[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 15563-15591]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  TRADE ACT OF 2002--CONFERENCE REPORT

  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the 
Senate will now resume consideration of the conference report 
accompanying H.R. 3009, which the clerk will report.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

       A conference report to accompany the bill (H.R. 3009) to 
     extend the Andean Trade Preference Act, to grant additional 
     trade benefits under that Act, and for other purposes.

  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the time 
until 10:30 a.m. shall be equally divided between the Senator from 
Montana, Mr. Baucus, or the Senator from Iowa, Mr. Grassley, and the 
Senator from North Dakota, Mr. Dorgan, or his designee.
  The Senator from Montana is recognized.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to vote 
yes on the motion to invoke cloture on the trade bill. Three months 
ago, the Senate passed its version of the Trade Act of 2002. It was a 
strong bill, it was a progressive bill, and it passed overwhelmingly 
with strong bipartisan support.
  We now have completed our conference with Representatives of the 
House. I am pleased to present the Senate with a conference report that 
retains and builds upon key elements of the Senate bill.
  Let me begin by discussing the reestablishment of the President's 
fast-track trade negotiating authority. This authority will make it 
easier for the President to negotiate strong trade agreements, but we 
do not give the President a blank check. Far from it. The bill makes 
Congress a full partner in trade by laying out negotiating objectives 
on a number of topics and creating a structure for consultations--I 
might add, much stronger than previous fast-track bills.
  Most of the debate on fast track has focused on three trouble spots 
in trade negotiations: Labor rights and environmental standards; so-
called chapter 11 provisions; and U.S. trade laws.
  Let me turn to them. First, labor and environmental standards. Most 
importantly, this bill adopts the standards set forth in the United 
States-Jordan Free Trade Agreement; that is, as a floor. No standards 
in future trade agreements can go below the floor set in the United 
States-Jordan Free Trade Agreement, which is a pretty high floor, but 
certainly agreements can be higher.
  In that agreement, in the United States-Jordan Free Trade Agreement,

[[Page 15564]]

both parties agreed to strive for labor standards articulated by the 
ILO and for similar improvement in environmental protection. Both 
countries also agreed to faithfully enforce their environmental and 
labor laws and not to waive them to gain a trade advantage.
  The conference bill's fast-track provisions fully adopt the Jordan 
provisions, and the bill makes it clear that Jordan is the model for 
every free-trade agreement we negotiate; that is, the bottom floor is 
Jordan. Again, agreements can go higher. That is a big step forward.
  In addition, the conference report obtains negotiating objectives 
seeking to eliminate the worst forms of child labor. Senator Harkin has 
been a tireless advocate on this issue, and I am proud the conference 
report includes this important objective.
  Another contentious issue pertains to investor-state dispute 
settlement, also known as chapter 11, in reference to provisions on 
this topic in NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.
  The conference report attempts to balance the legitimate needs of 
U.S. investors with the legitimate needs of Federal, State, and local 
regulators, and the concerns of environmental and public interest 
groups.
  The bill directs trade negotiators to seek provisions that keep 
Chapter XI-type standards in line with the standards articulated by 
U.S. courts on similar matters.
  It urges the creation of a mechanism to rapidly dispose of frivolous 
complaints and to deter their filing in the first place.
  And it urges the creation of an appellate body to correct legal 
errors and ensure consistent interpretation of key provisions by 
Chapter XI arbitration panels. That is a level playing field.
  So neither country has an advantage, and neither investors on the one 
hand, nor municipalities nor environmental groups on the other hand, 
have an advantage. It is a totally level playing field.
  I am pleased that, on the whole, we were able to retain the Senate 
objectives on investment.
  The second difficult issue within fast track is how we ensure fair 
trade.
  To battle unfair trade practices, the United States and most other 
developed countries maintain antidumping and countervailing duty laws. 
Another critical U.S. trade law--Section 201--aims to give industries 
that are seriously injured by import surges some time to adapt.
  Rather than being protectionist these laws are the remedy to 
protectionism. And importantly, these laws are completely consistent 
with U.S. obligations under the WTO.
  On a political level, these laws also serve as a guarantee to U.S. 
industries and U.S. workers.
  Without those critical reassurances, I suspect that the already 
sagging public support for free trade would evaporate, and new trade 
agreements would simply become impossible.
  Now, the Senate overwhelmingly supported an amendment by Senators 
Dayton and Craig. That amendment provided a process for raising a point 
of order against a bill that changes trade remedy laws.
  The House bill did not include this provision--although I expect the 
House might support such a provision if put to a vote.
  That said, in the conference process we needed to come up with an 
alternative if we were going to move forward. I believe the provisions 
that have come out of that process are very strong--and give Congress 
an important role before an agreement is finalized. Let me explain.
  First, this legislation raises concerns regarding recent dispute 
settlement panels under the WTO that have ruled against U.S. trade laws 
and limited their operation in unreasonable ways. These decisions 
clearly go beyond the obligations agreed to in the WTO and undermine 
the credibility of the world trading system. We must correct these 
erroneous decisions.
  That is why our concern regarding WTO dispute settlement is 
identified at the very outset of the bill--as findings--and why the 
Administration is directed to develop a strategy to counter or reverse 
this problem, or lose fast track.
  This bill also contains a principal negotiating objective directing 
negotiators not to undermine U.S. trade laws. This fully expresses 
Congress's view that maintaining trade laws is among the highest 
priorities in our trade negotiations.
  Finally--and most importantly, I believe--this bill directs the 
President to send a report to Congress, 6 months before he signs an 
agreement, that lays out what he plans to do with respect to our trade 
laws.
  This is important. This provision provides that the President--before 
he reports on any other issue--must lay out any changes that would have 
to be made to U.S. trade laws. This will give Congress a chance to 
affect the outcome of the negotiations well before they occur.
  In fact, to buttress that point, the bill provides for a resolution 
process where Congress can specifically find that the proposed changes 
are ``inconsistent'' with the negotiating objectives. I suspect that if 
either House of Congress were to pass such a resolution--by the way, it 
is privileged. I mean it is nondebatable. It cannot be filibustered. So 
the relevant committees--House Ways and Means and Senate Finance--
report this out, and it starts with a resolution offered by any Member 
of Congress in the respective bodies. I suspect that resolution--again, 
privileged, not filibustered, not amendable--would be very much 
listened to by the President.
  If they don't get that message, there are ways that either House of 
Congress can derail a trade agreement. But I don't think it would come 
to that. I think the agreement would be renegotiated in that 
circumstance--and that is the point.
  This is a solid fast track bill. If passed, this will be the most 
progressive fast track bill we have ever had.
  Let me turn to the portion of the bill that I believe is the most 
historic. We now have a unique opportunity to expand and improve a 
program that is a critical part of moving toward a consensus on trade--
that program is Trade Adjustment Assistance.
  TAA is a program with a simple, but critical, objective: To assist 
workers injured by imports to adjust and find new jobs.
  TAA was created back in 1962 as part of an effort to implement the 
results of the so-called Kennedy Round agreement to expand world trade.
  President Kennedy and the Congress agreed that there were significant 
benefits to the country as a whole from expanded trade. They also 
recognized, however, that some workers and firms would inevitably lose 
out to increased import competition.
  TAA was created as part of a new social compact that obliged the 
Nation to attend to the legitimate needs of those that lose from trade 
as part of the price for enjoying the benefits of increased trade.
  Unfortunately, we have not always upheld that bargain in pursuing new 
trade agreements.
  This legislation aims to fulfill the bargain struck in 1962.
  It makes several important changes in the TAA program to make it more 
effective:
  First, the conference bill expands the number of workers eligible for 
benefits.
  Like the Senate bill, the conference bill covers secondary workers.
  The conference bill also expands coverage to workers affected by 
shifts in production. Workers are automatically covered if their plant 
moves to a country with which the United States has a free trade 
agreement, or to a country that is part of a preferential trade 
arrangement.
  For workers whose plant moves to any other country, benefits are 
available if the Secretary of Labor determines that imports have 
increased or are likely to increase.
  ``Or are likely to increase'' is very important because obviously if 
a plant moves to another country, imports are likely to increase. Since 
companies that move offshore typically ship back to the United States, 
I can think of no circumstances in which relocating production abroad 
would not be accompanied by or lead to an increase in imports of the 
product.

[[Page 15565]]

  Moreover, I would note here that the workers do not have to prove 
that the increase in imports will come from the country to which 
production relocated. This is a standard that is easily satisfied.
  In addition, the conference agreement also includes a new program for 
farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and other agricultural producers.
  Taken together, these expansions in eligibility are likely to result 
in a program that would cover under 200,000 workers per year.
  Moreover, TAA benefits are substantially improved.
  For the first time in the history, we provide health care coverage 
for displaced TAA workers.
  Who would have thought--when we started this process 2 years ago--
that we would be able to achieve such an important and laudable goal?
  But that is exactly what we accomplished. Workers eligible for TAA 
will now receive a 65 percent advanceable, refundable tax credit that 
can be used to pay for COBRA coverage, that is, coverage related to 
lost health insurance on account of lost jobs or a number of other 
group coverage options through the States. This assistance is available 
to workers for as long as they are participating in the TAA program.
  I am pleased with the health care provisions in the conference 
report, and I hope that we can bring the same willingness to work 
together and compromise to other important health care issues before 
us.
  The conference report also extends income support from 52 to 78 weeks 
to allow workers to complete training. And thanks to the efforts of 
Senator Edwards, it adds a further 26 weeks of training and income 
support for workers who must begin with remedial education such as 
English as a second language. To pay for this additional training, the 
annual training budget is doubled from $110 million to $220 million.
  For older workers, the conference report offers wage insurance as an 
alternative to traditional TAA. Workers who qualify and who take lower-
paying jobs can receive a wage subsidy of up to 50 percent of the 
difference between the old and new salary--up to $10,000 over 2 years. 
The goal is to encourage on-the-job training and faster re-employment 
of older workers who generally find it difficult to change careers.
  The bill included a 2-year wage insurance pilot program. The 
conference report improves on the Senate bill in two ways--by making 
the program permanent, and by providing TAA health benefits to workers 
under the program if the new employer does not provide health 
insurance.
  Finally, in addition to expanding benefits and eligibility, the 
conference agreement makes a number of improvements that streamline the 
program. It eliminates bureaucracy. It makes the program fairer, more 
efficient, and more user friendly. And I believe it will meet the 
ultimate goal of TAA--getting workers back to work more quickly.
  All told, this bill amounts to a major expansion and a historic re-
tooling of TAA--a step that is long overdue.
  Forty years ago, President Kennedy asked Congress for trade 
liberalizing legislation. It was a much simpler bill at that time, when 
trade issues were more narrowly defined, but it was still 
controversial. For many of the same reasons, that remains controversial 
today.
  President Kennedy emphasized the importance of trade for our economy, 
for our workers, for American leadership, and the world. He also 
recognized, even then, that trade also creates dislocation and that a 
new program, trade adjust assistance, was needed to help workers left 
behind by trade. Congress seized that opportunity and passed the Trade 
Expansion Act of 1962.
  Today, we, too, can show the world and America what we stand for. 
Building not only on the vision of President Kennedy but also on the 
efforts of the Presidents who followed him, we can show the world that 
America will lead the way in building a new consensus on international 
trade. We, too, must seize that opportunity.
  I urge my colleagues to vote to invoke cloture and to pass the 
conference report.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from North Dakota.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, first of all, this debate, if it is like 
most debates on fast track, will not be a very thoughtful debate. There 
is a relentless chanting about free trade and the global economy, but 
no discussion about what is really happening in trade.
  I believe in expanded trade. I believe expanded trade helps our 
economy and helps economies around the world. I am not someone who 
believes we should put walls around our country and try to keep other 
goods out of our country. I do believe, however, our country has a 
right to be a leader in demanding and insisting on fair trade. That has 
not been the case for several decades. I will talk a bit about that.
  In October 2001, our trade Ambassador, Mr. Zoellick--a man I like--
speaking to a business group in Chicago, described opponents of trade 
promotion authority as ``xenophobes and isolationists.''
  That is fairly typical of the prevailing view on trade. There is a 
perception that this debate has two camps: The camp that is able to see 
over the horizon, they get it, they understand it, they understand the 
global economy, and they understand all of the issues; and then there 
are the others, xenophobic, isolationist stooges who cannot and will 
not understand.
  The Senate is preparing to give the administration the power to 
negotiate trade agreements in secret, and bring them back to Congress 
for very limited debate. Congress will have in place a procedure that 
will prevent the Senate from ever changing even one word of the 
agreement. In other words, Congress signs itself up to say: Handcuff 
us. Handcuff us so we cannot change a word in the next trade agreement 
you bring back. We understand we will not be part of the negotiation, 
we understand we will not be in the room, we will not even know where 
they take place, but we agree beforehand that whatever you bring back 
to us, we will not change a word.
  Had I been able to change a word of the United States-Canada Free 
Trade Agreement, we would not have the problem with grain trade with 
Canada we have had for a decade. When that trade agreement came back to 
the Senate, I could not change one word because Congress passed fast 
track.
  Trade promotion authority is a euphemism for what used to be known as 
fast track. It is Congress handcuffing itself, saying: Whatever you 
negotiate, wherever you negotiate it, we promise not to offer one 
amendment to change one word of the trade agreement.
  There are people who will sign up for almost anything. I saw in the 
paper a while back that the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile was advertising 
for a driver. The Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, which we have seen in 
clips, needed a driver, and 900 college graduates applied. I thought to 
myself, people will sign up for almost anything, won't they? Nine 
hundred college graduates aspire to drive the Weinermobile.
  Then I see people signing up for the proposition that the Congress 
ought to handcuff itself, in advance, before a trade agreement is 
negotiated in secret in some location we do not yet know, and I see 
people say: Sign me up, I think that is a good deal.
  Let me describe the circumstances in which we find ourselves after a 
barrelful of this trade strategy. This chart represents red ink, trade 
deficits. Today is Thursday. Today, the American people and our 
Government, our country, will incur a $1.4 billion deficit--just in 
this one day. Today, every day, 7 days a week, our trade deficit is 
relentless, and it increases at a relentless pace. The deficit for this 
year will go off the chart, by the way. That is a trade deficit we owe 
not to ourselves, as we do with the budget deficit, it is a trade 
deficit we owe to other countries.
  We have people who think this strategy works. Would this be 
malpractice in medicine if a doctor prescribed medicine and it did not 
work, and he prescribed it again and it did not work, and he said, 
let's keep prescribing the same medicine that does not work? How about 
a football team that calls the same plays despite the fact it does not 
work?
  That is exactly what we are doing in international trade. The same 
people

[[Page 15566]]

made the same promises then that they are making now: If we can just do 
more of the same, our country will be better off. Total nonsense.
  The last big debate we had was NAFTA--United States, Canada and 
Mexico. Prior to that debate, we had a very small trade surplus with 
Mexico. We had a surplus with Mexico and a reasonably modest trade 
deficit with Canada. We had people promising the Moon: If we just do 
this, if we sign up for the NAFTA agreement, if you let us negotiate it 
in secret--if you allow us to do that, we will add 300,000 new jobs in 
the United States of America. Total nonsense.
  Here is what happened after NAFTA: A trade surplus with Mexico turned 
into a very large deficit; a modest trade deficit with Canada turned 
into a huge trade deficit with Canada. People said: Well, if you just 
sign up to this, we will import the skills of low-skill labor from 
Mexico; that is what we intend to have happen. Do you know what the 
three largest imports from Mexico are? Electronics, automobiles, and 
automobile parts--all the product of high-skill labor. So the deficit 
explodes. Now we have a very large combined deficit with our two 
trading partners on the south and north of us, and we have people in 
the Senate who said: Boy, this is really working. What a great deal for 
our country.
  I graduated from a small school, a high school class of nine in my 
senior class. I know we did not have all the advanced mathematics some 
other people had, but this surely must be the only venue in America 
where grown men and women add 2 and 2 and get 5 and compliment each 
other on their math skills.
  In this morning's newspaper, there are reports about anemic economic 
growth, and worries about a double dip recession. According to 
economists, the trade deficit has done a lot to reduce our economic 
growth to just 1.8 percent.
  The fact is, this trade deficit matters, and we are getting clobbered 
by it. It ties an anvil to the neck of this country's economy. And we 
have people coming to the floor of the Senate saying: let's do more of 
the same; let's do much more of what is not working. I, for the life of 
me, cannot understand that.
  Postcloture, I am going to give a speech that describes the details 
of all of this and ask the question: Why are we all so interested in 
having the next treaty negotiated, or the next trade agreement 
negotiated, before even one problem is fixed? Let me give you some 
examples of problems, even if I do not describe them all now.
  How about eggs to Europe, high-fructose corn syrup to Mexico, 
automobiles to China, automobiles to Korea, potato flakes to Korea, 
unfairly subsidized grain from Canada, beef to Japan, flour to Europe? 
I can go on, and I will go on at some length about each of those. How 
about stuffed molasses from Canada? That is an interesting one, stuffed 
molasses. Brazilian sugar is sent to Canada and then mixed with liquid 
molasses, put in a container, and shipped into this country in 
contravention of our trade laws. They take the sugar out of the 
molasses, send the molasses back to Canada, and everything is as it was 
before, except we now have Brazilian sugar in our market in 
contravention of our trade laws and you cannot do a blessed thing about 
it. When the trade bill left the Senate, it contained a provision that 
fixed this problem. The bill that came back out of conference 
essentially dropped this provision. But that is typical of virtually 
everything in this bill that left the Senate with some decent 
provisions and came back here washed clean of those provisions.
  There is a company in Canada. It is called Methanex. It is a company 
that makes MTBE, a fuel additive. California has decided it is going to 
discontinue the use of MTBE in fuel because it ends up in the ground 
water. The fact is, it poisons people. You have to get it out of the 
ground water, so you have to stop using it in fuel. So when California 
decides on behalf of the safety of its citizens to stop using MTBE, a 
fuel additive that is now showing up in their water supply, guess what. 
The Canadian manufacturer of that product takes action in the WTO 
against the United States for violating trade laws. So a State that 
tries to protect its citizens from a poison going into the water supply 
is now being sued, under our trade agreement, by a Canadian company.
  Guess what. The NAFTA dispute tribunal is secret. They are going to 
shut the door, lock the door, and in a closed room somewhere--where we 
will not be told--they make a decision about whether we have the right 
to protect our citizens.
  I offered an amendment on this bill here in the Senate. A wide 
bipartisan majority of Senators voted for it. It said: Those dispute 
resolutions must be opened to the public. America needs to see them. 
Let's have the disinfectant of sunlight on those trade disputes.
  That makes sense, doesn't it? Except the trade bill came back from 
conference with that stripped out.
  The bill also came back from conference without the Dayton-Craig 
amendment, which I cosponsored. The Dayton-Craig amendment said if you 
are going to negotiate a trade treaty and weaken the laws that protect 
us against unfair trade, then we deserve to have a separate vote on it. 
Do you know what they did? They stripped that out and they said: What 
you can do is you can have a sense-of-the-Senate resolution.
  We can have a sense-of-the-Senate resolution right now. That doesn't 
mean anything. To offer this kind of placebo is an insult. You are 
either going to stand up for this country's interests or you are not. 
If you decide you are not going to stand up for this country's 
interests, just say so. Don't play a game with it.
  The Dayton-Craig amendment ought to be in this piece of legislation. 
The amendment I offered on transparency ought to be in this piece of 
legislation. Amendments dealing with child protection and child labor 
issues ought to be in this legislation--and it is not, despite the fact 
that at its roots it is bad legislation.
  We ought not handcuff ourselves. We should not preclude ourselves 
from offering one amendment to a treaty that has not yet been 
negotiated at a time and place not yet described; a treaty in which the 
negotiations are not open to the public. We in the Senate agree we will 
not offer one amendment; in fact, we will prohibit it. Has anybody read 
the Constitution lately? That is not what the Constitution says.
  People refuse to stand up on the floor of the Senate and say: On 
behalf of our producers we demand fair trade. On behalf of farmers, 
steelworkers, textile workers, we are willing to compete. Yes, we want 
competition, absolutely. Bring them on. We are willing to compete. But 
we demand fair competition. If it is not fair, we say to those who want 
to ship their trousers and shirts and shoes and trinkets to us, ship 
them to Nigeria or Zambia and see how fast they sell. Say to Korea, 
that sent 630,000 cars into our marketplace and we are allowed only 
2,800 cars into Korea: Korea, ship your cars to Zambia. See how many 
you sell. If you want to keep shipping Hyundais and Daewoos to the 
American marketplace, then open your market to American automobiles. It 
is very simple.
  I am going to talk more about this during the postcloture period. But 
my question is very simple: When will the House and Senate stand up for 
American producers? No, not for an advantage for them, just to demand 
basic fairness for workers and producers in this country. Just to 
demand basic fairness. When will we take action?
  I said before, maybe if there is a fast track urge around here, maybe 
if deep in the breasts of people around here they have some urge to do 
something on fast track, we should pass a piece of legislation that 
says the only fast track you have, Mr. Ambassador, is to put on fast 
track the solution to our trade problems. Fix a few problems before you 
negotiate a new trade agreement, just fix a few problems, then come 
back here and tell us you have fixed a few, and then we will work with 
you.
  Understand what is going to happen today. We will have a debate that 
is never at the center of the issue. We will have a vote. We will vote 
cloture.

