[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 122 (Tuesday, September 24, 2002)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9099-S9101]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       TERRORISM AND THE ECONOMY

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to speak about several 
important issues facing the Senate at the moment: namely, the situation 
with Iraq, and the state of our economy.
  First, let me speak about Iraq. And let me begin by saying that I 
don't think there is any question that Saddam Hussein is not following 
the terms of surrender at the end of the gulf war. He has failed to 
live up to any one of those terms or conditions.
  I was at the Incirlik Base in Turkey and visited with the pilots who 
are flying over the northern area of Iraq enforcing the no-fly zone. 
These pilots fly in harm's way. They are often shot at by the ground 
forces of the Iraqi Army. The fact is, Saddam Hussein has violated 
virtually everything to which he previously agreed.
  I don't think there is any question that this is a bad person, who 
poses a real threat. He wants access to nuclear weapons. He has access, 
apparently, to chemical and biological weapons. And the President says 
we ought to do something about this threat posed by Saddam Hussein. I 
agree that we should. The question is, How?
  The President went to the United Nations. And I think that was the 
right thing to do. The Secretary of State is now asking the Security 
Council to join us and pass another enforcement resolution so we can, 
with other countries, begin to enforce coercive inspections in Iraq to 
make sure that, if they have weapons of mass destruction, they are 
destroyed, and to make sure they are never able to acquire weapons of 
mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons.

  But there are other avenues that we should also pursue. I have 
thought for 10 years, since the end of the gulf war, that this country 
should press for the formation of an international criminal tribunal at 
the United Nations to indict and try Saddam Hussein as a war criminal.
  I don't know whether at the end of the day there is going to be a 
regime change in Iraq or not. I hope there is. I believe there ought to 
be a regime change, but I am not sure whether that is going to happen. 
If it doesn't happen, I still think we ought to push for the creation 
of an international war crimes tribunal, so that Saddam Hussein is 
indicted and convicted.
  There is ample evidence--both in this country and also in the United 
Nations--to indict and convict this man of war crimes.
  I spoke on the floor some years ago about a young boy and his family 
who lay dead on the ground in Iraq--victims of weapons of mass 
destruction unleashed by Saddam Hussein that killed thousands of those 
people. He is the only leader I know of in this world who has used 
weapons of mass destruction against his own citizens. So there is ample 
evidence for that and other reasons to indict, try, and convict Saddam 
Hussein for crimes against humanity.
  I have never understood the reluctance of this Government to push 
ahead to do that. I have never understood that. Senator Specter from 
Pennsylvania and I offered a resolution--I think it was about 5 years 
ago in the Senate--calling on the State Department to go to the United 
Nations and attempt to get a war crimes tribunal so we could indict, 
try, and convict this man as a convicted war criminal. I think whenever 
we talk about Saddam Hussein, we should be talking about a convicted 
war criminal.
  Had we done what we should have done 10 years ago and 5 years ago, 
that is what we would now call him, because the evidence is so 
substantial about what he has done to his own people, to people in the 
region, to his neighbors, the weapons he has used--there is just no 
question that this man, even in absentia, would be tried and found 
guilty as a war criminal.
  I think even today our State Department should press that case, even 
as we are pressing for coercive inspections and contemplating taking 
action again against the country of Iraq.
  I have asked my staff to talk to the staff of the Senator from 
Pennsylvania about offering that resolution once again in the Senate. 
It passed the Senate 4 or 5 years ago without a dissenting vote. Yet 
nothing has happened with respect to Saddam Hussein and Iraq and the 
creation of a war crimes tribunal at the United Nations to indict and 
to try him.
  Let me turn to the economy for a moment. Because while the Iraq issue 
is vitally important, we have other very big challenges that are 
largely being ignored. The President and some in this Chamber don't 
want to talk about this, but the fact is our economy is in some 
significant trouble. We have some people whose responsibility it is to 
be involved in fiscal policy who say: What trouble? Things are going 
just fine. This is just a little bit of a correction. Things will be 
fine. Just wait and do nothing. Things will work their way out.
  The fact is, we have come to an intersection in this country unlike 
any we have ever arrived at before. Just a year and a half ago, 
President Bush proposed a fiscal policy. He came to office, and said: 
What I see in this country is 10 years of surpluses, and big ones at 
that. That money belongs to the taxpayer. Let us give it back. Let us 
have a $1.7 billion tax cut.
  I did not vote for that because I said I thought we ought to be a 
little more conservative. I don't think we can see 3 months ahead, let 
alone 10 years ahead. I think the conservative thing to do would be to 
attempt to be a little more moderate in how we deal with fiscal policy 
and not lock in a $1.7 billion reduction in revenue.
  I lost that argument. The majority in this Chamber and the other 
Chamber voted for a $1.7 billion tax cut over 10 years. The President 
celebrated and his supporters celebrated. Everyone talked about how 
wonderful that was. Mr. Greenspan, down at the Federal Reserve Board, 
thought that was fine, too.
  It wasn't very much past that--some months past that--when we 
discovered the country was in a recession. If we had been in a 
recession at the time we were talking about these expected 10 years of 
surpluses, would we have made a different decision? Maybe.
  Not much more than a couple of months beyond that we had the 
terrorist attacks against our country on September 11. Had we known we 
were going to face a recession and the terrorist attacks on our country 
on September 11 that caused such a devastating loss of life, would we 
have said let us put in place a $1.7 billion tax cut? I think we might 
have made different decisions.

