criminal Debt. Justice Department officials believe these changes will remove many of the current impediments to better debt collection.

For example, Justice Department officials described a circumstance where they were prevented by a court from accessing $400,000 held in a criminal offender's 401(k) plan to pay a $4 million restitution debt to a victim because that court said the defendant was complying with a $250 minimum monthly payment plan and that payment schedule precluded any other enforcement actions. Our bill would remove impediments like this in the future.

This legislation will also address a major problem identified by the GAO for officials in charge of criminal debt collection; that is, many years can pass between the date a crime occurs and the date a court orders restitution. This gives criminal defendants ample opportunity to spend or hide their ill-gotten gains. Our bill sets up pre-conviction procedures for preserving assets for victims' restitution. These tools will help ensure that financial assets traceable to a crime are available when a court imposes a final restitution order on behalf of a victim. These tools are similar to those already used by Federal officials in some asset forfeiture cases and upheld by the courts.

Our bill has the support of the administration, and the support of many victims organizations.

I have a long list of them: The National Center for Victims of Crime, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, National Organization for Victims Assistance--all of these organizations support the legislation we are introducing today--the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, Parents of Murdered Children, Inc., Justice Solutions, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators. The list is rather substantial. It also includes U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley in Fargo, ND, who said this legislation ``represents important progress toward ensuring that victims of crime are one step closer to being made whole.''

That is the basis on which we introduce this legislation. Among other things, our bill would clarify that court-ordered Federal criminal restitution is due immediately in full upon imposition, just like in civil cases and that any payment schedule ordered by a court is only a minimum obligation of a convicted offender. It would allow Federal prosecutors to access financial information about a defendant in the possession of the U.S. Probation Office--without the need for a court order. This legislation would also clarify that final restitution orders can be enforced by criminal justice officials through the Bureau of Prisons' Inmate Financial Responsibility Program. Our bill would help ensure better recovery of restitution by requiring a court to enter a pre-conviction restraining order or injunction, require a satisfactory performance bond, or take other action necessary to preserve property that is traceable to the commission of a charged offense or to preserve other nonexempt assets if the court determines that it is in the interest of justice to do so. In addition, this legislation would clarify that a victim's attorney fees may be included in restitution orders, including cases where such fees are a foreseeable result from the commission of the crime, are incurred to help recover lost property or expended by a victim to defend against third party lawsuits resulting from the defendant's crime. It would also allow courts in their discretion to order immediate restitution to those that have suffered economic losses or serious bodily injury or death as the result of environmental felonies. Under current law, courts can impose restitution in such cases as a condition of probation or supervised release but this means that many victims of environment crimes must wait for years to be compensated for their losses, if at all.

Let me make a couple of final points. First, while this legislation reflects the entire set of recommendations from the Justice Department to improve Federal criminal debt collection, it may not include every possible improvement to the current system. For instance, the GAO has suggested making willful failure to pay court-ordered restitution a criminal offense. This is already the case for criminal defendants who willfully fail to pay a court-ordered fine. It is my hope the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider this and any other helpful improvements when it reviews this legislation.

In summary, Senator Grassley and myself and others believe that it is outrageous that unpaid criminal debt ordered by Federal courts to be paid by criminals now exceeds $40 billion. That is wrong and it ought to be dealt with. Our legislation will do so in a thoughtful, bipartisan way. It is legislation that is supported by the administration and by Republicans and Democrats who have joined in this legislation.

With the Justice Department's help, we can make criminal debt collection a top priority once again. That is good news for the criminal justice system and great news for crime victims.

Mr. President, today I am joined by Senators Grassley, Durbin, DeWine and Collins in introducing legislation called the Restitution for Victims of Crime Act of 2006. This legislation will give Justice Department officials the tools they say are needed to help them do a better job of collecting court-ordered restitution and other federal criminal debt.

Over the past several years, the Government Accountability Office conducted at my request and the request of others a study of the amount of federal criminal debt owed victims and the reasons why much of it is still uncollected. The GAO's findings revealed what many victims already know, that the current system for collecting restitution and other federal criminal debt is failing those it is intended to help.

Let me describe what criminal debt is. You go to court. Someone is convicted of a crime, and a fine is levied. The question is, Is that fine being paid? Or you go to court and the judge assigns guilt to a defendant and says: You must make restitution. So that becomes a debt.

The problem is that the amount of uncollected restitution and other federal criminal debt has spiraled upward while the percentage of that debt ultimately recovered for crime victims has plummeted. The amount of uncollected federal criminal debt skyrocketed from $6 billion in 1996 to over $41 billion by the end of fiscal year 2005. That's a nearly sevenfold increase in uncollected criminal debt owed to the victims of federal crimes. Some $15 million in criminal debt ordered by federal courts in North Dakota remained uncollected at the end of 2005, according to information from the Justice Department.

The percentage of debt that is collected or recovered for crime victims in the form of restitution has fallen to embarrassingly low levels. According to the GAO, Federal criminal justice officials collected an average of just 4 cents on every dollar that has been ordered in restitution and other criminal debt. This is restitution ordered by the courts to be paid to crime victims from those who perpetrated the crime.

The victims of crime deserve better. At the very least, crime victims should not be concerned that their prospects for financial restitution are being diminished because criminal offenders are frittering away their ill-gotten gains on lavish lifestyles and the like.

There is plenty of blame to go around for our failure to aggressively tackle this criminal debt problem. Some of the Nation's top law enforcement officials did not pursue a number of major recommendations made by the GAO in 2001 and again in 2004 and 2005 to boost our embarrassingly low criminal debt collection rate. These officials only started to take this matter seriously after I added language to an omnibus spending bill that required the Attorney General to establish a joint federal task force to develop a strategic plan for improving federal criminal debt collection. Second, Congress has not yet held extensive hearings about the federal government's recent track record on criminal debt collection and the related GAO reports.

I understand that criminal debt collection can be a tough job. It may be impossible to collect the full amount of restitution owed to victims in some cases. Clearly criminal debt collections may be more difficult in cases where convicted criminals are in prison, ill-gotten gains are already gone or these criminals are without any other financial means to pay their full restitution. However, GAO's work also made clear that more financial assets could be recovered.

Let me tell you why I and my colleagues have introduced this legislation. I had the GAO review a number of

white-collar financial fraud cases and report what is happening with respect to these cases.

I will cite some examples.

One offender, someone who was judged to be guilty criminally in the Federal court system, and his immediate family owned and resided at property that was worth millions of dollars. Yet he was not making the full restitution that had been ordered by the court to the victim.

Two offenders in Federal court cases who were ordered to make restitution to victims took overseas trips while on supervised release but had not made restitution to the victims.

One offender and his family established trusts, foundations, and corporations for their assets about the same time that they closed many of their bank and brokerage accounts and had not paid restitution to the victims of their crime.

Over the course of several years, one offender converted to personal use hundreds of millions of dollars obtained through illegal white- collar business schemes.

Several years prior to one judgment, one offender's minor child, who is now an adult, was given the offender's entire company. As of the completion of the GAO's work, that company had employed the offender. Restitution still had not been paid to the victim.

One offender and his family rented a very lavishly furnished residence--which they had previously owned--from a relative. The offender still had not made restitution he was ordered to pay.

Again, unpaid restitution and other criminal debt has gone from $6 billion to $41 billion over the last decade. We think that is an outrage. We have worked with the Justice Department as a result of the three GAO reports, and because of that, we have put together a bipartisan piece of legislation. The legislation is comprised of the comprehensive package of recommendations by the Justice Department that stem in large part from the work of the Task Force on Improving the Collection of Criminal Debt. Justice Department officials believe these changes will remove many of the current impediments to better debt collection.

For example, Justice Department officials described a circumstance where they were prevented by a court from accessing $400,000 held in a criminal offender's 401(k) plan to pay a $4 million restitution debt to a victim because that court said the defendant was complying with a $250 minimum monthly payment plan and that payment schedule precluded any other enforcement actions. Our bill would remove impediments like this in the future.

This legislation will also address a major problem identified by the GAO for officials in charge of criminal debt collection; that is, many years can pass between the date a crime occurs and the date a court orders restitution. This gives criminal defendants ample opportunity to spend or hide their ill-gotten gains. Our bill sets up pre-conviction procedures for preserving assets for victims' restitution. These tools will help ensure that financial assets traceable to a crime are available when a court imposes a final restitution order on behalf of a victim. These tools are similar to those already used by Federal officials in some asset forfeiture cases and upheld by the courts.

Our bill has the support of the administration, and the support of many victims organizations.

I have a long list of them: The National Center for Victims of Crime, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, National Organization for Victims Assistance--all of these organizations support the legislation we are introducing today--the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, Parents of Murdered Children, Inc., Justice Solutions, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators. The list is rather substantial. It also includes U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley in Fargo, ND, who said this legislation ``represents important progress toward ensuring that victims of crime are one step closer to being made whole.''

That is the basis on which we introduce this legislation. Among other things, our bill would clarify that court-ordered Federal criminal restitution is due immediately in full upon imposition, just like in civil cases and that any payment schedule ordered by a court is only a minimum obligation of a convicted offender. It would allow Federal prosecutors to access financial information about a defendant in the possession of the U.S. Probation Office--without the need for a court order. This legislation would also clarify that final restitution orders can be enforced by criminal justice officials through the Bureau of Prisons' Inmate Financial Responsibility Program. Our bill would help ensure better recovery of restitution by requiring a court to enter a pre-conviction restraining order or injunction, require a satisfactory performance bond, or take other action necessary to preserve property that is traceable to the commission of a charged offense or to preserve other nonexempt assets if the court determines that it is in the interest of justice to do so. In addition, this legislation would clarify that a victim's attorney fees may be included in restitution orders, including cases where such fees are a foreseeable result from the commission of the crime, are incurred to help recover lost property or expended by a victim to defend against third party lawsuits resulting from the defendant's crime. It would also allow courts in their discretion to order immediate restitution to those that have suffered economic losses or serious bodily injury or death as the result of environmental felonies. Under current law, courts can impose restitution in such cases as a condition of probation or supervised release but this means that many victims of environment crimes must wait for years to be compensated for their losses, if at all.

Let me make a couple of final points. First, while this legislation reflects the entire set of recommendations from the Justice Department to improve Federal criminal debt collection, it may not include every possible improvement to the current system. For instance, the GAO has suggested making willful failure to pay court-ordered restitution a criminal offense. This is already the case for criminal defendants who willfully fail to pay a court-ordered fine. It is my hope the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider this and any other helpful improvements when it reviews this legislation.

In summary, Senator Grassley and myself and others believe that it is outrageous that unpaid criminal debt ordered by Federal courts to be paid by criminals now exceeds $40 billion. That is wrong and it ought to be dealt with. Our legislation will do so in a thoughtful, bipartisan way. It is legislation that is supported by the administration and by Republicans and Democrats who have joined in this legislation.

With the Justice Department's help, we can make criminal debt collection a top priority once again. That is good news for the criminal justice system and great news for crime victims.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Virginia for his courtesy.

This is a vote that we had before in the Senate. It is a vote on the establishment of a type of committee called a Truman Committee. The Truman Committee was established in the early 1940s to try to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in military contracting. That was done when there was a Democrat in the White House, a Democratically controlled Senate, and a Democratic Senator named Harry Truman. He decided there ought to be a special investigation of waste, fraud, and abuse with respect to military contracting. They established a bipartisan committee to do that. They found a massive amount of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I think it is clear that perhaps the most significant amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that has ever occurred in this country is occurring right now. I think the American taxpayers are being fleeced. I don't think the Congress is doing nearly enough about it.

Let me go through a couple of charts that I have shown before on the floor of the Senate. This is from the highest ranking procurement official in the Corps of Engineers, which does all the procurement for the Department of Defense. She lost her job. She was demoted for being honest.

She said:

I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to the

contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and

improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of

my professional career.

This from the top civilian contracting official in our Government at the Corps of Engineers. She is being demoted for being honest. She was always given the best recommendations, the highest performance evaluations, and when they saw that the ``old boy'' network decided to give big sole-source contracts, no-bid contracts and do it in a way that violated procurement rules, she spoke out. ``The most blatant and improper contract abuse'' she has ever seen.

Let me describe one contract--the Custer Battles contract. Two guys-- Custer Battles--show up in Iraq. They know there is a lot of money. The American taxpayers are funding not only reconstruction of Iraq but also funding Army contracts. Two guys show up in Iraq with nothing. And $100 million later, they got $100 million of the taxpayers' money for contracts. The first contract was to provide security at the Baghdad Airport. There is a criminal inquiry as a result of that.

Here is what Bagdad Airport security said about this company, Custer Battles--Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles.

Custer Battles have shown themselves to be unresponsive,

uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative war

profiteers. Other than that, they are swell fellows.

They received 100 million in American taxpayer dollars.

By the way, they took the forklift trucks off the Baghdad Airport and put them in a warehouse. They painted them blue and then sold them back to the Coalition Provisional Authority--forklift trucks which didn't belong to them. There are now criminal proceedings about this contract. But this is the tip of the iceberg.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to show an item on the floor of the Senate.

Mr. President, a man named Henry Bunting worked for KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation, in the area of Kuwait where Henry Bunting was in charge of procurement. He had to buy things.