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Then tomorrow, after the bill is passed, the President will talk about 
how wonderful it is that he has this trade promotion authority, which 
is fast track. People in Congress will talk about how wonderful it is 
because they understand the global economy and how important this is. 
It is all sheer nonsense, and they know it.
  I hope tomorrow morning someone will address this question: Why is it 
when things are not working, you want to do more of it? Why is it you 
want to do more of that which does not work? Just describe for one 
moment why you think something that hurts this country is something 
that we ought to continue.
  Let me finish as I started. My speech, especially the speech I will 
give later where I will go into a lot of specifics, will be 
misinterpreted, because it always is, as someone who is a xenophobe 
isolationist who doesn't believe in free trade. I believe in expanded 
trade. I believe trade promotes opportunity for our country and for 
others. But I, by God, insist on fair trade for American workers and 
producers, and I do not believe that after fighting for 100 years in 
this country for the right to organize, for people dying in the streets 
for the right to organize in a labor force, for the right to have a 
safe workplace, for the right not to employ children, 10- and 12-year-
old children in coal mines and in factories, for the right to a decent 
wage--after fighting for those things for a century, I do not believe 
we ought to construct an economic system where companies can pole-vault 
over all of that in just a nanosecond and say, ``I renounce my American 
citizenship, let me become a citizen of Bermuda and put my jobs in Sri 
Lanka and Bangladesh,'' and not have to worry about all the things we 
fought about for a century.
  Fair is fair. There is a price for admission to the American 
marketplace. You cannot have a 12-year-old kid, pay him 12 cents an 
hour, work 12 him hours a day, and ship the product to Pittsburgh or 
Fargo or Los Angeles and call that fair trade. It not fair to America's 
workers and or producers. This fast-track trade authority for a trade 
agreement that has not yet been negotiated is, in my judgment, an 
aberration.
  It ignores the precepts of the consultation about international 
trade. In my judgment, because of what has happened in recent years, 
the evidence is clear that it also hurts our country.
  I reserve the remainder of my time.
  Mr. SARBANES. Mr. President, I rise to urge my colleagues to join me 
in opposition to the motion before us, on passage of the conference 
report on H.R. 3009, the Andean Trade Preference Expansion Act. During 
the Senate's consideration of this act, the bill's managers stripped 
H.R. 3009 of the language approved by the House and offered a 
substitute amendment comprising three measures reported by the Finance 
Committee. The first, H.R. 3009, is indeed the Andean Trade Preference 
Expansion Act. But the amendment added as well two other major trade-
related bills. The second measure, H.R. 3005, would grant the President 
fast-track authority for certain proposed trade negotiations, and also, 
retroactively, for other negotiations already underway. And the third, 
S. 1209, would reauthorize the Trade Adjustment Assistance and NAFTA 
Transitional Adjustment Assistance programs. H.R. 3009 thereby became a 
legislative vehicle for linking together three independent measures, 
all trade-related to be sure but each with its own focus and 
provisions.
  Let me say first that I am troubled by this procedural maneuvering. 
The three measures, each with far-reaching and very different 
ramifications, were considered independently of one another in 
committee. In my view they should have been considered separately on 
the floor of the Senate; each should have been amended and voted up or 
down on its own merits. Linked together, each measure became a hostage 
to the other two, a procedure which in my view ill served the American 
people.
  I am particularly concerned by the linking of trade promotion 
authority with trade adjustment assistance. TAA addresses specific 
problems which Congress has defined. In contrast, trade promotion 
authority is very broad, potentially reaching into areas we cannot even 
identify. In fact the term is a euphemism. What we have before us is 
the procedure known more precisely and accurately as ``fast-track,'' a 
procedure that radically redefines and limits the authority granted to 
Congress in article II, section 8 of the Constitution ``to regulate 
commerce with foreign nations.''
  It is easily forgotten that ``fast-track'' is a relatively new 
innovation whose long-term consequences are as yet little understood. 
It dates back only to the Trade Act of 1974, and it lapsed in 1994. It 
differs fundamentally from the ``Proclamation Authority'' that Congress 
granted the President in the Reciprocal Trade Act of 1934, which gave 
the Executive power to set tariffs within limits and periods of time 
set by the Congress. Proclamation Authority did not grant to the 
President authority to negotiate trade agreements requiring changes in 
U.S. law, let alone limit the discretion of Congress to approve or 
reject such changes. In contrast, fast track authority does both. It 
greatly expands the latitude of the Executive to negotiate an 
agreement, while sharply restricting the latitude of the Congress to 
consider any implementing legislation that results from the 
negotiation. Fast track guarantees that the executive branch can write 
legislation implementing a trade agreement and have that legislation 
voted on, up or down, 90 days after it is submitted, with only 20 hours 
of debate and no opportunity for amendment. While vast change in U.S. 
law may be at stake, under fast-track procedures Congress becomes 
little more than a rubber stamp.
  In no other area of U.S. international negotiation and agreement are 
arguments for fast track made. All major U.S. tax, arms control, 
territorial, defense and other treaties are still accomplished through 
established constitutional procedures, fully respecting the role of the 
Congress.
  Proponents of fast track often argue that in the area of trade, 
however, the Executive will find it difficult if not impossible to 
negotiate agreements. This is certainly not the case. Fast-track 
procedures are relevant only to trade agreements that require Congress 
to make changes in existing U.S. law in order for the agreements to be 
implemented. Most trade agreements do not require legislative changes 
and are thus not subject to fast track consideration. Of the hundreds 
of agreements entered into between 1974-1994, when fast-track authority 
was in effect, only five have required fast track procedures: the GATT 
Tokyo Round of 1979, the United States-Israel Free Trade Agreement of 
1985, the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement of 1988; the North 
American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, of 1993, and the GATT Uruguay 
Round of 1994. In 1994, after just twenty years, fast track lapsed, and 
in 1997 the Congress declined to extend it. Yet since 1994 hundreds of 
trade agreements have been successfully negotiated and implemented.
  For example, in 2000 the office of the Trade Representative 
identified the following agreements, negotiated without fast track, as 
having ``truly historic importance'': The Information Technology, IT, 
Agreement, under which 40 countries eliminated import duties and other 
charges on IT products representing more than 90 percent of the 
telecommunications market; the Financial Services Agreement, which has 
helped U.S. service suppliers expand commercial operations and find new 
market opportunities around the world; the Basic Telecommunications 
Agreement, which opened up 95 percent of the world telecommunications 
market to competition; and the Bilateral agreement on China's WTO 
accession, which opened the largest economy in the world to American 
products and services.
  I could cite many other examples. During this period the Executive 
negotiated and then obtained Congressional approval of normalization of 
our trade relations with China, a new Caribbean Basin initiative bill, 
and the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act. Without any fast-track 
authority the previous

[[Page 15568]]

administration negotiated major bilateral trade agreements with Jordan 
and Vietnam. The ground-breaking United States-Jordan agreement was 
submitted to and approved by Congress in January of last year. And 
although negotiated by the previous administration, the United States-
Vietnam agreement was actually submitted to Congress by the current 
administration. It was approved in June of last year.
  Furthermore, in the absence of fast-track authority the current 
administration has found it possible and prudent to carry forward the 
negotiations for bilateral free trade agreements with Chile and 
Singapore which were initiated by its predecessor. The case of Chile is 
particularly instructive. In 1994 Chile declined an invitation to join 
NAFTA, citing the Administration's failure to obtain fast track 
authority. Six years later, however, Chile reconsidered its position 
and in 2000 entered into negotiations on a United States-Chile 
bilateral agreement. Negotiations since then have continued more or 
less on a monthly basis, and in a report dated April 1, 2002 and titled 
``Chile: Political and Economic Conditions and U.S. Relations'', the 
Congressional Research Service concluded that ``Chile's trade policies 
and practices indicate that it is willing and able to conclude and live 
up to a broad bilateral FTA with the U.S., suggesting that this could 
be a comparatively easy trade agreement for the U.S. to conclude.''
  In 1997, I opposed the previous administration's request. It was my 
view then, as it is my view now, that the arguments for fast track have 
been vastly overstated--they simply ignore our continuing success in 
concluding agreements that open foreign markets to U.S. exporters and 
benefit U.S. consumers. Chile and Singapore offer a case in point. The 
absence of fast track has not prevented negotiations with either, yet 
this legislation would apply the procedure retroactively. It is not 
clear why this should be necessary.
  Additionally, I want to remind my colleagues that in December of last 
year our colleagues in the House of Representatives approved H.R. 3005 
by a single vote, 215-214. Writing in the Washington Post, David Broder 
called this a ``shaky victory on trade.'' He observed about that 
``longtime supporters of liberal trade'' voted against fast track 
because ``trade agreements now go far beyond tariff reduction and 
involve tradeoffs on intellectual property rights, environmental 
standards, basic labor laws and other issues''--issues too important, 
in Broder's words, ``to delegate sweeping authority to any 
administration to negotiate them away.'' These are the concerns, he 
wrote, of ``people who are by no means protectionists.''
  Indeed, these are the concerns of the American people, and it is for 
this reason that trade agreements affecting vital areas of social and 
economic policy should not be hurried through Congress using an 
expedited and restrictive procedure.
  Finally, not only do I disapprove of this measure as passed by the 
Senate, but I am deeply troubled by two very significant changes made 
to the legislation in conference. Whereas the Senate bill provided that 
employees whose factories move overseas would automatically qualify for 
health insurance, job training, and unemployment benefits, under the 
compromise, only workers whose companies relocate to countries that 
have a preferential trade agreement with the U.S. would be covered. 
Other workers would have to undergo a qualifying procedure through 
which the USTR must determine that the move was linked to trade. 
Additionally, during the Senate's consideration of the trade bill, 
Senators Dayton and Craig offered an amendment to the fast-track bill 
to allow Congress to consider provisions within trade agreements that 
weaken U.S. trade remedy laws. The amendment had the support of 61 
Senators and was adopted by voice vote. Following passage of the trade 
bill, I joined many of my colleagues in urging the conferees to 
preserve the Dayton-Craig language. Under the compromise reached, 
however, this language was removed from the bill and replaced by non-
binding language allowing members to simply express their objections to 
a particular trade provision. And as my colleagues are aware, over the 
weekend, our colleagues in the House approved the package that emerged 
from the conference by a margin of 215-212, a margin greater than that 
of last year's House vote by only two. It seems clear that the 
compromise before us is not a consensus on trade and I would urge my 
colleagues to oppose the conference report to H.R. 3009.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Edwards). The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I might 
consume, but I would like to be informed if I have reached the 7-minute 
mark.
  Mr. President, I hope people on the other side of the aisle will take 
into consideration the statements of the previous President of the 
United States, President Clinton, on the importance of trade. President 
Clinton rightly bragged about one-third of the new jobs during his 
administration being directly related to trade emphasizing the 
importance of trade. John Deere, Waterloo, IA--one-fifth of the jobs 
there are related to trade: 3M in Oakville, IA--40 percent of 
production is related to trade.
  We want to remember that trade creates jobs. It creates jobs that pay 
15 percent above the national average. According to President Clinton, 
and according to the economic facts of life, trade is good for American 
workers--creation of jobs, and creation of good jobs.
  I would also like to say that those who have been criticizing 
President Bush saying he does not have a strong economic team must, in 
fact, have their heads in the sand.
  Compare that criticism to what I just said about the importance of 
trade as emphasized by President Clinton. Then you will see the strong 
economic leadership of Ambassador Zoellick and Secretary Evans as they 
have worked on trade issues generally, and particularly their 
leadership on trade promotion authority.
  Two things about the economic policy of this administration: They 
have strong leaders in place to talk about the importance of the 
economy and to carry out policy important to the economy. And 
particularly they are considering continuing the trend that President 
Clinton emphasized--the importance of trade to creating jobs, and good 
jobs.
  I think it is bunk that this administration has no strong economic 
voice, particularly if you look at the strong leadership of Ambassador 
Zoellick and Secretary Evans on promoting good trade policy, and their 
very successful work on bringing this legislation to where it is now.
  Make no doubt in anybody's mind that I rise in strong support of the 
conference report accompanying H.R. 3009, the Trade Act of 2002, and 
urge my colleagues to support cloture and final passage.
  This bill is the product of over a year and a half of intense 
negotiations, discussion, and debate from both Republicans and 
Democrats in both Houses of Congress--and particularly strong 
bipartisan support here in the Senate.
  Because of these efforts, the Trade Act strikes a solid and balanced 
compromise among a number of key issues and competing priorities in the 
tradition of bipartisanship in the Senate. It is a product that should 
receive broad support here in the Senate today.
  The Trade Act of 2002 renews trade promotion authority for the 
President for the first time in almost a decade.
  Through a spirit of compromise, Democrats and Republicans were able 
to break the deadlock on trade promotion authority that was the 
environment during the last term of President Clinton, and we were able 
to reach a balanced compromise on a number of key issues.
  At the same time, we were able to provide the President with the 
flexibility that he needs to negotiate strong international trade 
agreements while maintaining Congress's constitutional role over U.S. 
trade policy.
  It represents a thoughtful approach to addressing the complex 
relationships between international trade, workers' rights, and the 
environment.

[[Page 15569]]

And it does so without undermining the fundamental purpose and proven 
effectiveness of this process now called trade promotion authority.
  It is an extremely solid bill. The Trade Act also reauthorizes and 
improves trade adjustment assistance for America's workers whose jobs 
may be displaced by trade. I think the trade adjustment provisions in 
the act are a vast improvement over the legislation that passed the 
Senate.
  Our provisions--which I voted for but wasn't entirely in tune with--
would have completely rewritten existing law of trade adjustment 
assistance.
  In doing so, the Senate bill added a number of new, costly 
definitions, time lines, and ambiguous administrative obligations.
  This conference report removes these burdensome and ill-advised 
changes. Unlike the Senate bill, the conference report simply amends 
and builds upon existing trade adjustment assistance law.
  It adds new provisions which help to actually improve trade 
adjustment assistance while maintaining a linkage to trade.
  In short, the Trade Act improves the Senate-passed trade adjustment 
bill and represents a balanced approach to ensuring that workers 
displaced by trade will get the necessary assistance in trading to 
reenter the workplace.
  I also mention the good provisions of the Andean pact because this 
will help create new employment opportunities in the countries of 
Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru. It will help us, too, in our 
efforts there to fight drug trafficking.
  I will be the first to admit that this bill is not a perfect piece of 
legislation. But, all in all, it is fair and balanced. It deserves 
strong support.
  International trade has long been one of our most important foreign 
policy and economic tools. It was a key component for the last 50 years 
for enhancing international economic strategy. This bill will make a 
difference.
  Nations around the world are waiting for our call and the usual U.S. 
leadership of the last 50 years. Trade ministers and cabinets all over 
the world are looking to the Senate now for the United States to 
reestablish its leadership that we haven't had for 9 years. I hope we 
will not let them down.
  I urge support for the conference report, vote for cloture and 
passage of the bill.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, before the Senator from Idaho speaks, I 
want to thank him for all his hard work on trade remedies. And I thank 
him, too, for the support and for being a very strong advocate of 
checking American trade laws. I thank him for all that he has done.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I thank the chairman of the Finance 
Committee, and also the ranking member.
  Mr. President, I rise in support of the trade promotion authority 
legislation. I will speak briefly about the strong provisions contained 
within the conference bill that will help the United States preserve 
the effectiveness of our trade laws.
  As many of you know, these laws are going to be critical to the 
ability of U.S. companies, farmers, and workers to combat trading 
practices that harm our economic interests. As barriers to trade come 
down around the world, it becomes critically important to uphold the 
rules that combat government subsidies and predatory pricing practices.
  As many of you know, and many of you participated with Senator Dayton 
and I in crafting an amendment aimed at preserving the ability of 
Congress to have a significant role in shaping our laws, it was not 
done in an isolationist or xenophobic attitude--not at all. That 
amendment had overwhelming, bipartisan support, and spoke directly to 
TPA and the role of the Senate.
  I tell you, I was disappointed the conference did not deal with the 
Craig-Dayton provision, but I do believe the conference bill does 
contain several strong provisions that require the administration to 
consult with us every step of the way during trade negotiations.
  First, the bill makes trade law preservation a principal negotiating 
objective.
  Secondly, it requires the administration to report to Congress a full 
6 months before a trade agreement is initialed regarding any trade law 
changes that trade agreement would require. In other words, the U.S. 
Trade Representative must come to the Senate and explain to each of us 
what will be changed in our laws, and how those changes meet the 
objectives of trade and also the rights of this Congress. We have 
gained transparency in the process of negotiation. I think that is 
critical.
  And third, if those changes do not satisfy our requirements of 
preserving U.S. trade law, well, we can vote on a resolution of 
disagreement. And I will help write it.
  Make no mistake, our trade laws are under attack at the WTO.
  First, several countries have put forth proposals that would fire a 
number of rounds into our trade laws with every intent of sinking them.
  Our trade laws are also unraveling, on a monthly basis, before the 
WTO dispute settlement process where bureaucrats in Geneva sit back and 
tell our trade law agencies how to make their decisions, completely 
ignoring the standard of review that was agreed to in the last trade 
round.
  These are some of the issues. So Ambassador Zoellick, Secretary 
Evans, hear us loud: Do it right or bring it back here and we defeat 
it.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's 3 minutes have expired.
  Mr. CRAIG. Sixty-two Senators said: Do not negotiate away our trade 
laws, or suffer the consequence.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. I yield the remainder of the time to Senator Nickles.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
  Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, how much time remains?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Forty-one seconds.
  Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 3 
minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. NICKLES. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of 
the conference report that is before us today and the cloture motion.
  Let me just make a couple very quick comments. I do not agree with 
everything that is in this bill. And I do not agree with the way it was 
put together. We had three bills together. The Andean trade bill should 
have been passed a year ago. It expired in December.
  You have Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru that have been needing 
us to pass this bill. Those are all allies of ours, but they were held 
hostage by it being put in a package. But the only way we can help them 
is by passing this bill today. It is better late than never. We need to 
do it. I apologize to those four countries for us taking so long.
  We have been collecting duties against our allies when, for years--
for over 10 years--we have not done it. So we are long overdue. Senator 
McCain has brought this to our attention on the floor. They were held 
hostage because these three bills were put together.
  Also, trade adjustment assistance--which the Congress has always 
passed and the Senate has always passed, but not as part of trade 
promotion authority, or not as part of fast track--we need to do it, 
but it should not be in the same package.
  I disagree strongly, very strongly, with a couple of elements that 
are in the trade adjustment assistance package, particularly the 
expansion of health benefits or the health tax credits. It is 65 
percent for people who now are between the ages of 55 and 65. Those now 
receiving Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation benefits are now going 
to get health benefits. It is almost like an incentive to dump your 
pension liabilities into the PBGC, which is going to have enormous 
financial problems in the future. Now that is an obligation for 
taxpayers.
  That being said, I think it would be a disastrous thing if this 
Senate did not

[[Page 15570]]

pass trade promotion authority. And now all three bills are tied 
together. So while I do not like the trade adjustment assistance--and 
if it was separate, I would be voting against it--when taken together, 
the good of the trade promotion authority far outweighs the entire 
package. We have to pass it.
  I would shudder to think what would happen if we did not pass it. I 
will even guess what would happen. I remember Chairman Greenspan was 
asked: What can we do to help the economy? And he said: You need to 
show fiscal discipline. We have not in many cases. And you need to 
promote trade. Well, if we did not pass this, there would be a big 
economic shock wave that would not only resonate in Wall Street but all 
across the world: The United States defeats trade promotion authority. 
The United States, the world leader in trade, really defeated trade, 
defeated trade promotion--taking us out of our active leadership role 
which we have had since at least the 1970s, which we have had for 
decades, really since the conclusion of World War II. We would be 
saying: No, we don't want to be a leader in trade. I think that would 
be a disastrous result.
  So I think the stock market would have a precipitous decline. Our 
leadership role in free trade would suffer an enormous defeat.
  So I urge my colleagues to support the cloture motion on TPA.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the proponents has expired.
  The Senator from North Dakota.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to add 3 minutes 
to my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from North Dakota.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, first of all, I appreciate that both sides 
should have equal time. I enjoyed listening to my colleague from 
Oklahoma. I might say, however, I do not believe that Chairman 
Greenspan would suggest we should promote trade deficits. I think he 
suggests we promote international trade. I am all for that. Sign me up. 
Count me as one who believes we ought to expand international trade. I 
think that is healthy. Good for our economy and good for the economies 
of those with whom we trade, provided the trade is fair and reasonably 
balanced.
  We have a trade deficit with China that is $60 billion to $70 
billion, and headed south. We have a trade deficit with Japan that is 
between $50 billion and $60 billion--slightly more than that, as a 
matter of fact. We have a trade deficit with Mexico and Canada that is 
becoming significant. And we have a trade deficit with Europe.
  It is interesting how all of the discussion this morning has 
carefully avoided the fact that the current trade policy they espouse 
isn't working. The current trade policy, last month, produced a $41.5 
billion trade deficit--just last month. That is a deficit that will be 
a yoke on the shoulders of every American. It is relentless, it is 
increasing, and everyone who speaks in favor of this trade policy 
carefully and studiously ignores it. They just do not want to talk 
about the fact that it isn't working.
  Let me, once again, put up a chart that shows what is happening in 
international trade. Our country is drowning in trade deficits. The 
next line would be up here off the chart. The merchandise trade deficit 
is exploding. Everyone in the Senate knows that. It emanates from a 
trade strategy that is, in my judgment, weak kneed, a trade strategy in 
which we lack backbone and will.
  Our country refuses--refuses--to say to China or Japan or Europe or 
Canada or Mexico that we demand some reciprocity and fair trade. We 
just refuse to do it.
  We have this huge trade deficit with China. So China wants to buy 
airplanes, and goes over and buys airplanes from Airbus, which is 
heavily subsidized by the European governments. Is that fair? It is 
fair to an American producer of airplanes? It is fair to Boeing? You 
know it is not fair.
  We ought to say to China: Look, you want to sell us all of your 
trousers and shirts and shoes and trinkets, and all the things you 
manufacture in our marketplace; good for you. Our marketplace is open 
to you, by all means. But understand this: When you need something we 
produce, you ought to be buying from us. That is the way trade ought to 
work.
  Mr. GREGG. Will the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. DORGAN. Of course. I have very limited time. You have used all 
your time.
  Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senator be 
granted an additional 5 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. GREGG. And that 5 minutes be granted also on this side.
  Mr. DORGAN. No. We have a vote.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we have a vote scheduled. I will yield on 
my time for a very brief question.
  Mr. GREGG. Well, the vote is scheduled to start at 10:30. It would be 
just an additional 5 minutes and 5 minutes.
  Mr. REID. What was the request?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota has the floor.
  Mr. GREGG. I asked unanimous consent the Senator be granted an 
additional 5 minutes, and also 5 minutes for this side.
  Mr. REID. Objection.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Objection is heard.
  Mr. DORGAN. I was willing to yield ever so slightly because I have 
such limited time.
  Let me say this: I am going to speak postcloture, and I would be 
happy to engage in the debate. No one in the Senate really wants to 
debate trade very much. They want to simply say there are those of us 
who support fast track, and those of us who get it, who understand it, 
who see over the horizon, and who have a broader view of the world. And 
then there are, as Ambassador Zoellick suggests, the xenophobes and 
isolationists, the stooges who just don't see it. That is the 
thoughtless debate that occurs every time we talk about trade.
  But I will, in the postcloture period, ask a series of questions. I 
hope perhaps some colleagues will be here.
  I will ask, for example, about the issue of washed versus unwashed 
eggs with Europe, corn syrup with Mexico, and automobiles with China. 
We will see if there are people on the floor of the Senate who agree 
with the circumstances of our trade relationships. The problems are 
relentless, they are pervasive, and they continue.
  What we want to do is rush off and negotiate the next trade treaty 
before we solve any problems in the previous treaties. How can we tell 
the farmers of North Dakota that it is all right? That it doesn't 
matter that they have had a problem for 10 years of a monopoly in 
Canada shipping unfairly subsidized grain south? We want to do another 
treaty. The folks who produce America's beef, who 12 years after the 
beef agreement with Japan now have a 38.5-percent tariff on every pound 
of beef sent to Japan--how can we tell these people that it just 
doesn't matter?
  Yes, we are a leader in trade. Regrettably, we have been a leader 
without a backbone. We have refused to say to our trading partners, 
there is an admission price to the American marketplace, and that 
admission price is fair trade with respect to labor standards and a 
range of other issues.
  Most especially, from my standpoint, I am concerned about the issue 
of fundamental fairness. I mentioned that I did not support fast-track 
trade authority for President Clinton, didn't think he should have it. 
I don't think President Bush should have it.
  I also mentioned earlier, the last two experiences we have had with 
fast track, both NAFTA and GATT, have not turned out well for America. 
The agreement that went into conference came out of conference in much 
worse shape than it left the Senate. They essentially got rid of the 
Dayton-Craig amendment and put a placebo in place. They got rid of the 
transparency issue I raised.
  I want to talk about what they boast about with respect to this 
conference agreement. It provides assistance with health insurance. 
What that means is

[[Page 15571]]

for those Americans who lose their jobs because of the next 
incompetently negotiated trade agreements, we will help pay their 
health insurance. That is going to be great news to people who will 
lose their jobs. It is safe to say not one man or woman in the Senate 
will lose their job because of this vote. Fast track will not cost any 
jobs here in the Senate. No Senator's job is threatened by this. It is 
also safe to say that those Americans who are working for companies 
that will be subject to unfair trade, because our trade negotiators 
want to negotiate the next agreement rather than fix the problems they 
have created in the past, are going to have little consolation with 
these provisions. If you lose your job, we give you health insurance. 
Well, maybe it would be better if they didn't lose their job.
  We expand coverage for secondary workers. If you are a secondary 
worker and you lose your job, we help you a bit. There is wage 
insurance for the older workers who lose their jobs: We will help you a 
bit. New benefits for farmers and ranchers: If you lose the farm and 
the ranch because of trade negotiations, we are willing to help you. It 
might be better just to negotiate trade agreements that are fair to our 
producers and say to our producers: This represents fair competition. 
You have to go compete. If you don't win, that is tough luck. But we 
have made the rules fair for you. You have to compete and win.
  That is not what we do here. Our trade negotiators don't do that. In 
negotiation after negotiation, we discover we don't have much of a 
backbone.
  Will Rogers once said that the United States of America has never 
lost a war and never won a conference. He surely was talking about our 
trade negotiators. They usually manage to lose in a week or two; 
sometimes it takes longer. I can't think of a trade negotiation in 
recent years that has enhanced this country's economic interests.
  How much time do I have?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 2\1/2\ minutes.
  Mr. DORGAN. We will have a cloture vote this morning, and my 
expectation is that sufficient votes exist to have cloture. We will 
then have a postcloture period in which I will speak at greater length 
about the specifics of unfair trade.
  Let me say this: The only bright spot for me for some long while in 
international trade was Mickey Kantor, trade ambassador some while ago, 
who in 1 year took action against Canada for engaging in horribly 
unfair trade against American farmers. I happen to like current trade 
ambassador Zoellick. I think he is a charming fellow. This is not about 
personalities, it is about strategy.
  The fact is, this Senate is going to make a serious mistake by 
deciding it will tie its hands and it will agree to tie its hands prior 
to negotiation of a new trade agreement so that if and when a trade 
agreement comes here for approval by the Senate, we agree not to change 
a word.
  Think of the difference that would have existed had we been able to 
change a few words in the United States-Canada trade agreement; think 
of what it would have meant for tens of thousands of American farmers 
if we had been able to say: We demand fairness in this agreement. But 
we couldn't. That trade agreement was negotiated, as all of them are, 
in secret. The next trade agreement will be negotiated the same way. We 
will come back 5 years from now, and I will be back on the floor of the 
Senate, if I am here, showing with another chart that we are drowning 
in red ink and jobs are leaving and opportunity is lost. We will have 
people saying: We ought to do the same thing. We ought to repeat the 
same failures.
  It is hard for me to understand how repeating something that doesn't 
work advances America's interests. This must be the only body in the 
world that has grown men and women adding 2 and 2 and getting 5 and 
complimenting each other on their math skills. It defies logic, in my 
judgment, to believe that this strategy enhances America's economic 
interests.
  I yield the floor.


