May 16, 1995 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — SENATE S6745

Norwest Bank of Colorado and Atlantis

Community, Inc.

Atlantis Community is the largest

home health care agency in Colorado,

with an outstanding record of service

to and advocacy for disabled individuals. With Norwest Bank, Atlantis developed a unique program to help lower

income disabled people achieve an

American dream: the dream of owning

a home.

Atlantis and Norwest pioneered the

Disability Community Homeownership

Program to help provide home mortgage financing to disabled people. This

program features 15- to 30-year first

mortgage loans with no down payment,

no closing costs, below market interest

rates, and other advantages to qualified home buyers. In 1993, Norwest set

aside $2.5 million for loans to the disabled community. Norwest now has

over $6 million in home loans to 100

people with disabilities, who could not

avail themselves of existing lending

programs.

Atlantis teamed with Norwest to

help build awareness of this program

among the disabled community. In addition, Atlantis offers financial counseling and money management services

specifically tailored to meet the needs

of disabled people. The interest in

these services was so high, Atlantis

and Norwest decided to expand it to a

consumer loan program for buying and

modifying vehicles, improving disabled

access to homes, and other purposes.

In recognition of these communityoriented efforts, Atlantis and Norwest

received nominations for the Social

Compact Outstanding Community Investment Award. Social Compact is a

coalition of hundreds of leaders from

the financial services and community

development industries, coming together to strengthen American communities through neighborhood partnerships.

I congratulate Atlantis and Norwest

for their nominations for this award,

and I applaud their initiative for turning community concerns into concrete

results.

WAS CONGRESS IRRESPONSIBLE?

THE VOTERS HAVE SAID YES

fMr. HELMS. Mr. President, before

contemplating today’s bad news about

the Federal debt, let us do that little

pop quiz once more. You remember—

one question, one answer:

Question: How many million dollars

are in $1 trillion? While you are arriving at an answer, bear in mind that it

was the U.S. Congress that ran up the

Federal debt that now exceeds $4.8 trillion.

To be exact, as of the close of business Monday, May 15, the exact Federal

debt—down to the penny—stood at

$4,881,377,281,278.42. This means that

every man, woman, and child in America now owes $18,529.79 computed on a

per capita basis. Which, I might add, is

an increase of $22 million over the

weekend.

Mr. President, back to the pop quiz:

How man million in a trillion? There

are a million, million in a trillion.

Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, in

MEXICO IS A LENINIST STATE

flate January I came to the floor to

speak of our relations with Mexico in

the context of the new North American

Free-Trade Agreement. My remarks

appeared in the RECORD under the

heading ‘‘Free Trade With an Unfree

Society.’’ I returned to a theme which

I had stated on a number of occasions

since NAFTA was first proposed during

the administration of President Bush. I

had been an enthusiastic supporter of

the free-trade agreement with Canada,

but was troubled by the thought of a

similar arrangement with Mexico, and

for the most elemental reason. I argued

that the political and legal arrangements of the United States and Canada

being essentially symmetrical, the vast

involvement in one another’s affairs,

the partial ceding of sovereignty implicit in such an agreement would

provide quite manageable. There would

be no political loss and considerable

economic gain. Optimality, as an economist might say. By contrast, I feared

that our political and legal institutions

were anything but symmetrical with

those of Mexico. Mexico, I said, was a

Leninist state.

I had hoped for some response to this

statement from the executive branch,

but there was little. Indeed, apart from

a gracious note from our distinguished

Treasury Secretary, Robert E. Rubin,

there was none. In any event, we were

then, in January, caught up in an intense effort to save Mexico from defaulting on its foreign debt. This was

the first of what I fear will be a sequence of such crises, and it seemed

gratuitous to press the argument in

that atmosphere. But now the first crisis has eased, thanks in large measure

to what Alexander Hamilton, our first

Secretary of the Treasury, termed ‘‘energy in the executive,’’ now embodied

in his successor, Secretary Rubin. And

so I would take this quiet morning to

return to the subject.

