Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, well, congratulations to the Bush economic team. Yet another record under their belt. Last Friday, it was the announcement that no private sector jobs had been created in America and that they are presiding over the largest job loss since Herbert Hoover in the 1920s, but today, they are touting their record on trade, a new record, a $43 billion one month trade deficit, and they say this shows the U.S. economy is recovering.

Why? We are running a large and growing trade deficit. This is recovery at the Bush White House, a jobless recovery because they are engaging in trade practices that are exporting the

manufacturing base of this country, now the intellectual technology base of this country. They say it is good to outsource jobs, although they are trying to change the word there, that is, U.S. jobs sent overseas are good for American consumers. The problem is Americans need jobs to be able to consume, and under this administration, those jobs are not available here because they are being shipped to China, but this is good news, says the Bush administration.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.

I have been intimidated to follow the chairman to the well since he does have impeccable credentials in the area of nutrition. He is the gentleman responsible for renaming French fries and French toast, although, of course, that did not do much for the caloric content of those food items.

But we do have a serious problem in this country; and, unfortunately, this bill and this debate will not rise to that issue. The statistics show an alarming increase in obesity among adults and, most alarmingly, an extraordinary increase in our youth. This can and will lead to real health problems. Those were talked about previously.

So we have a real problem. This could become a crisis and the question is, Why are we here today? Is there a crisis in litigation? Yes, there have been a few flaky lawsuits filed that have been dismissed, including one being dismissed with prejudice, something judges do not do routinely.

I think the majority is demeaning the intelligence of our juries, of the Americans who will sit there and cast judgment on their peers and say, no, have a little self-control; they did not make you eat that food. That is what the juries and judges have said so far, and I think they will continue to say.

But beyond that, they have said fitness and health cannot be legislated. Well, they might remember a former Republican who had a little more productive idea about this, Dwight David Eisenhower. He brought about the Presidential Fitness Program in the 1950s, mandatory physical education in all the schools in America because of concerns of so many males failing the physical for the draft in World War II and Korea. That was mandated when I was a kid growing up, and then sports were free.

What do we have today? Most States, many States no longer have mandatory physical education. They say they cannot afford it. In my State, kids have to pay to play sports. So many of them do not do it.

What we could do a lot more productively here today on the floor would be to consider legislation to add a little amendment to the so- called No Child Left Behind bill that would help our States, our local school districts reinstate or mandate that they reinstate physical education; but since it will be a Federal mandate, give them some help with the Federal mandate, something that the majority party has failed to do with No Child Left Behind and other mandates here in the Congress.

But let us send down a rule: we will have physical fitness. It will be mandatory. We will have kids able to play sports without having to pay and the Federal Government seeing that being in the national interest to avoid a crisis in health care caused by preventable illness, caused by obesity, we are going to take those steps. But that is not an amendment that would be allowed to this bill; that is not the subject here today. Instead, we will hear little funny speeches on that side where people will link together alliterations, as did the esteemed chairman of the committee, not dealing with the real problem.

Here we are. We will be done early today. Do not have a highway bill. Do not have extended unemployment benefits. We cannot even get labels on our food that are meaningful for country of origin. Congress is being defied by the administration. Do we have time for those real issues? No, but we have time for this little frolic.

This is a pretty sad day in the House of Representatives. Let us deal with this real problem and deal with it seriously and appropriately.

Mr. Speaker, on Friday the government announced its latest employment data. Unfortunately, the news for working Americans or Americans trying to find jobs was really bad. 21,000 jobs nationally were created. Now, remember, of course, it was

just 2 weeks ago that the President's principal economic advisor Mr. Mankiw, the same person who says it is good to export jobs, it helps the economy, predicted that the Bush tax cuts would produce 200,000 jobs a month. Of course, the President's former economic advisor, who was a little bit too honest about the cost of the war in Iraq, Mr. Lindsey, predicted the same thing last year and the jobs did not materialize.

Well, we are in the same situation now. They predicted 200,000. 21,000 were created. Now, were these jobs created because of tax cuts? Well, actually, no, because the 21,000 jobs that were created were government jobs. They were State and local government jobs. So the tax cuts had absolutely no impact on stimulating those governments to hire more people. That is for certain.

So, we now have 8.2 million unemployed Americans, 4.4 million Americans involuntarily working part-time. They would like to work full-time. They need to work full-time. They cannot find full-time work.

Three million private sector jobs have been lost since the beginning of the Bush 43 administration. That is the worst job creation or destruction record since Herbert Hoover in the 1920s. 3,000 manufacturing jobs lost last month, 2.8 million lost since the beginning of the Bush administration. But just today, the President was saying he is a radical free trader. There is nothing but free trade. The alternative to absolute free trade and exporting our jobs and our industrial and manufacturing base and impoverishing the working people of America is protectionism or isolationism.

Well, there is a pretty big ground between those two things. Some managed trade, something that would bring jobs or keep jobs of value here in America, might maintain our industrial and manufacturing and IT infrastructure, might not be a bad idea. But not to this President. His chief economic advisor says job exports are great. Yeah, they make a few people a lot of money: Corporate CEOs, some stockholders, but they sure do put a lot of Americans out of work and hollow out the wealth of this country long term.

Now, we saw the unemployment rate stay at 5.6 percent. Sounds pretty good except the reason it stayed there is because 392,000 people gave up looking for work. There is no prospect for them out there. So guess what? In the great world of George Bush and Mr. Mankiw, they do not count anymore. Americans who are unemployed who would like to work, but who are totally discouraged and give up looking for work, they do not count as unemployed in their world. This is pretty strange.

But the President says he has a solution to make his tax cuts permanent. That is, these unbelievably expensive tax cuts that would take place after the year 2010, now all the tax cuts he has already had which have put the country into the deepest fiscal hole in our history, are not creating the jobs. His free trade policy is not creating the jobs. He wants more free trade, he wants more tax cuts.