Let me show the Senate what he bought. He brought this to a hearing we held. This is a hand towel. He was charged, on behalf of Halliburton's KBR subsidiary, to buy hand towels. He would order a hand towel for the American troops at a certain price, but his company said: Don't do that. We want you to have a hand towel that has the embroidered logo on it, the name of our company. So double the price to the American taxpayer for hand towels for the troops. So you have KBR embroidered on the hand towel.

He says: Why should we do that? It doesn't matter. It is cost-plus. The American taxpayer is paying the bill. Don't worry about the cost.

Same guy, $7,500 a month for an SUV; $45, $43 for a case of Coca Cola. He said: Don't worry, be happy. The taxpayer is going to pay for all of this. Don't worry about the cost.

Yes, I know this towel is one small issue. But when you buy thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of towels and double the price so you can put the logo of the contractor on it because it is a cost-plus contract, that relates to $100 million contracts, and it relates, in my judgment, to billions of waste, fraud, and abuse.

Regrettably, the Congress doesn't care enough.

I suggest we remedy this by creating a Truman-type committee. It worked, it was bipartisan, and it began to root out the waste, fraud, and abuse that is so prevalent.

I am not going to go through the whole list again. But let me describe it. If you are in the right place of the country of Iraq, you can stumble onto 50,000 pounds of nails, 25 tons of nails, lying in the sand. Why? Because somebody ordered the wrong size nails. So you throw them out in the sand. Doesn't matter, the American taxpayer is going to pay for that.

Or you can see a brandnew $75,000 truck that was set on fire because it had a flat tire, and they run it off the road. They didn't have the capability to fix it and just left the truck. Doesn't matter, the American taxpayer is going to pay the bill.

I think this is unbelievable. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars at this point.

I understand that our responsibility is to do everything we should do, and must do, to support the troops who are fighting in Iraq.

We cannot send American men and women abroad wearing our country's uniform and not do everything that is humanly possible to provide all of their needs, equipment needs, weapons needs, and so on. I understand that. That is a responsibility we have. I believe the chairman of this committee and the ranking member of this committee have done a great job. I am impressed with that.

The one area where all of us have failed in this Congress, however, is oversight. We have not done the oversight. I think part of it is because we have one-party rule in this town--the White House and the House and Senate. Nobody wants to embarrass anybody. But the fact is there is such massive amount of money that is going out the door in support of these contracts--sole-source, no-bid contracts that have promoted waste. And nobody wants to take a second look at it. Nobody wants to see what is going on.

There are whistleblowers coming forward saying this money is being spent. It is being spent in an unbelievable way.

This is a slightly different picture. By the way, this is $2 million in $100 bills wrapped in Saran Wrap. This money actually belongs to the Iraqi people that was spent by us in something called the Coalition Provisional Authority. That was our responsibility to spend this appropriately. This money went to Custer Battles and is the subject of a criminal inquiry. This $2 million wrapped in Saran Wrap in $100 bills was a part of a substantial

stash of cash in the basement of a building where they were standing.

This particular fellow came and testified. He said: We used to throw these around as footballs. We wrapped up $100 bills in Saran Wrap and threw them as footballs in the office because the message in this office was this:

You bring a bag because we pay in cash. Bring a sack. If you want some money, bring a sack, we pay in cash.

The stories are unbelievable.

The American taxpayer is going to pay to air condition a building. It went to a subcontractor, to another subcontractor, and then to another subcontractor, and pretty soon we pay the bill. The American taxpayer paid the bill, and that building now has a ceiling fan--not an air conditioner.

What is going on is unbelievable. Yet nobody seems to care very much. Nobody seems to be willing to do anything. I suggest, given the unprecedented amount of waste, fraud, and abuse, that now is the time for us to decide we are going to take action. We will create a Truman Committee, bipartisan, and sink our teeth into this and investigate on behalf of the American taxpayer--investigate and expose the waste, fraud, and abuse.

The fact is we turned down, regrettably, a bill which I offered previously that would have prevented the no-bid, sole-source, huge contracts going to just a couple of companies. That is one way to solve this problem. We should have accepted that. But notwithstanding the decision by the Senate to turn down that amendment, this amendment stands on its own.

Are we going to decide that when the highest civilian procurement official in the Corps of Engineers responsible for all these contracts says that she can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse she has witnessed during the course of her professional career, are we going to decide that is serious? We are going to do something about it?

I know people will say we have done this or that. The fact is we haven't scratched the surface--not a bit.

It is time for the Senate to ask itself whether it is serious about oversight and doing the job.

I am not standing here trying to pull the ground out from under this committee--or any committee. I am saying we have never spent this much money so quickly, never given the kind of sole-source, no-bid contracts that we have offered. We have never shoved money out the door as quickly as we have for procurement and in support of contracts for the troops.

Again, let me show this towel as a small hand-towel symbol of a massive amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that I believe we ought to correct, and we ought to begin today by approving my amendment.

Might I ask consent to point out to my colleagues that Senator Harkin, Senator Durbin, and Senator Clinton are cosponsors. I did not mention that.

Mr. President, my understanding is that we are to end morning business and go on to the bill at 10:45. The hour of 10:45 has arrived, and I note that the chairman and ranking member are not here. I believe they are at a briefing. They are expected to be here shortly. But what I would like to do is ask consent that I be allowed to speak in morning business for up to 10 minutes. When the chairman of the committee and the ranking member arrive, I will ask them for permission to continue, if necessary, but if they have other business, I will understand that. I think the priority is the Defense authorization bill.

So I ask unanimous consent to continue in morning business for 10 minutes.

Mr. President, I have come to the floor today to talk about the Indian Health Care Improvement Act and some frustration--I should say enormous frustration--that I and Senator McCain have about what is happening with a piece of legislation that is so very important.

In this country, we have responsibility for health care for two groups of people: Federal prisoners who are incarcerated in prison--we are responsible for their health care. If they get

sick, they go to an infirmary, they go to a hospital, we are responsible. We provide health care for Federal prisoners. We also have trust responsibility for providing health care for American Indians. That is our trust responsibility.

It is interesting and enormously disappointing to me that we spend twice as much per person on health care for Federal prisoners as we do in providing health care, as is our obligation, for American Indians.

I want to talk a little about that because we have written a piece of legislation called the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, which builds on a piece of legislation that was passed some while ago. I want to talk about what American Indians are facing out in the country with respect to health care.

Let me describe it first with respect to a story. This is a very typical story about a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, which is called the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota. It is a story about a fellow who had diabetes. By the way, I held a hearing some years ago on that reservation. On that reservation, the rate of diabetes is not double, triple, or quadruple the rate of diabetes elsewhere. At that reservation, at that point, it was 12 times the rate of diabetes that existed elsewhere.

The person I am speaking about on the Three Affiliated Tribes or Fort Berthold Reservation is Laidmen Fox, Sr. He was a Native American who had struggled, as other members of his family had, with diabetes. He had his feet amputated. Later he had his knees amputated. Finally, his entire legs were amputated. He was on dialysis. And, finally, the doctors told him he would have to have his hands amputated. At that point, Mr. Fox said he wanted to be taken off of the dialysis machine and to be taken home to die. He died 2 years ago. He went home to be with family and friends, having lost his feet, his knees, then his legs, and then told he would lose his hands. He died, was taken off dialysis.

Just this last February, his daughter--who was 41 years old, and blind from diabetes, and also on dialysis--chose do have herself taken off the machine and went home to die in a similar manner.

We now have in this country something nobody wants to talk about. We ration health care for American Indians. Yes, there is health care rationing. There is something called contract health services. That means that when American Indians show up at a clinic or a hospital and, through the Indian Health Service, seek treatment for their problems, the only treatment they will get and the only reimbursement they will get for that medical condition is if it means ``life or limb,'' threatening ``life or limb.'' Otherwise, in most cases, under the contract health provisions, there is no health care available.

Let me talk about some other examples, if I might.

A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in my State was suffering from cancer. He went through chemotherapy, and went through chemotherapy again for a number of years through referral from the Indian Health Service to the University of Minnesota. All of a sudden the Indian Health Service said to him: We don't have any more funding. And they refused to pay for any additional treatment, even after he had a number of relapses.

This is not unusual for American Indians to face this sort of thing.

Another American Indian fell as a result of insulin shock at his home. He hit his hip, and hurt his hip badly in the fall. He was taken to a hospital by ambulance, given a shot for the pain and told he was to be released. His father objected because he said: My son can't walk. You can't release him. And the father said: I can't carry him. He can't walk. He must stay here.

The doctor said he could stay in the hospital for one night's observation. The next day, when the pain did not subside, they gave him an x-ray, found out his hip was broken, and referred him to another facility. And because so much time had elapsed since the accident, he had to have a full hip replacement.

Another tribal member was a Vietnam veteran and should have had the services of both the Indian Health Service and the VA available to him. He died after the Indian Health Service denied his request for a referral for him to be seen by a lung specialist at the Mayo Clinic. The IHS told him they had no money to send him to a specialist, and this Vietnam veteran died as a result.

In Montana, an Indian man went to the Indian Health Service clinic seeking assistance for gallstones. He was told it was not a ``life or limb'' situation, which would get him referred to a health provider off the reservation under the contract health provisions I have just described. Subsequent to that, his duct ruptured and he became infected. He had to have part of his pancreas removed, and now he is on dialysis.

Several months ago, a 24-year-old man at the Spirit Lake Nation went to the IHS clinic complaining he had abdominal pain. He was given some medicine and was sent home because he was not considered a ``priority'' patient. He ended up in the emergency room in a nearby hospital, off the reservation, and then transported to a larger medical center 125 miles away. His appendix had raptured. That was 3 months ago, and he is still in the hospital 3 months later, as they attempt to try to control his body temperature and other related matters.

He was determined not to have a ``life or limb'' emergency medical need, and so his actual condition was overlooked, with the results of several months now of acute care in a hospital.

Mr. President, I have spoken a number of times on the floor of the Senate about a young girl named Avis Little Wind. I brought her picture to the floor of the Senate. I did that with the permission of her relatives. She was 14 years old, and she hung herself. She killed herself 2 years after her sister had killed herself.

I went to the reservation because we have had a cluster of suicides of young teenagers on Indian reservations. I talked to this young girl's teachers, school administrators, people in the mental health area, tribal council folks, to try to understand what is wrong here.

What I discovered is this little 14-year-old girl, named Avis Little Wind, laid in a bed for 90 days in a fetal position. Clearly, something was seriously wrong with this young woman. Yet, it did not send a signal to anybody. Her father killed himself. Her mother was dysfunctional, a substance abuser. This young girl somehow just slipped through the system, and she got up one day out of that bed and took her own life.

Avis Little Wind is one person, but a person whose future was stolen from her because she felt hopeless or helpless. And the fact is, on that Indian reservation--as is the case for most Indian reservations-- there is no mental health treatment available. There are not enough people available just for the diagnosis of serious problems. You would think someone who misses 90 days of school at age 14 would send alarm bells all over, but it did not. There is not enough money in the Indian Health System to deal with it.

Senator McCain and I have passed some legislation recently dealing with the issue of Indian teen suicide and trying to begin to address that issue. But there is a serious lack of attention to the health care needs of Native Americans and, yes, teenagers like Avis Little Wind and the tragedy that resulted in her death.

It is not uncommon to see 75 people stand in line waiting to have a prescription filled. It is not uncommon for them to stand in line only to find out they can't get the prescription filled because the medicine is not available there.

I have been to a health care facility where one dentist is working in a small trailer house serving 5,000 people. Is that fair? Is that the right thing to do? We can do better than that as a country. Yet, somehow, this issue of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act is not a priority. The administration has dragged its feet, and dragged its feet for months and months. Senator McCain and I have just written the administration a letter saying: How about some help here? How about some cooperation? Let's find a way to solve this and fix it.

While we talk and while we dither and while the administration decides to delay, we have people losing their lives, and we have people going to

health care facilities with very serious problems being told: We don't have the money to refer you.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

The tribal chairman for the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota says: Everybody up there on the reservation understands, don't get sick after June. Just don't get sick after June because the money has run out on contract health services. If you get sick after June, there is no money. They are not going to send you to a hospital. Or if you go to the hospital, the hospital will charge back to you because they won't get the money from the Indian Health Service. It will ruin your credit, and you will have to file for bankruptcy. But don't get sick after June because the money won't be there.

What kind of message is that to the American people, especially the most vulnerable in our society? These reservations are where there is substantial poverty, great difficulty.

I have not mentioned methamphetamine. We have had hearings about that. It is unbelievable what is happening with respect to these reservations and health care, and yet somehow there is no urgency here.

Senator McCain and I are asking for a little cooperation from the administration and some cooperation here in the Senate to move this bill.

We had a witness just the other day at a hearing about methamphetamine on reservations. Methamphetamine is a scourge all across this country.

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

One of the witnesses at that hearing on methamphetamine on reservations, who is the chairperson of an Indian tribe, lives on a rural reservation with 13,000 Native Americans who live on that reservation. She told us that one-half of the babies who have been born to tribal members on that reservation--one-half of the babies--have tested positive for alcohol or drugs, including methamphetamine. Think of that.

I was in a hospital one day when they showed me a young baby that was born with a .12 blood alcohol content lying in the nursery. This baby was born with a .12 blood alcohol content, and the mother was down the hall and refused to see the baby because she did not want the baby. She checked into the hospital dead drunk.

The fact is, we have serious problems with methamphetamine and substance abuse and teenage suicide, and all of these issues, and we have a health care system on Indian reservations that is a rationing system. When the chairman of the tribe in my State says, ``All the Indians know: don't get sick after June because the money is not there under contract health to help you,'' that is a serious problem.