                             Cloture Motion

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the clerk will 
report the motion to invoke cloture.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

                             Cloture Motion

       We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the 
     provisions of Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, 
     do hereby move to bring to a close the debate on the 
     conference report to accompany H.R. 3009, the Andean Trade 
     bill.
         Harry Reid, Max Baucus, Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, 
           Robert G. Torricelli, John B. Breaux, Thomas A. 
           Daschle, Thomas R. Carper, Blanche L. Lincoln, Zell 
           Miller, Charles E. Grassley, Larry E. Craig, Phil 
           Gramm, Jon Kyl, Frank H. Murkowski, Trent Lott.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum 
call under the rule is waived.
  The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that the debate on the 
conference report accompanying H.R. 3009, the Andean Trade Promotion 
and Drug Eradication Act, shall be brought to a close?
  The yeas and nays are required under the rule.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant bill clerk called the roll.
  Mr. REID. I announce that the Senator from Hawaii (Mr. Akaka), the 
Senator from Vermont (Mr. Jeffords), and the Senator from Vermont (Mr. 
Leahy) are necessarily absent.
  Mr. NICKLES. I announce that the Senator from North Carolina (Mr. 
Helms) is necessarily absent.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Landrieu). Are there any other Senators in 
the Chamber desiring to vote?
  The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 64, nays 32, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 203 Leg.]

                                YEAS--64

     Allard
     Allen
     Baucus
     Bayh
     Bennett
     Biden
     Bingaman
     Bond
     Breaux
     Brownback
     Bunning
     Cantwell
     Carper
     Chafee
     Cleland
     Cochran
     Collins
     Craig
     Crapo
     Daschle
     DeWine
     Domenici
     Ensign
     Enzi
     Feinstein
     Fitzgerald
     Frist
     Graham
     Gramm
     Grassley
     Gregg
     Hagel
     Hatch
     Hutchinson
     Hutchison
     Inhofe
     Kerry
     Kohl
     Kyl
     Landrieu
     Lieberman
     Lincoln
     Lott
     Lugar
     McCain
     McConnell
     Miller
     Murkowski
     Murray
     Nelson (FL)
     Nelson (NE)
     Nickles
     Roberts
     Santorum
     Smith (NH)
     Smith (OR)
     Snowe
     Specter
     Stevens
     Thomas
     Thompson
     Voinovich
     Warner
     Wyden

                                NAYS--32

     Boxer
     Burns
     Byrd
     Campbell
     Carnahan
     Clinton
     Conrad
     Corzine
     Dayton
     Dodd
     Dorgan
     Durbin
     Edwards
     Feingold
     Harkin
     Hollings
     Inouye
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Levin
     Mikulski
     Reed
     Reid
     Rockefeller
     Sarbanes
     Schumer
     Sessions
     Shelby
     Stabenow
     Thurmond
     Torricelli
     Wellstone

                             NOT VOTING--4

     Akaka
     Helms
     Jeffords
     Leahy
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this question, the yeas are 64, the nays 
are 32. Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn having voted 
in the affirmative, the motion is agreed to.
  The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. Madam President, could the Chair inform me as to the 
parliamentary situation as it exists?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Cloture has been invoked on the conference 
report. The Senator has a maximum of 1 hour of debate. The amendments 
must be germane or the debate must be germane to the conference report.
  Mr. McCAIN. I understand.
  Madam President, I do not intend to take very long. I do want to 
speak for a relatively brief period of time on the importance of the 
Andean Trade Preference Act.
  I think it is very important we recognize that in our hemisphere 
today we have a number of very serious situations--the possibility of a 
breakdown of democracy. Institutions which were regarded as relatively 
strong and stable a short time ago, in many of the countries throughout 
our hemisphere, are in danger or in some cases near a crisis situation. 
That is why I think the Andean Trade Preference Act, although maybe not 
of major impact, is certainly one that is important and an

[[Page 15572]]

important signal to send to these countries in the region. That, 
coupled with our overall approval of trade authority for the President 
of the United States, I hope will be an encouragement to nations in our 
hemisphere that are now in varying degrees of duress.
  Argentina is in a serious financial crisis. A country that was once 
the fifth most wealthy nation in the world is now in such a period of 
financial difficulty that their economy could be close to collapse. 
Venezuela is a country whose democracy is under severe strain. Hundreds 
of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets recently to demonstrate 
against their elected President, and, as we all know, there was an 
attempted, briefly successful, coup which was antidemocratic in nature.
  In Bolivia, one of the countries that is directly affected by the 
Andean Trade Preference Act, there is now a candidate for President of 
that country who is running on one of his commitments to the people of 
Bolivia, which is that they will resume the growth of coca--a 
remarkable turnaround, particularly given that Bolivia had an 
incredibly successful cocaine eradication program.
  Peru is in such difficulties that the President, President Toledo, 
has gotten rid of the reform economists in his Cabinet and his 
popularity and approval have plummeted to almost historic lows.
  As we prepare to vote on this trade package, our country is 
precariously positioned in the international trade arena. Many of our 
friends and allies no longer see the United States as a nation that 
champions global free trade but, rather, as a nation that increasingly 
fears foreign competition and seeks to erect barriers to trade in order 
to protect domestic industries and advance narrow political agendas.
  A series of shortsighted protectionist actions in recent years has 
jeopardized our relationships with our most important trading partners. 
Given our recent double standards on trade, it is not surprising that 
the United States is quickly losing its credibility and leadership in 
championing free trade principles around the world.
  Our staunchest allies and most important trading partners are now 
doubting our dedication to the free trade principles we have long 
championed.
  Many of the nations that engage in the free exchange of commerce are 
also our staunchest allies in the war on terrorism. Over the past eight 
months, those countries have joined in our worthy cause, some making 
substantial sacrifices to advance our shared values. During that time, 
even as our allies have deployed their forces to stand alongside our 
own in Central Asia, we have pursued protectionist policies on steel 
and lumber, and passed into law a regressive, trade-distorting farm 
bill. We are already fighting one war on a global scale. We cannot 
simultaneously fight a trade war.
  The United States simply cannot afford to follow the dangerous path 
of protectionism. I hope that the passage of trade promotion authority 
and the Andean Trade Preference Expansion Act, both of which are 
included in this package, will represent a turning point. Now is our 
chance to put a stop to our short-sighted protectionism and recognize 
that such behavior has consequences.
  Mr. President, this package of trade bills, including the Andean 
Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, trade promotion authority, 
and trade adjustment assistance (TAA), demonstrates what I hope is the 
beginning of a renewed commitment to negotiating and expediting strong 
trade agreements. Enactment of this legislation will go a long way 
toward re-establishing faith and trust in the United States as a 
trading partner.
  The Andean Trade Preferences Act, a measure that would be expanded by 
this bill, is a trade-related success story that has not only 
strengthened our economy, but our national security as well. ATPA was 
designed to reduce the Andean region's drug trade and spur economic 
development. That Act has proven effective, and benefitted not only 
Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, but also the United States. Its 
extension is long past due.
  Originally enacted in 1991, entire export industries have been 
created through ATPA. The cut flowers industry alone has created more 
than 80,000 new jobs in Ecuador, and over 150,000 new jobs in Colombia. 
In Peru, the benefits of the Andean trade act encouraged farmers to 
cultivate asparagus, making it that country's largest export crop to 
the United States, creating 50,000 new jobs in the process. No longer 
are people in these countries confined to producing the raw materials 
that go into the production of cocaine; They have the ever increasing 
options afforded them under ATPA.
  Unlike other forms of assistance, ATPA costs the U.S. nothing. In 
fact, American workers and consumers benefit through reduced prices on 
goods and services.
  Despite such success, it has taken Congress well over a year to 
extend this non-controversial measure. Legislation was introduced in 
the Senate in March 2001 to extend and expand ATPA, which was set to 
expire December 2001. Along with this history, a long delay in the 
appointment of conferees and partisan disagreements, all unrelated to 
ATPA, prevented final Congressional action on this critical legislation 
until now. Fast-track authority for the President expired 8 years ago. 
By empowering the President to negotiate bilateral and multilateral 
trade agreements, TPA will enable the President to eliminate trade 
barriers, reduce tariffs, and open foreign markets to American goods 
and services. American workers, farmers, businessmen, and consumers 
will benefit from the regional free trade areas such as the Free Trade 
Area of the Americas, and bilateral trade agreements such as those 
currently being negotiated with Singapore and Chile.
  I repeat, a man is running for President of this country of Bolivia. 
One of his most popular themes is to reinitiate the cultivation and 
growth of coca. If that man wins--and I do not question the will of the 
people of Bolivia, but it is clear that it would be a dramatic setback 
to our efforts to eradicate the growth of coca in that country.
  In Peru, there are civil disturbances and the President of Peru, who 
is a good and decent man from all I can tell, is suffering enormously 
in popularity in polls.
  Colombia is a nation with its very existence at risk due to civil 
war, a lot of that fueled by the cocaine trafficking, the growth of 
which begins in the country of Colombia.
  Ecuador, next to Colombia, has felt many very devastating side 
effects of the war in Colombia and the effects on its own economy.
  I mentioned Argentina, Venezuela, Guatemala are having difficulties; 
Honduras, Nicaragua; and even Mexico is having some difficulties 
because of the failure, in the view of many of the Mexican people, of 
President Fox in delivering on many promises he made when he ran for 
President of Mexico.
  I cannot believe all of the troubles in our hemisphere, which in my 
view are more serious than they have been since the 1980s, on the 
absence of trade and the absence of renewal of the Andean Trade 
Preference Act. But in the words of the Presidents of these countries 
who visited my office, they said one thing: We do not want aid; we want 
trade. We want trade.
  Now, I have heard many of the arguments about how the lumber industry 
or the steel industry or the textile industry, or any other, is being 
harmed because some of the imports are lower priced goods. Well, I am 
not a trained economist, but I know these cut flowers are less 
expensive. I know it costs less to build a house for the average 
citizens when the lumber is cheaper. It is easier to clothe people when 
the apparel is cheaper.
  This protectionism which has characterized many of the actions of 
this body and the other body, and of the President of the United 
States, is harmful to average American citizens, many of whom do not 
make large campaign contributions, many of whom do not make huge 
contributions to the fundraisers. But they will pay more for the price 
of a house if we continue to

[[Page 15573]]

protect lumber. They will pay more for an automobile if we continue to 
protect steel. They will pay more for clothes if we continue to protect 
the textile industry.
  Are there people who are hurt by this free and open trade? 
Absolutely. That is why I have steadfastly supported insurance, job 
training, and outright assistance to any dislocated worker if the case 
can be made that that worker was dislocated or removed from their job 
because of a direct impact of trade.
  I am worried about our hemisphere. There was a front page story in 
the New York Times a couple weeks ago about the failure of free market 
economies in our hemisphere and how average citizens of these poor 
countries have enjoyed the benefits of the increased economic benefits 
of free trade and a great discontent and unrest that exists in these 
nations. We should pay attention to the difficulties in our own 
hemisphere. There is no stronger supporter of the war on terror than 
this Senator and all of the American people.
  We are going to have great difficulties because of one thing we have 
learned from the 1980s: That if governments are unable to satisfy the 
people, the people turn to other means to satisfy their legitimate 
yearnings and desires. We saw that manifested in guerilla movements and 
armed insurrections in Central America and in Latin America in the 
1980s, movements such as the Shining Path, the Sandinistas, and others. 
And the United States then expended a great deal of American treasure 
to try to prevent these movements from overthrowing legitimately 
elected governments.
  I rise in strong support today of the Andean Trade Preference Act. I 
want to make it very clear that along with my support for free trade, I 
also am strongly supportive of and will continue to commit to any 
worker and his or her family who are dislocated by free trade. But to 
argue that we should not have free trade as a result of this is 
ignoring the larger picture, and that is goods and services ranging 
from flowers to apparel to many other products are less expensive for 
average American citizens, thereby allowing American citizens to enjoy 
many of the things wealthier Americans are able to enjoy.
  I want to warn my colleagues. We have a serious situation in our 
hemisphere. Enactment of trade authority for the President in the 
Andean Trade Preference Act will not turn that around immediately. But 
there is no doubt in my mind that we are on a path in our hemisphere 
that could lead to enormous challenges and difficulties in the months 
and years ahead. By passing the Andean Trade Preference Act and giving 
the President trade authority, I think we can at least start on a path 
to reversing some of the terrible misfortunes that have beset so many 
innocent people in our own hemisphere.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.


                 UNANIMOUS CONSENT AGREEMENT--H.R. 5005

  Mr. REID. I ask unanimous consent the cloture vote on the motion to 
proceed to H.R. 5005 be vitiated, there be a time limitation of 7 hours 
on the motion to proceed on H.R. 5005, the homeland defense bill, 
equally divided between Senators Lieberman and Thompson for the 
proponents, and Senator Byrd for the opponents, or their designees; 
that the time begin on Tuesday, September 3, at 9:30 a.m., and the 
motion to proceed be the pending business at that time. I further ask 
unanimous consent that at the conclusion or yielding back of time, the 
Senate, without any intervening action or debate, vote on the motion to 
proceed to H.R. 5005.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Without objection, it is 
so ordered.
  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I listened intently to my colleague and 
friend from Arizona. There is no disagreement on the proposition that I 
want the benefits of international trade to accrue to American 
citizens, consumers who go to the store and want to buy the best 
possible product at the best possible price. There is no question about 
the doctrine of comparative advantage, in which each country, doing 
that which it does best and trading with other countries, promotes 
efficiency. There is no question about that, and that should not be the 
subject of this debate.
  It is not that those of us who oppose fast track do not support free 
trade. But I want to tell you about the kind of trade I do not support. 
The most recent agreement that we negotiated in this country was with 
China. It was a bilateral agreement, prior to their membership in the 
WTO. Let me just take one small piece of that bilateral agreement with 
China and ask a question.
  Our negotiators negotiated with the Chinese in this bilateral 
agreement, and they agreed to the following: After a phase-in period, 
the United States would impose a 2.5-percent tariff on any automobiles 
manufactured in China shipped to the United States, and China would 
impose a 25-percent tariff on any United States automobiles shipped to 
China.
  I am wondering, who in this Chamber would think that is a reasonable 
deal? We say to China: China, you have a $70 billion trade surplus with 
us. We have a $70 billion trade deficit with you. And by the way, here 
are some new terms on automobile trade. If you decide to build 
automobiles and ship them to our country, and we want to ship cars to 
your country--you have 1.3 billion people--we agree you can charge 10 
times the tariff on United States cars going into China. Who thinks 
that makes sense? Where do these negotiators come from? Do they go to a 
school somewhere, a school that fails to teach them the basics of how 
you negotiate and what a fair trade agreement is about?
  No one wants to discuss this. One of my colleagues said: I have half 
a notion to stay here and debate you.
  I said: Gosh, I wish you would.
  No one is interested in debating the issue of trade. There is the 
simplistic and thoughtless debate saying we are for free trade, we 
understand it, we see over the horizon, we understand the economy, and 
the rest of you are xenophobic stooges, and you don't know what you are 
talking about. That is the way the debate rages on the floor and in the 
Washington Post, with the same thoughtless drivel.
  I come from a State that has a lot of family farmers. We have to find 
a foreign home for over half of what we produce. I am the last person 
in the world who wants to retard the movement of goods around the 
world. I believe in trade. I believe in expanded trade. But on behalf 
of our farmers, I demand the trade relationships with other countries 
be fair. It doesn't matter to me whether it is wheat or corn or 
soybeans, if we are going to have a trade relationship with someone, 
and we are going to connect with somebody, I want it to be fair. So let 
me describe a bit what I mean about fairness.
  I mentioned Japanese beef. We ship a lot of Japanese cars into this 
country and good for us. If consumers want to buy them, that is good. 
They want access to that product. So I represent a lot of ranchers in 
North Dakota. They have a lot of beef to sell. Japan needs beef. So we 
negotiated a beef agreement with the country of Japan.
  Madam President, 12 years after the agreement was completed, every 
pound of hamburger, every pound of T-bone steak that goes into Japan 
now has a 38.5-percent tariff on it; 12 years after our agreement, we 
have a 38.5-percent tariff. Should we be shipping more T-bones to 
Tokyo? You bet your life we should. Why can't we? The tariff is too 
high. That is after our negotiators reached an agreement with them. Do 
our ranchers have a complaint? I think so; I believe so because the 
trade circumstances with respect to beef to Japan are not fair, and 
everybody knows it.
  Let me show a chart that shows the EU's import barrier to U.S. eggs. 
If you are an egg producer in this country, in the United States, it is 
standard to wash eggs before shipment. So if you go to the store and 
buy a carton of eggs and open the carton, that is what it is going to 
look like. It is something you might want to crack and eat.
  The European Union requires that imported eggs be unwashed, 
supposedly

