[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 18]
[Senate]
[Pages 24179-24183]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             ENERGY PRICES

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today in The Washington Post, the question 
in the business section is: How Big Is $9.9 Billion?
  That happens to be the single quarter profit for ExxonMobil Oil 
Company. Pretty fortunate for this company to have a $9.9 billion 
quarterly profit. That profit comes from people who are driving up to 
the gas pump, putting gasoline in their car; from people who are going 
to be heating their homes with home heating fuel, natural gas, and 
propane this winter.
  So we have this spectacle of one industry with record profits, the 
highest in the history of the world. This is the largest profit of any 
corporation ever. The gain is here and the pain is elsewhere.
  What does all of this mean? Well, I come from a State that is 10 
times the size of Massachusetts in land mass. We have 642,000 people 
spread out in 10 Massachusettses. We are a Northern State, so it gets 
cold from time to time in the winter. We use home heating fuel and 
natural gas to heat our homes. Heating our homes is not a luxury; it is 
a necessity.
  When we drive, we drive a fairly long ways. In fact, there is only 
one other State in which the per capita use of gasoline is higher than 
the State of North Dakota. It is Wyoming. We are fourth among all the 
States in all energy consumption, second in gasoline per capita.
  I am told in New York City that if someone decides to take a vacation 
to go see some distant relative in Bayonne, NJ, 50 miles away, they 
plan it for some months. They put an emergency kit in their trunk. They 
put blankets in their car. They probably get their car serviced. They 
get the gasoline all topped off. They get all ready to go 50 miles to 
New Jersey to see their relatives. Why is it such a big deal? Because 
they do not travel very much, that is why. In our part of the country, 
we travel a lot. We drive a lot. It is not unusual to drive 100 or 200 
miles to get a part for a combine or a tractor and then drive another 
100 or 200 miles back. That is not a big deal.
  In terms of pain, the pain in States such as North Dakota and, yes, 
Wyoming and other States in our area of the country is very significant 
related to these prices. This is not a pain that is spread evenly.
  We have the highest amounts in history in the corporate treasuries of 
the oil companies, and then we have a huge pain for American consumers 
who are paying at the gas pump and are going to pay for home heating 
fuel.
  I would like to put up a couple of charts to show what is happening: 
oil company profits. Let me make a point. I come from a State that 
produces oil. I do not wish the oil industry bad news. I support a 
number of things the oil industry does. I have supported an $18 floor 
on marginal wells, using tax credits to bring the oil up to $18 when 
necessary. I support opening up Lease 181 in the Gulf of Mexico for 
additional production. I support a number of things that the energy 
industry and the oil industry want.
  When I see what is happening with the oil industry at the moment, I 
know that a year ago last January, the price of a barrel of oil was 
$34.50 a barrel. Now it is almost $30 above that. At $34.50 a barrel, 
they were making the highest profits they had ever made. Now it is $30 
a barrel above that. What are the consequences of those increased 
prices? The consequences are enormous for American consumers. BP, one 
of the world's largest companies, 34 percent profit in the third 
quarter; ConocoPhillips, 89 percent profit increase in the quarter; 
ExxonMobil, 75 percent profit increase in the quarter, $9.9 billion 
just for the one corporation.
  The question might be asked, What is happening to this profit? Well, 
this is BusinessWeek. This is hardly some silly liberal rag. 
BusinessWeek says, Why isn't big oil drilling more?
  It says:

       Rather than developing new fields, oil giants have 
     preferred to buy rivals--``drilling for oil on Wall Street.''