I would begin by calling attention to

an essay by William Pfaff, which appeared in the International Herald

Tribune on March 16. Mr. Pfaff, who

writes from Paris, is a foreign policy

analyst of unexampled range, depth,

and experience. He would be such if he

lived in Utica, but living abroad gives

him a singular perspective on American affairs. His essay begins with this

simple, chilling analogy.

The commitment the United States now

has made to Mexico bears a distinct resemblance to the commitment it made to Vietnam during the late 1950s and the early 1960s,

when the troubles in that country were only

beginning.

That was war and this is peace. Nonetheless now, as then, with as little reflection

and a simplistic ideology, Washington has

taken on responsibility for the fortunes of

another nation that it scarcely knows and

fails to understand.

In Mexico this American assumption of responsibility is primarily economic, but Mexico’s economic plight is inseparable from the

political crisis afflicting the eleven-decadelong dictatorship in Mexico of the PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party, historically

the vehicle of Mexican nationalism—and of

resistance to American exploitation of Mexican oil resources.

Washington has demanded, and last Friday

was given, Mexico’s promise of a program of

economic austerity with distressing implications for millions of Mexicans, who only

weeks ago were being told that their country’s membership in NAFTA assured rising

prosperity for them and their country. One

aspect of the new arrangement is that a

major part of Mexico’s future oil revenues is

pledged against the new American and international loan guarantees.

Even without the debt crisis a national upheaval is under way in Mexico which not

even the Mexicans can be sure they can

solve. Washington’s commitment to a solution is an engagement with the uncontrollable and unforeseeable.

In my January statement I was

unapologetic about discussing government in the abstract. I allowed as how

Speaker GINGRICH, by encouraging us

to read or re-read The Federalist, was

directing us to just such abstractions,

which very much engaged the Founders

of the Nation. They ransacked history

for different ideal types of government

for lessons to be learned and contrasts

to be made with the new American Republic which they had set about constructing. Here, then, is a definition of

Leninism from the ‘‘Harper Dictionary

of Modern Thought.’’ The capitalized

words are employed in the original for

purposes of cross reference:

Leninism. The term refers to the version of

MARXIST thought which accepts the validity of the major theoretical contributions

made by Lenin to revolutionary Marxism.

These contributions fall into two main

groups. Central to the first was the conception of the revolutionary party as the vanguard of the PROLETARIAT. The workers, if

left to their own devices, would concentrate

on purely economic issues and not attain full

political CLASS consciousness, and therefore the revolutionary seizure of power needed the leadership of committed Marxist ACTIVISTS to provide the appropriate theoretical and tactical guidelines. The role of the

party was thus to be a ‘‘vanguard’’ in the

revolutionary struggle which would culminate in the overthrow of the CAPITALIST

STATE and the establishment of a DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT under the

HEGEMONY of the party.

The second major theoretical contribution

made by Lenin was to draw the political consequences from an analysis of CAPITALISM

as both international and imperialist. The

phenomenon of IMPERIALISM divided the

world between advanced industrial nations

and the colonies they were exploiting. This

situation was inherently unstable and led to

war between capitalist nations thus creating

favorable conditions for REVOLUTION. For

Lenin, the ‘‘weakest link’’ in the capitalist

chain was to be found in UNDERDEVELOPED regions of the world economy such as

Russia where the indigenous BOURGEOISIE

was comparatively weak, but where there

had been enough INDUSTRIALIZATION to

create a class-conscious proletariat. The idea

of world-wide SOCIALIST revolution beginning in relatively backward countries led to

the inclusion of the peasantry as important
S6746 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — SENATE May 16, 1995

revolutionary actors affording essential support to the proletariat in establishing a socialist order. Such socialist revolutions in

underdeveloped countries would exacerbate

the contradictions inherent in advanced capitalist economies and thus lead to the advent

of socialism on a world scale.

As compared with the ideas of Marx and

Engels, Leninism gives more emphasis to the

leading role of the party, to backward or

semi-colonial countries as the initial site of

revolution, and to the peasantry as potential

revolutionary agents. With the success of the

BOLSHEVIK revolution in 1917, Leninism became the dominant version of Marxism and

the official IDEOLOGY of the Soviet Union.