Maybe it is time to think about real investments, investments in infrastructure. You create 47,500 jobs with every billion dollars you spend on roads, bridges, and highways. We have bridges and roads crumbling across America. But what has the President and the White House doing? They are stonewalling the highway bill. The highway bill has expired. And nothing is happening because they will not agree on an adequate bill. They say oh, no, we want a low-ball bill. We do not believe that building roads, bridges, and highways creates jobs.

No, it does not create jobs overseas, like Mr. Mankiw thinks are great, it does not make investors rich. It does not give them tax benefits. But it puts a heck of a lot of the people in the construction industry to work, and a whole lot of small businesses to work and a whole lot of communities with some wealth and money flowing through those communities, that would do something for this country. That would put people back to work.

He will not even extend unemployment benefits for those who cannot find work but want it. He says we cannot afford it. There are $17 billion in the unemployment trust fund, paid in by employers and employees sitting there. He does not even have to borrow the money. He is borrowing the money for tax cuts for rich people. He does not even have to borrow the money to extend unemployment benefits for those Americans who want and cannot find work. He just has to authorize spending down some of the trust fund.

That trust fund this year is actually going to grow. It is going to grow. Of course, the money will be borrowed and given away in tax cuts to wealthy which will put people to work, he says, but it does not.

Now, just one last point on these tax cuts. One of the things he is really pushing for is a permanent extension of estates worth more than $5 million from any taxation. He says that will really put people back to work in this country. That would be after 2010. That costs $80 billion a year. Money drained out of the rest of the economy, drained from other taxpayers and Social Security to benefit a very, very small percentage.

This is voodoo economics at its worst, as his dad would have said.

Mr. Speaker, today and every day, wage-earning, salary- earning Americans and small business owners across the country will pay 6.2 percent of every dollar they earn up to $87,400 to Social Security, or twice that in the case of the self-employed. This is a heavy burden on the working, wage-earning, salary-earning people of America, particularly those of modest means. And again, it only falls on income below $87,400 so those who earn $3 million or $5 million a year pay a tax at a fraction of the rate of someone who earns $30,000 or $40,000 a year.

The theory is that Social Security in collecting these funds will collect $180 billion more than necessary to pay this year's benefits. That money is supposed to be set aside into a trust fund to meet the future obligations of Social Security. If all those moneys that have been set aside, and they are, unfortunately, just debt instruments, but if those debt instruments were honored, Social Security would have adequate funds to pay full benefits until the year 2042 under conservative assumptions, perhaps longer, and after that it would have a 23 percent shortfall. That is a problem, and we should deal with it.

But enter Mr. Greenspan, a gentleman who does not need Social Security, a gentleman who pays taxes at a fraction of the rate of average wage-earning Americans, a gentleman who does not know or socialize with anyone who needs Social Security. The fact is 20 percent of retired Americans are totally dependent on Social Security, and more than half would fall into poverty tomorrow if Social Security benefits were not there. Just 3 years ago the great Alan Greenspan said in supporting the President's reckless tax cuts which favor the wealthy, those who do not pay Social Security taxes in particular, those who invest for a living, he said that we could have it all; there was so much of a surplus, we could cut taxes on rich people, and we could still provide for Social Security benefits in the future.

Well, 3 years later, confronted with record deficits created by the Bush administration, Alan Greenspan, forever consistent, says the tax cuts should be made permanent, we should continue to borrow money, which we are doing, to finance tax cuts, but we can no longer afford Social Security, is what Mr. Greenspan says. So we are going to borrow money. In fact, this year we are going to borrow $180 billion that is being paid in by working, wage-earning Americans as a surplus into Social Security, which will be immediately borrowed and spent. Some will be spent on things that are good that the government does; some will be spent to give tax cuts to wealthy people.

Mr. Speaker, it is a new kind of transfer tax. We tax wage-earning, salary-earning Americans on every penny of their income. We then overtax them,

supposedly to provide their future benefits, borrow that money, and then transfer it to wealthy investors who do not pay a penny in Social Security taxes.

This is Mr. Alan Greenspan's world. He hears the pain of those people at the top, those who need further tax cuts, those who have done so well over the last decade. He is willing to say that we should borrow money to finance their tax cuts. He is willing to say we should borrow money from the Social Security trust fund to finance those tax cuts for wealthy people. But now, astoundingly, he says there is not enough money in Social Security to pay benefits. So he just recommends a couple of little things. First, we cut cost-of-living adjustments for seniors. Well, Social Security is already underadjusted for the cost of living of seniors. They have huge increases, in pharmaceutical, medical costs and other things, and the 2.1 percent they get does not reflect their real cost of living and many saw their Medicare or their insurance go up more than their puny increase in Social Security. But Mr. Greenspan does not know any of those people. He has never talked to them. He is not aware of them. They do not belong to the same clubs that he does.

But he also said in his let-them-eat-cake mode that we should just increase the retirement age a little bit more. We are already phasing it up to 67. If Mr. Greenspan had to work for a living, work hard like a logger or a mill worker or many other professions in this country or was in a profession where he could not work forever, unfortunately he can as long as George Bush reappoints him, he would realize that it is a problem if you increase the retirement age further beyond 67. Many Americans cannot physically work that long to collect their benefits and many others will not have the opportunity to work that long. But Mr. Greenspan is not concerned about those people. It is more important to borrow the money from the Social Security trust fund, to bankrupt the system in the future to finance tax cuts for the wealthy, and that is George Bush's priority, too.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and I thank my colleagues for considering this legislation today and certainly hope that it is successfully passed by the House later this evening.

Mr. Speaker, this is an issue upon which I and other members of the Oregon delegation have been working for a number of years. The issue of Winchester Bay, Salmon Harbor, and the Dunes access, which is an extremely popular OHV area, has been a growing problem because of the growing popularity. This is sort of a bright light on the coast of Oregon where the economy has been lagging and so many other industries are in a depressed state. The tourism and the support this provides for local community and small businesses is very welcome.

