Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, we are the wealthiest nation in the world. Yet American children go to bed hungry, and American seniors choose between food and medicine, between food and heating their home. American families stand in line at food banks stretched too thin to serve them.

There is a term for what millions of Americans face every day. It is called food insecurity. It means children are not getting the food they need to grow up healthy in too many cases. It means mothers and fathers foregoing food for themselves so they can feed their kids in too many cases. It means seniors who are rationing their food to one meal a day in too many cases.

I stood on this floor as long as a year ago telling the story of Rhonda Stewart who testified in front of the Agriculture Committee about food stamps. Ms. Stewart has a 9-year-old son. She has a full- time job, she is president of her local PTA, she is involved in the Cub Scouts for her son, and she teaches Sunday school. Yet she is squeezed at the end of every month because her food stamps simply do not go far enough. She gets about $6 a day from food stamps. The average food stamp in this country is $1 per person per meal. She told me that early in the month, she makes pork chops for her son because that is her son's favorite meal. They might do that once or twice early in the month. By the middle of the month, maybe the second or third week, she said she takes her son to a fast food restaurant, once, maybe twice. But at the end of the month, she often sits at the kitchen table with her son as he eats. She sits there not eating, and her son asks: Mom, is there something wrong? Are you sick? She says: I just don't feel like eating tonight. She runs out of food month after month.

Food insecurity, not having enough food, to put it bluntly, affects one in six seniors in this country. Our Nation letting children and seniors go to bed hungry is as shortsighted as it is heartless.

An hour and a half ago, from 6 o'clock until about 7 o'clock, I was in a call with more than two dozen people in Ohio who run food banks and food pantries from all over the State. Let me tell you some of the things they told me.

They told me they have pretty much about the same amount of dollars to run their food pantries as they had a year ago or 2 years ago or 3 years ago. A woman by the name of Tina Ossa in southwest Ohio, generally a pretty affluent part of the State--Butler County, Claremont County, that area--said she is running out of food in part because the cost of frozen chickens--she used to be able to buy a tractor trailer load of frozen chickens--has gone up almost 50 percent. She said a tractor trailer load of egg noodles has doubled in cost in the last year or so whether they are buying it wholesale or buying it directly from the food manufacturer.

Others told me on this call that the food banks are always sort of the last stop, an emergency safety net. The food stamp benefit is limited to $1 per meal per person. The cost of energy to heat their home has gone up. The cost of going to work has gone up with the cost of gas at $3 a gallon. And the last emergency stop for so many people is to go to a food bank because it is a safety net. Yet these food pantries are running out of food.

One food pantry told me typically this time of year they have 1 million pounds of food on hand. Now they have 400,000 pounds of food on hand. The lady, Ms. Ossa from Fairfield, OH, in Butler County, told me she started that food bank in 1983. It has never been close to as difficult a situation as today. They are getting fewer donations partly because the Government has not stepped up and partly because the people who have given to them--charity--in the past, who have given dollars for food, are hurting themselves and not as likely to contribute or contribute as much.

She said the companies, the supermarkets and food manufacturers, are more efficient and squeeze any waste out of their system. Any slightly damaged cans, any kind of items they might have given to a food bank before they are not doing so. They are more in tune to Wall Street and the bottom line, so they are less likely to give these charitable contributions.

One person on this call from Cleveland said there is a large bank in Cleveland where a woman at the bank organized other employees for a dress-down Friday. You can wear jeans on Friday if you give $5 to a local food bank. It has raised significant dollars for the food pantry as a result.

The husband of this woman who organized this drive at this major bank in Cleveland lost his job. She is now barely making it. They together are barely making it. The father-in-law has moved in because he has had problems, and she now is going to this food bank. She is a full-time worker with a good job in Cleveland, and she is going to this food bank because she cannot make it.

There is story after story. The most amazing story took place in Logan, OH, in the southeast, probably the most hard-hit Appalachian part of the State. It looks a lot like the area of the Presiding Officer in western Pennsylvania. This is southeastern Ohio.

In Logan, OH, on a cold day in December 6 weeks ago, people began to line up at 3:30 in the morning to get food from this food bank which opened at 8 o'clock. By 8 o'clock, cars were snaked all over the city streets in the town of Logan, a county of about 30,000 people. At 8 o'clock, they opened the door. By 1 o'clock in the afternoon, 2,000 people had been to this food bank, in a county of 30,000; 7 percent of the residents in this country had gone to this food bank, and many had driven 20 and 30 minutes to get there because it is a rural, pretty spread-out county.