  Do my colleagues want to know where a lot of these profits are going, 
the record profits above last year? Buying back stock, hoarding cash, 
and drilling for oil on Wall Street. I have news for them. There is no 
oil on Wall Street. They are going to drill a dry hole on Wall Street.
  The point of the BusinessWeek article is to point out that much of 
these profits are used to go buy others, to merge with others. We have 
now seen these huge, blockbuster mergers. We now have bigger oil 
companies than we have ever seen.
  There are three things that affect the price of oil. I know we have a 
lot of free market advocates in Congress. I think the free market is 
wonderful. I do not think it is perfect. A 7-foot, 2-inch basketball 
player gets paid the same amount as 1,000 elementary school teachers? 
That is the marketplace, I guess. A short stop gets paid $250 million. 
Judge Judy, that woman on television--I do not watch her much. Once in 
a great while, I tune in cruising the trials and she seems a little 
crabby to me, but Judge Judy makes 10 times, 20 times, or 30 times the 
amount of money that the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court makes. 
I guess that is the market system. I believe in the market system. The 
free market system makes a lot of sense, but there is no free market in 
oil at the moment.
  There are three things happening with oil. One, there are the OPEC 
ministers sitting around a table because they were fortunate to find 
that on this little planet of ours, a substantial amount of the 
reserves of oil, the first, second and third largest reserves, exist 
under the sands of the Middle East. OPEC ministers sit around a table 
and decide quantity and price to the extent they can--especially 
quantity--and then the major oil companies, made larger and more 
muscular by blockbuster mergers, decide to use their raw muscle in the 
marketplace. Third and finally, the futures market, which is designed 
to provide liquidity for trading, has become a grand bazaar for 
speculation, an orgy of speculation. Those are the three elements that 
now give us a price of oil of over $60 a barrel.
  Sixty-six million U.S. homes are heated mainly with natural gas, and 
their heating bills this winter are going to be 48 percent on average; 
60 percent in my part of the country--60 percent increase to heat one's 
home this winter at a time when the largest enterprises that sell the 
oil are filling their bank accounts and drilling for oil on Wall 
Street. Sound fair? It does not to me.
  I have proposed a windfall profits tax, the proceeds of which would 
be rebated back to the consumers. This is not your mother's or father's 
windfall profits tax. We had one once before. It did not work very 
well. That was to bring money into the Federal Government. I do not 
propose that.
  Last year, the average cost of a barrel of oil was $40. In January, 
it was $34.50. The average cost the entire year was $40, and the energy 
industry, the oil companies, had the highest profits in their history. 
I propose that above that level of $40 a barrel represents windfall or 
excess profits.
  I propose further that the oil companies have two choices: If they 
decide to use all of that excess or windfall profit to invest back into 
the ground to explore for more oil or to build refineries above ground, 
then they would not pay a windfall profits tax. If they choose not to 
do that, if they choose to drill for oil on Wall Street, if they choose 
to buy back their stock and hoard cash, then they would pay a 50-
percent excise tax on those windfall profits, the entire proceeds of 
which would be sent back to the American consumers.
  Some say, if that would happen, the oil companies would simply drill 
less or explore for oil much less aggressively. No. In fact, the most 
significant

[[Page 24180]]

incentive to get them to explore for more energy would be to avoid 
paying a 50-percent excise tax called the windfall profits tax that I 
have proposed. It would be the single most aggressive incentive to say, 
sink that money back into the ground, expand America's supply of 
energy.
  It is interesting that we use one-fourth of the oil that is produced 
every day. Eighty-four million barrels of oil a day are produced in the 
world. We use 21 million barrels of oil a day in our country. This 
little spot on this globe called the United States of America uses one-
fourth of all oil that is produced every day. Sixty percent of that 
which we produce comes in from other countries. We are hopelessly 
addicted to foreign oil, and it is dangerous for our country. That is a 
longer term other significant issue we have to deal with. We cannot 
continue to be addicted to oil that comes from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, 
Iraq, and elsewhere. We simply cannot do that. That is why we as a 
country need to establish goals toward energy independence.
  John Kenneth Galbraith said: In the long run, we are all dead.
  Those people who say, Well, in the long term, it is going to work 
out, in the long run, we are all dead. In the short term, we have a 
responsibility moving into this winter to try to find a way to deal 
with this dichotomy of the oil companies filling their treasuries and 
the consumers trying to figure out, How do I pay the bill? How do I pay 
a 60-percent increase in natural gas prices in the northern Great 
Plains? How do I pay $50 to put 16 or 18 gallons in my gas tank? I 
think this Congress has a responsibility to address this.
  As I said before, yes, I support the oil industry in a number of 
ways. I have described them. I can describe others. I support the free 
market system. But I think this system is broken and I think what you 
have is significant pain for the American consumers, significant gain 
for the largest oil companies, and I think it is unfair.