Lenin’s analysis of imperialism and his idea

of the ‘‘weakest link’’ also made his version

of Marxism appealing to emerging ELITES

in the THIRD WORLD. In the West, however,

while Leninist principles are maintained by

the small Trotskyist parties, many adherents of eurocommunism have begun to ask

how far Leninist ideas reflected specifically

Russian circumstances and should therefore

be modified to fit the conditions of advanced

capitalist societies.

Clearly, Leninst doctrine and Soviet

example had considerable appeal to the

revolutionary leaders and intellectuals

who came to power in Mexico in the

1920’s. It happens this was a time of artistic energy, perhaps especially in

mural paintings of Diego Rivera, Jose

Clemente Orozco, and David Alfonso

Siquieros. To this day one can see on

the walls of the Government buildings

of Mexico City vast scenes of revolutionary tumult. Amid a sea of yellow

sombreros and silver machetes there is

sure to be found an incongruously

bearded Lenin turned out in a starched

collar and black necktie. That, and of

course, swarms of red flags.

If the Soviet experiment attracted

sympathizers, even adherents, in the

United States in those years, I would

hazard that public opinion would have

shown even greater sympathy for the

goings-on in Mexico. A wonderful encounter came at the time of the construction of Rockefeller Center in New

York City in the early years of the

Great Depression. Diego Rivera was

commissioned to paint a fresco for the

lobby of the central RCA building, as it

then was. Word got out that it would

include not only red flags, but Lenin

himself. Nelson A. Rockefeller, who

was managing the enterprise, demurred. Much hullabaloo followed,

leading in turn to the classic poem by

E.B. White of the New Yorker, ‘‘I Paint

What I See,’’ describing an imagined

encounter between the youthful scion

of great wealth and the revolutionary

artist. Here are passages.

‘‘Whose is that head that I see on my wall?’’

Said John D.’s grandson Nelson.

‘‘Is it anyone’s head whom we know, at all?

‘‘A Rensselaer, or a Saltonstall?

‘‘Is it Franklin D.? Is it Mordaunt Hall?

‘‘Or is it the head of a Russian?’’

* * * * *

‘‘For twenty-one thousand conservative

bucks

‘‘You painted a radical. I say shucks,

* * * * *

‘‘For this, as you know, is a public hall

‘‘And the people want doves, or a tree in fall,

‘‘And though your art I dislike to hamper,

‘‘I owe a little to God and Gramper,

‘‘And after all,

‘‘It’s my wall. . .’’

‘‘We’ll see if it is,’’ said Rivera.

As I noted in January, it was no accident that when Leon Trotsky fled the

Soviet Union, having lost out to Stalin

in the struggle to succeed Lenin, he did

not settle in Paris, where failed revolutionaries were supposed to go. He went

to Mexico City, where he set up in considerable style, surrounded often as not

by American acolytes.

Two things are to be said about the

coming to power of the Institutional

Revolutionary Party in 1929. First—the

great English historian Sir John

Plumb has made this point—it was a

blessing for the Mexican people who for

decades had lived through indescribably bloody and agonizing turmoil. Of a

sudden, stability was achieved. Sir

John makes the point that revolutions

are easy; it is the onset of stability

that is rare in human experience. The

second point is that nothing like the

Leninist terror followed the coming to

power of the PRI. Diplomatic relations

with the Papacy—severed since 1867

when Benito Jua ́ rez implemented strict

controls of church power—became particularly hostile in 1926 during the rule

of Plutarco Elı ́as Calles, who would

later organize the PRI. His strict enforcement of the anticlerical provisions of the Constitution sparked the

Cristero rebellion which lasted 3 years.

The Mexican Government and the

church reached a modus vivendi in 1929

and after that Catholicism, the religion

of the people, was not generally speaking suppressed. But do not fail to take

note of Graham Greene’s ‘‘The Power

and The Glory.’’