[[Page 15574]]

because their farmers are not in the habit of washing eggs. Therefore 
United States eggs cannot be sold in Europe at the retail level, 
because we wash our eggs. Is that a fair trade deal? If you were 
involved in selling eggs, do you think you would like what Europe is 
doing to us? I don't think so.
  I mentioned yesterday the issue of $100 million in United States beef 
that is banned in the European Union. We have a fairly significant 
trade deficit with Europe. You read the European press, they make it 
sound as if all of our cows have two heads--this grotesque creature we 
are trying to sell that is going to injure their consumers.
  So we took the Europeans to the WTO court, the tribunal, and we said 
it is unfair, the $100 million of United States beef we cannot get into 
Europe, and the WTO said: Yes, you are right.
  So they said: Europe, you are going to have to allow that United 
States beef in.
  Europe said: Go fly a kite. We don't intend to let United States beef 
into Europe.
  So our trade negotiators got real gutsy for once. Our trade 
negotiators screwed up all of their courage and they said: Look Europe, 
if you don't play fair with us, we are taking tough action against you.
  What did we do? We took action against them, by imposing tariffs on 
selected products. Do you know what EU products our negotiators chose 
to retaliate against? Our retaliation is on truffles, goose liver, and 
Roquefort cheese. That will scare the devil out of a trade adversary, 
won't it? If you have a trade relationship in which someone is unfair, 
you better watch out or we might take action against your goose liver 
or Roquefort cheese. Maybe I come from a small town and don't 
understand that, but I don't think that is going to strike fear in the 
heart of a trading partner who is being unfair to America.
  Let's talk about the issue of potato flakes to Korea. What if you are 
a potato grower in the Red River Valley and you want to get potato 
flakes to Korea from which they make snack food? There is a 70 percent 
tariff trying to get potato flakes into Korea.
  While we are on the subject of Korea, how about automobiles going 
into Korea? Last year, this country brought 618,000 Korean automobiles 
into our marketplace to be sold to the American consumer. That is good 
for Korea. Korea produces a pretty good car, and they ship them into 
the United States, and United States consumers buy them.
  Guess how many United States-manufactured cars got into Korea last 
year? It wasn't 618,000. It was 2,008. Why? Try to sell a Ford Mustang 
in Korea. They use all kinds of non-tariff trade barriers. This is 
trade in which the Koreans sell us 217 cars for every car we can sell 
in Korea--618,000 sold here, and 2,008 in Korea.
  Is that because we don't make good cars? No. Is it because Koreans 
don't want American cars sold in Korea? Yes. It is that simple.
  I mentioned stuffed molasses, which are used to evade U.S. tariffs on 
sugar. Brazilian sugar is sent to Canada. Then a Canadian company 
combines the sugar with the molasses. Then it comes into this country, 
and the sugar is unloaded. They get another load of sugar and bring it 
down with stuffed molasses in contravention of our trade law. It has 
been going on for a long period of time. We can't do a thing about it.
  Trade problem? Sure, it is. If you are a sugar beet grower, is that a 
problem? You bet. Is anybody about to fix it? No. Nobody cares. 
Actually, the Senate version of the trade bill had a provision that 
aimed to fix this problem. But, like most other things of value in the 
trade bill, it was dropped out in conference. There is instead a 
placebo provision that means virtually nothing.
  I mentioned a bit ago that China has this huge trade surplus with us, 
or we have a huge trade deficit with them. I noticed in the newspaper 
the other day that China is buying Airbuses from Europe. China has a 
lot of people. They need a lot of airplanes. The Airbus is deeply 
subsidized by the European governments. It is unfair competition for 
the Boeing Company, for example.
  What is the remedy for a United States airplane manufacturer when the 
European company that is deeply subsidized by the European governments 
goes to China and sells them Airbuses, at the same time that China has 
this huge trade surplus with us?
  We had a situation recently because of NAFTA. The administration says 
we must allow long-haul Mexican trucks into our country. Of course, the 
fact is that long-haul Mexican trucks are not inspected the way we 
inspect our trucks. Their drivers are not required to carry logbooks 
the way our drivers do. There is a lot of concern about safety when 
they come in and move around our country. They have been limited to a 
20-mile distance from the border. Mexico said, apparently, that if we 
didn't allow long-haul Mexican trucks into our country, they were going 
to take action against us with respect to high-fructose corn syrup. I 
have news for the Mexicans. They have already taken action. We can't 
get high-fructose corn syrup into Mexico with any reasonable tariff 
because they are acting in contravention of our trade laws and 
agreements.
  The list is endless. I could go on for a long period.
  We have a trade agreement with Canada. Clayton Yeutter went to Canada 
and negotiated a trade agreement with Canada. This agreement 
essentially sold out the interests of our American farmers. I am sure 
he received something from Canada--perhaps greater access by the 
financial service community, or something. In any event, immediately 
after the trade agreement was negotiated with Canada, our farmers saw 
an avalanche of Canadian grain being sold in our country at unfairly 
subsidized prices by a monopoly controlled by what they call the 
Canadian Wheat Board. We can't do a thing about it. We sent 
investigators to Canada to get information about the prices at which 
they were selling the grain. They thumbed their noses at us and said: 
We don't intend to give you any information about the prices at which 
we are selling it in the United States.
  I rode up to the Canadian border with a farmer named Earl Jensen in a 
12-year-old orange truck with a couple hundred bushels of durum wheat 
on the back, and we were stopped at the border despite the fact that 
all the way to the border we saw 18-wheel Canadian trucks coming into 
the country hauling Canadian wheat.
  That is the kind of thing that angers the American people about 
trade.
  We have a circumstance where we have this huge trade deficit. It is 
interesting. We talked about this in the debate. No one really wants to 
talk about this deficit at all. People just act as if it doesn't exist. 
People come out here and dance around for a while, talk about the 
wonders of global trade and how terrific it is, but they want to 
pretend it doesn't exist. There is this relentless griping about the 
trade deficit that is increasing year after year and that is hurting 
our country. We don't owe this money to ourselves as we do the budget 
deficit, we owe this money to other countries. This is a claim on our 
assets by other countries.
  In May, the trade deficit was $41.5 billion--just last month. And the 
trade ambassador has said that he is going to put our antidumping laws 
on the negotiating table. We have antidumping rules. They are not very 
well enforced. But we have them nonetheless. They are one of the few 
tools we have to fight unfair trade. And they are now on the 
negotiating table. There are discussions about their elimination. We 
are willing to get rid of them in future trade negotiations--in secret, 
because all these trade negotiations are in secret--willing to consider 
getting rid of our antidumping rules. We will be defenseless. We have a 
weakened 301, no section 22, and now we have antidumping rules on the 
table.
  So where is the remedy for unfair trade? Under this trade bill, the 
only remedy for those who lose their jobs because of these trade 
agreements is that we are willing to give you some health insurance--
not all of a it, but we are willing to pay 65 percent for some health 
insurance for you. Lose your jobs, and you'll get some trade adjustment 
assistance. You can go home and say to your spouse: Honey, I have

[[Page 15575]]

lost my job. They are moving into Indonesia. They can find someone who 
works for 40 cents an hour. They don't have to have a manufacturing 
plant that is safe because they are not subject to all those darned 
OSHA rules. And they can dump the chemicals right in the streets, and 
they can pollute the air. They don't have to worry with that because 
there is no enforcement. And they can work 12-year-old kids for 12 
hours a day, and nobody is going to say anything. Honey, I have lost my 
job, and it is going overseas. But, honey, there is good news here 
because the bill the Senate has been considering is going to get us a 
little health insurance.
  They have even extended it now to farmers and ranchers who lost their 
farms and ranches. They get a little trade adjustment assistance as 
well, when they lose their farms.
  Incidentally, they are also going to expand the training budget 
because they know we are going to lose some of these jobs. We are going 
to give some training to all the people forced out of their jobs. Just 
don't expect their new jobs to amount to much. Because good jobs are 
being driven out of this country by all these trade agreements.
  It is interesting to me that there is no one in the debate who wants 
to defend the practices I have just described. All they want to do is 
chant. You can go to the street corners and hear chanting as well. 
Normally they have drum rolls and symbols, and they chant. We have the 
same exercise when we talk about trade--this relentless chant: ``Free 
trade, global economy, free trade, global economy.''
  Is there anyone in the Senate who wants to say: Yes, let us have 
expanded trade, but let us demand on behalf of this country that we 
have tried rules that are fair?
  This country got into a bad habit after the Second World War. We did 
it necessarily, and it was something which I would have supported if I 
had been here at that point. Just after the Second World War, we had a 
lot of countries flat on their backs. Trade policy for us was foreign 
policy. We said with all of these countries: Let us make concessions. 
Let us help them. We can do almost anything. We are the biggest, the 
best, the strongest, and we have the most. We can beat anybody in 
international trade competition with one hand tied behind our backs. So 
trade policy was then foreign policy. And that is fine.
  For a quarter of a century, our trade policy was foreign policy. But 
then, those who were flat on their back became shrewd, tough 
international competitors: Japan, Europe, and others. Yet our trade 
policy did not become trade policy or economic policy, it remained 
foreign policy.
  For the second 25 years after the Second World War, we began to see 
this problem, a problem of gripping, relentless trade deficits. With 
Japan, it has been a trade deficit that has continued virtually 
forever--year after year after year after year--because they want to 
protect their economy and keep United States goods out, to the extent 
they can, and they want access to our marketplace with their 
manufactured goods.
  And this country has said: Fine; that's a relationship that's fine 
with us.
  It is not fine with me, and should not be fine with others, whose 
principal interest ought to be the economic future of this country, 
whose principal interest ought to be to have trade agreements that are 
mutually beneficial to both trading partners.
  When I started talking, I talked about this Byzantine, twisted, 
perverted provision with China on automobiles. I did it for a reason.
  I recognize that we do not have a lot of automobile trade with China. 
China has 1.3 billion-plus people. One would expect, as the Chinese 
economy advances, that the opportunities to sell automobiles in China 
could be significant. But our negotiators, for reasons I could never 
understand, said: Oh, by the way, let's make a little deal. Just as one 
part, one paragraph, in a big, long trade agreement, here is what we 
will decide on automobiles: China, you have a big trade surplus with 
us, and we have a big deficit with you, but if we ever have any 
automobile trade between us, you can go ahead and impose a tariff that 
is 10 times higher on United States cars than we would impose on 
Chinese cars.
  We ought to find the person who agreed to that, and somehow put him 
out here on the Senate steps, and get a chair and sit beside him, and 
ask him to explain to us what school you go to, to learn that kind of 
nonsense, that kind of perverted sense of fairness.
  I could describe paragraphs in every trade agreement in the last 25 
years that have the same absurdities, the same unwillingness to stand 
up for American producers and American jobs, not at the expense of 
others, but just for the benefit of ours.
  Somehow there is an embarrassment in this Chamber about standing up 
for this country's economic interests. Yes, it is in our economic 
interest to have a system in which U.S. consumers have access to lower 
priced goods from around the world. But it is not, and never will be, 
in our economic interest, if those consumers are out of work, if the 
jobs that provided the income that used to allow the consumers to take 
the goods off the shelf through their purchases have now gone to other 
countries because corporations, that at this point are no longer 
American citizens but international citizens, have decided they ought 
to produce where it is very inexpensive to produce and ship their goods 
to the established marketplace.
  That, inevitably, and, in my judgment, more significantly as the 
years go on, will erode our job base of good jobs. I am talking about 
manufacturing-sector jobs. No country will long remain a strong 
economic power, a world economic power, if it decimates its 
manufacturing base. Manufacturing is critical to our country's economy 
and to our long-term economic health.
  There is a fellow in North Dakota who goes to county fairs and 
performs for money, and his name is John Smith. He has an act that he 
takes to county fairs, and they pay him for it. He takes old cars--gets 
some old wreck--and then he gins up the engine somehow, and then he 
goes and he jumps four or five other cars in front of the bandstand, 
wherever the county fair is. He calls himself the Flying Farmer from 
Makoti. He lives in Makoti, ND, and he farms.
  So he has this act where he travels with these old cars and he calls 
himself the Flying Farmer. He is an interesting guy. He wanted to set 
the Guinness record in the ``Guinness Book of World Records.'' And he 
is now in the ``Guinness Book of World Records'' for driving in reverse 
for 500 miles, averaging 38 miles an hour.
  Now, you might wonder why I thought about the Flying Farmer from 
Makoti. I was thinking about going in reverse this morning, and I 
thought what better example of going in reverse than the Flying Farmer 
from Makoti and the Senate on international trade.
  Year after year after year, we go deeper and deeper and deeper in 
debt. The current account deficit is somewhere around $2 trillion at 
this point this year. When the year ends, we will be somewhere around 
$450 to $480 billion in merchandise trade deficit. And we have to pay 
somebody that, somebody living outside of our country. It injures our 
economy, it injures future economic activity, and yet no one really 
wants to talk much about it.
  We are going in reverse. We are not making progress. Despite all of 
the protests by those who think this is a wonderful thing, the evidence 
is in.
  With NAFTA, the last trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, we 
turned a small surplus with Mexico into a big deficit; we turned a 
moderate deficit with Canada into a big deficit. NAFTA was a disaster. 
We were promised that there would be 300,000 new American jobs coming 
from this trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. The fact is, we have 
lost somewhere around 700,000 jobs.
  We were told by the economists, who thought they knew what would 
happen with Mexico, that we would simply get the products of low-
skilled jobs coming into this country as a result of NAFTA. The three 
largest imports from Mexico

[[Page 15576]]

are automobiles, automobile parts, and electronics--all products of 
high-skilled jobs that used to exist in major centers of manufacturing 
in our country but now exist in Mexico.
  We are not making progress. We are losing ground. That is the reason 
I oppose giving fast-track trade authority to this President. To 
suggest that we ought to ignore the Constitution--and, yes, we ignore 
the Constitution when we do this. The Constitution says that the 
regulation of trade with other countries is the province of the 
Congress--the Congress. And a majority of the Senate says: we have not 
seen your next trade agreement yet. We know you will negotiate it 
without us. We know it will be negotiated in secret somewhere. But we 
agree in advance, so whatever you do, whenever you do it, wherever you 
do it, we will handcuff ourselves so we are unable to offer even one 
amendment to change one word when it comes back to the Senate.
  I think that is one of the goofiest propositions I have ever heard. 
It just makes no sense at all. Yet a pretty broad majority of the 
Senate agrees to it.
  Well, let me make a final point.
  The business community in this country and in this world have become 
international citizens. Multinational corporations do business all 
around the world. They do not get up in the morning and say: Look, my 
principal interest is the economy of the United States of America. That 
is not their principal interest. Their principal interest is to their 
shareholders. And their interest to their shareholders is to do, in 
international economic circumstances, the best they can to improve 
profits. If that means moving jobs from Pittsburgh to Indonesia, in 
order to take advantage of lower labor rates, and to avoid OSHA, and to 
avoid all the other things you have to comply with in this country, 
then that is what they do.
  The problem is, this country, as a leader in international trade, has 
not described what fair competition is. We have never described, in the 
new global economy, what is fair competition. The global economy has 
galloped forward, but the rules have not kept pace.
  It begs the question, for all of us, as a leader in world trade: What 
are the rules? What are the conditions? What is the admission price for 
the American economy?
  I said earlier, if a company decides that it wishes to access the 
lowest possible labor rate anywhere in the world, and takes its 
corporate jet, and circles the globe, and looks down to see where they 
can possibly do that, and discovers a place where they can hire 12-
year-olds, and they can work them 12 hours a day, and they can pay them 
14 cents an hour, is that fair?
  Then they ship the product of that labor to Fargo or to Denver or 
Fresno and put on it the store shelf, and someone says: Isn't that a 
wonderful thing? What a wonderful thing; you actually have a lower 
price for that product. In fact, some studies suggest that is not the 
case. The difference is made up in profit for the corporation, not 
lower prices for the consumer. But setting that aside, people say: 
Isn't that a wonderful thing? That is lower priced than I expected.
  Yes, that is good for the consumer, but it is also the case that the 
would-be consumer may well have lost his job because the production of 
that item no longer exists here.
  I am not suggesting we should have the manufacturing advantage or 
capability for all products. I believe the doctrine of comparative 
advantage makes sense. If there is a country that can do it better, 
more effectively, has the natural resources more available than we do, 
one would expect they would do that which they do best. We do that 
which represents a natural advantage for us, and we trade back and 
forth.
  But that is not the circumstance today. The natural economic 
advantage these days is instead a natural political advantage. A 
country says, our political advantage is we will allow you to hire 
kids. We will allow you to pay 20 cents an hour. We will allow you to 
dump your chemicals into the streams and into the air, and we will 
allow you to do this in a workplace that is not required to be safe. 
Those aren't economic advantages that somehow relate to natural 
advantages. Those are political advantages created by a government that 
says: We will not allow people to form unions or labor to collectively 
bargain or rules against children put in factories. Those are political 
judgments and political circumstances. There is no natural economic 
advantage there. My point is, we have to come to grips with this 
galloping globalism. We must do that in fairness to the American worker 
and to the American businesses. To do less than that means that we 
consign our economy to unfair competition in a dozen different areas.
  Americans depend on us to represent our best economic interests, not 
some notion of what the economic interest is for a corporation that 
does business in every country and has no special interest or 
recognition in our economy or our economic growth or our workers.
  I know we have a 30-hour postcloture period. Several of my colleagues 
will want to speak on this issue. I expect they will have significant 
votes for it today and those who vote for it will be back on the floor. 
I will be back on the floor of the Senate again with another chart, and 
we will talk about whether it is wise for the Senate, when it discovers 
that doing something isn't working, to continue doing it over and over 
and over again.
  Most people learn by repetition. When you repeat something that has 
failed, most people understand that they want to do it differently. 
That is not the case with fast track and with our current trade policy.
  I believe in expanded trade. I believe economies are strengthened by 
expanded trade. I believe our economy and other economies of the world 
are strengthened by expanded trade. I don't want to put up a wall 
around our country. I am not an isolationist. But I believe very 
strongly there needs to be voices raised demanding fair trade rules. 
Whether it is China, Japan, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Korea, or others 
with whom we have very large trade deficits, we have a right as 
Americans, as producers and as workers, to expect our Government will 
represent our economic interests in demanding fair trade rules.
  That has not been the case to date. I hope soon after this vote 
today, we will begin to see some effort on behalf of our country in 
demanding the rules of trade keep pace with the galloping pace of 
global trade. That is the only thing that will be fair to American 
workers and American companies.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Madam President, if the Senator will yield for a 
second, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to follow the 
Senator.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. Madam President, I thank my colleague from North 
Dakota. If the Senate had been in session listening and heard the 
persuasive argument made by the distinguished Senator from North Dakota 
and we had a vote, we would vote his way immediately because he has 
presented the case.
  The only thing is, he has not presented the case in the stark reality 
that it really is. We are talking to a fixed jury. As an old trial 
lawyer for some 20 years, where I made enough to afford the luxury of 
serving here, I know how to talk to a fixed jury. Specifically, the 
contention in the trial of this case is that we have to give the 
President negotiating authority that cannot be amended; it is on a 
take-it-or-leave-it basis; and that the trading nations, some, let's 
say, 160, 170 trading countries, just will not enter into an agreement 
unless the President has fast track.
  He doesn't want to go through the negotiation period and then find 
that his particular trade agreement has been amended on the floor of 
the Congress.
  If you refer to the 2001 Trade Policy Agenda and 2000 Annual Report, 
which is the most recent, issued by the U.S. Trade Representative, turn 
to page 1 of the list of trade agreements. You will find, in essence, 
five trade agreements as a result of fast track, and thereafter

[[Page 15577]]

some 200 agreements without fast track. The contention that you can't 
get an agreement unless you have fast track is totally absurd.
  We have had the Tokyo round, and the United States-Canada Free Trade 
Agreement. Incidentally, this Senator voted for that because we have 
relatively the same standard of living. We have the labor protections. 
We have the environmental protections. When you have a level playing 
field, I am delighted to vote for trade, and so-called free trade. But 
now, we have fixed trade.
  That is what we are debating. This jury is fixed. We also had the 
United States-Israel trade agreement, which I also supported; NAFTA, 
which I opposed; and the Uruguay Round with WTO. Those are the five so-
called trade agreements under fast track. But then turn the pages and 
continue turning, and there are some 200 trade agreements without fast 
track.
  When I first got here, we had SALT I, and it was very complex. We had 
reservations and amendments on the floor of the Congress. We had a vote 
on that. We didn't have fast track for SALT I and fast track for SALT 
II and fast track for the chemical weapons treaty. The contention of 
the White House is you can't get trade agreements, but the President 
needs to look at his own book.
  Mr. BYRD. Will the Senator yield?
  Mr. HOLLINGS. I am delighted to yield.
  Mr. BYRD. Is he telling me that trade agreements can be negotiated 
without this fast-track mechanism?
  Mr. HOLLINGS. Yes, sir.
  Mr. BYRD. Is that what he is saying?
  Mr. HOLLINGS. I tell the distinguished Senator from West Virginia, 
they literally have almost a dozen and a half pages of all of these 
agreements, right here in the President's report, that were obtained 
without fast track.
  Mr. BYRD. I thought the President was saying to the country that he 
has to have this fast-track thing that we will vote on today in order 
to negotiate trade agreements. Is the Senator from South Carolina 
telling me he doesn't have to have that?
  Mr. HOLLINGS. No, sir, he doesn't. I can tell you now he wants the 
fast track for the fix.
  That is the point I want to make. I can tell you right now. Let's 
look at the result of the so-called trade agreements. Look at 1992, and 
you find that the Foreign Trade Barriers of the Office of the U.S. 
Trade Representative is 267 pages long. Oh, we had WTO, we had GATT, we 
had NAFTA, and we did away with all the barriers. Why then is this 
year's Foreign Trade Barriers--458 pages long?
  Like the monkey making love to the skunk, I cannot stand any more of 
this. I can tell you that right now. For Heaven's sake, don't give me 
any more free trade agreements or fast tracks. This would be the end of 
the argument, if you didn't have a fixed jury. What is better proof? I 
am using the President's proof. No. 1, he doesn't need fast track and, 
with fast track, we are actually going out of business.
  Mr. BYRD. Will the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. HOLLINGS. Yes.
  Mr. BYRD. What I have been hearing the administration say is that 
this is trade promotion authority. Does the Senator mean to tell me 
here in front of the eyes of the Nation, the ears of the people, that 
the President doesn't need fast-track in order to negotiate trade 
agreements for the United States? Is that what the Senator is saying?
  Mr. HOLLINGS. There is no question, Senator----
  Mr. BYRD. That is not what the President has been saying, is it?
  Mr. HOLLINGS. No. You bring out the point that this is bipartisan. 
President Clinton said he had to have fast track for NAFTA.
  Mr. BYRD. We didn't give it, did we?
  Mr. HOLLINGS. That is right. They said if we pass NAFTA we would get 
200,000 jobs, but we lost 700,000 textile jobs. In the State of South 
Carolina, since NAFTA, we have lost more than 54,000 jobs.
  Now, this farm crowd, they get their $70 billion bill, and they come 
here blinking their eyes and talking about free trade, free trade. They 
get all the subsidies and protection--the Export-Import Bank, support 
payments, and everything else of that kind--and they run away with some 
$80 billion. The poor, hard-working people, such as your mine workers 
and my textile workers--
  Mr. BYRD. Yes.
  (Mrs. CARNAHAN assumed the Chair.)
  Mr. HOLLINGS. As the distinguished Senator from Texas always says, 
they are pulling the wagon, paying the taxes, keeping the country 
strong. We have removed 700,000 textile jobs alone. Akio Morita and I 
went to a seminar in Chicago almost 20 years ago, and they were 
lecturing about the Third World countries, the emerging nations trying 
to become nation states.
  Morita, then head of Sony, said: Wait a minute, in order to become a 
nation state, you have to develop a strong manufacturing capacity.
  Then later, he turned and said to this Senator: Senator, the world 
power that loses its manufacturing strength will cease to be a world 
power.
  I am worried about this country. I tell you, we have over a $412 
billion deficit in fiscal year 2002.
  Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that page 1 and page 60 of 
the Mid-Session review on the budget just issued be printed in the 
Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                Summary

       When this report was published last year, the nation was in 
     the midst of a recession that, predictably, was already 
     having detrimental effects on the government's finances. What 
     no one could predict was that just 20 days later, a lethal 
     attack on America would exacerbate the recession and trigger 
     extraordinary military, homeland defense, and repair 
     expenditures that would at least temporarily make an enormous 
     difference in the fiscal outlook.
       By the February 2002 submission of the Budget for fiscal 
     year 2003, the budgetary effects of the recession and the war 
     on terror were well understood. It was also becoming apparent 
     that the flood of revenue that produced record surpluses in 
     the late 1990s was driven both by underlying economic growth, 
     the traditionally decisive factor, and, in ways no yet fully 
     grasped, by the extraordinary boom in the stock market. The 
     markedly greater dependence of revenues on stock market 
     developments was not yet understood by experts either inside 
     or outside the government.
       The economic recovery appears to be underway, the one-time 
     costs of recovery are being paid, and the expense of war-
     fighting abroad and new protective resources at home have 
     been incorporated in budget plans. Taking all these changes 
     into account, the federal government is now projected to 
     spend $165 billion more than it receives in revenues in 2002, 
     up from the $106 billion projected nearly six months ago. 
     Table 1 below comparing February and July estimates shows a 
     return to the pre-recession pattern of surpluses in 2005, and 
     growing surpluses thereafter. Future improvements, however, 
     depend to a significant extent on two key factors: (1) 
     restraint of the recent rapid growth in federal spending; and 
     (2) a resumption of growth in tax payments produced by a 
     stronger economy and a stronger stock market.


                moving forward amid the backdrop of war

       President Bush placed two purposes above all others in his 
     2003 Budget: Winning the war on terror and restoring the 
     economy to health. On both fronts, initial progress has been 
     encouraging. Military action in Afghanistan has depleted the 
     ranks and greatly weakened the operational capabilities of 
     the terrorists. On the economic front, the nation's gross 
     domestic product (GDP) grew at an impressive 6.1 percent 
     annual rate in the first quarter of 2002, making the 
     recession both shorter and shallower than most and the early 
     recovery far stronger than assumed in February's budget.
       For the future, we can be certain only of the intentions of 
     our adversaries and our own resolve to defeat them. We know 
     neither the length of the conflict nor the budgetary expense 
     of victory. Nor can we be certain the economy will not be 
     weakened by further shocks. To preserve the flexibility to 
     respond to future events while maintaining a fiscal framework 
     that will return the budget to surplus, it is imperative that 
     spending, . . .