I might add, Mr. Dick Stevens who runs this food bank told me that probably half of those beneficiaries who visited that food bank at the United Methodist Church in Logan, OH, were employed. Imagine that: You work hard every day, you play by the rules, you work as hard as any of us who dress this way in this institution do, many harder in some cases, you are working hard for your family, involved in your community, and you have to go to a food pantry to get enough food to make it through the week. Something is wrong that we in this body allow that to happen.

Another person involved in food pantries told me 90 percent of the people who come into food banks in Warren County, an affluent county straight northeast out of Cincinnati, the first county out of Cincinnati, 90 percent of food bank recipients are employed. In some places, it might be 30 percent employed or 90 percent. The fact is, nobody who has a full-time job ought to have to go to food banks, especially since those food banks, in most cases, are giving enough for 1 week, not 2 or 3, and they don't let them come back as often because they are running out of food. They have the same amount of

food or less trying to serve more people.

It is pretty clear this is as bad a situation as we have seen in recent memory. One of my constituents told me that he and his wife for years have donated time and money to Cleveland area food banks and soup kitchens. Over time, as his wages did not go up and with the higher cost of transportation, the cost of heating their home and the cost of food, Tim and his wife quit donating money but donate their time to the food banks.

Today, Tim is going to the food bank for food. Tim said: It took great humility in that food bank to ask for food. He said: I used to consider myself middle class, but the salary and cost of living don't make it anymore. The Emergency Food Assistance Program that helps fund our Nation's food banks is the quickest, most efficient way to get food into the hands of people as their last stop emergency measure. But since 2002, because the President has had other priorities--tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, a $3-billion-a-week war--the President has flat funded these food banks. Its current level of $140 million does not come close to taking care of these problems. Think about that. We talk a good game about personal responsibility, we talk about family values, yet for the basic level of nutrition, one in six seniors does not have enough food, and even a higher percentage of children in this society do not have enough food, and people who work full time in this society--forget about health care; we know many of them don't have health care--do not have enough food. Yet the President, because of the $3-billion-a-week war in Iraq, because he insists, even in his State of the Union Message, on more tax cuts, as Senator Casey, the Presiding Officer, was talking about earlier today, more tax cuts for the richest people in the country, we continue to spend exactly the same shrinking dollars for the last 5 years because you cannot buy nearly as much food on $140 million today as you could 5 years ago. We worked with other concerned colleagues to increase funding for food banks to $250 million in the farm bill. There has been bipartisan agreement there. Unfortunately, the President has threatened to veto this bill, in part because of increased spending on nutrition.

We have also seen the President flat-line funding of the Women, Infants and Children program, which is about as pound-foolish and penny-wise as you can imagine. We are going to spend less to keep women who are pregnant, low-income women, healthy, spend less on nutrition for them, so we will have more low birth weight babies, more children not getting what is most important after they are born--at the most important time in their lives, in utero and after they are born--having the kind of nutrition they need--we are not going to fund that? What kind of priority is that?

It is all a question of priorities. Do we give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in this country or do we take care of low-income women who are pregnant and children after they are born? And are we going to fund this $3 billion-a-week war in Iraq or are we going to look at some other priorities to take care of the 1-in-6 elderly people who have to choose between food and heat or food and the medicine they take? Are we going to continue to do these tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, at the expense of people who can't always help themselves?

Again, most of these people who go to food banks are people who are employed. They are working hard and playing by the rules, and they simply can't quite make it because their incomes haven't kept up with the cost of gasoline in getting to and from work; the cost of heating, to stay warm in the winter; and the increasing cost of food.

The President hasn't called for emergency measures to aid hungry Americans. He has consistently, as I have said before, tried to cut nutrition programs that target populations in desperate need. Indifference to human suffering is a moral failure, a moral failure that obscures our Nation's values and dampens our Nation's potential. Think about that: children in this country who don't have adequate food growing up, pregnant women who don't have the right nutrition. Considering what our other priorities are and how much we are spending on those other priorities, it is clearly something we should be doing in this body and in the House of Representatives.