All I am asking for and all Senator McCain is asking for is a little help and a little cooperation from the administration and, yes, from our colleagues to move this legislation called the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. It is the right thing for this country to do. Mr. President, I see the chairman of the committee is here, and I will, at this point, yield the floor.

I do have an amendment I wish to offer on the Defense authorization bill today, and I am available to do that when it is convenient. But the chairman and ranking Member are here, so at this point I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk.

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

Mr. President, first of all, I thank the Senator from Virginia for his kind comments. He did not say he welcomed my amendment because he probably knows that this amendment is one which we have dealt with before. But I feel so strongly the need to continue to offer the amendment, if only by voice vote, which says what is going on I think is dreadfully wrong and needs to be corrected. I know the Senator from Virginia and the Senator from Michigan are legislators with goodwill and good skills. I hope they will join with me as I once again describe the issues of contracting that exist because we are spending so much money in such a hurry that there is waste, fraud, and abuse which simply cannot be addressed in the regular order.

I believe this amendment is once again a proposal whereby there was a Truman-type committee, the type that existed when Harry Truman served in the Senate, a Democratic Senate then, with a Democrat in the White House. Harry Truman, I am sure, caused some real angst at the White House by saying: I think there needs to be a special bipartisan committee established to take a look at waste, fraud, and abuse in military contracting. He traveled all across this country to military installations to meet with contractors. His committee unearthed a substantial amount of waste.

I offer it again, as I have offered it on previous occasions. I understand I have not been successful, but I offer it again only because I don't think the problem has abated. I think the problem still exists.

Just the other day, in a supplemental emergency appropriations bill, we spent $92 billion. Some of that was for Katrina relief, but the rest of it, by and large, will find its way into the Pentagon accounts--to restore accounts.

The Senator from Illinois just came in, and the Senator from Illinois and I have jointly worked on this issue. Senator Harkin has asked to be a cosponsor as well. I offer it on behalf of myself and Senators Durbin and Harkin. This is something that we have talked about at some length over a period of time.

We have approved emergency supplemental appropriations bills to the tune of tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars. I believe it is now over $340 billion. Think of that: almost a third of $1 trillion approved without being paid for. This adds right on the top of the Federal debt.

This spending is in support of our military. I voted for it because we can't send our troops abroad and not provide them the equipment and things they need.

But when you spend this much money, including $18 billion-plus for reconstruction in Iraq, and then begin to see who gets hold of this money, it is hair raising to hear the stories about what is happening.

I am not suggesting that there would never be any waste as a result of this war. Wartime is a different circumstance. I understand that. But I think it is safe to say that there has been more waste, more fraud, and more abuse of the taxpayers' money in the recently short time, several years, than in the history of this country. I think it is unparalleled. I think we have a responsibility to deal with it.

Yes.

Mr. President, it is the case that whistleblowers from Kuwait, Iraq, and various parts of the United States have come to me and said: What is going on is wrong. We have held some hearings through our policy committee to take a look at it. They have wanted to testify.

Let me give you one example. I talked about Rory before. A man named Rory, an engaging fellow, who was a supervisor at a food service operation in Iraq, he said to us that what was going on was wrong. He worked for Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton.

No. 1, he said we were charging for thousands of meals that we weren't serving.

No. 2, we were feeding the troops food that had expired date stamps on them.

He brought it to the attention of his superiors. They said: It doesn't matter. Feed it to the troops. It doesn't matter.

He said: We had convoys of trucks that were attacked on the road with food in them. He was told: You go into that truck bed and you find out what food has shrapnel in it. If you find good pieces of shrapnel, you give it to your supervisors as souvenirs, but feed the food to the troops.

The other thing that was very interesting, talking about employees of Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, he said: We were told that when Government auditors come around, don't you dare talk to them. You are forbidden to talk to them. If you do, one of two things will happen. You will either be fired, or you will be sent to a part of Iraq where there is active, hostile shooting going on.

This fellow, in fact, was sent to one of the active areas of Falluja. He had the courage, guts, and temerity, and decided he would talk to Government auditors.

It is unbelievable to me to hear a whistleblower say that a contractor which was being paid with Government funds told the employees: Don't you dare talk to Government auditors. If you do, you will be fired.

That is so fundamentally wrong.

Mr. President, clearly that is what we ought to do on behalf of soldiers.

I tell the Senator that the most recent allegations have been made by two people who worked for, once again, Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation, about the water that was provided to the military installations. Let me describe that.

Taking water from the Euphrates River--and some of it goes into a system where it is purified and used as potable water to drink. Some of it is used as nonpotable water. But the way they designed the lines to serve nonpotable water to the base, which is used for showering, shaving, and brushing teeth, and so on, the water that was coming out nonpotable areas was actually more contaminated with E. Coli, bacteria, than the raw water coming out of the Euphrates River from the sewage disposal.

Halliburton said it is not true. The Pentagon said it is not true.

It just wasn't one base. We have a memorandum from the person from KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary in charge of water to all the military installations in Iraq. That memorandum, which has now been made public, was from the person who was in charge on behalf of Halliburton, or KBR, of all the water for all the installations. That memo admits that they have a serious problem, and they have made big mistakes that could have caused serious problems, including death.

After we held hearings, a young woman, an Army captain in Iraq, wrote us a long, unsolicited e-mail. She said: There is something going on on my base. I saw there was some questions about water to our military installations in Iraq. I am here. I am treating people for all kinds of skin problems. And I began to see things that made me suspicious that there was something wrong with the water.

She said: I had my staff track back to the water line.

She said: What I found out was they were providing nonpotable water to the

soldiers on this base that was contaminated.

This is from a doctor who is there today. This isn't conjecture, speculation, or accusation. This is from a doctor who is actually treating people. Yet, once again, the company that we are paying as a contractor to provide water service to these bases, connect and purify the water and provide the water to soldiers, denied publicly that anything was wrong. We have two eye witnesses who have testified, whistleblowers one that worked for the company. We have the internal document from the company that discussed how they had made these mistakes, and we have a doctor, a physician, who works for the Army. This is like the old Western movie: Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?

The fact is, we know what is happening there, yet no one seems much concerned about it. I write to the Defense Secretary about this and say it is quite clear that unhealthy water is being supplied to troops for showering, brushing their teeth, and shaving. No one seems to get really excited over that. It seems to me the Secretary of Defense ought to say, Wait, what on Earth is going on? Let's put a stop to this.

I will talk in a few minutes about how all of this happens. It happens because we have sole-source, no-bid contracts and very little oversight.

Mr. President, we have had three recorded votes on this, and we have brought this to the Senate maybe six times now, altogether. I know it is repetitious. I know it probably is not pleasant to hear all of these things again, yet I don't think there is any choice.

If I might, just for the benefit of my colleague from Illinois, Senator Durbin and I began talking about this some long while ago when we began to see the evidence of waste. We have worked at it since then.

When Senator Durbin was asking a question, I described the water issue. I want to read a quote from a memorandum that was written May 13, 2005, an internal Halliburton memorandum, written by Will Granger, the man who was paid with taxpayer funds to do this contract for Halliburton for all of the water issues in Iraq. These are the water issues for the U.S. bases in Iraq that directly affect United States soldiers.

Will Granger, the Halliburton employee:

No disinfection to the non-potable water was occurring [at

Camp Ar Ramadi] for water designated for showering purposes.

This caused an unknown population to be exposed to

potentially harmful water for an undetermined amount of time.

This event should be considered a ``NEAR MISS'' as the

consequences of these actions could have been VERY SEVERE

resulting in mass sickness or death.

The deficiencies of the camp where the event occurred is

not exclusive to that camp; meaning that country-wide, all

camps suffer to some extent from some or all of the

deficiencies noted.

That is what was covered up. This was not made public until I was able to dig it out. But when a whistleblower said this is happening-- and I am not referring to Will Granger, but to a whistleblower who said this is happening in his testimony to our committee--Halliburton said that it is not happening, you are not telling the truth, the Pentagon says there is no evidence of it.

And here is the internal Halliburton report that says it is happening, No. 1; and, No. 2, this camp was a ``near miss'' and:

. . . the consequence could have been VERY SEVERE resulting

in mass sickness or death.

A lot of people are making a lot of money, spent by this Congress, in support of our soldiers who are at war, and we have some contractors who are not playing straight with the soldiers or the American people.

I ask consent to show two items on the floor of the Senate.

A man whose name was Henry Bunting came to a hearing I held. I believe Senator Durbin was at that hearing. Henry Bunting worked for Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton in Kuwait. In Kuwait, he was the purchaser of supplies for the U.S. Army. They wanted some hand towels, needed some towels, so a purchase requisition goes to Henry. Henry is going to buy some towels. Except when he put in the order for the towels, his company said, no, no, no, you cannot buy those regular towels that way. Towels have to have our logo embroidered on them.

So this is what he had to buy, at more than double the cost of the regular towels, so that the company logo could be put on the towels, and the taxpayers could be charged twice as much.

I am sure the soldiers didn't care one way or another whether there was that embroidered logo on the towel. But Henry, the purchaser, was told: You buy these. And don't ask any questions.

Henry says, You know, the American taxpayer got charged double and he didn't like it and he want to speak publicly. And not just this, it was a thousand other examples of costs being run up, from $45 for a case of Coca-cola, to $7,500 a month to lease an SUV. Henry said, It is not just the towels, but he brought the towels along to show us what is going on is really wrong. The American people are taking a bath here and it undermines the soldiers, as well.

Thank God there are some whistleblowers who are willing to come forward.

What we need now, of course, is the opportunity to legislate and see if we can't stop this.

I will not go much longer, although I don't see anyone preparing to offer another amendment yet. I do want to make a couple of points I made the other day on the broader amendment that was turned down by the Senate. That amendment dealt with contracting as well, but it was a much broader amendment than this.

I made the point then, and this actually had to do with Bunnatine Greenhouse. I know there are some who do not want to hear about this anymore. But I don't think we have any choice. This was the top civilian contracting official at the Corps of Engineers. She was the one responsible for overseeing the contracts.

Through the Corps of Engineers, Halliburton and KBR got no-bid, sole-

source contracts, giant contracts. Over one half of the contracts in the war theater are Halliburton.

By the way, this has nothing to do with the Vice President. Whenever you mention that term, they say, You are attacking the Vice President. No, he has been gone a long time. It doesn't have anything to do with him. It has to do with a company that got over 50 percent of the contracts in Iraq.

Bunnatine Greenhouse, the top contracting officer at Corps of Engineers who lost her job, now, as a result of telling the truth, says:

I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to

contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and

improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of

my professional career.

For that, she got demoted. Pretty harsh treatment for people who are whistleblowers in this town. She has been replaced, by the way, by someone without experience. When I have asked the general who runs the Corps of Engineers, he said the person that is replacing Bunnatine Greenhouse is now being trained. Not much consolation or confidence, in my judgment, in that for the American people.

One final story. If the issue of water does not motivate someone, let me talk again about Custer Battles. I have plenty of people come to me about Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles. This is an example of what is going on with so much money available.

Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles show up in Iraq without any money, without much experience in contracting, and decide, I will get some of this; I want to get some of this contracting that is available. It was not very long and they got some contracts very quickly. In fact, they ultimately got over $100 million in contracts.

The first contract was to provide security. They set up a little firm to provide security at the Baghdad airport. Now, among other things, whistleblowers from their own company came forward and said, Here are the things they were doing. They are cheating you blind. They took the forklift troop trucks out of the Baghdad airport, took them somewhere else, put them in the warehouse, painted them blue and sent them back and sold them to the Coalition Provisional Authority. They do not belong to them. They repainted them and sold them back to us. They set up subsidiaries in Lebanon and other places to buy and sell to and from themselves, and inflate the price, and, therefore, injure the taxpayer.

Here is what the fellow who runs the security system at the Baghdad airport said. The Baghdad airports director of security in a memo--a guy, also, that was trying to provide some warning--a memo to the Coalition Provisional Authority, and that is us in Iraq; it was set up by Donald Rumsfeld and that was the United States--here is what he said:

Custer Battles have shown themselves to be unresponsive,

uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative and war

profiteers. Other than that they are swell fellows.

This from the director of security at the Baghdad airport. These guys ended up getting over $100 million in contracts. I will show you a little bit of their money. This is a picture of $2 million in cash, $100 bills wrapped in Saran Wrap. I happen to know this guy; you do not see his head, just his body standing in front of the $2 million. He showed up here. He wanted to talk about this. Here is what he wanted to say.

What he wanted to say was, When I was there, standing in Baghdad, working on these accounts, the word went out to all of the contractors: We pay in cash; bring a bag. He said it was like the Wild West. Bring a sack because we pay in cash.

This $2 million actually went to Custer Battles. They took a picture of it. He said they used to throw these around as footballs, Saran Wrapped $100 bills. They threw them around as footballs in the office. And down below they had billions and billions of dollars, apparently.

Lest there be any question about the misuse of money, let me show $2 million Saran Wrapped just before it went to Custer Battles. How did this happen? Because this guy right here, this fellow right here, told me that our message to everyone was ``bring a bag because we pay in cash.''

Does anyone doubt there is going to be dramatic waste, fraud, and abuse in those circumstances? Does anyone doubt that at all, and after all of these stories? Doubling the price of hand towels; 25 tons, 50,000 pounds of nails laying on the sands of Iraq because they were ordered in the wrong side, dumped in the sand.