What has been happening is that, because of a county campground nearer to the harbor and other camping, a number of people have been driving their OHVs actually on the road to access the nearest point into the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. That causes obviously congestion, conflicts with other vehicles on the road, and in some cases has been very problematic in the community and been a law enforcement problem on some of the big holiday weekends. This could be easily rectified, and hopefully will be today, by transferring this parcel of land.

I visited the parcel in question. It is extraordinarily underutilized at the moment. It is virtually unpoliced because of the cutbacks in BLM law enforcement and Forest Service law enforcement because of the Federal budget. There have been problems there with illegal camping, with the use of

fires in areas that are not contained, and with the dumping of trash. If we are successful in implementing this legislation today, we will see control pass to the county who will properly police it, who will develop it into a regular campsite, and who will provide excellent access for OHV users without having to drive on the public roads. They will be directly adjacent to the Dunes National Recreation Area.

This legislation, as passed by the Senate, is identical to legislation introduced into the House, H.R. 514, by myself and the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden). So since this is identical, and I believe it enjoys extraordinary widespread and bipartisan support, as the gentleman from Arizona already pointed out. I would recommend this legislation to my colleagues and urge that everyone vote in its favor so that we can enhance these recreational opportunities and protect the public health and safety and do just a little bit to help the economy of the south coast of Oregon.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his generous grant of time.

Mr. Speaker, this book has not hit the best seller list yet, but it should. This lays out the agenda of the President for the future of our economy, jobs, Social Security, and other programs. Actually, we have got to give the principal author, Mr. Mankiw, the President's chief economic adviser, some points for extraordinary honesty.

A quote from page 229, in reference to trade, of course, the United States of America is running a huge and growing trade deficit. We will borrow more than one-half of $1 trillion, $500 billion, from overseas to finance this. We are hemorrhaging jobs. U.S. corporations flee overseas to exploit cheap labor and Mr. Mankiw says that is all to the good. ``When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically.''

He went on to say that exporting trade jobs realizes the dream of free trade that economies have talked about for 2 centuries.

But then he says not to worry, because, of course, we have a comparative advantage. Well, the question would be, a comparative advantage in what?

Well, since they told us first we are going to lose those obsolete manufacturing jobs, which I disagreed with, because I do not think you can be a great Nation if you do not make things anymore, but then they said, do not worry, we are going to go to the intellectual jobs. We will do those sorts of things, and we will protect those through these trade agreements. Well, we now find we are exporting those intellectual jobs, and, in fact, we are also losing them to unfair trade.

But, remember, this President supported Most Favored Nation status for the bloody dictators of Beijing, the Communist Government of China, because of the insistence of U.S. corporations. It says here, do not worry, we will defend our intellectual property against countries like China, which regularly steal it. It said that if you bring intellectual property into China, within 24 hours it will be on the streets in counterfeit form; but yet this administration, which says if a country is found to be in violation of their obligations under a trade agreement, the United States could retaliate against those countries, against the entire range of transactions covered by the agreement.

That is right. Could. But guess what? Will not. How many trade complaints has the United States filed against the Communist Government of China for wholesale theft of American intellectual property, which is leading to our $124 billion trade deficit with China and the flood of U.S. jobs into that country? None. Zero. None.

A company in my district, Videx, an American dream. The guy started with Hewlett-Packard and came up with a new scanner technology. It is all made in America. All of it. He employs 160 people directly, and even in Texas he has contractors making this good. He has also developed an electronic lock. One day he found out, and he is operating in 44 countries, that he had been cloned. His company had been entirely cloned in China, including the Website, including the software language that says U.S. copyright or patents, translated into Chinese. The Chinese had even gone one better. They took the Videx Website and put a little waving American flag up in the corner on this phony Website for a Chinese company, and condoned by the Chinese Government.

I thought, well, certainly the Bush administration, who say they want rules-based trade, they will help this company. They are for small business; they will help this company. We went to the Commerce Department and the answer was, nope, sorry, you are out of luck. In fact, in a conference call just 2 weeks ago, this company, Videx, Corvallis, Oregon, was told by the Bush Commerce Department, those great defenders of free trade, intellectual property and rules-based trade, that, in fact, they would do nothing to enforce their intellectual property rights or prevent the theft of their entire company and product in China, as is happening to dozens of other American firms, because the big corporations do not want such complaints filed against China because it might make them mad, and they might lose access to the cheap labor to produce the goods that they export back here.

That is what this administration is all about. They talk about small business, but they are just there for a few multinational corporations. They have a real chance here to help an American company to save hundreds of American jobs, to stop the Chinese from stealing that product and the product of many other American firms and stop stealing those jobs. All they have to do is file a complaint.

The company cannot file the complaint at the World Trade Organization. The Bush people stacked the deck. The only way it can be filed is by the United States Government and the Commerce Department, and they are refusing to do that. If they care about jobs, if they care about the future of this country, they will eschew these radical free trade policies. And they are not only free trade, they are theft policies being pursued by other countries against the U.S.

This is not a level and fair trade field, and it is time that things changed. But I doubt very much under this administration that they will, because small companies cannot afford to contribute the millions of dollars to the reelection campaign that the big ones can.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. This is a must read for every American who is concerned about the future of our country, whether we will continue to be the leading industrial power in the world, whether there will be a future for Social Security, what will the rules of trade be and what are the objectives. This is the economic report of the President.

Now, we have to give the President's Chair of his Board of Economic Advisors, Council of Economic Advisors appointed by the President, full confidence of the President, we have to give him some credit, because he is distressingly honest. In this book on page 229, he talks about the fact that one of the great benefits of trade is that when a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically. Of course he does not deal with the fact that Chinese labor is oppressed and abused, that they have no protections in their workplace. Basically if someone gets their arm torn off operating a machine in China, they drag him away from the machine and put a new worker there, and then, after that, they might tend to some basic first aid before they send that person home or to the graveyard, but there are no benefits or significant health care provided. So they are recommending that the U.S. workers should somehow have to compete with this.