[[Page 15578]]



                                       TABLE 1.--CHANGES FROM 2003 BUDGET
                                            [In billions of dollars]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                        2002       2003       2004       2005       2006       2007    2003-2007
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2003 Budget policy surplus.........       -106        -80        -14         61         86        104        157
    Enacted legislation............         34         33         17         33          4          2         89
    Supplemental and other                 -13         -7         -6         -3         -4         -3        -25
     adjustments to Administration
     policy........................
    Economic and technical                 -80        -54        -45        -37        -26        -18       -181
     reestimates...................
------------------------------------
Total changes......................        -59        -29        -34         -8        -26        -20       -117
Mid-Session Review policy surplus..       -165       -109        -48         53         60         84         41
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


                                 TABLE 20. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FINANCING AND DEBT
                                            [In billions of dollars]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                                            Estimate
                                        2001   -----------------------------------------------------------------
                                       Actual      2002       2003       2004       2005       2006       2007
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Financing:
    Unified budget surplus (+)/            127       -165       -109        -48         53         60         84
     deficit (-)...................
    Financing other than the change
     in debt held by the public:
        Premiums paid (-) on               -11         -4
         buybacks of Treasury
         securities\1\.............
        Net purchases (-) on non-    .........         -6        -11         -*          *          *          *
         Federal securities by the
         National Railroad
         Retirement Investment
         Trust.....................
    Changes in:\2\
            Treasury operating cash          8         -6         -5  .........  .........         -5  .........
             balance...............
            Checks outstanding,            -13        -12         10  .........  .........  .........  .........
             deposit funds, etc.\3\
        Seigniorage on coins.......          1          1          1          1          1          1          1
    Less: Net financing
     disbursements:
            Direct loan financing          -19        -15        -15        -15        -15        -15        -15
             accounts:.............
            Guaranteed loan                 -4         -2          3          3          4          5          5
             financing accounts....
                                    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                Total, financing           -37        -44        -17        -11         -9        -14         -8
                 other than the
                 change in debt
                 held by the public
                                    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  Total amount              90       -209       -126        -58         44         47         76
                 available to repay
                 debt held by the
                 public............
    Change in debt held by the             -90        209        126         58        -44        -47        -76
     public........................
Debt Subject to Statutory
 Limitation, End of Year:
    Debt issued by Treasury........      5,743      6,155      6,535      6,897      7,195      7,506      7,805
    Adjustment for Treasury debt           -15        -15        -15        -15        -15        -15        -15
     not subject to limitation and
     agency debt subject to
     limitation\4\.................
    Adjustment for discount and              5          5          5          5          5          5          5
     premium\5\....................
                                    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Total, debt subject to           5,733      6,145      6,524      6,887      7,184      7,496      7,795
         statutory limitation\6\...
Debt Outstanding, End of Year:
    Gross Federal Debt:\7\
            Debt issued by Treasury      5,743      6,155      6,535      6,897      7,195      7,506      7,805
            Debt issued by other            27         27         26         26         24         24         23
             agencies..............
                                    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                Total, gross             5,770      6,182      6,561      6,923      7,219      7,530      7,828
                 Federal debt......
    Held by:
            Debt securities held by      2,450      2,654      2,906      3,210      3,550      3,908      4,282
             Government accounts...
            Debt securities held by      3,320      3,529      3,655      3,713      3,669      3,622      3,546
             the public\8\.........
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*$500 million or less
\1\Includes only premiums paid on buybacks through April 2002. Estimates are not made for subsequent buybacks.
\2\A decrease in the Treasury operating cash balance (which is an asset) would be a means of financing a deficit
  and therefore has a positive sign. An increase in checks outstanding or deposit fund balances (which are
  liabilities) would also be a means of financing a deficit and therefore would also have a positive sign.
\3\Besides checks outstanding and deposit funds, includes accrued interest payable on Treasury debt,
  miscellaneous liability accounts, allocations of special drawing rights, and, as an offset, cash and monetary
  assets other than the Treasury operating cash balance, miscellaneous asset accounts, and profit on sale of
  gold.
\4\Consists primarily of Federal Financing Bank debt.
\5\Consists of unamortized discount (less premium) on public issues of Treasury notes and bonds (other than zero-
  coupon bonds) and unrealized discount on Government account series securities.
\6\The statutory debt limit is $6,400 billion.
\7\Treasury securities held by the public and zero-coupon bonds held by Government accounts are almost all
  measured at sales price plus amortized discount or less amortized premium. Agency debt securities are almost
  all measured at face value. Treasury securities in the Government account series are measured at face value
  less unrealized discount (if any).
\8\At the end of 2001, the Federal Reserve Banks held $534.1 billion of Federal securities and the rest of the
  public held $2,785.9 billion. Debt held by the Federal Reserve Banks is not estimated for future years.

  Mr. HOLLINGS. Now you begin to see what I started to talk about--the 
corruption, not of Senators, but of the process. You and I saw the 
corruption of the process when they brought TV cameras in here. I first 
got here 35 years ago. If you wanted to know what was going on down on 
the floor, you had to go down on the floor. So you always had 20, 25 
Senators in this cloakroom, 20 Senators over in that cloakroom; and a 
point was made that you could immediately go out and contest that 
point. Now I stay back in my office looking at my TV. I know that is 
wrong, and I should run over to the floor. But when I get here, two 
other Senators have been waiting for an hour as the next speakers. So 
there is no debate. The process has been corrupted, as the budget 
process has been corrupted.
  Let me tell you exactly how it happened because I was chairman of the 
Budget Committee. I went over with Alan Greenspan in January of 1981 to 
brief President Reagan on the budget. He had pledged to balance the 
budget. He pledged, of course, tax cuts. He also pledged to balance the 
budget in 1 year. After the briefing, he said: Oops, this is way worse 
than I thought. It is going to take 3 years.
  That is how we got into the 3-year budgets. And with Gramm-Rudman-
Hollings, we got the 5-year budget, and now we have 10-year budgets. 
Whoopee, let's have a 20-year budget and make all kinds of happy 
projections and re-elect ourselves. That is the corruption that has 
gone on.
  After President Reagan came in, the Greenspan Commission issued their 
report on Social Security, making it fiscally sound. Section 21 of the 
Greenspan Commission report said: Put Social Security off budget.
  As a former chairman of the Budget Committee and an old-timer, I 
worked with John Heinz from Pennsylvania, and we finally got it passed. 
On November 5, 1990, George Herbert Walker Bush--President senior 
Bush--signed into law, section 13.301 that says you shall not use 
Social Security in your budget. But we do. The President violates it, 
the Congress violates it, and, more particularly, the media does.
  The distinguished Senator from West Virginia is so terrific on 
historical reference, and I must think at this moment of President 
Thomas Jefferson. When he was asked: Between a free government and a 
free press, which would you choose? He said: I choose the latter. So 
long as the free press tells the truth to the American people, the 
Government will remain free.
  Why do they say on page 1, which we have just put into the Record, 
the deficit is $165 billion? But on page 60, the deficit, the real debt 
we will spend in this fiscal year, Madam President, is $412 billion 
more than we take in. Why? Because Mitch Daniels, our Enron 
accountant--wants to fool Americans. He is more interested in rolling 
out hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks for Kenny-Boy Lay.

[[Page 15579]]

  Now, President Reagan, in trying to get both tax cuts and his pledge 
to balance the budget, got what he called ``unified.'' That was the 
biggest bunch of nonsense and charade I ever saw because it was all but 
unified. He just separated out the trust funds, including Social 
Security, and the civil service retirement and military retirees funds. 
He factored them out, and the next thing you know, we had unified.
  Then, under President Clinton, we went to on-budget, off-budget, on-
budget, off-budget. Then to continue the charade, under President Bush, 
we refer to it as public debt and Government debt, Government debt and 
public debt. They confuse the public in order to get reelected. They 
tell everybody Social Security is not spent. That is exactly what the 
Secretary of the Treasury said this last Sunday. He said that under no 
circumstance would we spend Social Security.
  I almost went through the TV set when I heard him say:

       Social Security moneys are never spent for anything except 
     Social Security. It's a red herring.

  CBO has already said we will owe not $1.170 trillion, but $1.333 
trillion to Social Security. In fact, on page 44 of the Mid-Session 
Review you will see Mitch Daniels hides that fact. I ask unanimous 
consent that page 44 be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                      TABLE 7.--BUDGET SUMMARY BY CATEGORY
                                            [In billions of dollars]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                 2002     2003     2004     2005     2006     2007    2003-2007
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Outlays:
    Discretionary
        Defense..............................      332      371      388      408      423      437        2,028
        Nondefense...........................      379      399      413      418      424      432        2.086
    Subtotal, discretionary..................      711      771      801      826      847      870        4,114
    Emergency response fund..................       36       17        8        3        2        1           30
    Mandatory:
        Social Security......................      453      473      494      515      538      566        2,587
        Medicare.............................      223      232      242      260      282      307        1,324
        Medicaid.............................      147      161      173      188      205      223          950
        Other mandatory......................      291      305      302      307      319      323        1,556
    Subtotal, mandatory......................    1,114    1,171    1,212    1,270    1,345    1,419        6,417
    Net interest.............................      171      180      196      198      197      194          965
Total Outlays................................    2,032    2,138    2,217    2,298    2,390    2,483       11,526
Receipts.....................................    1,867    2,029    2,169    2,351    2,451    2,567       11,567
Surplus......................................     -165     -109      -48       53       60       84           41
    On-budget surplus........................     -322     -282     -236     -165     -176     -171       -1,031
    Off-budget surplus.......................      157      173      189      219      237      255        1,072
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Mr. HOLLINGS. Madam President, you will see on page 44 that the 
Social Security moneys, to the tune of $157 billion, is spent. It shows 
it in his own document. We need to catch these fellows. That is why I 
say the budget is corrupt.
  Robert Kennedy, who used to sit at this desk, wrote a famous book, 
``The Enemy Within.'' I could write a book called ``Your Best Friends 
and My Best Friends.'' The best friends are the Chamber of Commerce, 
the Business Roundtable, the National Manufacturers Association, and 
the National Federation of Independent Business. They are the enemy 
within for fixed trade. Yes, they want to export--export our jobs. That 
is what this is all about. Senator Byrd, over half of what we consume 
in this country is imported. Does the Senator realize that?
  We import 56 percent of our optical goods; 80 percent of our watches; 
and 42 percent of our semiconductors. I thought we were in the age of 
high tech, high tech, high tech--that motor of growth, high tech, high 
tech. But we import 42 percent of our semiconductors.
  By the way, out in Silicon Valley, they do not have health care, and 
I say to Senator Byrd, they do not have medical care. They are part-
time workers. My friends at Microsoft had to sue to get health care. I 
would rather have a GE plant where they are making turbines and 
employee make $24 an hour, than to have high tech, high tech plants, 
where people make $12 or $14 an hour. Don't give me this high-tech 
stuff.
  This is all catching up with corporate America on the front pages. 
Corrupt executives are going to be indicted. The Justice Department has 
charged some executives already, but not Kenny Boy Lay, of Enron. You 
do not even hear about him.
  The Commerce Committee brought the Enron and WorldCom crowds in for 
hearings. We also heard from David Freeman, of the California Power 
Authority. I wanted to know how Kenny Boy Lay could not have heard 
about the fraudulent pricing structure Enron had out there. I saw his 
wife on TV, who said Mr. Lay did not know anything. Mr. Freeman said he 
knew everything going on out in California, I can tell you that.
  We have enough to bring charges. But that said, I am wondering and 
worrying about this because the fellow in charge of this, Deputy 
Attorney General Larry Thompson, used to worked at a law firm that 
represented Enron. And if you think we cleaned up corporate America the 
other day with the new accounting bill, we did not, because it did not 
include expensing stock options. We also need companies to change 
auditors every 5 years. If they do, then every 5 years you will have 
the auditors auditing the auditors. When you know that another audit 
group is going to come in behind you, you do not start any tricky 
stuff. You are on trial. That is the quickest way to clean up the 
books.
  I wanted to offer an amendment for that, but the leadership on both 
sides had it tabled. We have not solved that problem, but I will be 
back.
  Back to the task at hand, we import 46 percent of our camera 
equipment; 93 percent of electrical capacitors; 55 percent of printing 
and related machinery; and already 36 percent of motor vehicles. That 
is a third of the vehicles Americans drive. Imported cars keep taking 
over the market here, they keep taking over the market. Also we import 
62 percent of our motorcycles; over 50 percent of our office machines; 
70 percent of our television sets; and 50 percent of our crude 
petroleum.
  I ask unanimous consent to print this list in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                                                 Import
        Commodity                                            percentage
Optical Goods......................................................56.5
Ball and Roller Bearing............................................28.4
Watches............................................................80.8
Household Appliances...............................................31.5
Air Conditioning Equip.............................................23.0
Semiconductors.....................................................51.2
Computers, Peripherals, Parts......................................56.5
Cameras and Equipment..............................................46.8
Electrical Capacitors..............................................93.5
Metal Forming Machine Tools........................................46.9
Mechanical Power Transmission Equip................................36.2
Printing and Related Machinery.....................................55.2
Textile Machinery..................................................58.3
Electrical Transformers............................................51.8
Motor Vehicles.....................................................35.6
Motorcycles........................................................62.1
Office Machines....................................................50.7
Televisions........................................................69.2
Crude Petroleum....................................................49.8
Steel Mill Products................................................21.3
Electric Motors....................................................29.8
Consumer Electronics...............................................95.5
TV and Radio Broadcasting..........................................86.7
Printed Circuits...................................................24.6

  Mr. BYRD. Madam President, will the Senator yield?
  Mr. HOLLINGS. I yield.
  Mr. BYRD. But don't we need this trade promotion authority? Don't we

[[Page 15580]]

need this trade promotion authority to wipe out those deficits so we 
can start moving our goods, other than farm products and along with 
them, too, don't we need this trade promotion authority, I say to the 
Senator? ``Trade promotion authority,'' that tells me it promotes 
trade.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. I just read a list of products, showing how the fix is 
on with respect to trade. What they do is fix us. In other words, House 
members are elected every two years, so they have to explain their 
votes every 2 years. In the Senate, we just have to explain our votes 
every 6 years. So we do not have to explain too much.
  On our side, the Finance Committee is either a bunch of oil people or 
farmers--and that is a fix. When you get that crowd in there, they will 
accept anything with regards to trade, which they did with this 
particular conference report.
  Here is how they have fixed it in the past. In November of 1993, 
under fast track, Rep. Peter King helped President Clinton organize the 
GOP supporters of NAFTA. When Rep. King went home and found the Army 
Corps of Engineers was reneging on a deal to dredge, President Clinton 
fixed the problem for him.

       Lynn Martin, President Bush's Labor secretary, said that 
     ``If the president didn't make deals, they'd be saying he 
     doesn't understand Washington.''

  Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which the Senator from 
West Virginia carries in his breast pocket, says the Congress--not the 
President, not the Supreme Court--but the Congress shall regulate 
foreign trade.
  Mr. BYRD. Right.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. But here is how it is regulated. The President comes 
over and he gets this so-called fast track, which is fixed trade. So he 
gets a peanut butter deal, Durham wheat deal, orange juice deal, sugar 
deal, cucumber deal, beef deal, winter vegetable deal, frozen food 
deal, wine deal, and Honda auto parts deal.
  I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                  [From USA Today, November 18, 1993]

                 Wheeling, Dealing, To Assure a Victory

                           (By Steve Komarow)

       President Clinton couldn't get Rep. Clay Shaw's vote with a 
     highway overpass, water project or federal courthouse. Shaw's 
     demand was more personal: extradition from Mexico of the man 
     accused of raping a 4-year old girl.
       ``I am now confident that the Mexican authorities will do 
     everything in their power to see him brought to justice,'' 
     said Shaw, R-Fla., as he announced his vote for the North 
     American Free Trade Agreement.
       The California child, now 5, is the niece of Shaw's 
     secretary and ``just a beautiful little girl,'' he said. 
     Until NAFTA, it appeared unlikely her suspected attacker 
     would be tried.
       Mexico doesn't send its citizens to the United States for 
     trial, despite the existence of an extradition treaty between 
     the two countries.
       But not Mexican Attorney General Jorge Carpizo has 
     personally assured Shaw that they'll pursue Serapio Zuniga 
     Rios and, if he's captured, extradite him.
       Shaw's deal stood out among the flurry of bargains the 
     White House struck to secure passage of NAFTA. But at least 
     ``it had something to do with Mexico,'' unlike many, said 
     colleague Jim Bacchus, D-Fla.
       More often, they fell in the traditional category of favors 
     a president can bestow within limits of the budget.
       The White House offered everything from presidential 
     jogging dates to road projects during its final push.
       Opponents screamed foul.
       ``It's obscene, this horse-trading of votes,'' said Rep. 
     John Lewis, D-Ga., a ``no'' vote.
       ``We knew we couldn't compete. . . . We didn't have any 
     bridges to give away,'' said former representative Jim Jontz, 
     head of the anti-NAFTA Citizens Trade Campaign.
       But the administration said it was just using whatever 
     legitimate influence it had, at a time when it might do some 
     good.
       ``I think when we end up, there's no cost to the 
     Treasury,'' said Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen.
       A sheaf of last-minute side agreements was added, and 
     promises were made to help the wine, citrus, glass, sugar, 
     peanut and textile industries.
       Not only fence-sitters won concessions. The White House 
     also took care of allies.
       Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who helped Clinton organize GOP 
     supporters of NAFTA, had gone home last weekend to find the 
     Army Corps of Engineers was reneging on a deal to dredge an 
     inlet in his Long Island district.
       ``I was endorsing him . . . and getting screwed by the 
     administration,'' he said. ``It was a bureaucratic foul-up, 
     but it was putting me in a very awkward spot.''
       Not for long. King called the White House, explaining his 
     predicament. ``And yesterday they faxed us a signed copy of 
     the agreement,'' he said.
       Clinton's signature was all over Capitol Hill.
       ``I know that peanut growers are concerned about imports of 
     peanut butter and peanut paste as well as quality,'' the 
     president intoned in a typical letter to lawmakers with 
     goober-growers in their districts.
       Better to risk looking like a wheeler-dealer than to risk 
     losing the critical NAFTA vote. And what's so bad about a 
     little give-and-take?
       Said Lynn Martin, President Bush's Labor secretary, on 
     Larry King Live: ``If the president didn't make deals, they'd 
     be saying he doesn't understand Washington.''
       Quid pro quo: Who got what to win votes for the North 
     American Free Trade Agreement, President Clinton has made 
     side deals with members of Congress, promising benefits for 
     their districts--mainly protecting the prices farmers and 
     manufacturers get for their products. Some examples:
       Peanut Butter the Deal: U.S. peanut growers claim Canada, 
     with 25% of the U.S. market, evades trade barriers by 
     processing peanuts from China and Africa. Clinton will seek 
     limits on peanut butter and paste shipments to the USA if 
     Canada doesn't cut back within 60 days.
       Durum Wheat the Deal: U.S. producers of durum wheat, used 
     in spaghetti and macaroni, complain Canadian growers get 
     transportation subsidies. President Clinton promised talks 
     with Canada and, if talks fail, said he'd seek limits on 
     imports from Canada. Either way, the price would go up.
       Orange Juice the Deal: Clinton would impose pre-NAFTA 
     tariffs on frozen orange juice concentrate if Mexican 
     shipments rise, pushing prices below a five-year average for 
     five straight days. Also, he'll limit tariff reductions the 
     administration would accept in free-trade talks with other 
     countries.
       Sugar the Deal: Mexico agreed to tighten controls on sugar 
     and high fructose corn syrup exports to the USA. If the 
     ceiling is exceeded, Clinton could impose tariffs. Also, 
     Mexico pledged to prevent Mexican candymakers from using corn 
     syrup, which would have freed Mexican sugar production for 
     export.
       Cucumbers the Deal: Clinton would impose pre-NAFTA tariffs 
     if Mexican shipments rise, pushing prices down. Also, he'll 
     limit tariff reductions the administration would accept in 
     talks with other countries.
       Beef the Deal: New rules will keep Australian and New 
     Zealand beef from coming though Mexico by requiring shippers 
     to show where the animals were raised.
       Winter Vegetable the Deal: Clinton pledged to diligently 
     enforce NAFTA provisions that would allow reimposition of 
     tariffs to protect against sudden import surges from Mexico 
     of tomatoes, sweet corn and peppers.
       Frozen Food the Deal: Clinton agreed to push for ``country 
     of origin'' labeling on products like frozen broccoli. Unions 
     complains many plants in that category have moved to Mexico 
     in recent years to take advantage of Mexican vegetable 
     production and cheaper labor.
       Wine the Deal: Clinton would open negotiations to eliminate 
     Mexico's tariffs more quickly than the 10-year phaseout NAFTA 
     specifies. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor promised a new 
     arrangement by May 1994.
       Textiles, Clothing the Deal: Clinton promised to work 
     toward a 15-year, rather than 10-year, phaseout of American 
     textile quotas in global free-trade talks. Also, the Customs 
     Service will step up enforcement of trade quotas.
       Honda Auto Parts the Deal: The administration added a 
     provision that will relieve Honda of paying $17 million in 
     duties on auto parts shipped from Canada to its assembly 
     plant in Ohio since 1989.