I could go on forever from what I learned from whistleblowers. I will not do that, only to say this: The next step for this Congress, I think, is to establish a Truman-type committee. We have done it before and we can do it again. Never has it been more needed than now. There is, I think, plenty of evidence that the most significant waste, fraud, and abuse that has ever been visited on the taxpayers of this country is occurring now and has occurred in the last 3 years.

The remedy for that? It is not to blame anyone here. The remedy for that is for us to fix it, for us to do something. What should we do? Let's put together the type of thing that worked previously. Harry Truman had the guts to do it.

Harry Truman was a Democrat. There was a Democrat in the White House. I am sure they all were gnashing their teeth at what Harry Truman was trying to do, but on a bipartisan basis Harry Truman put together, with the consent of the Senate, the Truman Committee that sunk their teeth into this issue and really did investigate and came up with a massive amount of waste, fraud, and abuse.

That is a minnow compared to the whale that exists at the moment in waste, fraud, and abuse. It is required of us, in my judgment, required of us to pass this legislation.

Having said all of that, let me compliment the chairman and the ranking member, but let me not do it because it is obligatory but because I really do think they do a great job. I hope they decide to strongly support this amendment. Then I will come back and compliment them some more.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Senator is absolutely correct, first, about the history and, second, about the importance of this. Harry Truman used to have a sign on his desk saying, ``the buck stops here.'' Well, the buck stops here in the Congress on this issue. We are the ones who have to go find this waste, fraud, and abuse and put a stop to it. If we don't do it, it won't happen.

Harry Truman was a straight talker, a straight thinker. He used to say he would only accept one-armed economists because he didn't want people around him saying ``on the one hand'' and ``on the other hand.'' He decided to sink his teeth into the issue of waste, fraud, and abuse, and he made a big difference at a time when there was substantial waste, fraud, and abuse.

But I would venture to say there has never been a case in our history where

we have pushed hundreds of billions of dollars out the door in a very large hurry and put them in the hands of no-bid, sole-source contracts with big companies and said, ``Have a good time.'' It is unbelievable what is going on, and it is our responsibility to stop it--not tomorrow; it is our responsibility to stop it now.

This is the bill in which we should do it. This amendment fits exactly in this piece of legislation. My hope is that when the dust settles, we will have decided to accept this amendment.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to inform my colleagues of my request to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to strongly recommend the nomination of MSG Woodrow W. Keeble for the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Last week, the Secretary of the Army made a recommendation to the Secretary of Defense that the late MSG Woodrow W. Keeble be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I strongly encourage and request that the Secretary of Defense recommend Mr. Keeble for this award and that action be taken quickly, particularly for the sake of Mr. Keeble's widow, to recommend approval to President Bush.

Mr. Keeble was a full-blooded Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux, who fought in both World War II and the Korean war. He was born in Waubay, SD, and attended Wahpeton Indian School in North Dakota. While attending Wahpeton Indian School, Mr. Keeble excelled as a baseball pitcher. His outstanding athletic ability, for which he is remembered in the Wahpeton community, would later serve him well during his acts of bravery and courage in the Korean war.

The brave actions that make Mr. Keeble deserving of the Congressional Medal of Honor occurred during Operation Nomad of the Korean war on October 20, 1951. During the Korean war, Mr. Keeble was assigned to Company G, 19th Infantry, 24th Division of the U.S. Army. He was charged with leading the 1st platoon of Company G as master sergeant.

Mr. Keeble's actions on October 20, 1951, were reminiscent of Hollywood movies, but this was real heroism. On that date, Mr. Keeble's company was charged with the mission of taking and securing Hill 765, a steep rocky and well-defended terrain near Kumsong, Korea. As they began to reach their final objective, the lead platoon of Company G was ambushed with heavy fire from three enemy machine gun nests. The platoon's situation became grave as Mr. Keeble, acting platoon leader of a support platoon, left his position of cover and bravely made his way forward and joined the trapped platoon.

It took Mr. Keeble little time to decide that immediate action had to be taken. He courageously crawled directly into the line of fire to take out the enemy machine guns. He successfully crawled up the rocky terrain and neutralized the first two machine gun nests by hurling grenades and rendering them useless. The remaining enemy machine gun nest brought terrific fire down upon him. Undaunted by the rain of concussion and fragmentation grenades, Mr. Keeble proceeded to disable the final enemy position. After missing the enemy with his last grenade, he launched a one-man assault with his M-1 rifle. By this time, he sustained multiple shrapnel wounds. Fearlessly, he took out the final machine gun position with his rifle. While awaiting the arrival of his fellow soldiers, he continued to singlehandedly take out two additional nearby trenches of enemy troops, and he effectively neutralized the enemy stronghold, involving a series of close combat struggles. Mr. Keeble's heroic actions led to the successful accomplishment of Company G's mission and, no doubt, saved the lives of many American troops.

Those who served with Mr. Keeble twice recommended him for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but the recommendations were lost. The first was due to the regiment's move from the Korean theater, and the second was an inability to meet mapping requirements. However, it should be noted that both instances of application only required two signatures, but in each case, all the men in Master Sergeant Keeble's company signed the Congressional Medal of Honor request. Eventually, the deadline for the Medal of Honor consideration passed, but Mr. Keeble's family was granted their request in 2002 that his file be reopened.

For his acts of heroism he was awarded the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and the Distinguished Service Cross. The criteria for the Congressional Medal of Honor include deeds of personal bravery, self-sacrifice, or an action that conspicuously distinguishes the individual above his comrades. Should the President agree to this recommendation, Mr. Keeble would be the first Sioux Indian to be awarded the Nation's highest military honor if he is chosen to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Certainly the courageous and patriotic acts exhibited by Mr. Keeble during times of war make him a long overdue and deserving recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Mr. President, I urge the Secretary of Defense to strongly recommend the nomination of MSG Woodrow W. Keeble for the Congressional Medal of Honor to the President of the United States, and I hope my colleagues will join me in saluting a truly brave and courageous American.

Let me thank Senators Warner and Levin for their leadership on this legislation. This is a very difficult task, to put together the authorization for military expenditures and military operations.

I want to especially say I just walked in while they were talking about naming an aircraft carrier after former President Gerald Ford. That is a wonderful thing to have done. Gerald Ford gave great service to his country in the Congress, as Vice President, and as President of our country. I join them in acknowledging the significant achievements of President Ford and what he accomplished not only for himself but for this country as well. It is a great way to honor him, by naming an aircraft carrier for him.

Madam President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration. This amendment is sent to the desk on behalf of myself and Senators Bingaman, Boxer, Dayton, Feingold, Johnson, Kerry, Kohl, Lautenberg, Leahy, Mikulski, Nelson of Florida, Pryor, Reid of Nevada, Harkin, and Wyden. I ask for its immediate consideration.

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

This amendment is a rather comprehensive amendment. I offer it on behalf of a good many of our colleagues.

I wish to describe why I offer this amendment. As I do that, I wish to acknowledge the outstanding work done by my colleagues, Senator Warner and Senator Levin, in dealing with all of these issues. There is an area, however--given what has happened with respect to wartime expenditures in the military and also contracting outside of the military in the issue of reconstruction spending in the country of Iraq--there is an issue which I believe is of great seriousness. I think we have had some of the most significant waste, fraud, and abuse in the history of this country just in recent years, with a massive amount of money that is pushed out of this Congress, pushed out of the administration into the hands of contractors, into the hands of subcontractors, and then subcontractors, and subcontractors from them in the country of Iraq. There is a massive amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. The fact is, we are not dealing with it the way we should.

I want to show a picture. This picture shows a fellow standing here whom I have actually met. This is a picture that was taken in the country of Iraq. These are one-hundred-dollar bills, wrapped in Saran wrap. This is $2 million. These one-hundred-dollar bills were wrapped in Saran wrap to be the size of a small football. This fellow, by the way, said they actually threw some of these around as a football there in this office.

What they were doing here as they took this picture, they were preparing to pay a contractor in Iraq named Custer Battles, named after two men, Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles. Why were they paying in cash? Because, according to this fellow, the word was: You bring a bag, we pay in cash. He said it was like the Wild West. So here is a couple of million dollars. This was going to go to Custer Battles. Let me just tell the story of Custer Battles. I will abbreviate it, but the story is these two guys show up in Iraq. They don't have a great deal of experience, have very little money, but they decide they are going to be a company now. They are going to be a company in Iraq, and they are going to provide security. They start bidding on security contracts. All of a sudden, they are given

a contract to provide security at the Baghdad airport. The money starts rolling in. It turns out, before this is all over with, from what I have learned, Custer Battles Company got more than $100 million in contract money for various things. This is just a part of the payment-- in cash.

They have been charged with criminal behavior and fraud and other things. The allegations were that they took the forklift trucks off the Baghdad airport, put them in a warehouse, repainted them blue, and then sold them back to the Coalition Provisional Authority which was then running Iraq, which, of course, was us because the CPA was created by a document signed by the Secretary of Defense. So this company allegedly took the forklift trucks that existed at the Baghdad airport, for which they were providing security, put them in a warehouse someplace, repainted them, and then sold them back to the CPA. They also then created offshore subsidiaries in Lebanon and elsewhere to run money through and beyond.

We had a hearing on this subject. Here is what the director of security at the Baghdad airports said in a memo to the Coalition Provisional Authority that hired Custer Battles:

Custer Battles have shown themselves to be unresponsive,

uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative and war

profiteers. Other than that, they are swell fellows.

That is a direct quote, yes. Let me read it again.

Custer Battles have shown themselves to be unresponsive,

uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative and war

profiteers. Other than that, they are swell fellows.

Why do I raise this issue? It has been on ``60 Minutes.'' We have had a hearing about it. It is an example of what has been happening in contracting, particularly in Iraq.

Let me just say that the minute you talk about contracting in Iraq, you have to talk about Halliburton. The minute you talk about Halliburton, there will be those who will say: Aha, you are trying to talk about Vice President Cheney, aren't you? No, not true. Vice President Cheney is long gone from Halliburton. This is all about Halliburton in Iraq. It has nothing to do with Vice President Cheney.

I want to go through some stories because they are very important.

There is a woman who was the top civilian contracting official at the Corps of Engineers over at the Pentagon. Her name is Bunnatine Greenhouse. Some have written about Bunnatine. She received a top evaluation over two decades from her superiors as one of the top procurement people in this country. She knew the law. She knew the procedure. She had worked over two decades and had always received top recommendations from her superiors. She was tough as nails and dedicated to safeguarding the taxpayers' money.

Then the Pentagon decided to award a very large no-bid, sole-source contract to a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, something called ``Restore Iraqi Oil,'' or the RIO contract, which a number of my colleagues are familiar with.

Mrs. Greenhouse protested that the way this was done was in violation of proper contracting procedures. She later found that Halliburton was found by auditors to have overcharged $61 million on a piece of the contract for fuel delivery, and instead of taking the company to task for Defense Department auditors finding $61 million in overcharges, the top leadership of the Corps of Engineers rushed to Halliburton's assistance and provided the company with a waiver for the overcharges, a waiver of normal cost reporting rules, concluding that the prices were fair and reasonable. That waiver was provided without the approval of the top contracting official who was required to have signed it.

They kept the top contracting official, Mrs. Greenhouse, in the dark, and did so deliberately. She learned about the waiver when she read about it in the newspaper. When she spoke up, she was bypassed, ignored, and then ultimately forced to resign or be demoted.

This is what she told us. This relates to meetings that were held in the Pentagon prior to bidding. Halliburton was present in the meeting. She complained about the meetings being in violation by the way of the rules. Here is what Bunny Greenhouse said:

I can unequivocally state that the abuse relating to

contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and

improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of

my professional career.

This from the top civilian contracting official in the Corps of Engineers.

Does anybody care about this?

This woman, by all accounts, was judged to be at the top of her profession, with outstanding reviews always, until she blew the whistle on what she believed were abuses in contracting. When she blew the whistle, then things started to change very, very quickly.

She was demoted for having the courage to tell the truth. When she spoke out, they decided that they would replace Mrs. Greenhouse with a different Pentagon official. That different Pentagon official is now in this job. That person has over 40 years of Government service, but has none of that service related to procurement. So that person was selected to take this job knowing nothing about the job. They now have that person in training, going to school and training.

We have had plenty of examples of cronies. I believe seven of the top jobs in FEMA were filled not with people who knew anything about disasters but with cronies, people who needed a job. Stick them at FEMA. And then a hurricane hits and we have an agency that does not know what it is doing because you have a bunch of cronies involved in that agency.

Now we have a woman who was the top procurement official who blew the whistle on improper contracting, on both the Pentagon and also the company, and for that she was demoted and replaced by someone who is not certified as an acquisition professional and doesn't have the ability. She is now, according to General Strock, ``being brought up to speed on what it is she needs to know as a contracting official.''

That is absurd.

Let me describe some of the firsthand eyewitness issues in Iraq.