Now, it would be one thing if this was sort of a self-generated thing on the part of China or Mexico or any one of these other countries that are stealing our jobs. But guess what? It is being done with U.S. capital which are being subsidized with our tax cuts. Not only are we borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund to give to the wealthiest of Americans in tax cuts, we are also borrowing money, given our deficit situation, to subsidize the largest corporations in the world through OPIC, the Overseas Private Investment Council, and others, to export American jobs.

Now, I mean, I think that is one place where conservatives, who are against government subsidies, and progressives, who are against undermining the U.S. economy and the wage and labor standards of Americans and our standard of living as a whole and our industrial infrastructure, have some grounds for agreement. Let us at least repeal the taxpayer subsidies, the borrowed money that is subsidizing these corporations to export jobs overseas.

But again, Mr. Mankiw, the President's chief economic adviser, in his official report to the American people this year, the economic report of the President, he says, shipping jobs to low-cost countries is the latest manifestation of the gains from trade that economists have talked about for centuries.

Now, we have to wonder what that gain is, how illusory it is, when the American middle class is being devastated by these exports. A few years ago when the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) and I opposed NAFTA, they said, oh, you Congressmen, you are like dinosaurs. You want to protect those old, inefficient manufacturing jobs. Do not worry, it will just be the low-skilled jobs that go to Mexico. Well, of course, that was a lie, and what we found out was that most of the major U.S. auto manufacturers were willing to invest in state-of-the-art plants in Mexico to access that cheap labor, and then reimport those vehicles into the U.S. And guess what? The

price did not go down for U.S. consumers, but many U.S. families, those who used to be able to buy the product because they worked in the factories, could not afford to buy that product anymore.

But then as things evolved, and the trade deficit began to accelerate over this last decade; when I introduced legislation to establish the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission in 1997, the trade deficit was $111 billion. It is almost quaint today. We are talking about $500 billion. We are going to borrow a half a trillion dollars to finance the purchase of goods overseas by Americans. We are going to borrow another $700 billion to run the Government of the United States and to give tax cuts to the wealthiest of Americans. And a substantial amount of this money, almost all of the $500 billion and 40 percent of the $700 billion, is going to come from overseas. We are giving unbelievable leverage to those bastions of democracy like China, who is now the largest holder of U.S. debt, and others who may not have the best interests of the American workers or our economy in mind. But in any case, Mr. Mankiw thinks this is just fine.

Now, the President has tried to back away from this a little bit. He did that famous press event in front of a bunch of boxes which they had to repaint. Actually they said, oh, it was just an overzealous intern from the White House at one of his unbelievable staged press events that cost an average of $400,000 each paid for by the American taxpayers, of course; the boxes, when he went to this one particular plant, all said ``Made in China'' on them, but he wanted to talk about American jobs; a little embarrassing. So this, of course, intern, with no direction from the political staff at the White House or anybody else, somehow came up with all new labels to run through and label them all ``Made in the U.S.,'' of course another lie.

So what they are doing, Mr. Mankiw is an unbelievably honest man, because he admits that they are exporting jobs, and they think that is good because it makes a few people rich and just impoverishes a majority of the people in this country, and deprives them of their livelihoods, and undermines the industrial and economic might of our country; but the President is trying to pretend that he does not really believe in this stuff, but I guess why is his signature on page 4 if he does not really believe in it? There it is, the President's signature on this report, basically endorsing these policies.

We cannot continue this way. Do we know what that means? Let us break it down a little bit, and then I will yield back to the gentleman. Our current trade deficit, that is the amount of money we are borrowing from overseas to finance the purchase of goods, many of those goods manufactured by formerly U.S.-based corporations that have now seen fit to chase cheap labor and lack of environmental standards and other things overseas, is $1.5 billion a day. Mr. Speaker, $1.5 thousand million a day.

Now, how is that sustainable? That is $1 million per minute of U.S. wealth that is flooding overseas, giving unbelievable leverage to foreign governments over the U.S. dollar.

Just one last point on this, and then I am certain we will get on to other things. What do the economists say? Oh, do not worry, it has always been this way. What will happen is the U.S. dollar will decline, our goods will become cheaper, and then we will begin exporting again. But as I said to a number of these economists, none of whom can answer this question, I said, I understand how that used to work when we made things, but when we do not make things anymore, how does that work? If the dollar gets cheaper, then all of those imported goods we are buying become more expensive. We will see inflation in the United States. We will see the dollar continue to drop. We will see higher interest rates in the United States. We will see the dollar continue to drop.

We are headed toward an incredible economic train wreck here. And the chief engineer, George Bush, who signed this report, thinks it is just fine. Because guess what? A few tens of thousands of people, CEOs, his buddies, his principal campaign contributors, they are all going to make out like bandits. The profits are up. Wall Street's profits are up. We are just having this little problem called a jobless recovery; jobless because those jobs have been exported. The means of the production has been exported. The industrial might of this country has been exported. And I would say to the hawks on that side of the aisle, in fact, you are exporting the capability of defending the United States in the future against adversaries around the world.

With that, I am happy to yield back to the gentleman for a little further discourse on this.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, people are going to think we are making this up. I am not making this up. But let us go to the source. Economic Report of the President, signed on page 4 by President George Bush and endorsed by all of his economic advisers, and it says right here: ``When a fast food restaurant,'' this is page 73, chapter 2, halfway down the page, ``When a fast food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a service, or is it combining inputs to manufacture a product?'' Well, we can erase that very embarrassing manufacturing job loss that George Bush has provided, the largest manufacturing job loss in the history of the United States, worse than the Great Depression, we can erase that in one fell swoop. All we have to do is turn to page 73 and say, well, of course, as the President's chief economic adviser says, that is manufacturing a product. That is not a service.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, do not forget the farmers and ranchers. I had some cattlemen come to my town hall last week who say, hey, we are next. Not only was Canada a huge threat to our industry and not only are they bringing in stuff that might kill the American people with mad cow disease, but the so-called free trade agreement with Australia, Argentina, other target countries in CAFTA, that is going to kill off the U.S. agriculture people. So we will import the beef that will be probably ground up overseas because that is value added, but then when the frozen patties get here, we will still manufacture them into a finished device which is, i.e., a Big Mac or a Whopper, we do not want to shortchange Burger King here and/or whatever you want to call it, and somehow we will prosper as a Nation by doing this.