In the stimulus package that is about to pass the Senate, we have an amendment to provide an increase of $100 million for emergency food assistance. I know the Presiding Officer supports that, and I know most of my colleagues do. We also fear the Republicans will filibuster that because they do not think we should spend money directly on food programs. Some don't, some do. We know the President has threatened to veto anything in the stimulus package that wasn't his idea.

There are few things in our country more important than making sure seniors, people who have worked all their lives, and children whose parents are working hard and playing by the rules and doing their best should be adequately fed and adequately housed. So I urge that this Congress, in the next couple days, amend the stimulus package to include this food assistance.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 438, submitted earlier today.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; that any statements be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business, it adjourn until 11 a.m. tomorrow, Thursday, January 31, and that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the

leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and that the majority leader be recognized.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand adjourned under the previous order.

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

I ask unanimous consent to address the Senate as in morning business for 15 minutes.

I thank Senator Murkowski for her work. There is absolutely a need for that legislation. I appreciate what she has done.

Last night we heard a vision that the President of the United States was standing in the Chamber of the House of Representatives speaking to all of us. He talked about how best to proceed during times of clear economic crisis, job loss, health care, energy costs soaring, threats to our domestic safety nets, and a war in Iraq with no end in sight.

When news media people asked me what I thought about the speech, one of the things I said was I wished the President could have sat in on some of the meetings that I had as I traveled Ohio in the last year, my State. I had about 80 roundtable meetings of 15, 20, 25 people in a community where for an hour and a half I would ask them questions about their communities, about their problems. In every corner of the State, I heard from veterans and first responders, from farmers, from people running small businesses, from teachers, from students, from community leaders, from mothers and fathers. I wish the President had been able to hear some of this because people clearly want to hear their Government is finally committed to change and to fighting for the middle class.

They want to hear that the economic policies of the last 7 years, policies that have failed them, are a thing of the past and we have a new direction. They want to hear about a plan to finally bring back good-paying jobs, lower our health care and energy coasts, secure our safety nets, and end the war in Iraq.

For Ohioans, the future is about change. Let's say you are driving down the road. You notice that the signs, mile markers, exit signs, billboards as huge as houses are telling you that you are going in the wrong direction: Signs saying wages stagnating, signs saying U.S. jobs being shipped overseas, a housing crisis deepening, health care costs soaring, increased dependance on foreign oil, product safety unsure, no end to the war in Iraq. The longer you stay on the road, the worse things get.

So you hit the gas pedal and head further down that road. If you drive down the road, the wrong road, long enough, does it become the right one? Of course not. You do not proudly log more miles on the wrong road. You change direction.

If there is one thing you can say about the administration and its supporters in Congress it is that they are consistent. They consistently answer to the wealthiest Americans and to the largest corporations and pay lipservice to the rest of the population.

Think about last night. The President said 116 million people--if we extend the tax cuts, 116 million people will get tax cuts averaging $1,800 a person.

Does the President really say--does that really say what the tax cuts mean? It is a very small number of people getting huge tax cuts, and tens and tens and tens of millions of Americans are getting almost nothing.

Does he say it that way? Does he tell the American people that is what it is? Of course not. He says the average American will average $1,800 from the tax cuts. Simply, that is very misleading. We have seen that on tax policy over and over and over in this administration.

I will yield to the Senator.

I appreciate the comments from the Senator from North Dakota, who understands probably better than anybody in this body what this trade deficit means, what this trade policy means. And what is amazing is the President does not look at the $800 billion trade deficit.

When I came to the Congress in 1992, it was $38 billion. Now it is over $800 billion.

The President's father once said $1 billion in trade deficits translates into the loss of 13,000 jobs. Now it is $800 billion, and the President did not address that. But what he did say is: Let's do more of this. He said: We need a trade agreement with Columbia, we need a trade agreement with Panama, we need a trade agreement with South Korea. And it just makes me incredulous that the President cannot look at what has happened and say: Wait a second, let's do a timeout. Let's do no further trade agreements. Let's go back, as the Senator from North Dakota, Mr. Dorgan, has suggested, and let's have benchmarks. Let's look at what NAFTA did to our country, look at what CAFTA has done to our country, look at what trade with China has done to the middle class.

The President totally missed that. At the same time, the President said: Let's do more tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent at the expense of the middle class and drive up these budget deficits. So we have trade deficits of $800 billion, plus we have budget deficits of about $1 billion a day. And that is fundamentally the biggest problem with our economy, as you suggest.

