[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 55 (Wednesday, April 21, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H2229-H2230]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    CALLING FOR SIGNIFICANT REFORMS IN AMERICA'S SANCTIONS POLICIES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Dooley) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DOOLEY of California. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to be an advocate 
for the United States making significant reforms in our sanctions 
policy. It is becoming increasingly apparent that an increasing share 
of our gross domestic product and indeed the growth of our economy is 
becoming related to trade.
  It is obvious, I think, too, to most Americans when we look at the 
fact that only 4 percent of the world's population live inside our 
borders, with 96 percent living outside our borders, that this country 
has to adopt policies to ensure that we will have the greatest access 
to these markets, because that is where the interests of increased job 
opportunities that are so important to the working men and women of 
this country as well as the market opportunities for the businesses 
lie.
  I have beside me here a chart which really demonstrates one of the 
reasons and makes one of the most compelling arguments for sanctions 
reform. We currently impose some form of sanctions on over 75 
countries. The most distressing aspect of this is the fact that it is 
costing our economy up to $15 to $20 billion a year in lost imports, 
and that means we have $200,000 fewer jobs, high-paying jobs in this 
country because of the sanctions we have imposed.
  I have introduced a piece of legislation with my colleague, the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane). It is a bipartisan piece of 
legislation that is asking us to adopt a new policy to ensure that we 
will use sanctions only as a last resort.
  It does not say that Congress and this country cannot impose 
unilateral economic sanctions, but it does require that before we do so 
we have to do an analysis and make sure that when we impose a sanction, 
that it will indeed achieve the objective of mitigation of the behavior 
of a country which we are targeting.
  It also goes further, to say to Members of Congress that we need to 
have a study to analyze what will be the cost to our economy, what will 
be the cost in terms of jobs lost, what will be the cost to our economy 
in terms of markets lost to U.S. companies by the imposition of that 
sanction?
  I am confident that once Members of Congress have that information in 
front of them, they are going to realize that the policy and the 
utilization of unilateral economic sanctions is a policy that harms the 
interests of the working men and women, as well as the businesses in 
this country.
  A group of us who work closely with the New Democrat Coalition have 
made

[[Page H2230]]

this one of our highest priorities, and we are also expanding our 
effort to deal with some issues which are important to the technology 
sector.
  It is clear when we look at the fact that the United States has 
almost remained an island of prosperity and economic growth in the 
midst of a world which is suffering from financial crisis, that in 
large part that is due because of the fact that the United States has 
the relative advantage internationally in the development of new 
technology.
  Yet, we have some sanctions and some export restrictions in place 
which jeopardize our opportunity to continue to have this advantage 
internationally. It is time for us to relax some of our restrictions on 
the export of technology, and particularly restrictions on encryption 
technology.
  Unfortunately, we have a policy that restricts the sale of some of 
our computers embedded with an encryption technology that is using a 
technology that is over 10 years old. The fact that we have a policy in 
place now that will preclude U.S. companies from marketing some of 
their computers and other technology internationally because of our 
restrictions on encryption, how ludicrous this is witnessed by the fact 
that anyone in the world today can go to the Internet and download 
encryption that is far more powerful than that we are imposing upon or 
restricting our companies from selling that product overseas. That just 
does not make sense any longer.
  We also have a policy in place in this country where we restrict the 
speed of computers and microprocessors that we can export outside of 
our borders. That might have made sense 10 years ago or even 5 years 
ago, when we were worried about jeopardizing the national security of 
this country by giving powerful computers and putting them in the hands 
of some of the people who threaten world peace.
  But unfortunately, we have maintained an old policy that has not kept 
pace with the advancements in technology. Back 20 years ago when we had 
our Cray supercomputers, that were certainly so powerful and so 
important that we needed to have responsible restrictions on them, 
today we have reached the point where there is going to be a computer 
sold today, or in this next 6 months, with a chip developed by Intel 
which will have the capacity to perform the number of operations per 
second, and that chip alone will exceed the restrictions we have in 
place.
  It is time for us to make some responsible reforms in encryption 
policy, our restrictions on computer technology, and the overall reform 
of our sanctions policy.

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