                                 TRADE

  Today I want to speak about another subject very briefly and that is 
the subject of trade. Some while ago there was an airplane flying over 
Los Angeles with a bent nose wheel. That nose wheel, twisted and bent, 
meant that airplane stayed up a good number of hours to dump fuel 
because they were going to make a landing and they worried about 
whether that landing would result in the safety of the airplane for the 
passengers and crew. There was a lot of drama on television as all of 
us watched that airplane circle.
  Fortunately that airplane landed. There was a plume of smoke and ball 
of fire and it came to a safe stop. Those pilots must have been 
skillful pilots.
  It reminded me of something I read a couple of weeks before that, and 
that is that particular airline and virtually all other airlines 
decided to outsource their maintenance. I have no idea whether that 
played a role in the drama I watched on television that day, but that 
particular airline does some of its maintenance in El Salvador and 
flies its airplanes down to El Salvador empty to do its maintenance. I 
wonder why they do airplane maintenance in El Salvador and fly an empty 
Airbus 320 down to El Salvador to have it done. The answer is, you can 
pay a worker in El Salvador a fraction of what you pay a worker in this 
country and save a lot of money.
  I found out since that about 40 percent of the maintenance of our 
airplanes with commercial airlines is now outsourced; some outsourced 
to other companies in our country, some outsourced to other countries, 
as a matter of fact.
  I mentioned the airplane that was flying over Los Angeles with a bent 
nose wheel had some of its maintenance done in the country of El 
Salvador in order to save money. Outsourcing is something we hear about 
every day. Outsourcing is a term that doesn't sound so ominous unless 
it affects you. Outsourcing means you might get fired because somebody 
else is willing to work for a substantially lower salary. Corporations 
have now discovered we live in a world with roughly 6.5 billion people 
and there are anywhere from 1 to 2 billion people now who are willing 
to work for virtually pennies, so they have decided what we ought to do 
is outsource that work. When we produce something, let's outsource it, 
produce it somewhere else for 30 cents or 40 cents an hour, save a lot 
of money, and come back to this country and sell it on the store 
shelves in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Los Angeles and Chicago and 
Denver. Particularly in the last decade or so, that has become 
something most corporations are doing and they say we can't compete 
unless we outsource.
  What we are seeing is a massive exodus of American jobs. I have gone 
through a few in other speeches. I will start by pointing out we have 
the highest trade deficit in American history. No other country has 
ever come close. What does this mean? Today is Friday. It means today 
we are going to buy $2 billion more in goods from other countries than 
we are going to sell. That means today, on Friday, we are going to rack 
up a $2 billion debt, just for today, and every day, 7 days a week, all 
year long, a $2 billion debt because we are buying from abroad much 
more than we are selling. That means we are selling part of our 
country; that is what it means. This doesn't work out. This mortgages 
the future for our kids.
  How does that happen? A significant part of the debt is with China. 
About a third of it is with the country of China. Substantial numbers 
of jobs outsourced from this country are going to the country of China.
  IBM, Big Blue--this is a couple of months ago--proceeds to lay off 
13,000 workers in Europe and the United States; IBM plans to increase 
its payroll in India by 14,000 workers. By the way, the memorandum from 
IBM says, When you tell your workers they are losing their jobs, don't 
ever use the word ``outsourcing'' and make sure you tell them this is 
not about the quality of your work as you tell them you are done.
  This young lady worked for Palm Pilot, a young African-American woman 
who went to school, did everything you should do, got a great job in a 
technology company called Palm Pilot. The problem was they out-
sourced her job and many others. People think this is just about 
factories making textiles; it is not. It is outsourcing of good jobs--
engineers' and technicians' jobs and professional jobs. The last note 
she made on her Palm Pilot was, ``My job's gone to India,'' but she was 
fired. By the way, she had to train the person in India who took her 
job.
  I have gone through a long list of these. You have all seen the Fruit 
of the Loom Guys. They advertise Fruit of the Loom by having people 
dress up as grapes. I have never understood why they do that, but 
apparently it works. So you dress somebody up as a green grape or red 
grape and people dance and sing and people apparently think that is the 
pair of shorts or the undershirt they ought to buy because they saw a 
dancing grape. At any rate, Fruit of the Loom used to be all American. 
You walked around and put on some Fruit of the Loom underwear and you 
felt you were all American. No more. There are not any Fruit of the 
Loom garments made in the United States. They are gone.
  When I think of Levis, there is not one pair of Levis made in the 
United States. By the way, if you wear Tony Lama boots, you might be 
wearing boots from China.
  The list goes on and on. I have described many of them. I have 
described the problems in trade through automobiles, which is obviously 
a big ticket item. We have a lot of good jobs in the automobile 
industry. It is interesting, 30 years ago the largest corporation in 
America was General Motors. Most people who went to work for General 
Motors expected to have a career for a lifetime. They worked for a 
lifetime and then retired. General Motors paid good salaries, they paid 
good benefits, they had health care, they paid retirement benefits, and 
it was America's largest corporation. Now the largest corporation is 
Wal-Mart--I guess it switches between GE and Wal-Mart, but I believe it 
is Wal-Mart at the moment. When people go to work for Wal-Mart, they 
don't go to work for