I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is making an excellent point; but of course, they are following exactly the same rules, are they not? Do we not have a level playing field? Are they not required to provide health and safety, environmental protections, child labor protections? Are we not competing on a level playing field here?

Mr. Speaker, I come from a State that back when we were fighting NAFTA, I was pretty lonely up there in the Pacific Northwest, and we were told, what is wrong with you, you are going to be a major beneficiary. The State of Oregon on the Pacific Rim, strategically perched just north of Mexico and south of Canada, your State, your people are going to be a big winner, but it turns out that we are one of the top 10 losers under NAFTA.

As the gentleman alluded earlier, lumber and wood products are suffering because of subsidized Canadian lumber and wood products. The paper industry is seeing paper flee overseas to countries that do not observe any environmental practices or controls, and then a number of other more high-tech industries have gone elsewhere.

I sat next to a fellow who worked for Hewlett-Packard on the plane flying home a week ago, Hewlett-Packard in Corvallis. I said, what do you do? He said, I work in the ink jet division. I do engineering, design, and development. I said, God, that is really great. I am glad to see you are still working there. I was worried about those jobs. He said, well, no, actually, he said, my entire division was exported to Bangalore, India, last year. I am just working on a special project here in the United States, but my division is gone. The next design development, the next ink jet technology is going to come from Bangalore, India. He said they can get an engineer there for 8 to $10,000 bucks a year.

Are we telling Americans they should go to college for 4 years, incur $50,000 of debt to get a degree in engineering technology or whatever it is going to cost them to do it, and then they are going to work for $8,000 a year, raise a family, buy a home and all the other things that are a part of the American Dream? These people are killing the American Dream. That is what they are doing.

There are a few people who are going to profit from it, and those are the people that support them; and they are so insulated from it some of them do not even realize what they are doing to destroy our country.

One other point. Sometimes that is not even enough to say to an American, 4-year, 6-year degree, you are going to compete with some guy or woman from Indian who worked for $8,000. Sometimes it is not enought. You know what we also do? We are subsidizing, the American taxpayers, through our taxes, are subsidizing the export of these jobs. Here is a short list:

Motorola laid off 42,900 workers while investing $3.4 billion in China with a $190 million taxpayers subsidy.

In General Electric, 260,000 U.S. workers, while investing $1.5 billion in China, $2.5 billion in corporate subsidies paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Insult to injury. Steal their jobs, destroy the economic future of our country, our kids and our grandkids, and charge us to do it. That is what they are doing to

average wage-earning Americans, because most of this is coming out of Social Security wages, out of payroll taxes.

To buy the products.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, when I lay this out to my constituents, they say, well, certainly the CEOs and others could not support that; they would not want to live in those communities or under those conditions or see those things happen. Well, the fact is today's CEOs,

where there is still a manufacturing job, earns 500 times what a worker earns. It is only a couple of decades since the ratio was only 20. They do not live in the same communities. They do not live in the same world. They live on a different planet.

They live behind gates in their mansions with their servants. Now there will be a lot more servants out there for them, and probably the cost of servants will go down, so this will be a great benefit to them. Of course, under Bush we can import those, too, or maybe Americans can work for those low wages. Their kids go to private schools, so they are not worried about what the gentleman from Ohio was talking about, the support for our societal infrastructure, schools and those sorts of things.

They do not really need the police. I guess we have not gone back to private for-profit fire departments yet, that is probably not far away, but they have private security so that we do not find a lot of support from them for police infrastructure or first responders, particularly not with the administration cutting their budgets under the homeland security proposal.

And then when they want to go somewhere, they go to the private country club in their chauffeur-driven limousines. Or if they go further away, they go in private executive jets so they do not even have to deal with the deregulation of the airline industry, the overcrowding and all those sorts of things. But these are true international folks. They are talking about globalization and international trade and all the benefits. There are benefits for them, just not for the masses of America.

Whatever happened to Henry Ford? ``My workers are going to be able to afford the product they make.'' We all did better under that system. We created the envy of the world here in the United States. We created the largest middle class. Everybody did better together. But a few people got greedy, and now they have got their hands on the levers of power, and they simply do not care about the majority. But they might find ways to distract them with wedge issues, social issues, or something else to distract them from the loss of their jobs, the opportunity for their kids, the lack of educational opportunities, or the future of this country.

I do not think the American people are going to be fooled for very long. They are going to demand changes, and we have to bring about changes. This trade policy is one of the most devastating levers of power that they have to wield against the American system, against American workers, and against the wealth of this country, and they are using it ruthlessly.

Mr. Speaker, there is one exception to free trade. People have to realize who runs this administration. There is one exception to free trade, and it is for the first time in a trade agreement with Australia. It is a prohibition on the importation or the reimportation of FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured pharmaceuticals from Australia, not because they are unsafe like the phony baloney they are giving us about Canada, but because they are cheaper there. That is in the trade agreement. What is that doing in the trade agreement if this is not all about big business and multinational corporations? It is not about making things cheaper for American consumers. If it was, why did President Bush insist on prohibiting the reimportation of FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured drugs from Australia at half the price? It is not about making things less expensive and benefiting our consumers and our society. It is all about benefiting a very privileged few.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone).

Mr. Speaker, I did not come to the floor to speak about prescription drugs, but I cannot let what the gentleman before me in the well said. He voted to prevent the Federal Government, unlike any other industrial nation on Earth, any other developed country, negotiating with the pharmaceutical industry for lower drug prices, unlike the private insurance industry, that can negotiate lower prices.