[[Page S9100]]

  Then, on top of that, we had the technology bubble burst and the 
stock market began to act like a yo-yo with more down than up.
  On top of all that, we had the corporate scandals in which we saw 
some of the largest corporations in this country--Enron, to name one. I 
chaired the hearings in the Commerce Committee investigating Enron. We 
saw the executives of that company and others run these companies into 
the ground. They cheated and lied to the investors and to the 
employees. The board of directors finally had their own investigation 
into their own company. Do you know what they said? They said: What we 
found inside our company was ``appalling.'' They said: We found this 
corporation was reporting $1 billion in earnings that it didn't earn.
  To give a small example of what was going on, the chief financial 
officer of that corporation invested $25,000 of his own money into a 
corporation, a partnership--a corporation in which he had a proprietary 
interest--and he took out $4.5 million 60 days later.
  Let me say that again.
  He invested $25,000 of his own money and then took out $4.5 million 
60 days later.
  I come from a town of 300 people. We call that stealing in my 
hometown.
  In corporation after corporation, we see all of these corporations 
and the books being recalculated and company executives being led away 
in handcuffs.
  There are a lot of great companies in this country, and a lot of 
great CEOs. Make no mistake about that. Some people say it is just a 
few bad apples. That is true. How big is the orchard with bad apples?
  It is just too many corporations, too many accounting firms, and too 
many law firms that are the enablers that allowed all of this to happen 
and too many executives with larceny in their hearts who don't 
understand this wasn't their money. This was the investors' money.
  What you have is an intersection of a recession, a terrorist attack, 
corporate scandal, the tech bubble bursting, and the stock market 
collapsing.
  Yet, the Administration is telling us that they don't even want to 
talk about the economy, as if the circumstances had not changed at all.
  When people sit around a supper table and talk about their lives, 
most families talk about some key things. Do we have good jobs? Do our 
jobs pay well? Do we have job security? Do our kids go to good schools? 
Do grandpa and grandma have access to good health care? Do we live in a 
safe neighborhood? Those are all the questions that affect the lives of 
America's families.
  Do we have job security? Let me give you an example. A fellow wrote 
to me. He said: My life savings as an employee of the Enron 
Corporation--he worked for a pipeline corporation that was a 
subsidiary--were in Enron stock. It was worth $330,000. I saved for 
years to put together $330,000 in my 401(k) account in Enron stock. It 
is all that I have. That $330,000 is now worth $1,700.
  Is that a problem? You bet your life it is a problem for that family, 
and so many other families across this country who have seen their life 
savings dissipate.
  Now, people say: Well, that is just anecdotal information about this 
family or that family. But it is not that. The average 401(k) account 
in this country has lost one-third of its value. These are the life 
savings of people, the retirement savings of people. It has lost one-
third of its value.
  Do you think that is going to have an impact on our economy? Of 
course it is. Our economy is all about people's expectations about the 
future.
  I used to teach economics. I overcame that, nonetheless, and have 
been able to go on and do some other things productively. The field of 
economics is not much more than psychology pumped up by helium. It is 
just people estimating what might or might not happen.
  Our economy is very simple. If our future is a bright, rosy future, 
if people are confident about the future, then they do things that 
manifest that confidence. They buy a house, buy a car, take a trip; 
they do the things that represent people who are confident in their 
future. And that expands the economy.
  When people lack confidence in the future, they do the exact 
opposite. They decide not to take the trip. They don't buy the car. 
They don't buy the house. They defer purchases they might have 
otherwise made. As a result, economy contracts.
  So we are in a situation where we have an economy that is in some 
trouble. It is not growing. People are not confident about the future. 
They see corporate scandals. They are worried about investing in a 
corporation. They are worried about the method by which we ask people 
to invest in a share of stock in a company they never visited with 
executives they don't know, with accounting firms they are supposed to 
trust but now do not.
  And still we have the Administration and some in the Senate saying: 
Well, what is the problem? We don't need to revisit any of these 
circumstances. We don't need to talk about fiscal policy. We don't need 
to talk about the economy.
  They are wrong. We need to talk about jobs. What is happening in 
jobs? We need to talk about the economy, economic growth, and 
opportunity. We need to talk about this country's fiscal 
responsibility, its budget mess.
  There isn't anyone in this Chamber who can get up and talk about how 
this budget adds up, because it does not. We have a fiscal policy that 
is sorely out of balance, and everybody knows it. Everyone wants to 
pretend that is not the case. And it starts with the President.
  Now, what is the record?
  Job losses. We are not expanding. We are losing jobs at this point. 
Private-sector jobs are down, down sharply.
  Weak economic growth. In fact, some indicators suggest we may have 
almost no growth at the present time.
  We have an anemic economy, there is no question about that.
  Declining business investment.
  A falling stock market. Just take a check over the last week or two; 
in fact, go back 6 years to find when the NASDAQ was as low as it was 
yesterday.
  Shrinking retirement accounts. I have just described that. An average 
family having a 401(k) is losing a third of its value.
  Eroding consumer confidence.
  Rising health care costs. One of the issues we ought to talk about on 
the floor of the Senate is this: rising health care costs. It also 
explodes the Federal deficit, causes havoc with every State budget, 
especially causes chaos with the budgets of families.
  We are trying to say to the American people and the pharmaceutical 
industry: The prices you are charging for prescription drugs are 
outrageous. You charge the American people the highest prices in the 
world for prescription drugs, and it is unfair.
  Yet, when you take on that industry in this Chamber, asking, ``how do 
you justify this; how do you justify to a woman who has breast cancer 
that the drug Tamoxifin is going to cost her 10 times as much in the 
United States as you charge for the identical drug in Canada; how do 
you justify that,'' there is no answer. It is a deafening silence.
  But yet you can't get effective legislation through the Congress 
because we have too many here who support the pharmaceutical industry. 
The big, powerful, and strong make a great deal of money, and they like 
the status quo.
  We are going to focus on an economic forum of sorts in the coming 
couple of weeks, to see if we can get together people who want to talk 
about the economy who have contrasting views about the economy, and to 
see if we can begin a debate about what ought to be done.
  We have too many people out of work. We have too many people who have 
lost too much money in the market. We have an erosion of confidence. We 
have a budget deficit that is escalating.
  We could not get appropriations bills through the floor of the Senate 
by the October first date. Why? We could not get a budget? Why? Because 
none of it adds up. And everyone in this Chamber knows it does not add 
up.
  How do you add up a circumstance where you have less revenue coming 
in, and you decide you have to do $45 billion more for defense in 1 
year, probably something close to $30 billion more for homeland 
security in 1 year? Add that additional spending on top of a fiscal 
policy in which you have either slow growth or a recession, and less