Absolutely. I remember back in the early 1990s, we were concerned about the twin deficits, the trade deficit and the budget deficit. We had a budget deficit then of about $300 billion a year and a trade deficit, as the Presiding Officer knows--who joined me in voting against NAFTA a decade ago--of under $100 billion. We considered that a serious problem. Today, President Bush doesn't recognize that this trade deficit means anything. To the contrary, he says, it seems to be working. Let's do more of it.

Again, I go back to what his father said, that a billion dollars in trade deficit translates into 13,000 lost jobs. You can see how it does. Because a billion dollars in trade deficit means we are buying a billion dollars, we are importing a billion dollars more than we are selling, and that means we are manufacturing less because we are not making it ourselves. If we manufacture less, it means thousands of Ohioans or North Dakotans or New Jerseyans are finding they are not working at $12 or $15 or $20 an hour. If those plants lay off workers, communities get less tax dollars, police, firemen and teachers are laid off. It undercuts the economic vitality of the community and the public safety. It undercuts the ability of our schools to educate our children. It is clearly a downward spiral that is only accelerated when we pass a trade agreement with Colombia and with Peru and Panama and another trade agreement with South Korea.

When I hear Senator Dorgan talk about this, I think about 20 years from now, 15 years from now. We are going to look back on this time, and we will think: What were they thinking when they changed the laws to allow so many cheap imports from

China, made by workers in unsafe conditions, sending products back, toxic toys to our children's bedrooms and contaminated food into our kitchens and pantries? We are going to look back 20 years from now and think: Why did we dismantle our industrial base, jeopardizing our national security, the security of our family farms in North Dakota and Ohio and small businesses and manufacturers in New Jersey and all over the country? We are going to look back and think: Why did we let corporations lobby this Congress so that they changed the rules so that it made sense for these companies, in terms of their bottom line, in terms of their profits, to go to China instead of manufacturing in Galion or Toledo or Youngstown, OH?

Imagine instead if we as a nation decided we were going to have a Marshall plan or go to the Moon kind of plan on alternative energy, that we changed our trade law and our tax law and we began through biomass, through production of wind turbines and solar panels. Imagine if we set out to remake our energy policy and our country's industrial base by changing trade law, by changing tax law. We clearly still do the best R&D in the world on all kinds of scientific research and medical research. But so often we do the R&D here, which is good for the economy and good for creating jobs, but then most of the production is shipped offshore. So what good is that for our country, when we develop the research, we do the research and development and then send it offshore?

The Senator mentioned the Ohio Art Company. That sort of tells the story. It is a company in northwest Ohio right in the corner where Indiana and Ohio intersect with Michigan. They make something that most of us knew as children called Etch A Sketch. About 7 or 8 years ago--I was in Bryan a couple months ago talking to an executive of Ohio Art Company. Seven or eight years ago a major U.S. retailer went to them and said: We want to sell your product in our stores for less money, for under $10. The only option that Ohio Art Company had was to stop most of its production in Ohio and move its production overseas. Every job that was moved to China meant less money for the Bryan Police Department, less money for the Williams County government, less money for public schools, less money paid into Medicare, less money paid into Social Security. It made us poor as a nation. At the same time, those products moved to China. But it lifted the living standards there because wages are so low. The Chinese wink and nod at best at any kind of environmental rules or worker safety rules. We have done little to lift up.

Senator Dorgan and I want more trade but a different set of rules. Instead of lifting workers up so Mexican workers would be buying American products and we would be buying Mexican products back and forth the way we should trade, and their living standards would go up, they would have good environmental and worker safety standards, their wages would rise. That is what happened with the 50 States in the United States. As companies moved around the United States to the South, eventually their wages went up and we began to enrich all sections of the country.

We are not doing that with China. We are not doing that with our trade policy. That is why I was so disappointed that last night the President said: We want a new trade agreement with Colombia. We want one with South Korea. We want one with Panama. Instead of going in the right direction, we are changing our trade policy and moving in a different direction.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota. He told the story about the immigrant who settled in Chicago. That may have been a story from a different era, but we still in so many ways are a nation of tinkerers and inventors, entrepreneurs and scientists-- a nation that still leads the world in brain power in terms of figuring out new products, new ways of doing things, new services. The problem is, there has been a disconnect between that and production and job growth and job creation.