He says market forces will do better. Well, that is funny. Maybe the pharmaceutical industry would have fought against market forces. They plain and simple want to continue to gouge American consumers. The Bush administration's working day and night on this.

The Australian Free Trade Agreement prohibits the reimportation of U.S.-manufactured, FDA-approved drugs from Australia if they are cheaper than sold in the United States. They are working day and night to get Canada to agree to raise the price of FDA-approved, U.S.- manufactured drugs exported and sold in Canada at a lower price. They want the price lifted for the reimportation to the United States, and he comes to give us this little joke here after he has voted to prevent the one most effective measure we could have taken to give seniors and everyone else in this country a better deal on prescription drugs than market forces would do better. Yeah, sure.

Job Creation in America

Mr. Speaker, here is another thing that the Republicans have been talking a lot about. The President is concerned about jobs. Despite the worst job-loss record of any President since Herbert Hoover, he is really concerned. He has been appearing around the country with people and actually I kind of doubted him, but I found out yesterday in reading the Los Angeles Times that he does really care about jobs. The President really does care about creating jobs. The only problem is, he does not put any priority on where those jobs are created.

Here it is right here. Los Angeles Times, Bush supports shift of jobs overseas.

Whoa. Where is that coming from? Well, we have a few quotes to back it up. The administration's top economic adviser, ``Outsourcing,'' i.e., moving American jobs overseas, ``is just a new way of doing international trade. More things are tradeable than were tradeable in the past. And that's a good thing,'' says the President's own personally chosen senior economic adviser, Mr. Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors.

He goes on to say, ``The market is the best determinant of where the jobs should be,'' and that is according to Bush and Mankiw, overseas, not in the United States of America because there is cheaper labor over there.

He says here, people are concerned, maybe we will outsource a few radiologists. What does that mean? That means the false promise that was heard for years, do not worry about the industrial jobs; they are obsolete. They say, I wonder how you are a great Nation if you do not make things. Let us accept their argument for a moment.

Then they said they would retrain American workers for those high- tech knowledge industry jobs. Radiology, that is a pretty educated job. We are going to export those. We are going to export a whole host of IT jobs. In fact, the prediction is we will export 3 million U.S. IT jobs over the next 10 years. This is the next huge hemorrhaging of U.S. jobs overseas, and what does the President think? He thinks it is a good thing because the labor is cheaper over there. It gives a better bottom line for the corporations.

What about the American workers? What are they going to do? Here are a couple of other quotes from Mr. Mankiw: ``Shipping jobs to low-cost countries is the `latest manifestation of the gains from trade.' '' Shipping U.S. jobs overseas by the Bush administration is considered to be a gain from trade.

This is unbelievable, but at least they are finally being honest with us what they really believe, and they are now engaged in negotiating an expansion of NAFTA through the entire Central America, and they tell us this will be good for America. Why? Well, because the jobs would not have to travel quite as far from the United States. They would not have to go all the way to India or China. Maybe we can just export the jobs 1,000 miles down to South America so the owners of the corporations, the few managers that are left in the United States, can more easily get there to occasionally supervise their new workforce working down there in Chile or Argentina or someplace else.

That is their bottom line agenda here. They do not give a darn about American workers, American jobs, the industrial might of this country, the economic base of this country, the huge and growing trade deficit.

We are going to borrow more than $500 billion from overseas this year because of our trade deficit. That is not sustainable. The dollar is dropping like a rock, and the Bush administration says that is a good thing because our goods will become cheaper. Guess what. We do not make much in America anymore; and if Bush has his way, we will not make anything in America anymore.

Mr. Chairman, we are in incredible denial on the other side of the aisle. Once again, it is not needed, not now, not this way.

Nationwide, 375,000 people will exhaust their unemployment benefits this month. In Oregon, by March, 43,000 will have lost all their benefits. We hear the unemployment rate is dropping. Yeah, the statistic is dropping. We are not creating jobs. People no longer qualify for benefits. Well, they do not count as unemployed anymore.

We heard this extraordinary statement that some have become entrepreneurs, some are the modern day equivalent of selling apples and pencils on the street corner. Yeah, the entrepreneurs in my district are picking up bottles and cans for the five cent deposits, and it is really ironic.

Unlike the tax cuts for the billionaires where we have to borrow money from average working people and the Social Security trust fund to give tax breaks to billionaires, we do not have to borrow money to extend unemployment benefits. Working people have already paid the tax. There is $17 billion in the unemployment trust fund. All we need is for the majority to allow us a vote to authorize spending that money that is on account to help these people in their time of desperation and the President to sign the bill.

Vote ``yes.''

Mr. Speaker, today Congress will take up one of the largest single aggregate spending bills in the history of our Nation. There are billions more for foreign aide, there are many questionable projects and priorities; but what is most glaring about this legislation is what is not in it.

The interesting thing is that much of the money that funds the agencies and the projects under this bill will be borrowed. And Americans, working Americans, for the next 30 years, will be paying that bill. But there is one glaring oversight, one thing that is left out where we would not have had to borrow money, and that is to take care of the long-term unemployed here in the United States of America.

Why would we not have to borrow money to take care of them? Because there is $20 billion in the unemployment trust fund, taxes that were paid in by employers and employees, that were set aside to take care of Americans in a time of need when they have lost their job and they cannot find another job through no fault of their own. $20 billion is there. So out of the hundreds of billions of dollars in this bill that will be borrowed and spent elsewhere, including foreign aid, we could have taken care of the unemployed in the United States at no additional cost.

So why is it that they have been omitted for the second year in a row? Last year we notified the Republican leadership and the President that unemployment is a problem outside the Beltway of Washington, D.C. People are exhausting their benefits and they need help. That fell on deaf ears here in the House. The Republican leaders refused to bring forward legislation to help the long-term unemployed. Finally, sometime between Christmas and New Year's, when these people were receiving notices that their benefits would no longer be coming, Merry Christmas, the President woke up and asked the Congress when it reconvened in January to extend benefits further.