  Mr. HOLLINGS. The point is the fix is in. Members get all kinds of 
favors for their votes. I remember my good friend Jake Pickle got help 
with a cultural center down in Texas. I remember in northern California 
there were two golf games with President Clinton. Then there were two 
C-17s given down in Texas where they were making them, and on and on. 
Members who vote for trade get all the favors. They have already fixed 
this vote, and that is why you see the empty Chamber. They have made up 
their minds.
  But the country is in trouble with a $412 billion fiscal deficit, and 
we heard the figure by the distinguished Senator from North Dakota. 
Last month there was a $41.5 billion trade deficit, so we are right at 
a $500 billion current account deficit, with the outcome being a 
weakening of the dollar.
  We now have high unemployment. We have a Secretary of the Treasury 
that says everything is fine. That is nonsense. They want more tax 
cuts. They

[[Page 15581]]

cut $1.7 trillion of the revenues and then wonder why at this time last 
year we were talking about a 10-year $5.6 trillion surplus and now we 
have a $412 billion deficit.
  They try to blame that on the war. I think we ought to look at this 
particular article about the Office of Management and Budget.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. Mitchell Daniels, on September 4, 2001--7 days before 
September 11--projected for fiscal year 2001 that our government would 
have the second largest surplus in history.
  I have looked at the figures. Overall, 9/11 cost the government, and 
I say this to the chairman of the Appropriations Committee $31 billion. 
Of that $4 billion was during fiscal year 2001, and $27 billion in this 
fiscal year. The war did not cause the supposed surplus to disappear.
  We have always paid for our wars, but this President comes along and 
says we have a war on so we are going to have to run deficits, and 
incidentally the war is never going to end.
  When we go home, Governors are struggling. Mayors are cutting back 
spending. They are having to layoff firemen and policemen. But in 
Washington, there is no tomorrow. We have a war on, so let's have some 
more tax cuts even with a $412 billion deficit.
  Wall Street talks about consumer confidence, but there is not 
confidence in the Government. On Wall Street, they know those long-term 
interest rates are bound to go up. The Government is going to crowd in 
with its sharp elbows, borrowing the money to keep it going, crowding 
out business finance, running up the long-term interest rates. That is 
what is happening to the stock market. It is not another tax cut, for 
heaven's sake, that we need. The President ought to come back and go to 
work and cut out his fund-raising, for goodness' sake.
  We have problems in this country. The biggest problem that is 
unmentioned, except by the Senator from Minnesota, the distinguished 
Senator from North Dakota, the Senator from West Virginia and others, 
is we are spending Social Security moneys.
  The Enron accounting did not start with Kenny Boy Lay. It started 
with us 20 years ago. Infectious greed? No, Madam President. Infectious 
fraud, fraud on the American people.
  I am not proud to say that, but the process has been corrupted.
  I ask unanimous consent that this article in the Financial Times from 
2 days ago be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered printed in the 
Record, as follows:

               [From the Financial Times, July 30, 2002]

                            Infectious Fraud

       How can Americans be confident in the stock market and the 
     country when everything seems to be one grand fraud? It seems 
     as if every day another blue-chip corporation is under 
     investigation. And somebody in Washington is cooking the 
     books, when last year the US had a 10-year $5,600bn surplus 
     and this year it has an estimated $412bn deficit.
       Enron bookkeeping started in Washington. In 1983, the 
     Greenspan commission restored the soundness of Social 
     Security with a graduated payroll tax, meant to take care of 
     the baby-boomers in this century. The commission's report 
     required surpluses from Social Security to be put in an off-
     budget trust fund to be used for future generations. Back 
     then Reaganomics, the policy of economic growth by cutting 
     taxes, led to spending Social Security and other trust funds 
     in order to say the deficit was decreasing, while it was in 
     fact increasing.
       President George H. W. Bush called Reaganomics ``Voodoo''. 
     Now President George W. Bush is giving us Voodoo II. This 
     Enron system of accounting hides the truth by juggling two 
     sets of books. It is like paying off one credit card with 
     another.
       The Bush administration continues this charade by dividing 
     the budget into public debt and government debt. Both debts 
     combined constitute the total national debt. But Mr. Bush 
     talks only about the public debt (the bonds and notes America 
     issues) while hiding the government debt (the Social Security 
     and other trust funds being raided). What Mr. Bush needs to 
     talk about is the total national debt.
       The budget committee tried to stop this charade in 1990 by 
     passing section 13301 of the Budget Act, forbidding the 
     president and the Congress from citing a budget that spends 
     Social Security. But, no matter, the president, the Congress 
     and the media--acting like Enron--violate section 13301 by 
     spending Social Security and other trust funds and 
     fraudulently reporting that they have not been spent.
       The financial markets see this fraud. They know the 
     government will need to borrow money, coming into the market 
     with its sharp elbows, crowding out business finance, 
     stultifying the economy and causing long-term interest rates 
     to go up. When Ronald Reagan came into office the interest 
     cost on the national debt was $95bn. By 2001 it was $359bn--
     so every day the government borrows nearly $1bn to service 
     the national debt. This is outrageous waste. But the bigger 
     outrage is the president, Congress and the media crying foul 
     at Enron while engaging in the same type of fraud.
       To expose this fraud, in 1989 a debt clock was erected near 
     Times Square in New York. It spins like a speedometer 
     reporting the combined public and government debt going up, 
     up and away. In 2000, when the debt started coming down, the 
     clock was turned off. But this month the government's office 
     of management and budget released numbers showing an alarming 
     amount of new red ink.
       On page one of the mid-session review, the deficit was for 
     this fiscal year ending September 30 will hit $165bn. Of 
     course, this is the ``Enron figure'' the government hopes 
     everyone will use, not the real number. On the last page of 
     the report readers can find that this year's true deficit is 
     $412bn, of which only $27bn is due to September 11. The debt 
     clock has been turned on again.
       The true story of today's economic downfall began with 
     candidate Bush in 2000. He stated that his first order of 
     business as president would be to cut taxes. In office, Mr. 
     Bush told the nation that not only was there enough money for 
     a tax cut; there would also be money left over to pay down 
     the debt, to protect Social Security and Medicare, and 
     $1,000bn for any special needs. The dam really broke in 
     January 2001 when Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal 
     Reserve, in a fit of irrational exuberance, cautioned that 
     surpluses were growing too fast and we were paying down too 
     much debt. With this blessing of tax cuts, Wall Street 
     started selling. And in less than four months, we went from a 
     $2bn surplus in June 2001, when the tax cut was passed, to a 
     $143bn deficit on September 30 last year. Less than $4bn of 
     this was because of September 11.
       In the 1990s, when we were paying down the debt with 
     spending cuts and tax increases, America had eight years of 
     the best economic growth in history. Mr. Bush's $1,700bn tax 
     cut has put the country into the ditch.
       The president says we should not worry about deficits while 
     there is a war on. There is no end to the war and he calls 
     for more tax cuts. This requires further government invasion 
     into the market, so the market stays on edge.
       The US should freeze next year's budget at this year's 
     levels, with the exception of defense and homeland security; 
     cancel the tax cuts; and start, once again, paying down the 
     debt. If Americans want to regain confidence in the stock 
     market and in the country they should know the problem is 
     infectious fraud, not infectious greed.

  Mr. HOLLINGS. Here's another headline from July 31, ``Automakers Get 
Even More Mileage From The Third World. Low Cost Plants Abroad Start To 
Supply Home Markets As Quality Picks Up Steam.'' And this one from the 
Los Angeles Times, ``High-paid Jobs Latest U.S. Export.'' That is what 
we are exporting. That is what the people ought to be reading.
  Understand that we are going out of business. Productivity is high, 
yes, of what we produce, but we are not producing anything. We are 
giving fast food to each other and going the way of England. At the end 
of World War II, they said, do not worry, instead of a nation of brawn, 
we will be a nation of brains. Instead of producing products, we will 
provide services. We have heard that ``service economy wag'' in this 
Chamber. Instead of creating finances, we will handle it and be the 
financial center. They have the haves and the have-nots, and a bunch of 
scandal sheets and debating Parliamentarians. We are going the way of 
England. We are going out of business and nobody wants to talk about it 
because we have the campaign; we have lunch coming along.
  I remind everybody what made this country great. It was in the 
earliest days--and this has to be included in the Record--under our 
Founding Fathers. The British said to our little fledgling colony, now 
that you have won your freedom, what you ought to do is trade back to 
the mother country what you produce best and the mother country will 
trade back what it produces best.
  We were saved by Alexander Hamilton, who helped write the papers, his 
report on manufacturers. It is too much, I believe, to put in the 
Record, but in a line, he told the British, ``bug

[[Page 15582]]

off.'' He said, we are not going to remain your colony, importing the 
finished goods and just exporting our timber, our coal, our iron, our 
ore, our farm products. We are going to become a strong economy, a 
nation state.
  The first bill was the seal of the United States of America, and the 
second bill on July 4, 1789, was a tariff bill, protectionism. These 
children run around on the floor hollering, ``protectionism, 
protectionism.'' They do not know how the country was built. They have 
no idea of history, no sense of accomplishment. We did not pass the 
income tax until 1913. We built this strong United States of America 
with protectionism, tariffs.
  Fast forward 100 years to Teddy Roosevelt, and Edmund Morris' book 
``Theodore Rex.'' We ought look at the turn of the century when old 
Teddy came in. The United States was already so rich in goods and 
services that she was more self-sustaining than any industrial power in 
history.
  We are not today by any manner or means. We do not have a strong 
economy by any manner or means. Tell the Secretary of the Treasury.

       Back then, we consumed only a fraction of what we produced. 
     The rest went overseas at prices other exporters found hard 
     to match. As Andrew Carnegie said, the ``Nation that makes 
     the cheapest steel has other nations as its feet.'' More than 
     half of the world's cotton, corn, copper, and oil, flowed 
     from the American cornucopia, and at least one-third of all 
     steel, iron, silver, and gold did, too. The excellence of her 
     manufactured products, guaranteed her dominance of world 
     markets. That was in the early 1900s.
       I went to New York recently on Amtrak's Acela. It is a 
     train made in Canada. When I arrived at the station, the dogs 
     that sniffed me were from Czechoslovakia. We are even 
     importing the dogs. We don't have anything Made In America 
     around here, other than a few politicians. I wish newspapers 
     and politicians could be produced overseas. If they were, we 
     could straighten this country out overnight, I can tell you 
     that right now.

  Senator Wellstone, before you would be able to open up Wellstone 
Manufacturing, you would have to have for your employees a minimum 
wage, clean air, clean water, Social Security, Medicare, plant closing 
notice, parental leave, safe working place, safe machinery--on and on 
and on. Then the plant next door says: Wait a minute. I can go down to 
Mexico and pay workers 58 cents an hour and have to do none of that. 
And they go. Unless you follow, you will go broke.
  The job policy in the Senate today is to export and get rid of jobs. 
I remember when Sam Ervin stood at that desk and we added $5 billion 
for highway construction in the 1970s to create jobs that were needed.
  Now, instead of creating jobs, we come in and have a welfare reform 
bill. They stand in the well and pride themselves, look, we have 
extended payments for unemployment; we are offering a little bit more 
for health care. They do not talk about creating jobs anymore. They 
present this as a welfare reform bill. I don't want welfare reform. I 
need to hold on to my job.
  What happens to the some 54,000 textile workers in South Carolina? 
Washington said: Go global. Be like Mao Tse-tung and reeducate them if 
they lose their jobs. In my state, the mills that made the T-shirts, 
they get closed down. They had 487 employees. The average age was 47 
years.
  The Senate said: Let's retrain them for high tech. And tomorrow 
morning we have 487 expert computer operators. Are you going to hire a 
47-year-old expert computer operator and take on their retirement costs 
and their health costs? Or are you going to hire a 21-year-old?
  We brought in BMW to South Carolina, but we still have empty towns 
back home. A couple years ago, we had 3.2 percent unemployment. Now 
it's over 6 percent. In some counties, it is over 10 percent 
unemployment, and we have lost 54,000 textile jobs alone. There you go.
  I regret the corruption and the fix. You talk about accounting 
corruptions, option corruptions; you talk about job corruptions. They 
could care less about the jobs. I can go right down, article after 
article, where the recovery will not reach.
  We have corrupted the financial and fiscal affairs of the Nation. We 
have corrupted the economic base all on the premise that we need fast 
track because trade issues are very complex; whereas, one more time, 
Senator, I don't believe you were here, but in my hand is the trade 
policy agenda of the President of the United States, issued by the U.S. 
Trade Representative. To negotiate five trade agreements the President 
had fast track authority: Tokyo, NAFTA, U.S.-Canada, U.S.-Israel, the 
Uruguay, or WTO. But the next dozen pages contain some 200 trade 
treaties and agreements that have been entered into without fast track. 
They can do it, but we are in the hands of the Philistines, unless we 
can get corporate America to pull in its hold.
  I do see a minor sign of hope. General Electric said they would start 
expensing their stock options. This is very different than the way GE's 
Jack Welch ran the place. I have the record here and his particular 
article I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                   [From Business Week, Dec. 6, 1999]

                       Welch's March to the South

                          (By Aaron Bernstein)

       One of General Electric Co. CEO John F. Welch's favorite 
     phrases is ``squeeze the lemon,'' or wring out costs to 
     maintain the company's stellar profits. In the past year, the 
     lemon-squeezing at GE has been as never before. In a new, 
     superaggressive round of cost-cutting, the company is now 
     demanding deep price cuts from its suppliers. To help them 
     meet the stiff goals, several of GE's business units--
     including aircraft engines, power systems, and industrial 
     systems--have been prodding suppliers to move to low-cost 
     Mexico, where the industrial giant already employs 30,000 
     people. GE even puts on ``supplier migration'' conferences to 
     help them make the leap.
       GE's hard-nosed new push could spark other companies to 
     emulate its tactics. The supplier crackdown is reminiscent of 
     a similar attempt by former General Motors Corp. parts czar 
     Jose Ignacio Lopez de Arriortua. His efforts largely failed 
     in the face of stiff supplier resistance. But if GE succeeds, 
     other companies could be inclined to try again. GE officials 
     at headquarters in Fairfield, Conn., say the business units 
     are simply carrying out Welch's larger campaign to globalize 
     all aspects of the company. Says Rick Kennedy, a spokesman at 
     GE Aircraft Engines (GEAE): ``We're aggressively asking for 
     double-digit price reductions from our suppliers. We have to 
     do this if we're going to be part of GE. ``GE's efforts to 
     get suppliers to move abroad come just as World Trade 
     Organization ministers start gathering in Seattle on Nov. 30. 
     That timing could help make the GE moves an issue at the 
     talks, where critics will be pointing to just such 
     strategies--and the resulting loss of U.S. jobs to low-wage 
     countries--as the inevitable fruit of unregulated trade. GE's 
     14 unions hope to make an example in Seattle of the company's 
     supplier policy, arguing that its paving the way for a new 
     wave of job shifts. They plan to send dozens of members to 
     march with a float attacking Welch. PALTRY WAR CHEST. The 
     campaign by GE's unions, which bargain jointly through the 
     Coordinated Bargaining Committee (CBC), is also the opening 
     salvo of bargaining talks over new labor contracts to replace 
     those expiring next June. Because GE's unions are weak--fully 
     half of their 47,000 members at the company belong to the 
     nearly bankrupt International Union of Electronic workers 
     (IUE)--they'll have a hard time mounting a credible strike 
     threat. Instead, the CBC is planning a public campaign to tar 
     Welch's image. They plan to focus on likely job losses at GE 
     suppliers. The unions also suspect that GE may move even more 
     unionized GE jobs to Mexico and other countries once it has 
     viable supplier bases in place. ``GE hasn't moved our jobs to 
     Mexico yet because our skilled jobs are higher up the food 
     chain,'' says Jeff Crosby, president of IUE Local 201 at GE's 
     Lynn (Mass.) jet-engine plant. ``But once they have suppliers 
     there, GE can set up shop, too.'' His members from parts 
     supplier Ametek Inc. picketed the plant on Nov. 19 to protest 
     GE's pressure on Ametek to move to Monterrey, Mexico.
       Although it has never openly criticized Welch before, the 
     AFL-CIO is jumping into the fray this time. Federation 
     officials have decided that Welch's widely admired status in 
     Corporate America has lent legitimacy to a model of business 
     success that they insist is built on job and wage cuts. 
     ``Welch is keeping his profit margins high by redistributing 
     value from workers to shareholders, which isn't what U.S. 
     companies should be doing,'' charges Ron Blackwell, the AFL-
     CIO's director of corporate affairs. Last year, the AFL-CIO 
     proposed a bold plan to spend some $25 million on a massive 
     new-member recruitment drive at GE, but the IUE wasn't 
     willing to take the risk. So the federation is backing the 
     new, less ambitious campaign that focuses on traditional 
     tactics like rallies and protests. STRONG TIDE. GE's U.S.

[[Page 15583]]

     workforce has been shrinking for more than a decade as Welch 
     has cut costs by shifting production and investment to lower-
     wage countries. Since 1986, the domestic workforce has 
     plunged by nearly 50%, to 163,000, while foreign employment 
     has nearly doubled, to 130,000 (chart, page 74). Some of this 
     came from businesses GE sold, but also from rapid expansion 
     in Mexico, India, and other Asian countries. Meanwhile, GE's 
     union workforce has shriveled by almost two-thirds since the 
     early 1980s, as work was relocated to cheaper, nonunion 
     plants in the U.S. and abroad.
       Welch's supplier squeeze may accelerate the trend. In his 
     annual pep talk to GE's top managers in Boca Raton, Fla., 
     last January, he again stressed the need to globalize 
     production to remain cost-competitive, as he had done in 
     prior years. But this time, he also insisted that GE prod 
     suppliers to follow suit. Several business units moved 
     quickly to do so, with GEAE among the most aggressive. This 
     year, GEAE has held what it calls ``supplier migration'' 
     conferences in Cincinnati, near the unit's Evendale (Ohio) 
     headquarters, and in Monterey, where an aerospace industrial 
     park is going up.
       At the meetings, GEAE officials told dozens of suppliers 
     that it wants to cut costs up to 14%, according to documents 
     about the Monterrey meeting at Paoli (Pa.)-based Ametek, 
     whose aerospace unit makes aircraft instruments. The internet 
     report, a copy of which Business Week obtained, says: ``GE 
     set the tone early and succinctly: `Migrate or be out of 
     business; not a matter of if, just when. This is not a 
     seminar just to provide information. We expect you to move 
     and move quickly.''' Says William Burke, Ametek's vice-
     president for investor relations: ``GE has made clear its 
     desire that its suppliers move to Mexico, and we are 
     evaluating that option. We have a long relationship with GE, 
     and we want to preserve it.''
       GEAE officials argue that heightened competition leaves 
     them no choice. Jet engines sell for less than they did four 
     years ago, says Kennedy, the unit's spokesman. Almost all 
     GEAE's profits have come from contracts to maintain engines 
     already sold. And that business is getting tougher, with 
     rivals such as United Technologies Corp.'s Pratt & Whitney 
     laying off thousands of workers to slash costs. ``This 
     company is going to make its net income targets, and to do 
     it, we will have to take difficult measures,'' says Kennedy.
       Still, even some suppliers don't see the Mexico push as 
     justified. They point out that GEAE's operating profit has 
     soared by 80% since 1994, to $1.7 billion on sales of $10.3 
     billion. GE, they argue, is leading the cost cuts. ``It's 
     hard to give away 5% or 10% to a company making so much money 
     when most of the suppliers are marginally profitable,'' says 
     Barry Bucher, the CEO and founder of Aerospace International 
     Materials, a $30 million distributor of specialty metals in 
     Cincinnati. Nonetheless, Bucher says he's looking into a 
     joint venture in Mexico in response to the demands from GE, 
     his top customer.
       The unions, for their part, worry that GEAE will follow in 
     the footsteps of GE's appliance unit. To remain competitive 
     in that low-skilled, low-margin industry, GE Appliances has 
     slashed its workforce nearly in half at its Appliance Part 
     facility in Louisville, to some 7,500 today. Much of the work 
     has been relocated to a joint venture in Mexico. Union 
     leaders have tried to stave off further job shifts by 
     offering concessions. In early November, the company agreed 
     to a $200 million investment in Louisville in exchange for 
     productivity improvements and lump-sum payments instead of 
     wage hikes for its members. ``We hope GE will see this as a 
     solution they can adopt in jet engines and elsewhere,'' says 
     IUE President Edward L. Fire.
       Labor's new campaign may embarrass Welch and even prompt GE 
     to tone down its demands on suppliers. But it won't rebuild 
     the union's clout at the bargaining table the way a serious 
     organizing drive might have done. Until that happens, Welch 
     probably has little to fear from his restive unions.

  Mr. HOLLINGS. Just two years ago Mr. Welch met with his suppliers and 
said to them: you will have to go overseas in order to make it. Unless 
you move to Mexico and cut your costs, you will not be a supplier of 
GE. Then he held seminars around the country for all the suppliers 
saying: Get out of the country, get out of the country, get out of the 
country.
  Now, unless these industrial leaders gain a conscience and quit 
telling all the suppliers they have to go to Mexico or China; and quit 
telling their board of directors they have to go to Bermuda to avoid 
taxes, we are going to be in serious trouble. They need to help us 
rebuild the industrial strength of the United States of America.
  But we are in a fix. The debate in the Senate is controlled. We 
already have cloture. People are ready to go home and pass over the 
responsibility.
  Senator Helms could not be here. But he and I wanted to get that 
printing, dyeing, and finishing provision in the Caribbean trade bill. 
They didn't want to do it. They had plenty of time to do it, but the 
Bush administration said: We can fix this and get the vote of the 
Congressman from Greenville--which they did. And he voted again for 
fast track. But now that we have the fast track he voted for, what we 
wanted for printing, dyeing, and finishing is out. It has gone to 
Andean countries.
  When I was Governor of South Carolina, we had a contest for the 
slogan of an insurance company, Capital Life. We said:

       Capital Life will surely pay, if the small print on the 
     back don't take it away. That was the winning slogan, and 
     that is what we have in Washington.

  They have won out. We have lost the blooming stuff. They fixed the 
jury here, and they are all getting fattened up in order to win the 
next election. But on how to win the economy and save this country--
there is no interest.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Madam President, before the Senator from South 
Carolina leaves, I want him to know that normally I ask unanimous 
consent to follow and normally I might have gone back to the office and 
done some other things. But there are a few Senators I like to come out 
on the floor and listen to. The Senator from South Carolina is one of 
them.
  He is the opposite of sterile and plastic and scripted and rehearsed. 
He is colorful, but, frankly, and more importantly, he is prophetic and 
he is right. In my years in the Senate, which is going on 12, there is 
not another Senator for whom I have greater respect. I mean that as 
sincerely as I can say it.
  Mr. HOLLINGS. I thank the distinguished Senator. He is overgenerous 
to me. But I am trying to follow you and our hero, Senator Humphrey.
  Mr. WELLSTONE. Madam President, building on the comments of the 
Senator from South Carolina, I really feel sorry for working people 
right now in our country. I just think they are getting pounded. I 
believe ordinary citizens are just getting pounded. For example, take 
Qwest workers in Minnesota. When Arthur Levitt was the Chair of the 
Securities and Exchange Commission several years ago, he tried to put 
into effect a rule that would have dealt with this conflict of interest 
situation. The Senator from South Carolina talked about this a few 
minutes ago. It would have prohibited the Arthur Andersens of the world 
from raking it in on these consulting contracts when they do an 
independent audit. He was stopped by too many Members of the House and 
Senate. But he did get a rule put into effect that they at least had to 
disclose their contracts.
  With Qwest, as it turns out, in the year 2001 and 2002, by first a 6-
to-1 ratio and then in 2002 a 8-to-1 ratio, Arthur Andersen was getting 
all kinds of money from these consulting contracts. I am not even sure 
what they did for all this money--6-to-1 to the actual money they got 
for the independent audit. So you know you don't bite the hand that 
feeds you. They didn't do an independent audit. And all of a sudden we 
find out Qwest was short quite a bit of money.
  Above and beyond that--I am just going to give this context--above 
and beyond that, the management of Qwest tells the workers and the 
investors--a lot of little people are investors--we have had this 
company audited. Our auditing company wants to be clear with you that 
we have had this independent audit that we can vouch for, so on and so 
forth. But it turns out at the same time the actual audit committee did 
not say that. They actually do not say that they can, with 100-percent 
assurance, say this is a completely independent audit.
  At the same time that this is being said, the CEOs are dumping some 
of their stock. And at the same time, too much of the workers' pension 
plan is invested in stock in the company, trying to be loyal workers, 
and they are locked in, and no one is helping them out. Now you have a 
lot of people out of work and, in addition, they have seen a lot of 
their pension plan eroded in value.
  That is the story of a lot of people in the country who are not part 
of lobbying coalitions in Washington, not big

[[Page 15584]]

investors, not heavy hitters, not well connected. I really feel sorry 
for working people. Frankly, I think this piece of legislation is yet 
another example of pounding a lot of regular people--regular people, 
ordinary citizens. I don't mean it in a pejorative sense, I mean it in 
a positive way.
  One good thing that came out of conference is that there are some 
additional health care benefits for some of our older steelworkers--
some of our retirees, some of our older steelworkers. That is good. But 
as I look at what happened in this conference committee, this bill is 
infinitely worse. This trade promotion authority bill is infinitely 
worse than when it left the Senate.
  There was the Dayton-Craig amendment. I am very proud of the Senator 
from Minnesota, Mark Dayton, for his work, so that any Senator would 
have been allowed to raise a point of order to any part of the trade 
agreement that would weaken U.S. trade remedy laws such as section 201, 
saying: Look, we are not going to give up our right to protect working 
people. If you have a trade agreement that basically undercuts our 
trade remedy laws, we are not just going to forfeit our responsibility 
to come out here on the floor and challenge that. We have to represent 
people back in our States.
  That passed in the Senate but was taken out of the conference report. 
I wonder why.
  Then my colleague, Senator Harkin from Iowa, who has such passion 
about the exploitation of children, working God knows how many hours a 
day for so little wages--he had language that would have prohibited the 
use of exploitative child labor among our trading partners. That was 
taken out of the conference report.
  I had an amendment that said our trading partners ought to respect 
human rights--would respect human rights. That was taken out of the 
conference report.
  I had another amendment that said: Let's do a real jobs impact 
analysis. Let's really find out what is going on. Sometimes ignorance 
is not random and people don't want to know what they don't want to 
know.
  Recently the Economic Policy Institute noted:

       NAFTA has contributed to rising income inequality, 
     suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened 
     collective bargaining powers and ability to organize unions 
     and reduced fringe benefits.