Even so, one party control, and the

corruption that so quickly follows, settled on the Republic of Mexico. The

forthcoming 1994–95 edition of ‘‘Freedom in the World,’’ the authoritative

annual survey published by Freedom

House, states:

Since its founding in 1929, the PRI has

dominated the state through a top-down corporatist structure that is authoritarian in

nature and held together through co-operation, patronage, corruption and, when all

else fails, repression. The formal business of

government takes place secretly and with

little legal foundation.

I correct Leninist practice, the party

controlled not only the State, but all

the private institutions that might

seem to be arrayed against the State,

most importantly the trade unions.

The Department of State reports in the

Country Reports on Human Rights

Practices for 1994:

The largest trade union central is the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), organizationally part of the ruling PRI. CTM’s

major rival centrals and nearly all the 34

smaller confederations, federations, and

unions in the Labor Congress (CT) are also

allied with the ruling PRI.

Of late, however, the Leninist state

in Mexico appears to have entered a

time of troubles, possibly of disintegration. As William Pfaff, writes, ‘‘a national upheaval is underway.’’ Let us

turn to Tim Golden’s account of the

May Day celebrations in Mexico City

this year.

DEFIANT WORKERS IN MEXICO PROTEST

GOVERNMENT POLICIES.

MAY DAY DEMONSTRATION IN CAPITAL’S CENTER

Defying the pro-Government union leaders

who have dominated Mexican labor since the

1930’s, independent unions and leftist political groups turned the celebration of Labor

Day today into an outpouring of anger at the

economic policies of President Ernesto

Zedillo.

The limited political strength of the independent labor movement was evident in the

colonial central square of this capital, where

the biggest of more than a dozen protests

around the country drew only about onefifth of the 350,000 demonstrators that organizers had predicted. But for the first time in

decades, May Day’s main political act was

something other than a loyal tribute to the

Government and its long-ruling Institutional

Revolutionary party.

Leaders of the pro-Government unions had

canceled their traditional parade through

the square weeks ago, apparently out of fear

that they would be unable to control the

critics in their ranks.

Trade union subservience to the PRI

has been a settled fact for half a century. As I noted in January, this hardly escaped the notice of the American

labor movement. Perhaps more recently the party seems to have begun

parceling out hugely profitable state

enterprises or resources to favored

business leaders, who have evidently

become fabulously wealthy. A dacha

outside Moscow is one thing; $25 million a plate fundraising dinners in the

Presidential palace are surely another.

Such enormities, such contrasts can

never be stable, and in Mexico the system is obviously under strain, as Pfaff

observes.

On March 23, 1994, Luis Donaldo

Colosio, the Presidential candidate of

the PRI, was assassinated in Tijuana.

One Mario Aburto Martinez was arrested at the scene, convicted, and sentenced to 45 years in prison. The administration of Carlos Salinas de

Gortari, who had chosen Colosio as his

successor, maintained that the assassination was the work of this lone gunman. However, on February 25, 1995,

the new Mexican Attorney General Antonio Lozano Gracia announced the arrest of a second suspected gunman,

Othon Cortes Vazquez, a PRI security

guard.

A second political assassination occurred on September 28, 1994, when

Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the Secretary-General of the PRI was killed in

Mexico City. On February 28, 1995, Attorney General Lozano Gracia announced the arrest of Raul Salinas de

Gortari, the brother of former President Salinas, in connection with Ruiz

Massieu’s assassination. The investigation into the Ruiz Massieu assassination had previously been carried out by

the victim’s brother, Mario, who was

soon after arrested in the Newark, NJ

airport with $46,000 in undeclared cash.

The Mexican Attorney General has

since located $10 million in United

States bank accounts linked to Mario
May 16, 1995 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — SENATE S6747

Massieu which he apparently obtained

while in charge of Mexico’s

counternarcotics program.

Add a further twist to the tale.

Former President Salinas whom the

United States supported as our candidate to be the first president of the

World Trade Organization until this

story was revealed, is now living in the

United States in virtual exile.