Unfortunately, the leaders, again, here in the Congress, the Republican leaders, chose to bury deep in that reauthorization of extended unemployment benefits something called a look-back provision. What it says is if half the people in your State are unemployed today, you can get extended benefits. But if a year from today, you still only have half the people in your State unemployed, those benefits will expire. The look-back provision says your unemployment has to get worse before we will extend benefits again. Oregon and many other States are falling into this trap now. Our economy has not gotten significantly better. There are still many thousands of Oregonians unemployed who cannot find work. Many of them fall into this category of long-term unemployed. Thousands of them are going to see their benefits expire this month and tens of thousands more over the next couple of months. But because of this so-called look-back provision, they are no longer eligible to get unemployment benefits.

This is just extraordinary that this Congress would again think about leaving town for the Christmas and New Year's holidays and into the next year without authorizing extended unemployment benefits for tens of thousands of Oregonians and other Americans at no additional cost to taxpayers, just spending down those reserves in the unemployment trust fund.

But Congress, the Republican leaders, do not want to do that because that would make the obscene deficit look just a tiny bit bigger. We would not have to borrow that money to pay those benefits; but it would make their $300 billion or $500 billion, however you want to calculate it, if you calculate the fact that they are borrowing and spending every penny that is flowing into Social Security this year, no more lockbox around here, that money will be spent and borrowed and spent and borrowed and spent. But if you exclude that, we are in the $300 billion range, the largest deficit in the history of the United States and spending down the unemployment trust fund would, on paper, make it look bigger; but it would not be anything that would be borrowing to obligate future generations of Americans, unlike the hundreds of billions of other spending in this bill.

So Congress wants to do one thing for this country and one thing for some of the people who have the most merit and are hurting through no fault of their own in this so-called jobless recovery, people whose jobs have been exported, in the case of my district to Canada, Mexico and China, under the trade policies of this administration and, yes, the past administration, which I opposed. These people want to work. They are productive people. They are hardworking people. They are willing to work. They just cannot find a job in the jobless recovery. So let us just give them a little bit of help in the interim so they do not lose their home, so they can feed their kids, so they can keep the lights on.

Do not go home, Congress, until you extend unemployment benefits for all Americans.

Mr. Speaker, unemployed Americans are about to get their annual Christmas gift from the Republican majority, and that is the end of their unemployment benefits.

This is not the first time this happened. Last year, Congress went home without extending unemployment benefits for those who, through no fault of their own, cannot find a job and have exhausted their benefits.

Now they say, well, we just cannot afford it. They can afford hundreds of billions of dollars of other things in this bill, foreign aid other things, much of it borrowed, but they cannot find the money for unemployed Americans. Well, that is actually a lie because there is $20 billion in the unemployment trust fund.

They do not even have to borrow the money to help unemployed Americans like they are going to borrow to help many of the special interests. All they have to do is agree to spend some of the taxes paid and on deposit to help unemployed Americans, paid by workers, paid by employers. That is why that money is there.

Every week, 400 Oregonians exhaust their benefits in this jobless recovery. Nationwide, tens of thousands of Americans are losing their unemployment benefits. They cannot find work through no fault of their own. They want to work. They want to work, but they cannot find a job. Their job has exported to China or to Mexico or from my district, some of them even to Canada. They cannot find a decent paying job. And now what is the Republican majority going to do? They are going to go home without extending unemployment benefits for these people. Many will lose the benefits Christmas week or New Year's week or in the month following. They may not be able to make the payments on their house. They are not going to be able to help their kids get the things they need to go to school, to feed their family, to pay their electric bills. These are basics.

We cannot find that money. We have the money. It is sitting in the bank. All we have to do is agree to spend it.

We have to stop pretending that everything is good with the economy, that America's just booming ahead again. We have what is called ``a jobless recovery'' in this country, and those are real people who do not have jobs. They are real people in my district. And Congress could do something real for them today. It is just choosing not to. It will help the special interests but not working Americans.

Mr. Speaker, today the House will take up an incredibly complicated $400 million bill which purports to provide seniors something they need: help in buying pharmaceuticals. We could do this more simply and more cost effectively. We could have the government negotiate lower drug prices on behalf of seniors as they do for the Veterans' Administration, a minimum of a 24-percent reduction for veterans' drugs and actually an average of about 50 percent.

There is a bigger group of Medicare people. We could do better. It would not cost anything.

We could also allow the free reimportation of FDA-approved, U.S.- certified, U.S.-manufactured drugs from Canada and other countries. Many seniors in my district are doing that now, saving an average of 50 percent. But, no. Instead, this bill is going to prohibit the reimportation. This bill is going to prohibit the government from negotiating lower prices for pharmaceuticals, all to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical industry at a time when many seniors cannot afford the drugs they need to maintain their health.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, 14,345 days. That is how long it has been since Medicare was enacted, the most important social program to lift seniors out of poverty in the history of the United States.

I worked with seniors, ran a senior citizen program, studied in the field of gerontology. Before Medicare, we had double the rate of poverty among seniors because they were driven there because of the cost of medical care.

Medicare has been a tremendous benefit to our seniors. It was opposed by the Republicans, it was opposed by the AMA, it was opposed by the nursing homes and all of them. Now, of course, they are the greatest supporters of the program because of the reimbursement and the business it provides.

But now we are about to make the most important changes in the 13,435-day history of Medicare, and we cannot have 1 day. We are not to be allowed 1 day to read a 791-page bill, which, to the best of my knowledge, and the gentleman can correct me on his own time if this is wrong, is not available in printed form. Some people like to read 791 pages on a computer screen. I do not. I think there are a lot of other Members of this Congress and the public who would like to actually have a printed copy in their hand to be able to flip back and forth easily and understand what this bill really does. But we are not going to have printed copies, or perhaps we will at some point when the debate begins. But even with speed reading, that is going to be tough.