[[Page 24181]]

a lifetime. There is a 70-percent turnover in Wal-Mart and the average 
wage is between $17,000 and $19,000 a year, and half of them don't have 
benefits. Difference? Pretty big difference. What does that say about 
the job base in our country? I think that says a lot about the job base 
in this country.
  What we need to do, it seems to me, is to care a little about the 
circumstances of international trade and begin to decide, as a country, 
are we going to put up with this? Is this what we want to have happen?
  The description of these next photos I want to show you describes 
something that tells about the conditions in which we are producing 
products we are purchasing. When I say we, the corporations that are 
outsourcing these products. These happen to be photographs that were 
taken in Bangladesh. These photographs are of striking workers at a 
factory called Pantex, which produced sports clothing for the Decathlon 
label, which is sold in the U.S. and Europe.
  These people, mostly children, were forced to work 14 hours a day. 
They worked them 7 days a week, and 700 Pantex workers decided the 
conditions under which we are working are almost intolerable, 14-hour 
days, 7 days a week, being paid pennies, so they protested. They 
blocked the gate to the plant.
  Here is what happened to them by the Government and the company 
itself--people were beaten, badly beaten. People were killed. Why? 
Because they had decided they wanted the opportunity--you can see the 
photographs and they are devastating photographs--they wanted the 
opportunity as workers to be able to work in a safe work plant, to be 
paid decent wages, not to have to work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  Does anybody in this country care that those are the conditions under 
which products are made and sold on the store shelves of America? Does 
anybody care that we tell Americans you have to compete with that, you 
have to compete with companies that will hire kids, work them 14 hours 
a day, 7 days a week? And if somebody does care about it, when will we 
do something about it? When will we pass legislation to do something 
about it?
  This gospel of so-called offshoring these days is now taken as 
something that needs to be done in order to stay competitive. Get rid 
of your American workers, sleep well at night, don't say the Pledge of 
Allegiance in the boardroom, decide you should hire kids, hire whatever 
you want, hire a contractor who hires kids or hire a contractor who 
hires young women. I held a hearing one day and two women showed up 
from a plant in Honduras. This particular plant was making shirts for 
Puff Daddy.
  Puff Daddy, you might remember, changed his name to P. Diddy. I don't 
know why somebody would change his name from Puff Daddy to P. Diddy, 
but then he decided he would change his name to Diddy, so it is Puff 
Daddy to P. Diddy to Diddy. His real name is Sean Combs and Sean Combs 
is quite a sporty guy. He dresses well. I have seen some pictures. He 
has a line of clothing which apparently is a pretty good line of 
clothing.
  Two women who worked in a plant in Honduras, to make P. Diddy or 
Diddy or Puff Daddy or whatever it is shirts, showed up to talk about 
the conditions in that plant. This is a plant that was doing contract 
work.
  Mr. Diddy--I am not quite sure what I should call him, Mr. Combs or 
whatever his name is--said he wasn't aware of this. And I expect that 
is the case. I don't think he or anyone else who engages in this 
believes that a contractor is going to have a plant in Honduras or 
Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or Indonesia and say it is fine if they go 
ahead and hire a bunch of kids or hire people and don't have safe 
workplaces, don't pay them adequate wages. Most people would say no, 
that is not fine. But it is fine if it is out of sight and they don't 
have to know about it. Just get the socks made, shirt made, shoes made, 
get them over here. We don't care about the conditions in which they 
are made.
  By the way, we get a chance, as an American company, to say if our 
people can't compete with that, by God, they lose their jobs because we 
are going to be competitive, and if it takes hiring people in China or 
Bangladesh to be competitive, that is the way it works.
  I don't understand this at all. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, 
there was a man who waited hours in line to go past his casket, along 
with other Americans. A reporter was asking people for his story, to 
get a little flavor of things, he was asking people their thoughts and 
so on. He walked up to this fellow, obviously a workman, holding his 
hat in his hand. He stood there for hours and had tears in his eyes. 
The reporter said,

       Did you know Franklin Roosevelt?

  And this fellow said,

       Oh, no, I didn't. But he knew me.