Brand new $85,000 trucks that were left on the side of the road because of a flat tire and then subsequently burned; 25 tons, 50,000 pounds, of nails ordered by Kellogg, Brown & Root, the wrong size, that are laying in the sands of Iraq; ordering hand towels for soldiers embroidered with the ``KBR'' logo, so they could double the price of the hand towels paid for by the American taxpayers; 42,000 meals a day charged to the taxpayers by Halliburton, by KBR, 42,000 meals a day being served to the troops each day paid for by taxpayers for the soldiers and only 14,000 are actually served; leasing an SUV in Iraq for $7,500 a month; serving food at a cafeteria in Iraq for the soldiers, and a man named Roy who was the supervisor in the food service kitchen said that the food was date-stamped ``expired.'' In other words, it had a date stamp, which meant the food wasn't good anymore, and he was told by superiors that it doesn't matter. Feed it to the troops. It doesn't matter that they had an expired date stamped--feed it to the troops.

What we have discovered is pretty unbelievable. I will not go on at great length because I have done it before about the water contracts. We have direct testimony from physicians, Army doctors, and others about providing nonpotable water for shaving, brushing teeth, and so on that is in worse condition as water than the raw water coming out of the Euphrates River.

What was going on with respect to this contracting is unbelievable. I have just mentioned a couple of companies. There are more. I will not go on at great length.

I think when you are at war, when a massive quantity of money is being pushed out the door, that we ought to decide to get tough on those who would be engaged in war profiteering. The amendment I have offered has a number of provisions in it.

First, it punishes war profiteers with significant punishment. It is a piece of legislation that has been introduced separately here in U.S. Senate. That legislation was previously introduced by Senator Leahy, but it is now made a piece of this larger piece of legislation.

We have a provision that would crack down on contract cheaters by restoring a rule that this administration rescinded, which the previous administration put in place as a rule, that says that if a contracting company exhibits

a pattern of failing to comply with the law, they can be debarred and suspended. That ought to be the rule. If you have a pattern of cheating you ought to be suspended.

I have seen circumstances where we have had major defense contractors over in criminal court being judged guilty on the same day that they were over in the Pentagon signing a new contract. It is a slap on the wrist, a pat on the back. That isn't the way we ought to be dealing with this.

Punishing war profiteers, cracking down on contract cheaters, forcing real contract competition--it gets back to what Mrs. Greenhouse indicated. You can't do these no-bid, sole-source contracts for billions of dollars and decide it does not matter to the taxpayer. Of course, it matters. They are going to end up paying through the nose-- and that is exactly what has happened.

There is another provision that would end cronyism in key positions. I know it doesn't deal just with defense with respect to that, but we ought to be expecting that people have some qualifications when they come to their job. The top procurement official at the Corps of Engineers has to be sent to training because she doesn't have the background. Why do they have the opening? Because they demoted the person that had the background, was given excellent recommendations in every performance evaluation, but was demoted because she had the courage to stand up and call the old boys network wrong when they tried to violate contracting rules.

The amendment also strengthens whistleblower protection. I think it is really important that we strengthen protections for those who have the courage to stand up as whistleblowers and are willing to tell us what is happening when waste, fraud, and abuse occurs. I think we need to know about it and take action.

I have offered previously--and will again--legislation that would establish a Truman committee here in the U.S. Senate. The Truman committee was established in the 1940s when the Senator from Missouri went around this country to military bases and discovered substantial waste and fraud.

We should do that again. I believe we ought to have a Truman committee. I have offered it I think three times on the floor. I will offer it again.

But this amendment is different. This amendment is called Honest Leadership and Accountability in Contracting. It is a separate bill by over 30 my colleagues here in Senate, and I offer it in total as an amendment to the underlying Defense authorization bill.

My hope is we can have a discussion about this. I have simply scratched the surface about waste, fraud, and abuse that we have uncovered. It is pretty unbelievable. The American taxpayer shouldn't stand for it, and neither should the U.S. Congress, and we ought to take action right now on this piece of legislation. There is no better time than right now to decide we are going to do something about this on behalf of the taxpayers of this country.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, my understanding is that there will be a motion, perhaps a motion to table--in any

event, a vote on my amendment at 3:45. I had asked that I be allowed time to speak once again on the amendment.

It is an obligatory statement to come to the floor and congratulate the chairman and the ranking member, but in this case I will always mean it. The work of my friend and colleague from Virginia, as chairman of this committee, is really excellent work. So, too, is the work of Senator Levin from Michigan. I always say this is a big, big piece of legislation, a difficult piece of legislation. The Defense authorization bill is a real piece of work to put together. It is made even more difficult during wartime to stretch for all of the needs-- unlimited wants with limited resources. So I come here understanding that there are things in this legislation that are very important that inure to the credit of the chairman and the ranking member.

I want to describe something that is not in the legislation, however, and the opportunity to offer it to this legislation at this time is very important. This bill will authorize the expenditure of a great deal of money. That is not new. We have authorized the expenditure of a lot of money for a lot of things, particularly with respect to the military expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years-- something close to $350 billion. That is with a ``b,'' $350 billion has been spent. That was virtually all done as emergency appropriations, not paid for with anything, just added on top of the debt.

Even as we have done that, we in the Congress have also voted for $18 billion in reconstruction funding in the country of Iraq. That $18 billion in reconstruction for the country of Iraq has gone out in various contracts and been spent. What we are hearing now, as a result of a massive amount of money being spent in a fairly short period of time, is the most hair-raising tale of waste and fraud and abuse that I have ever heard.

I dare say that never in the history of this country has so much money been wasted so quickly. And, yes, there is fraud involved, there is abuse involved, and it is the case that there is a dramatic amount of taxpayers' money that is now being wasted.

I went through this morning a description of what is happening in some areas. In our policy committee, we held hearings over 3 years about this issue. This is a photograph which I showed this morning of this man, the man with the brown belt. He was actually in his office in Iraq. These are $100 bills wrapped in Saran Wrap. This represents $2 million, and it was to be paid to a company called Custer Battles, named after Mr. Custer and Mr. Battles. They are two folks who went to Iraq to seek their fortune--one I believe a former Army Ranger. Neither had experience as contractors, but they knew there was a lot of money to be made. They went to Iraq to set up a company. They got there, and the first contract, I believe, which they received was to provide security at the Baghdad Airport, which at that point wasn't open.

As they provided security at the Baghdad Airport, whistleblowers came forward who were working for them and said: What is going on here is really pretty awful. In fact, one of the whistleblowers was threatened. Someone threatened to kill him for speaking out. But they said it is wrong and awful. This company that had the contract for security at Baghdad Airport took forklift trucks off the airport, which belonged to the airport, put them in a warehouse, painted them blue, and sold them back to the Coalition Provisional Authority. It is the sort of thing that was going on.

This picture of $100 bills wrapped in Saran Wrap was $2 million that was paid to this company called Custer Battles. This fellow who was in charge of that money said there was a basement with a vault in this building in Iraq where he said he thought billions and billions of dollars in cash was stored.

The message to the contractors in Iraq was: Bring bags because we pay in cash. Bring a sack because we pay cash.

Then there is the story about a contract for air-conditioning a building in Baghdad. The contract goes to a subcontractor, which goes to another subcontractor, and a fourth-level subcontractor. And the payment for air-conditioning turns out to be payments to four contractors, the fourth of which puts a fan in a room. Yes, the American taxpayer paid for an air-conditioner and, after the money goes through four hands like ice cubes travel around the room, there is a fan put in a room in Iraq.

I mentioned this morning that every time you talk about this you have to talk about Halliburton. Every time you talk about Halliburton, they say you are talking about Vice President Cheney. Not true. He hasn't run Halliburton for many years, but this company received very large, no-bid, sole-source contracts worth billions of dollars and massive amounts of money have been wasted.

Investigators and inspectors at the Department of Defense discovered this contractor had overcharged. The contracts were in some cases awarded under questionable circumstances.

I described just a few of the examples today, such as $85,000 new trucks that had a plugged fuel pump and left by the side of the road-- brand new--to be burned; $85,000 brand new trucks with a flat tire, left beside the road to be torched.

It is pretty unbelievable, the stories we have heard about what is going on with these contractors in Iraq.

The buyer for Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subcontractor for Halliburton, came and testified. He was a purchaser stationed in Kuwait. His job was to purchase things that the Army needed in Iraq. He was told you should purchase hand towels for the military. So he gets about the business of buying hand towels--tens of thousands of hand towels, except he was told by his bosses, KBR, don't buy just the ordinary hand towels. We want to have them embroidered ``KBR,'' for Kellogg, Brown & Root, therefore doubling the price. Buy the towels, doubling the price. It doesn't matter. The taxpayer is paying for all of this, and it has cost-plus. Don't worry, be happy. Charge as much as you can.

And $7,500 a month to lease an SUV; $45 a case for Coca-Cola. It doesn't matter. The taxpayer is paying the bill. Order 25 tons of nails, 50,000 pounds, the wrong size, doesn't matter, lay them on the sand in Iraq. Nobody will know. Just 25 tons of nails.

The stories are pretty unbelievable.

Frankly, one of the great surprises to me is that the Pentagon has not been very interested.

A guy named Rory came over here. He was actually in Iraq. He was a food service supervisor at Kellogg, Brown & Root. He was a supervisor in the food service kitchen. He said the convoys of trucks that were hauling food in would occasionally be attacked. There was shrapnel in the back of the trucks. They were told to go back and pick the shrapnel out of the food, save the bullets as souvenirs for the supervisors, but pull the fragments out of the food and put the food in the food line. And then he said: Routinely we would have food that had an expired date stamp. This food is good until August 22nd, expired; routinely expired food. What did the supervisor say? It doesn't matter. Just feed it to the troops.

I am surprised that Secretary Rumsfeld, for example, didn't become apoplectic about that. You would think he would have a seizure when they were paying contractors to feed the troops and to feed them outdated food and nobody seems to care very much; or feeding 42,000 people, according to the billing record, and only 14,000 people were eating.

I come from really small town of 300 people. We have one little restaurant. You could miss a cheeseburger, or two or three. But to miss 28,000 meals when you say you fed the troops that you didn't feed? In my hometown, we have a word for that sort of thing.

It is unbelievable what is going on and the stories. These aren't stories that we have heard second or third-hand. Rory, for example, worked there, lived there, served food there in the cafeteria. He was told this.

He said this on the record: When the auditors come around to your base in Iraq and come to your food service operation, you dare not talk to them. If you talk to Government auditors, you are going to be in some real trouble. One of two things will happen. You will either be fired or you are going to be sent to an area that has intense fighting. It turns out that Rory was sent to Fallujah in the middle of hostilities there because he had the gall to talk to

Government auditors who were asking questions about what was happening in the food service operation.

No one in this Chamber believes this sort of stuff ought to go on. It shouldn't happen. Yet, I think there is so much money being spent with big, sole-source, no-bid contracts being let.

I described this woman this morning. I am going to do it again because I have met her several times now. I think what has happened to her is a crying shame. Bunnatine Greenhouse, the highest civilian official in the Corps of Engineers, rose to become the highest civilian official to serve in the Corps of Engineers. Well-educated, smart, with a great career that every supervisor said was excellent by every evaluation, this woman knows what she is doing. She is an outstanding public servant. But she ran into some trouble.

The trouble was she saw contracts being let that violated contract provisions. She saw meetings being held in which big companies were part of the meetings, talking about the new contracts that were going to be let. She began to complain, saying: You are violating the rules of contracting. The old-boy network didn't like that at all. Bunnatine Greenhouse got into trouble for speaking out. She was demoted. This woman who had the courage to speak out against waste, fraud, and abuse paid for it with her job.

She said:

I can unequivocally state that the abuse relating to the

contracts awarded to Kellogg, Brown & Root represents the

most blatant and improper contract abuse that I have

witnessed during the course of my professional career.

A career, I might add, was judged--not by the Department of Defense-- to be outstanding by people outside of the Department of Defense who worked with her. For that, she paid with her job. And nobody seems to care.

By the way, this job is now being filled by someone who is unqualified. The general who made the decision to fill this job with someone unqualified said it is true the person they put in that job to replace Bunnatine Greenhouse doesn't have the necessary experience, but she is now being trained.

That is really helpful. I assume that is what they were doing down at FEMA when they put something like seven of the top FEMA officials in place who were cronies who had no experience in disaster preparedness or relief. I guess they were being trained too. The problem is Hurricane Katrina hit and that agency was a mess.

We don't need cronyism. We need good, strong professional people who have the courage to speak out when they see something wrong.

The amendment that I have offered is very simple. The amendment that I have offered deals with war profiteering. Nobody in this Chamber believes that anybody ought to be justified in profiteering from war. If there are people profiteering from war, there ought to be strong sanctions.

This amendment includes a number of different pieces of legislation. The war profiteering amendment is one which Senator Leahy constructed in the last Congress and brought forward. That is a portion of this amendment. The amendment deals with contract abuse, requiring competition in contracting.

Also, the amendment has protections for whistleblowers. We ought to care about that.

There are about six or eight provisions of this amendment that I described earlier today. But I want to conclude with this.

I mentioned earlier the Custer Battles company. They are the subject at this point of criminal prosecution.

The Custer Battles folks are the two men named Custer and Battles. ``60 Minutes'' just did a program on them on CBS. We held hearings about Custer Battles. They went to Iraq, as I said earlier, and got a contract for security at the airport. They eventually ended up being paid more than $100 million in contracts. These are people without experience in contracting. They went to Iraq to seek their fortune and to get contracts. And they did.

Here is what the Baghdad airport director of security said in a memo to the Coalition Provisional Authority. That was us. We were running Iraq before they created their new government. Here is what the Baghdad airport director of security said:

Custer Battles have shown themselves to be unresponsive,

uncooperative, incompetent, deceitful, manipulative and war

profiteers. Other than that, they are swell fellows.