  We are talking about a net total of 3 million actual and potential 
jobs lost in the U.S. economy from 1994 to now. But the provision I had 
in the legislation was also taken out in conference.
  This administration is gung ho on commercial property rights. They 
want to make sure they are fully protected in our trade agreements. 
This administration is gung ho on all the big financial institutions 
and all the big multinational corporations. That is where they raise 
their money. A lot of the key positions in the administration come from 
this background. A lot of their task forces are disproportionately made 
up of such people--you name it. They are gung ho when it comes to the 
commercial property rights of multinationals and big financial 
institutions. But when it comes to labor, when it comes to 
environmental, when it comes to human rights, they are nowhere to be 
found. I think that is wrong. I think it is profoundly wrong. And I 
think it is tragic that so many Democrats are not out here on the floor 
fighting for these rights.
  I think the vast majority of people in Minnesota and the vast 
majority of people in the country would say we do not want to put walls 
up at our border. I get so angry at the charge: You are an 
isolationist. My father was born in Odessa, fled persecution in Russia, 
spoke 10 languages fluently. I grew up in a home that made me, by 
definition, an internationalist. My mother's family was from Ukraine. 
She was a cafeteria worker. I grew up in a family that emphasized that 
we live in a world and we ignore that world at our peril, and also 
emphasized being there for working people.
  That is not the question. The question is whether or not we have 
trade agreements that respect basic human rights, that lead with our 
values as Americans, and that focus on promoting democracy. If we, as a 
country, can't promote democracy and human rights, who are we? That 
really protects little children, and says it is wrong to have a 9-year-
old working 19 hours a day for 30 cents hour; that also says there 
should be environmental standards; there should be fair trade; do not 
put our workers in the position of when they try to organize or do 
organization and bargain collectively for better wages for their 
families, companies say, no, we are leaving, we are going to Mexico. 
When those workers try to organize, companies say no, we are going to 
leave and go to South Korea, or Indonesia. Then those companies say to 
those countries, if you should pass any legislation that would give 
workers the right to organize, or have environmental standards, or have 
child labor standards, we will not invest in your country.
  Where are the values that promote the good standard of living for 
families in our country and families in the developing countries as 
well?
  There was a Washington Post piece entitled ``Worked Till They Drop: 
Few Protections for China's New Laborers.'' The article is 
heartbreaking. It tells of the death of Li Chunmei. I quote:

       Coworkers said she had been on her feet for nearly 16 
     hours, running back and forth inside the Bainan Toy Factory, 
     carrying toy parts from machine to machine. When the quitting 
     bell finally rang shortly after midnight, her young face was 
     covered with sweat.
       This was the busy season, before Christmas, when orders 
     peaked from Japan and the United States for the factory's 
     stuffed animals. Long hours were mandatory, and at least two 
     months had passed since Li and the other workers had enjoyed 
     even a Sunday off.
       ``Lying on her bed that night, starting at the bunk above 
     her, the slight 19-year old complained she felt worn out, her 
     roommates recalled. Finally the lights went out. Her 
     roommates had already fallen asleep when Li started coughing 
     up blood. They found her in the bathroom a few hours later, 
     curled up on the floor, moaning softly in the dark, bleeding 
     from her nose and mouth. Someone called an ambulance, but she 
     died before she arrived.''
       The article goes on to say that what happened to Li ``is 
     described by family and friends and co-workers as an example 
     of what China's more daring newspapers call guolaosi. (GO-
     LAO-SI). The phrase means ``overwork death,'' and usually 
     applies to young workers who suddenly collapse and die after 
     working exceedingly long hours, day after day.

  Can't we with our trade policy lead with our values? Can't we promote 
human rights? Can't we protect children? Can't we promote protection of 
the environment? Can't we protect the rights of working people to 
organize and bargain collectively?
  I could read from the State Department report in country after 
country after country--in Colombia, there are so many examples of 
workers who have been murdered for trying to join a union; same sort of 
coercive practices that workers in Mexico have experienced for years. 
Certainly that is the case in China. And the list goes on and on.
  I believe that most Americans believe trade policy should be about 
promotion of human rights. Trade policy should be about respect for 
human rights. Trade policy should be about promoting a decent 
fundamentally good standard of living for Americans as well as our 
brothers and our sisters in other countries as well.
  What this piece of legislation says to me, as a Senator from the 
State of Minnesota, is that I have to forgo my constitutional rights to 
represent people in my State. When I see a trade agreement that 
overturns or overrides consumer protection in Minnesota, environmental 
protection in Minnesota, and workers' rights in Minnesota, I don't have 
the right to come out here and challenge that? I don't have the right 
to come out here with an amendment?
  I didn't vote to give fast-track authority to President Clinton, and 
I am certainly not going to vote to give fast-track authority to 
President Bush. I will say it on the line. I have seen what this 
administration has done with repetitive stress injury. I have seen the 
way in which they overturned an important rule to protect people. I 
have

[[Page 15585]]

seen what they have done when it comes to practically nothing by way of 
making safer workplaces for people. I have seen what they have done 
which amounts to practically nothing when it comes to mine safety 
issues. I have seen what they have done in trying to go after 
prevailing wages. I have seen what they have done in terms of one 
antilabor initiative after another. I have seen what they have done 
when it comes to a lack of commitment to people being able to organize 
and bargain collectively and labor law reform.
  Frankly, I wouldn't for anything in the world give away my right to 
represent Minnesota and to represent workers and to represent unions. I 
am a proud labor Senator. I am a proud Senator who represents working 
people. You want to know something else. The best thing is there are a 
lot of people in the business sector who feel the same way.
  I think exports are so critically important to our economy and very 
important to Minnesota. We do really well. I think imports are good 
because imports mean our companies have to compete. We should have that 
competition.
  The only thing I want to see is some rules that go with this new 
global economy. I want to see fair trade. I want to see a global 
economy that does more than just promote the interests of multinational 
corporations. I want to see a global economy that promotes the 
environment. I want to see a global economy that promotes human rights. 
I want to see a global economy that promotes democracy. I want to see a 
global economy that protects the interests of working families in 
Minnesota and all across the country.
  That is what I speak for. That is what I fight for. That is what I 
believe in. That is why I believe that this piece of legislation, which 
will pass overwhelmingly, is so profoundly wrong and so profoundly 
mistaken.
  I feel sorry for working families today. They are getting pounded. I 
think we should do a better job of representing them.
  I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Miller). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, earlier today a number of the minority held 
a press conference. I have not spoken to Senator Daschle, but I know 
what took place at that press conference. It was all directed toward 
Tom Daschle. I think it was so unfair what they did.
  They went to some printer and got a little thing printed up, and they 
passed this out to the press as a progress report on what has happened 
in the Senate.
  Of course, they selectively picked some things that are not totally 
completed at this time. But it is interesting how they did this. For 
example, they talked about judicial nominations. I talked to Senator 
Leahy yesterday. I think we have done 73, or something like that, 
judicial nominations--way ahead of what has ever been done before. We 
have a batch of them we are going to do today.
  They complained about the Defense appropriations conference, that it 
is incomplete. We just finished the bill yesterday, Mr. President, in 
record time. Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye did this in record 
time. The largest Defense bill in the history of the world, and we 
completed it yesterday in record time.
  Homeland security, we have worked out an arrangement that we are 
going to go to that immediately when we return. The minute we get back 
here there will be a debate on that and we will be on the bill on 
Wednesday, the second day we are back.
  Prescription drugs, they criticize Senator Daschle for not doing 
something on prescription drugs. I will tell you, that takes a lot of 
nerve, a lot of nerve, because we all know that there was, first, the 
Graham-Miller, and then we tried to do something less than that to try 
to develop a consensus here. I mean, we spent almost 3 weeks on that 
bill.
  So I guess the best offense, in their mind, is what you do when you 
are on the defensive--energy, complaining about that.
  The fact is, Mr. President, that in addition to this ``progress 
report'' that they made, a ``report card'' to the majority leader, one 
of the things we picked up, as they were hurrying out of there--because 
some, of course, are going to go away to the beach this summer, or at 
least part of the time--and we found--it just happened to fall out--a 
list of what they are going to be reading this summer.
  I don't know, I guess, in a rush to get out of here, someone from the 
minority side must have dropped their required reading assignment for 
this summer. But in the interest of making sure all are aware of these 
reading assignments, I would like to read a list of books the GOP 
leadership has assigned to its caucus.
  The first isn't a bestseller yet, but it possibly could be. It is 
called: ``Paying U.S. Taxes is for Suckers: A Guide to Offshore Banking 
in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.''
  Another book is: ``Grapes of Wrath 2002: How to Let Medicare Wither 
on the Vine.''
  Another book that I am fascinated with--I think I will take a look at 
it--is: ``See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil: Economic Leadership 
for the Enron Era.''
  A book: ``Master of the Senate Republicans: How Drug Company Cash 
Killed the Prescription Drug Benefit,'' or one that should be pretty 
exciting is: ``Drilling Our Way to a Cleaner Environment,'' or ``Sea 
Dick Run . . . From Haliburton Accounting,'' or ``The Art of Timely 
Self-Promotion by Harvey Pitt (includes a foreward on securing non 
military burial rights at Arlington Cemetery).''
  Another, Mr. President, is: ``How to Succeed in Business Without 
Really Earning: The Inside Story of [the] Harkin Energy [Company].''
  And then the final book they put on the list--I am not sure the order 
is appropriate--is called: ``Someone to Watch Over You: The John 
Ashcroft Story.''
  In all seriousness, Mr. President, everyone can play these games 
about what has not been accomplished, what has been accomplished. But 
we have really worked hard to try to come up with legislation, and we 
have done a lot. People have to understand how much we have been able 
to accomplish. The country, the people of Missouri, Georgia, Nevada, 
all over this country, should be proud of the work we have done.
  The rules in the Senate were not developed yesterday. They have been 
here for more than 200 years. I have to tell you, it is hard. I served 
in the House of Representatives. The Presiding Officer served in the 
State legislature in Georgia, was Governor of the State of Georgia. The 
rules are not the same.
  For example, Mr. President, the State of Nevada met on Monday, a 
special session of the Nevada State Legislature, called by the 
Governor. Why? Because we have, in the State of Nevada, a medical 
malpractice problem. And, you know, they handle it in the State of 
Nevada where it should be handled. And they did. They finished at 4:15 
this morning. They now have, for the Governor to sign as soon as he 
wakes up this morning, the bill. We have a new medical malpractice law 
in the State of Nevada. But they did it in 3\1/2\ days. Here that would 
take 3\1/2\ weeks. But that is the way it is.
  The U.S. Senate has these rules, but we have been able to do a lot. I 
repeat, our country can take pride in what we have done.
  Let me talk about a few things: Antiterrorism use of force 
resolution; immediate $40 billion response to terrorist attacks; 
defense/homeland security appropriations, significant ones; 
supplemental Defense appropriations; the United States Patriot Act; 
airport, border, and port security; terrorism insurance, which we 
passed out of here--it was tough; we finally got a conference report on 
that--support for the airline industry; economic stimulus, which 
included unemployment insurance.

[[Page 15586]]

  We passed a Patients' Bill of Rights; corporate and auditing 
accountability, the Sarbanes bill; greater access to affordable 
prescription drugs. We worked so hard on that, Mr. President. As the 
Presiding Officer knows, we did not get everything we wanted, but we 
passed something dealing with generic drugs, dealing with giving the 
States help that they need so badly with their medical problems. That 
is all in this bill we passed yesterday. In that bill was prescription 
drug reimportation to reduce costs. Fiscal relief to States is in 
there. I have just talked about that. The trade bill, some like that a 
lot. It is going to pass sometime today.
  We have had campaign finance reform; election reform, as I have 
mentioned, judicial confirmations; clean water and brownfields 
revitalization.
  This brownfields bill is so important. We learned that we could not 
completely revamp and renovate and change Superfund legislation, but we 
learned there are things we could do. There are brownfields sites, 
industrialized sites in our States that are not really in bad shape. 
Maybe they had a dry cleaning establishment there.
  Under the brownfields legislation, we can come in and take care of 
that. It is happening all over the country. In Nevada alone it is going 
to create thousands of new jobs, some of them at shopping centers where 
we had dry cleaning establishments and lenders stayed away. They didn't 
want the Superfund liability. We took care of that with this 
legislation.
  There was education reform; that certainly was done. We passed the 
energy bill; that is now in conference. I am a member of the 
conference, chaired by Mr. Tauzin of Louisiana. We finished all the 
secondary items this week. As soon as we get back, the first week, we 
will see if we can work our way through that. I believe we can.
  We passed a huge farm bill that was so difficult but so important, 
especially for various sectors of our country. Then we passed the 
Defense authorization. And we will pass, in just a little while, the 
largest appropriations bill in the history of the world.
  We have done a lot. I don't think we need to talk about Tom Daschle's 
report card. He has done a good job. He has been a magnificent leader.
  I wish we wouldn't do this. It is not good for the whole body 
politic. It does not help. Tom Daschle is somebody who is respected. 
Why? Because he is a quick learner. He is totally ethical. He works 
tireless hours. He tries to be fair to everybody. We don't need this 
kind of stuff. We don't need these readings lists.
  Anybody who comes out here and slaps around Tom Daschle, I will slap 
back. They can have the report cards. They can have all their progress 
reports they want. I will come back. I am not going to let these 
scurrilous attacks on a fine man go unanswered. If they don't want to 
hear about their reading list, then leave Tom Daschle alone. If there 
is something they don't like that is going on, do it right here. This 
is the place to do it, where we can have a good debate and go on to 
something else. I hope we can do that.
  These were not Democratic accomplishments alone, although I will take 
credit for what we have done. But we have been able to do them because 
you don't do anything here alone. We have passed these. We should be 
proud of this. It is good for the country. We don't need any more of 
this.
  Mrs. CARNAHAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business for up to 10 minutes for the purpose of introducing a 
bill.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The 
Senator from Missouri is recognized.
  Mrs. CARNAHAN. I ask unanimous consent that the time used be counted 
against my hour postcloture.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (The remarks of Mrs. Carnahan pertaining to the introduction of S. 
2842 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced 
Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mrs. CARNAHAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I see a Senator on the other side who is 
prepared to speak. Does he wish to speak immediately? What is his 
situation?
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I would like to speak on TPA at 
sometime during the debate for around 7 to 10 minutes. But the senior 
Senator from West Virginia was in the Chamber preceding me, so I will 
recognize his attendance here and his seniority.
  Mr. BYRD. I thank the Senator. He would need 7 minutes?
  Mr. BROWNBACK. That is approximately the amount of time I would 
speak.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, ordinarily I would suggest that the Senator 
take his 7 minutes now. My speech is probably going to be 45 minutes or 
longer, and I understand there is a vote scheduled for 2 o'clock; is 
that correct?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. At 2 o'clock, we will consider the Department 
of Defense appropriations bill.
  Mr. BYRD. There is not a vote at that point?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. That is correct.
  Mr. BYRD. Very well. Mr. President, I have the floor, do I not?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has the floor.
  Mr. BYRD. I have an hour under the cloture motion?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I yield to the distinguished Senator for 7 
minutes.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. I will try to do it in around 5 minutes.
  Mr. BYRD. I yield for no more than 7 minutes on his time, but I 
retain my right to the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kansas is recognized.
  Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I thank the Senator for his courtesy. I 
want to talk about trade promotion authority, and I appreciate very 
much the Senator's graciousness.
  I met yesterday with members of the administration at the U.S. Trade 
Representative's office in the Department of Commerce and the President 
of the United States. I stated to the President that I don't think 
there is another thing we could do in the near term for us to be able 
to grow this economy that would be more important than to pass trade 
promotion authority. I think it is that critical a piece of legislation 
for us to stimulate the economy. At this point in time, this is 
critical for us to do.
  We received economic figures today that showed anemic growth in the 
last quarter--1.1-percent economic growth. We need to do everything 
possible to stimulate this economy. Trade promotion authority is the 
lead piece of legislation that we can do to expand the trade 
opportunities for this Nation. I strongly believe that.
  I have worked in the trade field. In 1990 and 1991, I worked in the 
U.S. Trade Representative's office when we were beginning the 
negotiations for the NAFTA treaty--certainly a treaty that is not 
perfect, but one that has expanded trade opportunity and has grown the 
economy of the United States. The United States has an international 
economy. From that, I mean to say we have an economy that is based 
substantially upon trade. My State has an economy that is based 
substantially upon trade. My family is dependent substantially upon 
trade. We are in agriculture. We produce grains, cattle, and these are 
things in which we have a significant trade market.
  Trade promotion authority will allow the President to negotiate trade 
agreements and trade tariff agreements that will reduce tariffs. I 
think people need to recognize that a tariff is a tax. So this will be 
a tax reduction treaty. It will also open up trading opportunities for 
the United States and for our trading partners. One of the lead ways we 
can grow it is by doing this. What trade does when you lower tariffs, 
lower the barriers to trade, is it allows people to compete based upon 
the theory of comparative advantage and who can do the best and more.

[[Page 15587]]

  Fortunately for the United States, we have comparative advantages in 
main economic fields. So we are going to be able to compete more 
aggressively with more countries because there will be fewer barriers. 
The United States also has one of the lowest trade barriers. We have 
fewer barriers to trade in the United States than most nations.
  With this trade promotion authority, we are going to be able to 
negotiate trade-opening agreements with a number of countries around 
the world. It is going to reduce barriers in other nations more than in 
the United States for their incoming products. We are going to have 
more ability to go there, and that will expand because of the 
comparative advantages of the U.S. economy in producing goods and 
services--though not all goods and services. There are going to be 
problem areas that we will need to protect in our economy because of 
difficulties we have, or subsidies in other countries, or because of 
things they do trying to block our products. We may have to respond in 
kind at times.
  The administration is aware of that. They are seeking this authority. 
It is an authority that we need to grant to the administration. I think 
with it we are going to see substantial trading blocs expand for the 
benefit of the United States. We have a NAFTA trading bloc of Canada, 
the United States, and Mexico. I see that expanding. The administration 
is pushing to expand to Central America and South America, so we have 
an entire Western Hemisphere; North and South America will be in one 
open trading type of bloc.
  We are also being pursued by other countries to expand trade 
opportunities with them. These hold substantial opportunities for us to 
grow. But without trade promotion authority, the agreements will not 
happen.
  For those reasons, I am a strong proponent of trade promotion 
authority. I believe it is important for us to have. I think this is 
the right time and place for us to do it. This country needs to let 
this President have trade promotion authority so we can expand 
agreements. So I will be voting for TPA. I urge my colleagues to do so 
as well.
  With that, I thank the Senator from West Virginia for allowing me 
this time. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia is recognized.
  Mr. REID. Will the Senator yield for a unanimous consent request?
  Mr. BYRD. Yes, I yield.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I have spoken with the distinguished 
President pro tempore of the Senate, and he has indicated his remarks 
will probably take 50 minutes or thereabouts.
  Mr. BYRD. Yes.
  Mr. REID. I, therefore, ask unanimous consent that the defense matter 
which is now scheduled to begin at 2 o'clock, that time which is 
encompassed in the unanimous consent agreement, be delayed to begin at 
2:20 p.m. today rather than 2 o'clock.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. REID. So the President pro tempore can use his time postcloture 
and can come back later.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished majority whip. As 
always, he is most gracious, most considerate, and most courteous. He 
also wants to be helpful.
  Mr. REID. I thank the Senator.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Will the Senator yield for a unanimous consent?
  Mr. BYRD. I yield to the distinguished Senator for a unanimous 
consent request provided that my speech does not show an interruption 
and that I retain my right to the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BAUCUS. I ask unanimous consent I be able to speak for 7 minutes 
concluding the remarks of the distinguished Senator from West Virginia.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, in the dead of night, under cover of 
darkness, near the bewitching hour of midnight on July 25, 2002, House 
and Senate conferees reached agreement on a new trade bill. The White 
House embraces this new trade bill, not because it contains trade 
adjustment assistance--no, no, no--but because it provides the 
President with fast-track negotiating authority. The administration 
likes to refer to it as trade promotion authority--that is an old 
Vaudeville trick--trade promotion authority.
  This is fast-track negotiating authority that the President wants, 
but he does not call it fast track. He wants to call it ``trade 
promotion authority.'' That sounds good. That has a sweet ring to my 
ears--trade promotion. Who would not be for trade promotion? The 
President knows how to frame these terms in ways one may be lulled to 
sleep--trade promotion authority--but it provides the President with 
fast-track negotiating authority, fast track.
  As we all know, the real effect of fast track is not to promote 
trade--no, no, no--not to promote trade but to prevent amendments to 
trade agreements. That is why we have fast track.
  This Constitution, which I hold in my hand, gives to the Congress the 
power to regulate trade and commerce with foreign nations. This 
Constitution is my authority, not fast track. This is my authority.
  This bill we are talking about here and about to vote on and upon 
which cloture was invoked earlier today is a fast-track bill. It is not 
really about creating jobs or helping workers. It is about weakening 
our trade laws, making it easier for multinational corporations to move 
offshore where they can pay slave wages and where they do not have to 
pay health insurance and where they do not have to pay retirement 
benefits. That is what this bill does. That is why the Chambers of 
Commerce around the country favor it.
  Just in my home State of West Virginia, we have lost thousands--
thousands--of jobs, good jobs that supported families and breadwinners 
who worked hard for their money, very hard, indeed.
  When I was first elected to Congress 50 years ago--elected 51 years 
ago--we had glass factories in West Virginia; we had pottery plants in 
West Virginia; we had leather goods; we made shoes; we produced steel. 
We employed many West Virginians in the steel industry. That was 56 
years ago when I first got into politics, and then 50 years ago when I 
first came to Congress. We had those thousands of good jobs in West 
Virginia.
  Those jobs supported families and breadwinners who worked hard for 
their money, I say. They labored in the coal mines. They labored in the 
steel mills. They labored in the glass plants. They labored in the 
chemical manufacturing works. They worked in the leather goods 
industries in West Virginia. They were employed in the textile and 
apparel industries in West Virginia. These hard-working families 
deserve a fair slice of the pie.
  These and other American workers elected the various Members of this 
body to look after their interests in national trade matters. Senator 
Randolph and I, when we came to this Chamber, did just that; but other 
States elected their Senators, too, to give them, the American workers, 
a fair shake when the trade deals were being made. I have to say that 
Senators cannot fulfill this obligation by handing Presidents fast-
track authority.
  The President proclaimed victory in obtaining his trade bill, but it 
is a hollow victory. It is a Pyrrhic victory. Remember Pyrrhus, who 
fought the Romans, who was the first to bring elephants to Rome and to 
the Italian peninsula to fight the war? That was in 280 B.C. He won a 
victory but a very costly one, and that has been called a Pyrrhic 
victory.
  So the President won a Pyrrhic victory for America.
  The President threatened to veto the bill unless the conferees 
dropped the Dayton-Craig amendment. So what did they do? They folded. 
They dropped it because the President waved his veto pen.
  Why should that make one falter or faint or fall? The Constitution 
gives the President that right. The Constitution says he can veto a 
bill. But why shake and tremble in one's boots because the President 
threatens to use