That is why the President's speech last night, to me, was so disappointing,

that he has asked for more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, tax cuts that, frankly--usually, these tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans are at the expense of the middle class. He has asked for more trade agreements while our trade deficit explodes year after year after year.

As Senator Dorgan suggested, we know what we need to do as a nation. We know what we need to do with tax policy to serve the middle class. We know what we need to do with trade policy to serve the middle class.

Even though the President wants to stay the course, wants to continue the same direction, I think there is change afoot in this country. People want change. People want to strengthen again the middle class and strengthen our communities in New Jersey and Rhode Island--Senator Whitehouse is in the Chamber, too--and in my State of Ohio, from Lima to Zanesville and from Dayton to Warren.

I thank you, Mr. President, for your time and again exhort Americans to look down the road for a new trade policy, a new tax policy that helps to build the middle class.

Mr. President, first of all, I thank the Senator from Iowa for his terrific work on advocating for those who are most victimized by this recession, the elderly who need help on their heating and weatherization of their homes, the people who need food stamps, people who have lost their jobs, people who have lost their health

insurance, people who are struggling the most. I wish to thank Senator Harkin for his work.

I wish to tell a story that I think illustrates the hardship among middle-class Americans, middle-class Ohioans, people who have worked hard, played by the rules, have seen their unemployment run out, or seen their job lost or seen the prices of gasoline and home heating and food go so high that they cannot afford the middle-class lifestyle or even the subsistence living that has afflicted their lives.

I mentioned this story on the floor a couple times, but it so much illustrates Senator Harkin's words and Senator Harkin's solutions of extending unemployment, that gets money in people's pockets quickly; of helping with food banks and food stamps and LIHEAP and all that.

Congress's response needs to be twofold. We need to stimulate the economy, and the House version is a start, it is a good start, and we need to help those who are most victimized by the recession.

In Logan, OH, in Hocking County, a county halfway between Columbus in Central Ohio and Athens on the Ohio River, in Logan, OH, a southeast Appalachian county, on a cold December day about a month ago, at 3:30 in the morning people began to line up outside the United Methodist in Logan, the county seat of Hocking County, to get food. It was 3:30 in the morning on a cold winter day. By 8 o'clock, cars were snaked around the church and the neighborhood and up and down the streets when the food panty opened. By 1 o'clock in the afternoon, 2,000 people--2,000 people in a county of about 30,000--7 percent of the county, had come to this food pantry.

Many of those in this county had driven 20, 25 or 30 minutes to get there, a county that has had problems in the past but a county where that food bank served only a few dozen people 3 or 4 or 5 years ago.

Across the State, in Warren County, a relatively affluent community overall, a larger county northeast of Cincinnati down in southwest Ohio, the head of the United Way told me 90 percent of their people who come to their food pantries in their county, 90 percent of the people have jobs.

The mayor of Denver told a group of us, the Presiding Officer was there, that 40 percent of the homeless people in greater Denver are employed. Underemployed, perhaps, employed obviously in low-wage jobs.

Tim, a gentleman from Cleveland, used to donate time and money to the local food bank and soup kitchen. He is still employed, but the costs were consuming him and his family. He quit giving money to the food bank but continued to volunteer there. Now he is in a position where he relies on those resources himself. He said he used to be middle class, but he does not consider himself middle class any more because his wages have not kept pace with the cost of basic needs such as food, heat, and shelter.

He spoke of the great humility it took to go to the food bank for his own household. He said it is merely a drop in the bucket compared to what his family needs.

Today my office received an alarming e-mail from Ohio's Second Harvest. Second Harvest is a group of food banks that serve our State. The e-mail mail explained that Second Harvest Food Bank of Southeastern Ohio, which serves the area where Logan is, the community I mentioned earlier, is nearly out of food. For the fourth time in just over a year, the e-mail said, they have come very close to closing their doors; there is no relief in sight.

This problem is not unique to Ohio, it is affecting cities all over this country. It is affecting rural areas, large cities, small towns, and suburbs. No community seems to be immune from this.

That is why our efforts are so very important. Senator Harkin had a chart that showed the importance of putting money directly into the pockets of those who are most afflicted by this recession. That means people who go to food banks; it means people on food stamps; it means people who have problems paying their heating bill; it means people whose unemployment has run out.