[[Page S9101]]

money coming in, and therefore higher deficits, and then what is left 
for the things that represent domestic discretionary spending, 
including health care and education?
  What is left to try to do something that says to kids: Your education 
matters because our future is in our schoolrooms? We believe that every 
young child ought to walk through the door of a schoolroom where their 
parents are able to say: We have sent our child to the best schoolroom 
in the world.
  How do you do that when there is no money left for education or 
health care because we have a fiscal policy that does not add up 
because 18 months ago we said we were going to have surpluses for 10 
straight years, and 18 months later--following a war, a recession, 
stock market collapse, corporate scandals, and more--we now have turned 
surpluses into big deficits.
  I think it is time--long past the time--for this Congress to have an 
honest, real, aggressive, significant debate about this country's 
economy: what is wrong; how do we fix it; what has worked; what works; 
what is right; what does not work, and how do we repair it.
  I began by talking about Iraq. The situation in Iraq is very 
important. But our economy is also vitally important. We have been the 
economic engine for this world. When the economy in Asia was soft, we 
still were the economic engine that provided strength. When the 
economies of Europe were soft, the American economy was still the 
economic engine. Take a look what is happening to the American economy 
today, and it is not working well.
  This Congress has a responsibility to begin a thoughtful, sober, 
serious discussion about what works and what does not with our economy, 
and how we construct a new fiscal policy to fix that which is wrong. 
The President has a responsibility to join us as well. At the present 
time he talks only about foreign policy. Foreign policy is important, 
but it is not exclusive. This President has a responsibility to join 
us. It is his fiscal policy. He won 18 months ago. It is his fiscal 
policy that now helps create large deficits rather than large 
surpluses. He must join us in trying to determine what we can do to 
pull ourselves out of this morass.
  This country can do better, but it needs good public policy coming 
from this Congress.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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