[[Page 15588]]

his veto pen? Let him veto it. Go to it. Explain to the American 
people, Mr. President, your veto of this protection that was written 
into this bill. Explain to them. Yes, go ahead and veto it.
  He has a constitutional right to do that. Of course, the House and 
the Senate under the Constitution have the right to override his veto, 
but they will not on this bill.
  In these 50 years that I have been in the Congress, the House and the 
Senate, every administration, Democratic and Republican, has sung the 
same old song. It is the State Department song. Administration after 
administration, Democratic and Republican, have sung the same old song: 
Give us free trade agreements.
  Well, I voted against about every one that I can think of that came 
before this Senate, NICPAC--no, not NICPAC, but you name it, I voted 
against these so-called free trade agreements.
  I am for free trade. We are for free trade. Who would not be for free 
trade? But as some say, there is a great deal of difference between 
free trade and fair trade. They are two different terms.
  So the conferees dropped it. They dropped the Dayton-Craig amendment. 
They trembled when they heard the President say he would veto it. What 
happened? They dropped that language. The President struck fear, I 
suppose, into their weak hearts by saying, ``I will veto that bill. If 
it comes with that language in it, I will veto it.''
  I say, go to it, Mr. President. You just go ahead and veto it. I dare 
you to veto it and then go and tell the American people. Let's both go. 
Let's have a debate on this. Let the American people know.
  So they scrapped the only meaningful part of the bill that allowed 
the Congress to stop the President from weakening our trade law. They 
scrapped the Dayton-Craig amendment, the only meaningful part of the 
bill that allowed the Congress to stop the President from weakening our 
trade laws in the next round of trade negotiations. Dayton-Craig would 
have allowed the Congress to exercise its constitutional right to amend 
and strengthen whatever agreement the President brings back to us. 
Without Dayton-Craig, we are at the mercy of our negotiators in Geneva, 
the same old place where nearly every week some WTO panel tells the 
United States that it has no right to enforce its own laws.
  The Dayton-Craig amendment was a bipartisan amendment that I 
cosponsored along with a third of the Senate. Although the amendment 
was supported by an overwhelming majority of the Senate--62 Members of 
the Senate from both sides of the aisle now--in conference it was 
blithely cast aside as a bag of dirty laundry in the face of the veto 
threat by the President. Like a bag of dirty laundry, whiff, out went 
the Dayton-Craig amendment.
  The President said he was afraid it might offend certain members of 
the WTO.
  Well, Mr. President, I must ask this question--ungrammatically I will 
put the question: Who is the President working for, the WTO or the 
United States?
  As I have often said, I was sent to the Congress not by the President 
of the United States. I have worked with 11 Presidents since I have 
been in Congress. Not one of them sent me to the House or to the 
Senate. I was not sent by any electoral college either. As I have often 
said, I was sent by the people, we the people of West Virginia. I 
listen to them. I was not sent by the President, and I was not sent by 
the WTO--nor was that Senator, nor that Senator, nor that Senator, nor 
that Senator. The last time I checked, neither the President nor I was 
elected by the WTO but by the American people.
  Not surprisingly, the very day after the trade conferees' deal was 
announced, the Director General of the WTO commended President Bush. 
Imagine that. The very day after the trade conferees' deal was 
announced, the Director General of the WTO commended President Bush. 
The WTO Director General congratulated the President of the United 
States for having obtained a trade bill that wrests from the Congress 
its right to strengthen and protect American trade laws under article 
I, section 8, of this U.S. Constitution which I hold in my hand.
  Again I ask: For whom is the President working? I will say it 
ungrammatically: Who is the President working for, the WTO or the 
people of the United States? Who is he working for, the President, the 
WTO, or the people of the United States?
  Of course, the Director General of the WTO is pleased with the 
President's trade bill. If I were pleased with it, I would congratulate 
him, too. The WTO is pleased with it. The President is now free to 
negotiate trade deals more favorable to other WTO members than to the 
citizens of West Virginia and the citizens of the United States. That 
is this trade bill I am talking about.
  I have seen how the employment figures in West Virginia have gone 
down over these years that I have been in Congress, and we have voted 
one time after another to take the Congress out of the equation, give 
Presidents free trade agreements. They can negotiate trade agreements 
without this bill we are going to vote on. They can. They don't need 
this to negotiate trade agreements. They call it promotion trade 
authority. What is that--PTA? Forget it. That is not promotion trade 
authority. That sounds good, count me in, if we promote trade.
  But this is fast track, nothing short of it. This is the old hat 
trick. Don't watch what is going on in this hand; watch what is going 
on over here. Everything really is happening over here. This is the old 
hat trick.
  So the WTO Director General ``congratulated'' the President for 
having obtained a trade bill that wrests from the Congress what 
Congress is entitled to under that Constitution--the right to debate 
and particularly the right to amend.
  These are the very same countries whose representatives, sitting on 
WTO dispute settlement panels, have ruled against the United States in 
nearly each and every U.S. antidumping, countervailing duty, and 
safeguards case taken to the WTO since the last round of international 
trade negotiations.
  So now, inexplicably, our President wants to enter into a new round 
of international trade negotiations. Why? To further undermine the 
ability of the United States to enforce its own laws against unfair 
trade. Despite congressional advice to the contrary, this 
administration honored the requests of foreign governments to 
renegotiate our trade laws, knowing full well that these are the same 
governments that are gutting these laws in Geneva.
  So again I ask, Who does the President work for, the WTO or the 
people of the United States? Why would our President want to do this? 
Let's step back a minute and look at this objectively. What exactly is 
the point of giving the President this authority to negotiate new trade 
agreements? Whom are we kidding? The goal of foreign governments in 
these negotiations is not to strengthen U.S. trade laws but to weaken 
them. And they have said as much. They begged us to put our laws on the 
negotiating table so they could water them down or kill them.
  Does anyone really believe that negotiating new trade agreements at 
the explicit request of the very nations that are committed to 
destroying our trade laws would somehow result in a better deal for the 
United States than if we had simply walked away?
  The foreign governments whose representatives sit on these WTO panels 
are launching a two-pronged attack on the United States. First, they 
seek to undermine our trade laws by having the President renegotiate 
them, meaning weaken them, in the new trade round. At the same time, 
whenever the United States applies an antidumping or countervailing 
duty order or a remedy under section 201 as we did recently in the 
steel case, our foreign competitors simply take us to the WTO where 
they continue to chip, chip, chip away at the laws passed by Congress 
precisely to stop their illegal actions.
  We already know, based on bitter experience, that regardless of what 
is negotiated in Geneva, future WTO panels will continue to find U.S. 
law inconsistent with the new international

[[Page 15589]]

agreement. These WTO panels are not ruling against the United States 
based on their understanding of international law. They are not seeking 
to uphold a greater good. These panels are ruling against the United 
States to eviscerate--eviscerate, disembowel--our trade laws so they 
can gain unfettered access to our markets--aha, the largest and most 
lucrative markets on Earth. And inconceivably this administration wants 
to help them do it.
  Even the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Baucus, 
agrees that the WTO panel's interim ruling against the Continued 
Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act, known to some as the Byrd amendment, 
was yet another example of how WTO panels are trying to undermine our 
trade remedies by telling us that we cannot enforce our own laws. These 
WTO panels are not seeking simply to prevent us from enforcing our own 
laws. No, they are going far beyond that. They are basically making new 
laws. That is what they are doing. They are basically making new laws 
by exceeding the scope of legal review that is permitted under the WTO 
agreements. Standard of review of the relevant WTO agreements is based 
on language that was painstakingly negotiated by all WTO members during 
the Uruguay round.
  In those negotiations, WTO members agreed that in a dumping case, a 
panel is not permitted to substitute its own judgment for a member's 
government so long as, one, there is more than one permissible 
interpretation of a WTO agreement; and, two, the interpretation by the 
member government is a permissible one.
  The problem is, according to the WTO, there is only one permissible 
interpretation to these agreements. That permissible interpretation, it 
turns out, is never the interpretation of the United States. Instead, 
it is always the interpretation of the WTO panel. Rigged? We are beaten 
before we go in. We are out of the game before we enter. Instead, it is 
always the interpretation of the WTO panel.
  During the Uruguay round, all WTO members agreed that there could be 
more than one permissible interpretation of a WTO agreement, but 
current WTO panelists dismiss that.
  So if WTO panels do not respect their own agreements today, why does 
President Bush think they will abide by the agreements he negotiates 
tomorrow? Why should they? They know if down the line they refuse to 
play by the rules, this President will simply suggest another round of 
trade negotiations and those negotiations in the end will benefit whom. 
Them. Not us.
  The President is again getting started on these lengthy negotiations 
right away. Why? Who does he work for, the WTO or the American people 
out there who are watching through those lenses? He thinks he can 
appease our trading partners. In effect, this administration is trying 
to ``buy off'' our foreign competitors. It is more worried about them 
than it is about America. The administration is like Willy Loman in 
``Death of a Salesman.'' He wants everybody to like us--everybody.
  I have a new little dog. It is a Tibetan terrier. Its ancestors were 
born and bred in Tibet. They were to be used in the palace because they 
were so loving. They loved everybody. My new little dog is called 
Trouble. My wife named our little dog Trouble.
  No dog will ever take the place of Billy, but Billy is gone. Billy 
has gone on to Billy's heaven, and so has Bonnie, his sister.
  Now we have a new dog--a new dog, a little dog. It is a lap dog, a 
real lap dog. That is why these dogs were bred. And they are loving. 
They are small. They were born and bred for the palace in Tibet--China. 
So the little dog loves everybody. I can pick up that little dog, and 
it will lick me, and it will lick me, and it will wash my face, and it 
will kiss me. It loves everybody.
  Well, that is the way it is here. That is the way it is here. The 
administration is like Willy Loman in ``Death of a Salesman.'' It wants 
everybody to love us.
  Maybe the President has a special nickname for each of our foreign 
competitors, as he does for our adversaries in the press corps. How 
about that? The President has a nickname for adversaries in the press 
corps--the fourth estate that sits up there in those galleries and 
watches, watches, and listens every hour and every minute that we are 
here.
  So he has a special nickname for each of our foreign competitors--
maybe--as he does for his adversaries in the press corps. But his 
desire to have the United States be loved by everyone could result in 
our trading partners' loving us to death. His ongoing attempts to buy 
friendship abroad are sowing the seeds of destruction here at home.
  For example, the Bush administration continues to compulsively exempt 
foreign imports from the 201 remedy on steel because it is concerned 
that the remedy is ``upsetting'' our foreign competitors. Rather than 
adhering to the letter of the 201 law, in the face of foreign critics, 
the administration every few weeks bows and scrapes, hems and haws, 
and, lo and behold, issues a new list of products suddenly exempted 
from the 201. These exclusions amount to thousands of tons of imported 
foreign steel. Is it any wonder that, despite the 201 tariffs, there 
was a 37 percent increase in steel imports in June compared to May of 
this year?
  And here is another question. Is the President's strategy of 
appeasing our offended trading partners paying off? Apparently not. As 
of July 12, the President had excluded 247 products from the 201 
remedy, which amounted to 740,000 tons of foreign, unfairly-traded 
steel. However, after reviewing the exclusions that were announced by 
the administration on July 11, a spokesman for the European Commission 
said those exclusions were ``not enough.'' The EC said the United 
States would have to provide more exclusions or the EC would retaliate. 
So, glory be, what a surprise, on July 19, 2002, the President issued a 
new list of additional exclusions, including, of course, more 
exclusions of European steel. If that wasn't enough, the administration 
went on to announce that it would continue to grant exclusions on a 
``rolling'' basis--which apparently means whenever we are threatened 
with retaliation--through the end of August. Not surprisingly, the EC 
suddenly announced it had decided to postpone its decision on whether 
to retaliate until the end of September. Coincidence? I think not. 
Listen to what the EC told us. The Danish Foreign Minister, speaking 
for the EC, candidly stated, ``We decided that if we sanctioned the 
United States now, it might prove more difficult for the U.S. to add 
additional exclusions.'' But notice he did not say that the EC would 
not retaliate at the end of September, even if the President gives the 
EC all of the exclusions it asks for. Will we be able to buy off the EC 
by continuing to grant these exclusions? Not based on recent history. 
Listen to this.
  On Monday, the WTO Dispute Settlement Body announced it was adding 
Brazil to the list of seven other WTO members that have requested a WTO 
panel in Geneva to contest our steel 201 remedy. If someone were to 
ask, ``Well, why didn't the President just exclude Brazilian products 
from the 201, as he has so many others?'' they might be surprised to 
learn that, in fact, Brazil was one of the first nations to be granted 
a 201 exclusion, and it was a whopper. You know about those fish we 
catch--``And it was a whopper.'' Obviously, it is not only futile but 
ridiculous for the United States to keep caving in to the demands of 
foreign critics. Why are we allowing ourselves to be cuckolded by 
foreign suitors we know are insincere? We cannot appease them by giving 
them further exclusions. They will have their cake and eat it, too--
won't they?
  Professor John Jackson of the University of Michigan is considered to 
be one of the most knowledgeable experts on GATT and the WTO in the 
whole wide world. Listen to what Professor Jackson wrote about the 
origins of the GATT in 1969. He wrote that it was an invention created 
by men, that was perhaps the least handsome of all the major 
international institutions of our time. He said the GATT began as only 
one wheel of a larger machine, the ill-fated International Trade 
Organization. And, he said, when the ILO fell

[[Page 15590]]

apart, this wheel--the GATT--became a unicycle on which the burdens of 
the larger machine were heaped. He said of the GATT:

       This unicycle, for reasons not fully understood, has 
     continued to roll through two decades since it was put 
     together. To be sure, it takes careful balance to keep it 
     rolling and ad hoc repairs and tinkering have brought it to a 
     point where the bailing wire and scrap metal which hold it 
     together form an almost incomprehensible maze.

  Professor Jackson made this observation in 1969. Add to this maze 
another thirty-three years of bailing wire, scrap metal, and ad hoc 
repairs and what do you get? The World Trade Organization. The WTO. An 
incomprehensible maze that is still rolling along, but rolling so hard 
and fast now, it's careening out of control.
  And the greatest irony of all of this, Mr. President, is that it all 
began at the behest of the United States. In the early 30's, at the 
request of Senator Roosevelt's Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, the 
United States enacted the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934. 
Between 1934 and 1945, the President negotiated and entered into 32 
trade agreements. Most, if not all of the clauses in the GATT, can be 
traced to one or another of the clauses that were contained in those 
early trade agreements. So the United States was there at the inception 
of the GATT, and it continues to nurture what is now the WTO. And, I am 
sorry to report that we in the United States are still the greatest 
financial contributor to the WTO, paying approximately 16 percent of 
its total budget for the luxury of being told our laws are meaningless, 
and we don't know how to interpret WTO agreements that are rooted in 
American law.
  I submit we are being hoisted on our own petard, and that, rather 
than protecting us, the Bush administration is simply helping to 
sharpen the blade.
  I yield the floor. I reserve the remainder of my time, if I have 
anything.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who yields time?
  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, today we stand on the precipice of passing 
a monumental expansion of trade adjustment assistance and overdue fast 
track trade negotiating authority for our country.
  Before the debate closes, I wanted to explain how important this 
legislation is to my home State of Montana. Montana exports nearly a 
half billion dollars in products a year. We only have 900,000 people in 
our State. This includes $260 million in agricultural commodities, $100 
million in industrial machinery, $24 million in chemical products, and 
$37 million in wood and paper products.
  We export more than $300 million to Canada, $34 million to Mexico and 
have significant trade with China, Japan, Germany and the United 
Kingdom. In fact, just last week, Ambassador Moreno from Colombia 
visited Great Falls, Montana and announced a major wheat and barley 
purchase, with more trade opportunities to follow.
  And that is just the beginning--if we are willing to engage the 
world. This bill helps us do that by allowing the President to 
negotiate new agreements to open foreign markets which is so necessary 
to the United States, and brings down trade barriers which is so 
important to this country.
  I would like to read a letter I received from the Montana Grain 
Growers, Montana Stockgrowers, Montana Farm Bureau and Montana Chamber 
of Commerce that addresses this very point. To quote:

       We are aware that trade is not always free or fair, but we 
     believe this legislation is vital in putting the United 
     States on a similar playing field with agreements that are 
     negotiated around the world. While we understand that trade 
     promotion authority will not fully address inequities with 
     existing trade agreements, we feel strongly that this is an 
     important way of establishing long-term agreements that will 
     help return profitability back to the producer level.

  I could not agree more. We need to take a seat at the negotiating 
table and level the playing field for our producers. It is not level 
today.
  This means taking aim at the Canadian wheat board and finally 
dismantling its market distorting monopoly.
  This means reducing foreign agricultural tariffs to levels that are 
the same as or lower than those in the United States. These are the 
same tariffs that block Montana beef exports to Korea and Japan.
  This means eliminating all export subsidies on agricultural 
commodities while maintaining bona fide food aid and export credit 
programs that allow the U.S. to compete with other foreign export 
promotion efforts.
  As you well know, Mr. President, the European Union maintains the 
lion's share of these agricultural export subsidies. You know this 
figure. It is 60 times more than the U.S. agricultural export 
subsidies--not 6, 60 times more than the United States. How can we as 
Americans ever expect to compete in the world if we are undersold time 
and time again by foreign-backed competitors? We can't. We need a trade 
agreement so we can begin to level that playing field and begin to 
eliminate those trade-distorting subsidies that are 60 times greater in 
one area than those of the United States.
  This means preventing unjustified sanitary or phytosanitary 
restrictions not based on sound science. For three decades we fought to 
pry open the Chinese market to Pacific Northwest wheat. Now we are 
struggling with markets in Chile and Russia that place arbitrary 
sanitary barriers on U.S. exports of beef, pork and poultry. This must 
end, to say nothing about the EU restriction on American beef.
  They will not take American beef. I remember meeting with Mrs. 
Margaret Thatcher. She admitted to me that it was a phony excuse. She 
said that to me personally.
  And, most importantly, this means promoting trade while 
simultaneously maintaining a strong agricultural policy that preserves 
our family farms and rural communities.
  Agriculture is not the only industry dependent on trade, however. We 
must continue to work to guarantee that small businesses have access to 
foreign markets.
  It is open foreign markets that create new opportunities for a 
Bozeman, MT company that ships trailers for mining equipment to Latin 
America; that allow a Missoula company to expand its nutraceutical 
trade; it is open foreign markets that allow our nurseries to send 
seeds and seedling trees to developing nations rather than fighting 
phony sanitary barriers.
  The potential for preserving good jobs--and even creating new jobs--
doesn't stop there.
  But there is a potential downside to trade that is also addressed by 
this bill. In this package we target assistance for workers who are 
struggling because of trade assistance for workers who are struggling 
because of trade by expanding the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program.
  Many Montana workers are now back at work and many firms are still in 
business thanks to TAA. Take for example, Montola Growers which is 
researching new markets for its safflower oil, Thirteen Mile Lamb and 
Wool Company which is designing new garments for manufacture by 
contract knitters, and Pyramid Lumber, which is improving its milling 
efficiency.
  Expanded trade adjustment assistance will help Montana workers by 
streamlining the process and expanding the net of eligibility. More 
will be eligible. In addition, a new program will provide up to $10,000 
in cash assistance to Montana farmers and ranchers injured by imports. 
This should be a good incentive to keep Montana farmers and ranchers, 
their families, and future generations on the land.
  Good jobs will be created in Montana if we are willing to give our 
negotiators the strong hand needed to secure sound trade agreements, 
open those markets, and knock down those barriers. I hope my colleagues 
will feel the same about their own constituencies and lend their 
support to this very important matter.

[[Page 15591]]

  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of the 
letter I quoted be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the letter was ordered to be printed in the 
Record, as follows:
                                                    July 31, 2002.
     Hon. Max Baucus,
     U.S. Senate, Washington, DC.
     RE: Unified Support for TPA Passage
       Dear Senator Baucus: On behalf of the Montana Farm Bureau 
     Federation. The Montana Stockgrowers Association, the Montana 
     Grain Growers Association and the Montana Chamber of Commerce 
     we would like to reconfirm our support of Trade Promotion 
     Authority (TPA). We ask for your support as well when the 
     bill comes to the floor of the Senate later this week.
       As you know, this bill has already overcome many hurdles, 
     including passage in both the House and Senate. Just last 
     week, the House approved the conference report. Passage in 
     the Senate is the last hurdle before it goes to the President 
     for signature.
       We are aware that trade is not always free or fair. But we 
     believe this legislation is vital in putting the United 
     States on a similar playing field with agreements that are 
     negotiated around the world. While we understand that trade 
     promotion authority will not fully address inequities with 
     existing trade agreements, we feel strongly that this is an 
     important way of establishing long term agreements that will 
     help return profitability back to the producer level.
       It should be noted that Montana sold over half a billion 
     dollars worth of exports last year to 100 foreign markets. 
     Agriculture accounted for half of that value. We must find a 
     way to put more money in the pockets of our farmers and 
     ranchers or they will not be able to stay in business. The 
     vast majority of ag producers recognize that increasing 
     exports increases their bottom line.
       Thank you for your continued strong support of Montana 
     agricultural producers.
           Sincerely.
     Jake Cummins,
       Executive Vice President, Montana Farm Bureau Federation.
     Steve Pilcher,
       Executive Vice President, Montana Stockgrowers Association.
     Webb Brown,
       President, Montana Chamber of Commerce.
     Richard Owen,
       Executive Vice President, Montana Grain Growers 
     Association.
  Mr. BAUCUS. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

                          ____________________