I appreciate the House action. As I said, the House has a good start, putting money into the pockets directly of middle-class taxpayers, of working families. But we need to do more. The best thing we can do while we want to stimulate the economy, the best thing we can do is extend unemployment compensation. Because that money will be spent by those people who are hurting because they lost their job, they cannot find work, and their unemployment has run out.

Our proposal of $40 million that I introduced back in December may need to be more than that, but that would be a good start, to get people over December, January, February as these food banks have run out of food. That $40 million spread around the country will matter, as these food banks say they are in the worst shape than any time in the last 20 years. They are in worse shape because grocery stores donate less because they are more efficient, they damage fewer cans, they have less oversupply or waste that they donated to food banks in the past.

Obviously, the demand on these food banks is so much greater than it has been. Again, I would also add that donations are down in January. They always are after Christmas. People, as generous as they are at Christmas, sometimes sort of forget in January, so they are not getting help from the individuals and the community. Of course, the demands on those food banks are higher.

So that stimulus package, while a good start in the House, putting money in the pockets of middle-class Americans and working Americans, needs to go further and needing to go further is helping the most afflicted, pained, the people who need it most and have been victims of this recession.

As Senator Harkin said, that money will then be spent in our communities with American-made products and will have a very good multiplying effect for jump-starting our economy.

No one should go hungry in the richest country in the world. We are spending $3 billion a week on the war in Iraq. The tax cuts the President gave over the last 6 years resulted in huge numbers of dollars to the richest people, the richest 1 percent in this country. It is time we dealt with some of the problems that are hurting people in Steubenville and Lima and Zanesville and Dayton and Cleveland and Akron and Youngstown and Warren in my State.

So I ask, as this bill comes to the Senate after House passage, that we look seriously at the proposal Senator Harkin had to take care of food stamps and food banks, to extend unemployment benefits, to take care of seniors who simply cannot meet their heating bills as the winter moves on.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 425 submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to and the motion to reconsider be laid on the table.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H. Con. Res. 282 just received from the House and at the desk.

I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution be agreed to and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, without intervening debate or action.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Presiding Officer of the Senate be authorized to appoint a committee on the part of the Senate to join with a like committee on the part of the House of Representatives to escort the President of the United States into the House Chamber for the joint session to be held at 9 p.m. on Monday, January 28, 2008.

Mr. President, I understand that S. 2556, introduced earlier today by Senator Reid, the majority leader, is at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. President, I now ask for its second reading and object to my own request.

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

Madam President, I appreciate the comments of my colleague from Maryland and his insight. The economic house in our country is not in order. The United States may be entering its first recession since 2001--since the beginning of the Bush Presidency. It is pretty clear in my State of Ohio, from places I visited in January, from Kenton to Celina to Cincinnati to Lancaster, to places all over my State, that people are suffering. Food banks are at their most perilous time in at least 20 years.

In Logan, OH, a small community halfway between Columbus and the center of the State and the Ohio River and the town of Athens, halfway between Hocking County and Logan, OH, is the United Methodist Food Pantry. At 3:30 in the morning on a cold December day just about a month ago, people began to line up to go to this food bank, and by 8 o'clock, when the doors opened, cars were all the way up and down the road. This is a small county. By 1 o'clock in the afternoon, 2,000 people--7 percent of the people in this rural Appalachian county, Hocking County, Logan, OH--had come to this food bank; 2,000 people, 7 percent of the people who live in this county, many having driven 20 or 30 minutes to get there.

Middle-class families in Ohio and throughout our Nation face higher costs for energy and health care and education, amidst stagnant wages and falling home prices. In Lebanon, OH, in Warren County, the United Way director told me 90 percent of people going to food banks to pick up food are employed.

The mayor of Denver told a group of us today--Senator Stabenow and others--that 40 percent of homeless people in greater Denver are employed, they have jobs, but not making enough because of foreclosures or cost of food or transportation, simply not making--making low wages, not making enough to make a go of it.

Our Nation is bleeding jobs. The middle class is shrinking. People are hurting. When it comes to responding to these realities, we have several choices. We can try to buy time, as many of the Republican candidates for President are saying, and leave it at that. The economy is cyclical; it will get better; let's ride it out. No government involvement at all. That is one option.