  What he meant was this President knew the American worker and stood 
up for the working men and women of this country. ``He knew me.''
  Who knows America's workers now? Who knows the workers who will be 
told today or tomorrow that their job has gone to China, their job has 
gone elsewhere? Where will we develop the base, the foundation for the 
middle class that sustains the economy in this country?
  I didn't bring it to the floor today, but I should have--I asked the 
Labor Department for a list of the companies that have outsourced jobs 
and are then claiming, as a result of that, through filing at the 
Department of Labor, trade adjustment assistance for the people who are 
losing their jobs because of outsourcing. I was very surprised to find 
that in the first 6 months of this year I received 32 pages, single 
spaced, small type, both sides, line after line after line of the names 
of companies that have outsourced their jobs in the first 6 months of 
this year.
  My point is this. None of this adds up.
  We are a country that is unique in the world. We built something 
extraordinary, and we did it because we honored work, we valued work. 
We understood that men and women in this country who go to work and 
provide for themselves earn an honest wage for a day's work. We decided 
the conditions of that work shall be that workers have a right to 
organize. And, oh, by the way, you know that little teddy bear you are 
buying at some shop today may well have been built in China or some 
other country, and some worker who was protesting 12, 14-hour days, 7 
days a week was probably sent to prison.
  I should come to the floor and read the names of people who are 
sitting in prison today in China. Their transgression? They believed 
people should have a right to organize. We decided long ago that people 
should have the right to organize and work in a safe workplace. We have 
child labor laws. We have laws that prevent companies from putting 
chemicals and pollution into the ground, the streams, and the air. But 
you can get rid of all of that. Just pole-vault over all of those 
things and move your jobs offshore in order to be ``competitive.''
  What is the strategy and how does all that work? Who is going to pay 
the bills? Who is going to go to work in this country in the future and 
earn sufficient money to take care of their family if we do not stand 
up for the interests of this country? I am not suggesting we should put 
walls around our country. I am just saying our trade strategy is a 
bankrupt failure, a total failure, and no one really seems to want to 
admit it.
  Our trade strategy ought to be to push other countries up, not push 
our country down. I come from a State that needs to sell a lot of 
products overseas. We produce a lot of agricultural commodities, and we 
need to ship a fair amount overseas. So I believe in fair trade. Free 
trade does not mean anything to me. ``Free trade'' is just a jingoistic 
phrase, people standing on street corners banging cymbals, wearing 
robes, and chanting ``free trade.''
  What I care about is for this country to require fair trade. We are 
not, and for this reason: For the first 25 years after the Second World 
War, we could beat anyone, anywhere, anytime with a hand tied behind 
our back. We were the

[[Page 24182]]