Isn't that unbelievable? Does anybody dare say now that we didn't know what was going on over there? They knew.

What is still now going on over there is unbelievable.

What we need at this point on behalf of the American taxpayers and on behalf of the troops who put on the uniform and serve this country, and without question put their lives on the line, what we need on their behalf is an understanding that we are doing the right thing here.

This piece of legislation, this authorization bill, is a good bill. It will be a better bill with this amendment because this amendment plugs a very big hole that exists with respect to contracting and profiteering.

I mentioned earlier today that I have previously offered and will again offer an amendment that establishes a Truman Committee here in U.S. Senate. I wasn't around, of course, during the Truman Committee. The Truman Committee was established in the early 1940s at a time when a Democratic Senator with a Democratic President in the White House said we have to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse. And he did on a bipartisan basis. They put together a special committee, and they sunk their teeth into this issue of waste, fraud, and abuse. It was unbelievable what they discovered. The country was better and stronger as a result of it.

I bet sometimes FDR gritted his teeth over the investigations. But it was not about the White House at all; it was about making sure the taxpayers were getting their money's worth, making sure we were doing the right things for the troops. The same is true now.

I don't offer this with any political intent at all. It is just that I sat hour after hour after hour and listened to stories--yes, some of them about Custer Battles, some about KRB, some about Halliburton, and some about other companies--and I have seen unbelievable stories and heard unbelievable stories about waste, fraud, and abuse. I see very little desire at the Pentagon to sink their teeth into it and fix the problems.

The woman who had the courage to stand up and blow the whistle has lost her job. This is not a very hospitable place for people willing to have the courage to speak out. We ought to stand up for Bunny Greenhouse and say we need more like her. When you see something wrong, you report it. When you see something bad, you stop it. We need more people like her.

This amendment is not about her; it is about protecting people who have the courage to stand up for our interests and who care about what is being spent, what is being done, who care about when we are being defrauded and when people are war-profiteering.

I ask consent that Senator Kennedy and Senator Clinton be added as cosponsors of the amendment.

Mr. President, let me conclude by saying that this amendment is not aimed at the White House. It is not aimed at some political objective. It is certainly not aimed at the chairman and ranking member of this bill. This is aimed at trying to find common sense in the way we deal with these issues, especially in wartime.

I mentioned this morning that common sense is sometimes described as genius in work clothes. Common sense could take us a long way if we just applied it in these circumstances. We understand what happens when a company gets a special deal--by the way, you get a big old contract worth billions of dollars, you do not have to bid on it, and we will negotiate the terms later. I understand what happens then. That is like leaving the till open. The stories that come from it are unbelievable. On behalf of the American taxpayer, we ought to do something about it.

Perhaps my colleague wishes to respond.

If I might just respond briefly, I don't think this is a substantive answer to the very serious allegations raised by Ms. Greenhouse--not just in her statements, but in other documentation about improper meetings, about improper actions by the Corps of Engineers, in violation of their own regulations. Nowhere do I see the Pentagon officials or General Strock willing to address those in their specifics. I will await their response to that, as I have waited now for 2 years, but that answer is not yet forthcoming.

It is perfectly fine to have this printed in the Record. I will, during this debate, evaluate it and also respond to it, but even with this, we have never gotten a straight answer from the Pentagon about these issues. They are very anxious and interested in making sure there are no waves around this on contracting because they have their own way of doing things, and if it does not work out, that is tough, they do not want news coverage.

I appreciate the courtesy of Senator Warner, and I may do so at an appropriate time.

On behalf of Senator Kennedy, I ask unanimous consent that his Navy detailee, Tom Crowley, and a State Department fellow, Rick Driscoll, be granted floor privileges during the consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act of fiscal year 2007.

Mr. President, the issues that have just been discussed by my colleague, and others as well, about fiscal discipline are very important issues. I would make the point that I don't think one can find fiscal discipline around here with a high-powered telescope. There is no fiscal discipline around here, unfortunately. In fact, the very bill we are debating at this point is appropriating something over $90 billion, none of it paid for--none of it.

Emergency funding for defense, emergency funding for Hurricane Katrina. We have done emergency funding for defense previously. We have done it again, we have done it again, we have done it again. We are now over the hundreds of billions of dollars, all in emergency funding, and we are pretending somehow we have some discipline. It is imperative for this Congress to begin thinking about what this means for our kids and grandkids.

The conference report before us is a conference report that falls short on this very specific area about which I am concerned. Let me mention another area first.

One of the things this bill does is fund a great deal of money for the Defense Department for money that has been consumed in Iraq and Afghanistan in prosecuting the war. It replenishes military accounts, and we are going to do that, we understand that. We have a responsibility. We cannot send American troops abroad and decide we are not going to fund that which they need to do their jobs. We understand that. It would be smarter if we paid for it all, by the way. It would make a great deal of sense if we decided to pay for this rather than charge it to the kids and grandkids. But here we are, once again.

One amendment that was stuck in the bill when it left the Senate was very simple. It was the determination of the Senate that we were not going to have permanent military bases in the country of Iraq, that we were not going to have permanent military basing in Iraq. The Senate agreed with that. My expectation is that we are in Iraq because we want to provide freedom for the Iraqi people, we want to deal with the insurgency, and at some point bring our troops home.

Saddam Hussein was found in a rat hole. He is now on trial. Perhaps he will be executed. The Iraqi people are rid of Saddam Hussein, who committed mayhem and murder on a grand scale. There are unbelievable numbers of skeletons of people who were murdered by Saddam Hussein who turned up in mass graves. So we are there. And we want the American troops to finish their mission and to be able to come home.

But the Senate had previously decided on this bill that we wanted not to have long-term military basing in Iraq. One of the reasons for that decision I think is the administration asked originally for $1.1 billion to build a U.S. embassy in Iraq, which would be the largest embassy in the world: 1,200 employees and $1.1 billion. So I regret that the provision dealing with a decision that we were not going to have a permanent military presence, military basing in Iraq was taken out in conference. That was a bipartisan decision by the Senate to put it in, and I regret it was taken out. Nonetheless, it was.

Let me describe just for a moment my concern about another significant part of this bill. I am happy to be supportive of the efforts to help the people in the gulf region who were devastated by the worst natural disaster to ever hit this country. When Hurricane Katrina hit, people were displaced and people were killed, and it was devastating to be there, and devastating to watch, for that matter. I think this Congress very quickly said to those people in the gulf region, You are not alone and we want to help you. I come willingly and in an interested way to be a part of the people who say we want to help you.

But this piece of legislation that is now before us with respect to family farming--and that is what I want to talk about specifically-- says something very unusual and very unfair. It says those farmers in the Gulf of Mexico who lost their crops due to a hurricane called Katrina are going to get some help. They are going to get some disaster relief. All the other farmers across this country who lost their crops: Sorry, you are out of luck.

The U.S. Senate included a provision that I authored in the Appropriations Committee that provided $3.9 billion in disaster assistance for all farmers in this country who lost their crops due to a disaster. Let me just describe what happened around this country last year.

Last year around this country we had a whole series of things happen. We had serious drought, the third worst year for drought purposes in Illinois since 1895. We had the third driest year in well over a century. In Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Arkansas: The worst drought since the 1980s. Oklahoma wildfires destroyed--burned--one out of every 100 acres. In North Dakota, this is an example of what the fields looked like. We had 1 million acres that could never be planted. It was never planted. One million acres was planted and washed away. We had farmers who had just dramatic amounts of rainfall. We had one farmer who received one-third of all of the yearly rainfall in one day; just washed everything away. This farmer lost everything.

Once again the U.S. Senate said: We are going to provide disaster help to farmers who lost their crops. It doesn't matter where they are. In the Gulf of Mexico? Yes. To a hurricane? Yes. But then when we got to conference, the President prevailed. The President said, I will veto this bill if it has disaster relief in it, and the Speaker of the House and the folks who march to that tune in the conference said: No, you can't have disaster relief; we will only allow disaster relief for gulf farmers who lost their crops.

So that is the way it came out of the conference. The folks who were burned out, the folks who dried out, the folks who were flooded, those farmers were left behind, once again. And it starts at the doorstep of the White House.

It was this President who came to North Dakota some long while ago and said to farmers: When you need me, I will be there. I will be there for you. Well, we needed him. He is the one who said, I will veto the legislation if you provide disaster relief for farmers. So

he was successful. They stripped the Senate provision out of the bill. When it came out of the Senate, it was a bipartisan provision. It was supported by the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. It was supported by the Senate conferees upon a motion of mine, once again, in the conference. I sat downstairs in this building at 1 o'clock in the morning. We fought for five hours to try to put this in conference, to keep the Senate provision in conference, and we lost.

Someone once said that common sense is genius dressed in work clothes. The question of common sense here is this: Why should we have a circumstance that we are going to legislate now with this conference report that says if you are a farmer in one part of the country and lost everything, you get a little help. If you are a farmer in the rest of the country, Sorry, Charlie, it is over; no help for you.

Rodney Nelson, who is a cowboy poet in North Dakota, wrote an op-ed piece once in the North Dakota papers, and he asked a question about farming. There aren't many people here who are farmers. We come wearing suits. We have nice, shined shoes. We do our work in white shirts. Nobody here is in farming. But the people out there living on the land, raising livestock, planting a seed, hoping they will grow a crop, hoping they will be able to harvest and go to the grain elevator, and perhaps make some money, and be able to carry over for spring planting the next year, those are America's heroes. Those family farmers struggle.

Rodney Nelson asked this question: What is it worth to a country to have a kid that knows how to plant a crop? What is it worth to a country to have a kid that knows how to fix machinery, how to hang a door, how to weld a seam, how to grease a combine, how to butcher a hog? What is it worth to a country to have a kid know how to feed a newborn calf out of a pail? What is it worth to a country to have kids that know all of these things? What is it worth to a country to have a kid know how to go out and work in bitter cold winters or hot summer sun? What is that worth to a country?

The only university that teaches all of those things is American family farming. It is out under the yard light on the family farm someplace. That is where they teach these courses. Carpentry, welding, mechanics, and horticulture, all of these things you learn on the family farms--agriculture, livestock.

Once again, the farmers who have had these fields and ended up having no crop, some of whom are now out of business, they will lose those farms because they can't go a year without income. The bank doesn't say, We are sorry about that. I will tell you what. We won't need our money from you. You just don't need to pay us.

Some of these farmers will have been gone by now. But we were trying to say to them, You are not alone. We know you got hit really hard with torrential rain in North Dakota and drought in Missouri and Illinois. That is what the Senate was saying. The Republicans and Democrats here said that. And then we got to conference and the President and the House conferees led by the Speaker said: No way; we don't intend to do that.

We are not asking for the moon. This was just a little bit spilling from the barrel. We have talked about all of this money, billions and tens of billions and now hundreds of billions of dollars, all of which have gone through an Appropriations Committee, none of which has been paid for to deal with wars and all of these issues. I understand why we have to do this. What I don't understand is why we are not willing to do what we should do as a Nation to farmers last year who got hit with natural disasters and who lost everything.

I don't come to the floor to say that the people in the gulf shouldn't be helped. Of course they should. I don't come to the floor to say farmers who lost their crops in the gulf shouldn't be helped. Of course they should. I am the first to support them. But I do come to the floor of the Senate to say it is fundamentally unfair to decide there are a couple of classes of farmers who lost everything, and the first is a class that lost it to a natural event, a weather event that has a named called a hurricane.

My colleague, Senator Durbin, suggested maybe our problem was that-- since we had a weather event in June of last year that provided one- third annual rainfall in 24 hours and washed every seed out of the ground--maybe our problem was we didn't name it. They name hurricanes. They didn't name that torrential rain. Maybe if they had named it, then we would have a circumstance where the President and others would say, Let's treat everybody the same. If you got hurt, if you lost everything, we are here to help. That should have been the refrain from this Congress and should have been the refrain from the White House. Regrettably, it wasn't.

So, after working for months, after beginning in the Senate Appropriations Committee on a bipartisan basis, with the chairman of the committee and others, Senator Burns from Montana and many others, after doing that, after coming from the floor of the Senate and defending it, getting it through the Senate and going to conference, we got stiffed. When I say ``we,'' I am talking about people who lost everything out there that fully expected this Congress to do the right thing.

Regrettably, this conference report, while it does the right thing in some areas, in my judgment shortchanges a lot of farm families who had high hopes that this Congress would do the right thing for them.

So we will live to fight another day for fairness, but this conference report with respect to the way it treats family farmers who suffered disasters last year certainly cannot be linked under the category of fairness, in my judgment.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, this is an interesting debate, and in some ways it is very troubling. I wish to talk a little about fiscal policy and where we find ourselves.

It is almost as if this place is disconnected from what is happening. The night before last, I sat in HC-5 until about 1:30 in the morning working on the emergency supplemental appropriation request--roughly $90 billion for Iraq, Afghanistan, and a portion for Katrina. None of it is paid for; it is just emergency spending--$90 billion. This takes us to something close to $400 billion over these recent years, none of it paid for.

Not many weeks ago, we had on the floor of the Senate a proposed $70 billion tax cut. That passed. It wasn't paid for. Just cutting the revenues. I voted against that. So we are spending money without covering it. We are cutting taxes. The gross federal debt will be $8.6 trillion at the end of 2006. We will add over $600 billion to the indebtedness just this year alone in fiscal policy. We will add over $700 billion this

year alone in trade deficits. That is different from the fiscal policy. Combined this year, we likely will be in debt by some $1.3 trillion. Everybody understands this is completely off track and dangerous.