The second option is we can enact a short-term economic stimulus package where we put money in the pockets of middle-class taxpayers, whether they are paying income tax or Social Security tax, put money in the pockets of middle-class taxpayers, extend unemployment compensation, offer aid for food stamps and food banks, and also offer aid to LIHEAP for seniors who are particularly victimized by this recession.

The third option is we can learn from our mistakes. We certainly need to do the short-term economic stimulus package. That is very important, but that is not enough. We can learn from our mistakes. We can confront the underlying causes of our Nation's economic stability. I want to focus on one of those causes. It is a refusal to acknowledge that U.S. trade policies must evolve as the global marketplace does.

When I first ran for Congress in 1992--the same year as the Presiding Officer was elected from her State of Washington--our trade deficit was $38 billion. Our trade deficit figures for 2007 are estimated at nearly $800 billion, and that is before we count the December numbers. So we know our trade deficit went from $38 billion to, a decade and a half later, nearly $800 billion.

President George Herbert Walker Bush has said that $1 billion in trade deficit or surplus translates into 13,000 jobs. So if you sell a billion dollars more out of the country than you import, that is a net increase of 13,000 jobs. If you export $1 billion less than you export, then that is costing 13,000 jobs. Do the math. We went from a $38 billion trade deficit to an $800 billion trade deficit.

The fact is, these job-killing trade agreements are hemorrhaging jobs out of our country and our manufacturing communities, from small towns such as Tippin, OH, to cities as large as Cleveland, OH, from places like Chillicothe, to places like Columbus. The U.S. trade deficit with China, which has continued to spiral upward, hit $238 billion through November of 2007. In 1992, the year I ran for Congress, our trade deficit with China was slightly over $10 billion. It hit over $238 billion, and that is just through November 2007. As President Bush the first said, $1 billion in trade deficit costs 13,000 jobs. Do the math.

Just with China alone, this is the highest annual imbalance ever recorded with a single country, with any bilateral relationship in world history. The trade deficit we have with China now accounts for 33 percent of the U.S. total trade deficit in goods.

Since 1982, our Nation has accumulated trade deficits of $4.3 trillion. That is money that must be eventually repaid. When you look at $4.3 trillion, think of the first President Bush's formula: a billion-dollar trade deficit costs 13,000 jobs.

Today, Americans are losing jobs for reasons, frankly, that have nothing to do with this recession. They have much to do with our country's narrow, myopic, tunnel-vision trade policies. When we craft trade deals that favor gains for multinational corporations over evenhanded competition for both trading partners, why should we be surprised when U.S. companies are crippled or they move out of the country? In Tippin, OH, where I visited a week and a half ago, workers are losing their pensions, health care, or the company has come in and raided these communities and put people out of work, so there are less dollars for schools, less dollars for police protection, for fire protection, and fewer dollars for the local hardware store, fewer dollars for the local restaurants, all of that.

That is why we need to enforce trade rules meant to prevent anticompetitive practices by countries such as China. We should not be surprised when our manufacturing sector--which is not only crucial to our economy but to national security--falters because of these anticompetitive practices. It is not in our Nation's best interest to rely on other nations for our defense infrastructure, our transportation infrastructure, our industrial infrastructure.

The tragedy is, we in this country do the best research and development in the world. We do the research and development and so often companies take that research and development and make the products in other countries. Then we continue to do research and development, and they continue to take the production of these items and goods and this research and these high-tech products out of our country. The research and development certainly creates jobs, good, high-paying jobs, many in the State of the Presiding Officer and many in mine.

The fact is, we cannot continue to run an economy when we do the research and development in this country and then we farm out the production of those goods that are developed to other countries, to exploit low-wage labor, to exploit weak environmental laws, to exploit worker safety laws, to exploit the consumer products safety net. Look at the toxic toys coming from China and the contaminated toothpaste and dog food, and the unsafe tires coming from countries that don't have a consumer products safety net and the food safety net we have.

We clearly need a stronger manufacturing sector such as we have had in our history. That sector cannot effectively compete against companies subsidized by the Chinese Government, companies that pay slave wages, that too often churn out dangerous toys that end up in our children's bedrooms, and toxic, contaminated food that ends up too often in our families breakfast rooms.

On a level, competitive playing field, U.S. companies thrive. When the cards are stacked against them, they struggle, of course.