biggest and strongest country in the world, and most of our trade 
policy could be concessional foreign policy, in many cases softheaded, 
but still concessional and still foreign policy.
  In the second 25 years after the Second World War, our trading 
partners became bigger, tougher, shrewder, and the competition became 
much different. But what also happened was the growth of enterprises, 
which can produce almost anywhere in the world, decided that if you can 
produce by finding much cheaper labor elsewhere, that is what we are 
going to do. We create those enterprises here. We give them a charter 
called a corporation.
  By the way, many of them not only are producing elsewhere where they 
can hire kids for 30 cents an hour, but they are also running their 
operations through a mailbox in the Bahamas in order to avoid paying 
taxes in this country, which is a subject for another day.
  The question is, When will, or will ever, this Congress decide that 
this strategy does not work, that this strategy is not a strategy that 
is going to strengthen this country, it is going to weaken this 
country? Go to any business school in this country and ask those who 
are teaching classes about outsourcing, and they will give you a dim 
prospect for future jobs because you can hire engineers in India for a 
whole lot less than you can in the United States. You can hire people 
in China for a whole lot less money than you can in the United States. 
That does not mean a textile worker in this country is valueless. Jobs 
in this country are important.
  I once asked Carla Hills, who was a trade ambassador, Is there 
anything that you wouldn't trade away? Are there any concentric circles 
of economic activity that are essential for our country to remain a 
strong world economic power? The answer was really not. Whatever the 
competition is, it is.
  That is just wrong. That just does not make any sense. There are 
certain things that are required in our country for our country to 
remain a world economic power. Part of it is to stand up for our own 
economic interests, and, yes, to care a little about trying to bring 
others up but certainly not to allow our standard of living to be 
pushed down.
  Those who hear me who feel differently think, as they have always 
thought, those of us who speak this way are xenophobic isolationist 
stooges who don't have enough brain power to see over the horizon. 
Won't they ever learn expanded trade benefits everybody?
  Expanded trade, if it means out-
sourcing of American jobs because you can find people who will work for 
pennies an hour, does not benefit this country. It benefits the 
consumers in the short term perhaps, but consumers without jobs will 
not long be consumers. And this economic strategy, I think, finally--
given this chart that I showed at the start--finally the understanding 
by nearly anyone who is thinking and sober is this strategy is creating 
an abyss for this country that is very serious. This is a very serious 
problem: mountains of red ink, substantial lost jobs, and economic 
opportunity leaving our country.
  I have a series of recommendations on how to respond to all of this. 
I will mention one again because we are going to vote on it the week 
after next--I have offered it four times, and I have lost all four 
times. We will have a fifth vote. One would think that the first baby 
step in the direction of doing the right thing would be to shut down 
the perverse and idiotic tax exemption or tax credit for moving jobs 
overseas. Yes, that is right. We actually provide a reward for someone 
who shuts down their American manufacturing plant and moves the jobs 
overseas for the purpose of shipping the product back into this 
country. We actually reward them for doing that.
  One would think the first baby step would be to shut down that 
perverse tax incentive. There are not enough votes in this Chamber, at 
least historically, to do that. We are going to see the week after next 
whether some in this Chamber who have previously voted against it might 
either have seen the light, felt the heat, one way or the other, and 
have decided it is not useful--in fact, it is destructive--to reward 
those who decide to ship their American jobs overseas.
  That is just the first step. There are many others, and I will in a 
future discussion talk about the practical steps we should and could 
take to protect the economic interests of our country, even as we 
attempt in every way to expand fair trade.
  I am not against trade. I believe trade is important. But this 
country ought to expand opportunities for fair trade all around the 
world and stop being a pin cushion, an Uncle Sam that is played for 
Uncle Sucker in every single way.
  I did not talk about automobiles, but the automobile trade is 
unbelievable. Has trade in automobiles required U.S. companies to 
improve their vehicles? Yes, it sure has. But I will give, again, one 
example with respect to Korea, and there is a longer story with China, 
but Korea is enough.
  We have ships that bring Korean cars into this country. I am sure 
they are offloading today at some port. Nearly 700,000 Korean cars are 
shipped into our country each year. Do you know how many American cars 
we are able to sell in Korea? Less than 4,000--700,000 cars coming this 
way, and we get less than 4,000 cars into the Korean marketplace.
  One that is of interest to me is the Dodge Dakota pickup because it 
is named after my State, Dakota. There was a time when the folks who 
made Dodge Dakota got really excited because they sold something like 
100 of them in Korea. They thought they were going to ramp up a sales 
effort. They seemed to like Dodge Dakotas. They got shut down just like 
that.
  Look at the sales of Dodge Dakota pickups in Korea for the first 9 
months of this year and you will see the Korean Government did a great 
job of shutting that down. They want to ship 700,000 cars and allow us 
to ship 4,000 back. What does that mean? It means a mass exodus of 
American jobs.
  Mr. President, we have so many challenges. My hope is that we will, 
through amendments I will offer to the reconciliation bill and other 
approaches in the Senate and in other ways, finally come to grips with 
whether we think this is doing anything other than dramatically 
injuring America's future economic opportunities.
  One of my favorite people is Warren Buffett. He is the world's second 
richest person, but you wouldn't know it looking at him, and you 
wouldn't know it talking with him. He is a wonderful guy with a great 
sense of humor, just plain spoken.
  Warren Buffett is one of the few main business people in this 
country, one of the few people coming from a business background who 
says this is nuts, this is dangerous. This is going to turn us into a 
country of sharecroppers. He is very up front about it. Very few others 
are.
  My hope is that ideas he has advanced--one of them I particularly 
like and they advanced in an article in Fortune magazine, which is how 
to deal with these devastating deficits and outsourcing, is that at one 
point or another this begins to take root in this Chamber.
  Today I understand we are poised on the head of a pin because a 
Supreme Court nomination was withdrawn yesterday, and that is a big 
news item. Today the special prosecutor, at 2 o'clock, will announce 
the results of his decision with respect to the leak of outing a covert 
CIA officer. We have all these issues, and we dance on the head of pins 
on all these issues. Yes, some of them are important, some not. This is 
important. This describes whether our kids are going to have jobs; 
whether our country is going to expand and grow; whether America is 
going to be, in the future, what it has been in the past: a strong 
country, a world economic power, and one that can supply and one that 
can provide a standard of living and the kind of life that Americans 
have built for themselves for many decades.
  Mr. President, I will speak more about this issue at some future 
point. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

[[Page 24183]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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