So what is the business today? How about cutting some taxes again? What is going to come behind this? A third tax cut bill coming from the Finance Committee. It is unbelievable. It is almost as if somebody pulled the plug out of the socket, so there is no current coming through here by which people can think straight. You can go to the hometown cafe or restaurant and folks ask: What do you do next? You are choking on debt up to your neck--$8.6 trillion of fiscal policy debt this year. It is going to increase to almost $12 trillion in the next five years, we expect. So what do we do next? We say we ought to get rid of the ``death tax.''

But there is no death tax, of course. This is a function of a clever pollster, paid handsomely by people with a lot of money to come up with a moniker that would allow them politically to cast this into the water and have it float. My colleague spoke at great length about the ``death tax.'' Clever, interesting, but it doesn't exist.

There is, in fact, a tax on inherited wealth in this country. Very few Americans pay it. Currently, the exemption is $2 million for a husband and $2 million for a wife. If you don't have $4 million in net assets in your family, don't worry about this issue. That is going to $3.5 million apiece, so that is $7 million. If you are not above $7 million, don't worry about it.

By the way, notwithstanding those exemptions, if one spouse dies, the other owns everything--a 100-percent exemption--and there is no estate tax. It doesn't matter what the estate is worth; the other spouse owns it. There is a 100-percent spousal exemption.

This ruse of suggesting that this is a death tax is an unbelievable. The most interesting hoax of all is this small business and family farm issue. I will tell you why it is a hoax. I came to the floor of the Senate twice and offered amendments twice. The last time I offered the amendment, it would have completely repealed the estate tax obligation of any small business and any family farm passed from the parents to the children, the lineal descendants who continued to operate it. If that family business or farm, no matter the size, were passed from the parents to the children, on January 1, 2003, it would have forever been exempt from an estate tax. My amendment would have taken that issue off the table. And 54 Members of the Senate voted against that, including the people here today crying crocodile tears over small business and family farm issues. When they had the chance to do this, they didn't want to. Why? That is not the purpose.

The purpose of this issue is to say to the wealthiest Americans that we want to help you. My colleague said we are going to craft something that is a little bit of a modification. He didn't tell you that the modification would lose some 80 percent of the money. But his real interest and the interest of most of the folks who are speaking is to repeal the death tax, which doesn't exist.

Now, we are at war, up to our neck in debt--$8.6 trillion in debt, heading toward $12 trillion in debt--with a budget policy that is completely out of control and a trade policy that is wildly out of control. What do those who have the majority in this Chamber decide they ought to do? The President, the majority in this Chamber and in the House--what is their next step? It is to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans.

Let me tell you what Warren Buffett says about this. He is an interesting guy. He is the second richest man in the world but a really public-spirited man. He said, ``If this is class warfare, my side is winning.'' He doesn't approve of this; he thinks this is nuts. He has an estimated worth of $42 billion. He said:

I personally think that society is responsible for a very

significant percentage of what I have earned. If you stick me

down in the middle of Bangladesh, or Peru, or someplace, you

will find out how much this talent is going to produce in the

wrong kind of soil.

Being here is what allowed him to be successful, he said. He said, by implication, that we owe something back.

We are at war, and my colleagues have decided that the pressing priority is to remove the tax burden from the wealthiest people in this country, the ones worth billions of dollars. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in one of his fireside chats--this in another age when we were at war:

Not all of us can have the privilege of fighting our

enemies in distant parts of the world. Not all of us can have

the privilege of working in a munitions factory or a

shipyard, or on the farms or in the oil fields or mines,

producing the weapons or raw materials that are needed by our

Armed Forces. But there is one front and one battle where

everyone in the United States--every man, woman, and child--

is in action. . . . That front is right here at home, in our

daily lives, and in our daily tasks. Here at home everyone

will have the privilege of making whatever self-denial is

necessary, not only to supply our fighting men, but to keep

the economic structure of our country fortified and secure. .

. .

Do you see any urge at all by the majority here, by the White House, to call this country to action for some public spiritedness, about what we need to do together? We have soldiers dying on the battlefield, and we are sitting downstairs in the Capitol Building until about 1:30 in the morning appropriating money for those soldiers for their munitions, for their trucks and tanks and battleships, and we will not pay for it. The majority party says we will not pay for it. Even as we spend money, we won't pay for it. But we see that their highest priority is to cut taxes for those who are very well off.

The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now own a bigger piece of the pie than the poorest 90 percent added together. That gap is growing. This legislation will once again decide to expand the inequality of income in this country.

Let me say this again. Those who come to this floor talking about small businesses and family farms had a chance to vote for the repeal of any estate tax obligation for any transfer of any family-owned business or any family-owned farm, and that full repeal would have been effective on January 1, 2003; and 54 Members of the Senate voted no. I daresay almost everybody speaking today in support of this legislation because they believe it will help family farms and small businesses, when they had the chance to do it, they voted against it.

And that tells you a little something about what is really at stake.

Has anybody here ever seen a hearse pull a U-Haul? Don't think so. You can't take it with you. We are on this Earth for a relatively short period of time. We are blessed to live here, a unique spot on this planet. And this, in my judgment, requires of us some responsibilities.

Oh, I know some don't want to lose anything. They want to take it all with them. But you can't take it all with you. The question is: Should at least some of the largesse that those who have been most successful in this country have accumulated in this lifetime bear a tax because most represent an accumulation of assets that never ever bore a tax? Growth appreciation of stocks that has never been taxed, should that not also contribute to this country's defense and well-being? The answer is yes.

I hope we decide to do the right thing and reject this proposal.

I move to reconsider the vote.

I ask unanimous consent the Senator from Iowa be recognized. I believe the Senator from Alabama wishes to be recognized. I am happy to proceed following those two.

Mr. President, I understand there is an order with respect to my presentation on this matter.

Mr. President, this reminds me of Madam Tussaud's wax museum. It looks like there are people here, except there is no movement. Month after month after month, we hear the results of unbelievably bad trade agreements that pull the rug out from under our workers and farmers, pulling the rug out from under our economy, ringing up the highest trade deficits in the our history, shipping American jobs overseas, even as we import cheap labor through the backdoor, and no one says a thing. No one does a thing. We today have a proposal before us to approve the nomination of a new U.S. trade ambassador. For what purpose?

Let me describe what is happening with our trade deficit. This is the trade deficit from the most recent year going back to 1995. We are hemorrhaging in red ink.

These are the largest trade deficits in the history of humankind, by far, not even close with any other country. What does this mean? This means that we are selling part of our country every day to those who live outside of our country. It is called the selling of America.

We seem to think that it is all right to have a trade deficit of $2 billion a day. That means that we import products more than we export to the rest of the world, and we pay for those imports with our currency or debt instruments. The result is at the moment the bank of Korea holds $200 billion of our currency; the Chinese, $750 billion; the Japanese, $800 billion; the Taiwanese, $250 billion. We are literally selling our country with these trade deficits every day.

Trade deficits are not just about selling America piece by piece. It is about shipping American jobs overseas and undercutting American workers all at the same time.

Winston Churchill said: The further backward you look, the further forward you can see. So I will look back a little bit. It is surprising to me that we have the nomination of a trade ambassador on the floor of the Senate and no real discussion, save that of my colleague, Senator Conrad, about the merits of where we are headed. This country is dangerously off-track with wildly inflated and mushroomed trade deficits. It is getting worse, much worse, not better. Yet there is not a whimper here in the Congress about it.

Part of the reason is that the folks who work here are not going to have their jobs outsourced. No one wearing a blue suit and suspenders who hangs around here is going to have their job sent to China. If that were the case, we would have a change in trade policy immediately. But nobody loses their job here. For that matter, no journalist loses their job. That is why all you

read, for example, in most of these major newspapers in support of this trade policy that, as we can see from this chart, is a massive failure. Just take a look at a portion of it. Two hundred billion of that $700 billion is with China alone. You can take a look at what is happening there, dramatic growth.

Here is the trade strategy we are currently working under: exporting good American jobs and importing cheap labor. We just finished importing cheap labor with the immigration bill 2 weeks ago. I didn't support that. I voted against that. I voted against the trade agreements that have allowed us to export good jobs.

I have gone through at great length in the Senate a range of issues. Let me use a couple to describe what has happened and what our trade agreements are about.

We are now negotiating a trade agreement with Korea. Let me talk about automobile trade with Korea. See if anybody cares about that, see maybe if this new trade ambassador would care about that. Last year we got 730,863 cars coming in on ships from Korea. They loaded all the Korean cars on ships, sailed across the ocean and offloaded 730,000 Korean cars in the United States.

Guess how many American cars we were able to sell in Korea. Seven hundred thirty thousand? No. Four thousand two hundred. Ninety-nine percent of the automobiles on the streets in Korea are produced in Korea. Why? They don't want American vehicles to be allowed into their market. They want to send their vehicles here for sale, but they don't want our vehicles sold in Korea.

This imbalance exists. Does anybody care about it? It doesn't mean a thing to most people. What it means to a lot of families is they have lost their jobs. United Auto Workers have lost their jobs. But nobody cares much about that because nobody in this Chamber is going to lose their job because of this imbalance in automobile trade.

Japan: 95 percent of the cars driving in the streets of Japan are produced in Japan. Why don't we export more cars to Japan? They don't want them. They, like China and many other parts of the world, including Korea, want to exercise their right to send their products to the American marketplace, but they sure don't want to have their marketplace wide open to that which is produced by American workers. That is the last thing they want.

Let me go back a few decades to 1970 or so. The largest American corporation was General Motors. In most cases people who went to work for GM worked there for a lifetime. That was their job. They were going to retire there and did. They worked there for a lifetime, got good pay, good benefits, good retirement. Now, 30 years later, the largest corporation in America is Wal-Mart. Average salary, according to published reports, is about $18,000 or $19,000 a year.

A substantial portion of their employees have no benefits. Of those eligible for health care benefits, they pay double the amount that most employees of corporations would pay for health care. Many of those who do have full-time jobs at low salaries cannot afford the benefits that are offered. So have we made progress in these 30 years?

By the way, with respect to Wal-Mart, 70 percent of the products on their shelves is from China. Wal-Mart's pressure will lead their to close their American operations and move them to China. The only way to sell it the way the we want to is have it produced in China, where you can pay a worker 33 cents an hour.

I read a month or so ago that China has finally purchased Whammo Corporation. There are a lot of companies moving, deciding they cannot afford to produce in America anymore. They don't want to pay U.S. workers decent wages. They want to produce in China for 33 cents an hour, where you don't have to worry about health care and retirement. We have seen 4 million to 5 million American jobs gone from our country.

I noticed in the newspaper that Chinese purchased Whammo Corporation--Frisbee, Hula Hoop, Slip 'N Slide. It is sort of the hood ornament on what is wrong with our trade. So Whammo is gone. What about the steelworker in America or the textile worker in America or the metal fabricator in America or the family farmer or the software engineer--their jobs are gone in increasing numbers.

Alan Blinder, the former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said recently in a Foreign Affairs article that there are roughly are 42 million to 56 million jobs in America that are subject to being outsourced to other countries--China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and more.

American companies have discovered that this large planet has a billion to a billion and a half people, and perhaps more, where if you move the technology and capital, you can employ people in other parts of the world for pennies. You can hire kids, you can work 12-year-olds 12 hours a day and pay them 12 cents an hour. You can ship the product to Toledo, Fargo, Los Angeles, or Lansing, MI, and say to the American producer and business and worker: Compete with that. The fact is, you cannot compete with that, and you should not be asked to compete with that.

We fought for a century in this country for the standards of production that have made this a great place and allowed us to expand the middle class. I have spoken before about James Fyler, who died of lead poisoning; he was shot 54 times. Earlier in this century, he and others were standing up for the right of people to organize, for workers to be able to organize. We finally became a country in which workers can organize without having to go to prison, like they do in China. I have the names of people sitting in prison in China because they wanted to organize workers for a fair deal. We signed the Fair Labor Standards Act in this country and established a minimum wage and gave people the right to organize. We did a whole series of things-- child labor laws--that have established the conditions of production, that produced a burgeoning middle class and the strongest economy the world has ever known. Now it is systematically being taken apart. I know it is hard to see day by day, but you watch what is happening in this country to the good jobs, the jobs with security that pay well, with benefits. One by one, 1,000 by 1,000 and, yes, a million by a million, they are leaving this country.

No, it is not just the bottom rung of the economic ladder; it is also engineers, software producers, and others. Nobody here seems to care very much. This Congress certainly doesn't. This Congress supports all that. This Congress supports giving a tax break to companies that ship their jobs overseas. Show me a company that fires all the American workers and ships their jobs to China, and I will tell you that this Congress supports giving that company a tax break--$1.2 billion a year our current Tax Code spends in tax cuts to companies that ship their American jobs overseas. It is unbelievable.