So a 791-page, unbelievably complicated bill making extraordinary changes in a program which we have had for 39 years, and we cannot take 24 hours, or even, as the rules would provide, 72 hours to read it. What would be the harm in voting on Monday? Let it sit over the weekend. Let everybody have a chance to read it. I would be willing to stay over the weekend, work through the weekend, get through the other work and vote on this bill on Monday.

The gentleman talks about competition in the marketplace. This is a bizarre bazaar of a marketplace, because this is more like a souk, where there are all these back-room deals, and you do not know what is going on.

Competition? Well, it has subsidies for the private health insurance industry, HMOs, who still continue to enjoy an antitrust exemption, so there will be no requirement that they offer these plans; there will be no requirement that they guarantee seniors coverage beyond a 1-year basis; and there will be no requirement for them to take seniors who are not good risks or keep seniors after they make a claim. As many of my constituents know, as soon as you claim against an insurance company these days, they tell you are going to be terminated when your renewable comes up. That is what is going to happen to seniors in these private plans.

Then we have protectionism. The party of free trade, free trade over here, the Republicans are trading our jobs to China and all these other places, this bill is protectionist. It is not going to allow Americans to reimport FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured drugs from Canada or any of the other developed industrial nations who bargain on behalf of their citizens and get huge price reductions. So Americans are going to have the door slammed on the one place they can get less expensive drugs. And none of the benefits under the bill, even at the cost of $400 billion, will reach the simple benefit that my constituents can get by importing FDA-approved, U.S.-manufactured drugs from Canada.

So we are going to spend $400 billion, create this unbelievable Rube Goldberg, and the benefit for every one of

my constituents will be less than they can get today by buying from Canada, and we are going to slam that door with this bill. So they are not going to have that opportunity any more. They are going to be forced to buy drugs at higher prices, even with the so-called coverage under this bill. That is price fixing.

So we have a bill that has protectionism, price fixing, subsidies for the HMOs, the insurance industry is exempt from antitrust laws, and the gentleman says somehow this is the marketplace of competition.

What a bizarre view of a true, free and competitive marketplace. We could more simply allow these Medicare constituents to have a negotiated price for the reduction of their drugs, as we do for VA, but the industry is opposed to that because there would be too much market force, too much market clout on the part of the government in those negotiations, and allow the continued, safe reimportation of drugs from Canada.

And there is a big red herring here. The administration says FDA- approved, U.S.-manufactured drugs reimported from Canada are not safe, they cannot guarantee their safety, except we know that the drug custody chain in the United States of America is much more compromised than in Canada.

Canada first negotiates about a 50 percent reduction in prices, licenses the importers, licenses everybody, and tracks all the people who touch the drugs. In the U.S., the pharmaceutical companies dump huge amounts of drugs into an unregulated secondary market that is licensed by the States, into these phony closed-door pharmacies, and organized crime is involved in getting counterfeit drugs into the system here in the United States.

There is a huge breach of the integrity and safety of the system here in the United States, which there is no concern about because the industry is making money by having that system, but we are going to say, oh, those Canadian drugs, they are not safe. They are safer, in all probability. There have been no instances proven in Canada, unlike the United States, of organized crime getting counterfeit drugs into the system.

Mr. Speaker, we could do something simpler and cheaper if we defeat this bill.

I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Speaker, it was just a little over a year ago that the Biscuit fire was raging in southwest Oregon in an area shared by myself and the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden). We held a hearing in the Committee on Resources during that fire about the issue of the fuel buildup in our forests. After I listened to a few of the witnesses, I really did not ask any questions, I gave a pretty impassioned speech about how I was tired of the fact that we all kind of went to our political corners on this issue when a real solution was warranted. Surprisingly after the hearing I was approached by a number of Members that people would be surprised could sit down in a room and work together on an issue like this, but notably the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis) came forward and said to me, I really agreed with a lot of what you said and I would like to try and work something out, as did the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg), the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden), and the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller). We sat down and began some very difficult negotiations.

Unfortunately, last year the clock ran out on us. We had an election year, so we did not get the bill done. But now here we are hopefully at the point of adopting the bill in the House and the Senate and seeing it signed into law. This is not exactly the bill I would have written. It is not exactly what we negotiated last year, but I believe it is a bill that can get the job done. Most importantly, it authorizes $760 million. I think we could even authorize and do more work than that on an annual basis given the unnatural buildup of fuels in the forests, but if we can get that money actually spent, it will provide for a lot of jobs. It will provide for tremendous protection for communities and resources.

The bill has language about how the work should be conducted. The idea is to leave the big old fire-resistant trees and return the forest to what we call a presettlement condition, before we began unnaturally repressing fire more than 100 years ago with the settlement of the West. What you need to do, and there was a dramatic example at the Davis fire in central Oregon this year, you could see where the lodgepole pines were growing up into the crowns of the big old fire- resistant Ponderosas and unfortunately a lot of those Ponderosas went because that is called a ladder fuel. It just ran up this crummy old lodgepole and right up into the beautiful old Ponderosa and we lost everything. We need to go in and remove those lodgepole pines and other unnatural fuel buildups. That will provide both for jobs, potentially for some merchantable material in certain areas, and eventually we will be able to manage our forests back or help return them to a state where low-intensity fires can burn through, fires that do not destroy whole stands, that do not turn the Earth into glass and sterilize it. That is the condition that prevails today in the West.

This bill is not without controversy. That is again part of the process. I think the protections are there. People still have a right to appeal but appeals will be expedited. People have to participate meaningfully in the process. I do not have a problem with that. I think people should participate meaningfully in the process and we should open it up to everybody who is concerned. People will still have a right to go to court if they feel that the law is being violated but we are going to have the money, we are going to have the tools and if this administration applies this properly, if they get and spend all the money that is promised under this bill, we will begin a very long process of restoring our forests to a more natural state in the western United States and in a state that will not lead to a multi-number of catastrophic fires on an annual basis, which is the state we are seeing today.

I want to thank my colleagues on that side. I neglected the Committee on Agriculture, where I do not serve, but I know that the Committee on Agriculture also played a key role in this legislation. I think we will be all the better for it.