And now another political murder

would seem to have occurred. On May

10 the former Jalisco State Attorney

General, Leobardo Larios, who previously had been responsible for investigating the 1993 killing of Cardinal

Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, was assassinated in Guadalajara. At the time

of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo’s assassination, the first official explanation

of the killing was that the Cardinal

had been accidentally killed in the

cross-fire between two rival drug cartels. However when the autopsy later

revealed that the Cardinal had been

shot 14 times at close range, Leobardo

Larios postulated that the Cardinal

had been mistaken for the leader of a

local drug ring, despite the fact that

the Cardinal was wearing his clerical

garb.

Revelations such as these are familiar. Power in Mexico has resided within

the PRI and on occasion arguments

within the party settled by murder.

These features of Leninist totalitarianism appeared early in the Soviet state.

In ‘‘Political Succession in the USSR’’

(1965), Myron Rush explains,

[W]hile Lenin still ruled, he exercised his

power through both the Party and the government. In the Party, formally, he had no

special position but was simply a member of

the Politburo along with six others; he headed the government, however, as Chairman of

the Council of People’s Commissars. He governed through the state apparatus directly,

through the Party apparatus indirectly. * * * The Party, as the embodiment

of the Revolutionary will, decided overall

policy.

After Lenin’s death, no one person was

in a position to consolidate power.

The ensuing power struggle was

waged for control of the party, not for

control of the Government. At the time

of Lenin’s death there were six other

members of the Politburo, the chief deliberative body in the party for the formation of policy, including Stalin and

Trotsky. By 1929 Joseph Stalin had

managed to expel the other five surviving members of the Politburo and secure unchallenged leadership of the

party, and by extension of the state.

Stalin did not take a political title

until May 7, 1941, when he became the

formal head of the Government as

chairman of the Council of People’s

Commissars. Mexico continues to

maintain the Leninist model of having

the President fulfill the official role of

head of state, while controlling the

party without formal title, though the

party and the Government appear to be

moving apart somewhat. Much of what

happened of late in Mexico echoes an

earlier time of change and violence.

But there is much that promises a new

era altogether.

On May 23, 1991, as we in the Senate

debated granting fast-track authority

to enable the administration to negotiate the North American Free-Trade

Agreement, I took to the floor to explain my opposition. I began, ‘‘Mr.

President, for some months now, I have

made the point to the administration

that Mexico does not have an independent judiciary.’’ This was, and I fear

still is, a matter of seeming small interest to our Department of State. But

observe. It has become a matter of considerable interest to the rulers of Mexico. On May 12, 1994, the first ever Presidential debate took place between

Ernesto Zedioll Ponce de Leon, the PRI

candidate who succeeded the assassinated Colosio, and his opponents

from the National Action Party [PAN]

and the Party of the Democratic Revolution [PDR]. During the debate Diego

Fernandez de Cevallos of the National

Action Party charged that Zedillo does

not get a passing grade in democracy.

If elected, Mr. Fernandez de Cevallos

promised to form a plural government.

In turn, Zedillo used the debate to announce his intentions to establish a

truly independent judiciary. The CIA

Foreign Broadcast Information Service

records him as saying, ‘‘I am proposing

the total reformation of our judicial

system. This must be a deep-rooted reform, starting virtually from ground

zero, because we need a justice system

that will function for the Mexican people.’’

Once elected, President Zedillo in

one stroke cleared the bench of all 21

sitting supreme court justices. These

judges had been appointed for life. Like

most things in Mexico, while the constitution provides for an independent

judiciary, reality is something quite

different. Appointments to the court

are made by the President and approved by the Senate; in which 95 of

the 128 Senators belong to the PRI.

Again, Freedom House is instructive:

The judiciary is subordinate to the president, underscoring the lack of a rule of law.

Supreme Court judges are appointed by the

executive and rubber-stamped by the Senate.

The court is prohibited from enforcing political and labor rights, and from reviewing the

constitutionality of laws. Overall, the judiciary system is weak, politicized and riddled

with corruption.

And yet, and yet, very possibly President Zedillo means to change this. And

to change much else. The North American Free-Trade Agreement surely indicated a desire by Mexican elites to

begin to put the institutions of the

Leninist state behind them; indeed, to

throw in with the liberal democratic

states that appear to have prevailed in

that epic struggle of the 20th century.