I have offered four amendments in this Senate to shut that perverse tax break down and I have lost four times. In 2005, Bo Anderson, one of the top executives at General Motors dealing with parts and supplies, called 380 parts and suppliers together; he called the executives of the parts suppliers to a meeting. He said to them that you need to be building your automobile parts in China to reduce the cost. In other words, move those jobs offshore, get rid of those American workers. Delphi, which used to be the largest General Motors parts supplier, were paying workers $26 to $30 an hour with benefits. Well, that is over. They are in bankruptcy and, of course, it is blamed on the workers. Nobody talked about the executives and what role they might have had. They want to outsource the jobs, and for the jobs they would keep here, they want to pay $8 to $10 an hour. I am wondering how you create a country with a growing middle class and a consumer ability to make purchases in this country if jobs are going elsewhere in search of pennies an hour. IBM laid off 13,000 people; they are going to ship the jobs to India. They said to workers, by the way: This is not a comment on the excellent work you have done. See you later. Your job is gone.

The question is, What are we building and what does all this mean? The reason I mention all of this is that all of it comes from trade agreements. We have all of these trade agreements, and one is NAFTA with Mexico. We turned

a small trade surplus into a giant deficit with Mexico. It is pretty unbelievable when you think about it. My colleague says that the current nominee believes that the trade agreement with Mexico is a huge success. She has not lost her job to outsourcing either. But it is not a success by any standard. The trade deficit with Mexico and with Canada and with Europe, with Japan, Korea, and China--it is a disaster. Nobody seems to care much.

Now, I want to talk a little about this notion of free trade. It sounds like such a wonderful term, ``free trade.'' Freedom. Free trade means that you want to substitute that which we have fought for and built, that which people have died for, that which people have debated for a long time--what are the standards of production? What is being an American all about? What is protecting children? What is a fair wage? What is a safe workplace? What is the right to organize worth? It is trading that in and saying none of that matters. The largest corporations can pole-vault over all of it and move their factory to China. We are taking apart that which we built for a century. That is what the trade agreements are doing. I have shown you the red ink. So the trade agreements are an abysmal failure.

I would like to speak now about something that we learned very recently, involving sweatshops in the country of Jordan.

At the outset, let me say that the trade agreement with Jordan was slightly better than all the others. I give credit to President Clinton because they negotiated a free trade agreement with Jordan that had standards with respect to workers' rights, for a change. So it was a step forward--not a giant step but a step in the right direction.

What has happened to trade with Jordan since that time? The New York Times has written an article based on some work by the National Labor Committee. They have done terrific work investigating what is going on in Jordan. Remember, this was supposed to have created the gold standard for labor protection for workers, signed in 1999. But what happened since then is that Jordan has flown in so-called guest workers from countries such as Bangladesh and China to make products in Jordan for export to this country. So we see products in stores such as Wal- Mart, Target, and others, that have now, we know, come from sweatshops in Jordan under our free trade agreement.

Here is how the New York Times describes these sweat shops:

Propelled by a free trade agreement with the U.S., apparel

manufacturing is booming in Jordan. Exports to America are

soaring twentyfold in the last 5 years. But some foreign

workers in Jordanian factories that produce garments for

Target, Wal-Mart, and others are complaining of dismal

conditions--of 20-hour days, of not being paid for months and

months, of being hit by supervisors and of being jailed when

they complain.

These factories in Jordan are flying in planeloads of workers from the poorest countries, such as Bangladesh, to work in slavelike conditions. They also ship in Chinese materials--textiles in this case--to those manufacturers. What you end up with are Bangladesh workers working up to 120 hours a week in sweatshops in Jordan piecing together Chinese materials to be shipped into the United States under free trade agreements to be sold in a Wal-Mart or a Target.

Is that what free trade agreements are supposed to be about? I don't think so.

The workers at these Jordanian sweatshops testified they were forced to work far below minimum wages, promised $120 a month, but in many cases they were not paid at all. One worker paid $50 for 5 months of work. It is unbelievable to see what is going on.

Then when this is exposed in the New York Times, you hear people say: Well, we had no idea this was going on. It is kind of akin to the French police chief in the movie Casablanca, he was shocked to find that there was gambling taking place in Rick's Cafe. Nobody ought to be shocked by this. This is what is going on in the world.

I am going to introduce legislation at the end of my presentation today dealing with these issues of sweatshops and how we try to respond to them. My legislation will establish substantial civil penalties for the import of sweatshop goods. When sweatshop factories abuse workers for profit, the best way to attack the problem is to take that profit away. If the Federal Trade Commission determined that an overseas factory was producing sweatshop labor, it would issue an order prohibiting importation from that factory. Violation would carry a civil penalty, and each separate violation would be a separate offense. Also, my bill would allow U.S. retailers the right to sue their competitors in U.S. courts if their competitors are sourcing their merchandise from these sweatshop factories.

I feel strongly that as we come to talk about trade today and the nomination of a new trade ambassador, we ought to talk about what is going on in the real world. I have described previously so many stories. I was going to talk about Maytag--you know, the repairman who has nothing to do, and part of that is because Maytag is moving its jobs overseas these days.

Here are the dancing grapes in this picture. I love the dancing grapes from Fruit of the Loom. They make shorts and T-shirts that are all over America, and they have these people dressed up as grapes. Who on Earth would dress up as a grape? I guess a job is a job. Who is dancing in grape suits these days? That is the way they advertise this American underwear. Guess what. It may still be all-American underwear, but it is not made here anymore. They danced right out of this country. Fruit of the Loom is gone to Mexico. And it is not just Fruit of the Loom. The best example I know is Huffy bicycles. They are now a Chinese company. They got rid of all their Ohio workers; they fired them because they made too much money, $11 an hour. They have now become a Chinese company. You can still buy them here, and they produce a product they call all-American. It is just that they are made in China. I happen to know where. They pay 33 cents an hour there, and all those American workers who lost jobs, who had a long career making these bicycles at the largest bicycle plant in the world, they were told: Your career is over. You make too much money at $11 an hour, so Huffy has gone to China. If you had a Huffy years ago, you noticed there was an American flag decal on the front. That is gone too. Now it is a decal of the globe.

By the way, on the last day of work at Huffy Bicycles, when their jobs left for China, I was told that when the workers left the parking lot, as they drove out of the lot, they left a pair of empty shoes in the space where their car was. It was a way of saying to the company that you can move our jobs to China, but you are not going to be able to fill our shoes. That is how much they cared about their jobs.

Little red wagon, Radio Flyer--I bet there is not a kid around who hasn't ridden in that little red wagon. Of course, that was American for a century. Gone to China. The list goes on and on. I could talk for hours about companies.

Levi's. There is not one pair of Levi's made in America. Talk about all-American jeans--there is not one pair of Levi's made in America. If you wear Tony Lama boots, you might be wearing boots made in China, by the way. The list goes on and on.

The question for this nominee for the U.S. Trade Ambassador's job is, Do you care whether these jobs are gone from our country? Do you care whether Americans are now asked to compete against those in other parts of the world who make 33 cents an hour? Do you care about that? Do you care that our workers are asked to compete against young kids, some of them locked in manufacturing plants, some of them hand-weaving rugs, some of them whose fingertips were scarred by putting sulfur on the fingertips and lighting the sulfur in order to produce a scar so that when they are using the needles on the rug and they stick their fingers, they won't bleed? Do you care about all that?

How about a trade policy that stands up for the interests of our country? Yes, I think we ought to trade. Yes, I think expanded trade is good for our country. But it must be and has to be fair trade. You cannot say to companies: All right, we have decided over a century what the conditions of production are in this country that represent a growing middle class and a growing economy and a humane way to do things. We have decided that, but you

can avoid all of that by just deciding to shut your American manufacturing plant, move the jobs elsewhere, and if somebody messes with you when your plant has moved overseas and they want to organize workers for better wages, you can get the government to throw them in prison. If somebody cares about you putting poisons in the water and the air, pumping effluent and pollution into the water and the air, you don't have to worry about that because you can do that with impunity. When somebody says you can't hire children, you don't have to worry about that because you can put kids in your manufacturing plant. And if somebody says OSHA is going to come, you can say: There ain't no OSHA here; I can do what I want here. And by the way, when I get the product produced, I am shipping it to the United States of America because I have store shelves to fill and I have American customers who want low prices. I know, they are the same customers who are going to drive Korean cars to the store, wear their Italian shoes, wear their Taiwanese shirt, wear their Chinese slacks, and they are going to wonder where all the American jobs went.

I would like to ask one of these days when we have a change in the U.S. trade ambassador's job what they really think success is. Do you really believe this hemorrhaging of red ink, selling America $2 billion a day to foreign governments, foreign enterprises, do you really believe that can continue? It cannot. That just cannot continue.

And, oh, by the way, the strategy I described earlier that I believe doesn't add up for our country is a strategy by which we tell companies: You can export good American jobs, and you can import cheap labor. That was the immigration bill, the last portion--export good jobs, import cheap labor. I am saying that doesn't add up.

At least a portion of that--exporting good jobs and importing cheap labor--is now attended to by a desire to decide that when you export good jobs and import cheap labor, you can run your profits through the Cayman Islands so you don't have to pay taxes in this country.

This little house, I have told my colleagues before, this five-story white house, called the Ugland House on Church Street in the Cayman Islands, is home to 12,748 corporations. That is right. They are not there; it is just a figment of someone's imagination. Lawyers have established this address for 12,748 corporations for one purpose, and that is to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It is unbelievable, if you think about it.

So export your jobs, import your products here, sell them in the United States, and run your income through the Cayman Islands. I am just saying none of this adds up and none of it works.

I agree with my colleague who described a while ago his opposition to this trade ambassador. I don't believe the nominee is unqualified, I just believe there our trade policy is terribly misguided. That is pretty troublesome because I don't think this country will have the kind of economic strength that expands so that our kids have jobs, good jobs that pay well with benefits in the future. I don't think it is going to happen. I wish I were wrong. I don't think I am. Yet all this continues in a giant silence. Nobody seems to care very much.

Let's just continue doing this. We will sell a little bit of America every single day, keep shipping jobs elsewhere, not think much about it because we can buy a cheap product at Wal-Mart, and it will be just fine. Be happy. I am just saying I don't think this adds up for our country's future.

I don't support this nomination because I want a nominee at the U.S. trade ambassador's office who is going to stand up for a trade policy that is fair for this country--fair trade.

A colleague just came into the Chamber who comes from a State that has a lot of ranching. We are not getting beef into Japan at the moment. That is a different story. It is unbelievable with the trade deficit that we can't get beef into Japan. Let's assume that problem was resolved tomorrow. Every pound of beef that would go into Japan would have a 50-percent tariff on it, and that's 16 years after we had a beef agreement with Japan. That is just a tiny little example, beef to Japan. That would be considered a failure by any standard, a 50- percent tariff a decade and a half after the beef agreement.

We blithely go along and say: Be happy, it will be fine, drive to Wal-Mart and pick up an Etch-A-Sketch and be happy. It doesn't matter. This will all work out in the end.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 4 additional minutes.

Mr. President, I conclude by describing one of the concerns I have about the silence on these issues. Some long while ago, I was on the floor of the House of Representatives when there was a joint meeting of Congress. A fellow named Lech Walesa was speaking to Congress at a joint meeting.

Lech Walesa told a story--pretty unbelievable--a story, of course, I had known from the history books. He told us this: He said it was Saturday morning in a shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. He had been fired from his job as an electrician from this plant. He went back into the shipyards on Saturday morning to lead a labor strike against the Communist government, believing workers ought to have the right to self-determination. He went back in to lead a strike against the Communist government. They seized him that Saturday morning and brutally beat him, beat him bloody, took him to the edge of a fence that was heightened with barbed wire and threw him over the barbed-wire fence into the dirt on the other side of the fence.

He laid in the dirt face down, bleeding, having been beaten severely. He told us he wondered what he should do next. As he lay there, he decided what to do next. He picked himself up, climbed back over the fence into the shipyard, right back into the same shipyard that morning. Ten years later, this unemployed electrician was identified by the Doorkeeper of the U.S. House of Representatives as the President of the country of Poland--not an intellectual, not a military leader, not a business leader, just an unemployed electrician with the guts to take on the Communist government for a free labor movement.

They called it Solidarity. We all celebrated solidarity. What a wonderful thing it was. We supported Solidarity. He said to us: We didn't have any guns; the Communists had all the guns. We had no bullets; the Communists had all the bullets. We were workers armed with an idea. We were armed only with an idea; that is, people ought to be free to choose their own destiny.

What is the idea here? What is the idea in America by which we fought for 100 years for the basic standards, by which we expanded the middle class, safe workplaces, decent wages, the right to organize? What is that idea, and does it have value now, or have we forgotten that idea and is there someone willing to stand for that idea today?

I hope so. I don't believe we ought to decide that which we created is somehow unworthy as we look to the future of this country, and I believe we ought to continue to build a place that is better for our children. We want a place, all of us want a place we can turn over to our children and grandchildren that is better than the place we inherited. That ought to be the goal.

I don't intend to ask for a recorded vote, but I do not support this nomination only because I think we are headed toward a trade strategy-- and we have been in the middle of it for some long while now--that is injuring this country and is going to ship jobs overseas.

As I said when I started, Alan Blinder, a respected Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said there are 42 million to 56 million American jobs at this point subject to outsourcing. Those not outsourced are still going to be required to compete with others in the world who make a great deal less money. That is not the way we are going to continue to build the economy we believed we were building for the last century.

I am not suggesting putting walls around our country. I am not a xenophobe. I am not an isolationist. I am not one who believes trade is not worthy. I do. But I think this country

ought to insist and lead in the area of demanding fair trade, demanding trade be fair, standing up for our businesses, standing up for our workers, and saying we insist on and demand fair trade.