In 2007, prior to the onset of the 2008 recession, 217,000 manufacturing jobs across the country were lost. That was last year before this recession seems to have deepened. Madam President, 217,000 jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector last year in places such as Youngstown, Warren, Ravenna, and Lima, all over my State.

The United States now has fewer manufacturing jobs--get this--the United States, now with 300 million people, has fewer manufacturing jobs today than it did in 1950 when we had about 150 million people in our country. Manufacturing jobs bring wealth to our communities. A job that pays $15 an hour in Marion, OH, and pays $14 an hour in Springfield, OH, brings wealth into the community that spends out into other jobs and prosperity for other people in the community.

We have lost more than 3 million manufacturing jobs since President Bush took office in 2001. Many of these jobs have been eliminated because of imports from China or direct offshoring to countries such as China.

Last week, NewPage, a paper manufacturing company based in Miamisburg, OH, near Dayton, announced it was shutting down plants in Wisconsin, Maine, and Chillicothe, OH. Heavily government-subsidized Chinese paper producers account for nearly 50 percent of the world market.

One country, because of subsidies and low wages, unenforced environmental rules, and pretty much nonexistent protection for workers, accounts for 50 percent of the world market. That is not free trade, that is a racket.

China has done little to address the fundamental misalignment of its currency, a practice that continues to take jobs and wealth from our country, and they don't share it with their workers. If they didn't have an oppressive, authoritarian government, it would be a different story. They are taking wealth out of our country, and it means higher profits for outsourcing companies, more money for the Chinese Communist Party, for the People's Liberation Army, but not much for Chinese workers.

When we allow China to manipulate currency, trade isn't free, it is fixed. When we allow China to import dangerous products into our country, we should not be surprised when Americans balk.

It took generations for our Nation to build a solid product safety system. If we don't demand safe imports from China and our other trading partner nations, our investment in U.S. product safety becomes an exercise in futility. Think how it happens. U.S. companies shut down an American toy manufacturer, for instance, and those U.S. companies, after shutting down the manufacturing in the United States, move to China. China is a country with low wages, unenforced environmental and worker safety standards. The U.S. company goes to China because of weak environmental and worker safety standards and low wages. Because they don't enforce those rules, you know what is going to happen. Products made in those countries will be made in bad conditions, and there is likely to be toxic or dangerous toys, and more likely to be contaminated food.

The U.S. companies in China then push their Chinese subcontractors to cut costs because they want more profit. So they are pushing the Chinese subcontractors to cut costs, and then those products that are imported into the United States are even more dangerous. Then the Consumer Products Safety Commission in this country--because of President Bush's decisions, we have weakened the regulatory system, so those products come in and there are not enough inspectors. The laws are weakened, so the dangerous toys and contaminated food too often ends up in our family rooms, bedrooms, and our kitchens.

Some free-trade proponents say workers and consumers should get over it, get used to it; it is globalization and there is nothing you can do about it. That is wrong.

Continuing this course will not only cost the middle class more jobs, it will cost our economy its global leadership. It will foist so much debt on our children and their children that basic economic security, basic retirement security may be reserved for the fortunate few. Certainly not the middle class. And as for the poor, just let them eat cake.

The people in Ohio, in all corners, are swimming upstream against deteriorating economic forces. One important reason for that is that Federal policymakers continue to cling to the fantasy that markets run themselves and police themselves, and as long as the rich are getting richer, wealth will trickle down, jobs will be created, and everybody is better off.

It is time to take the blinders off. To secure our economy for the future, we need to write trade rules that crack down on anticompetitive gaming. In our country, still the most powerful in the world, with the most vigorous economy, we need to write trade rules that crack down on anticompetitive gaming of the system. That is what they have done. We need trade rules that prevent dangerous products from entering our country. We need trade rules that acknowledge that destroying the environment in any country, whether it is China or the United States, is a threat to every country.

We need to take responsibility for the consequences of our inaction when it comes to trade policy. We need to take responsibility for the consequences of mistakes we have made in writing trade policy. We need to change course, and we need to do it now.

I yield the floor.

(Mr. CASEY assumed the Chair.)

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 421, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid on the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 422, which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid on the table.

Mr. President, I regret I wasn't standing here with the congratulations of the Red Sox beating the Cleveland Indians earlier last year.