Pfaff writes:

The new president, Ernesto Zedillo, a product of the PRI system, is attempting to reform the party and the way it has perpetuated itself in power. For the first time

crimes committed within the party leadership are being exposed to public view, investigated and given the promise of prosecution.

It may be the United States can help.

More to the point, we have no choice

but to try to help. We have made a

huge commitment to this relationship.

There is no point arguing whether we

should have done so. We did. And in no

time at all we began to realize this.

The Mexican currency crisis appears to

have been the direct result of overspending on imported consumer goods,

which the ruling party determined

would help with yet another Presidential election, this time when there

was serious opposition. Perhaps not

least because in a North American freetrade zone it is taken as normal for

elections to involve more than one

party! My argument is to a somewhat

different point. I have been here on the

Senate floor talking about the nature

of the Mexican state for half a decade.

Apart, as noted earlier, from a generous note from the Secretary of the

Treasury, I have never had the least indication from the executive branch

that anyone had the least idea what I

was talking about. In my remarks in

January, I noted that the American

labor movement had no such difficulty.

From the time of Samuel Gompers,

who in 1924 had to be brought across

the Rio Grande so that he might die on

American soil, American labor has followed events in Mexico with clear understanding of the threat a Leninist

state poses to a free labor movement.

Can the Nation ever adequately express

our debt to the leaders of the A.F. of L.

and later the AFL–CIO, for their international activism through all those

years of the cold war? But the Department of State? To my knowledge, there

has been little or no interest at all in

any of this.

The President has just returned from

Moscow, where the great transition

from totalitarianism is underway, to

what purpose and what end we do not

know. But surely, we know that it matters to us. Surely, the Department of

State has focused attention on the

matter; has proposed policies, responses. The same intelligent, patient,

persistent attention needs to be paid to

the transition in Mexico. There is, perhaps, not that much America can do,

especially given our long history of aggression against Mexico, and the consequent suspicion of our motives. But

surely we can let it be known that we

have some inkling what they are going

through. There are small ‘‘d’’ democrats in Mexico who need to know this.

If there is anything we have learned

from this hideous century is that it

makes all the difference when those

who resist totalitarian regimes know

that there are those abroad who know

of their resistance. I do not wish to

suggest that Mexico is in any way to be

compared with, shall we say, East Germany. But still, it is not Denmark and

those who would see it change need to

know that we are with them. At the

same time, we need to be very careful

about the commitments we take on. It

is perhaps a heartless thing to say of so

rare a thinker as William Pfaff, but I
S6748 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — SENATE May 16, 1995

hope this time, for once, he does not

prove to be prescient. But this can only

happen if we attend to what he foresees.

The financial crisis has eased. We are

free to think anew and act anew. There

was at least one such moment in our

involvement with Vietnam. We missed

it.

Mr. PRESSLER. Mr. President, once

SOUTH DAKOTA FLOODS

fagain, Mother Nature’s fury is challenging the spirit and perseverance of

South Dakotans. For the past several

weeks, persistent rains have brought

flooding conditions to much of the

State for the third straight year. As a

result, 38 counties already have been

declared disaster areas. More counties

may be added in the days ahead. Just

by way of comparison, in July 1993, 33

counties were disaster areas due to the

heavy rainfall and flooding that made

front page headlines nationwide.

Flooding has made vital roads and

bridges impassable, placing the assurance of basic services at risk. Rivers

and streams overflowing their banks

have wreaked havoc in urban and rural

areas across South Dakota—basements, fields, and roads are inundated

with water. Damage to public and private property threatens the well-being

of farmers, small business men and

women, families, and individuals.

On Monday, Gov. Bill Janklow requested that the President declare the

State a disaster area and provide Federal emergency assistance in excess of

$16 million. The devastation appears already to have surpassed that caused by

the so-called Great Flood of 1993. Some

areas of the State already are experiencing their wettest springs in history

with 3 weeks remaining in the season.

An end does not appear to be in sight.

National Weather Service reports indicate heavy precipitation will continue

through the end of this month and

maybe into this summer. If this is the

case, South Dakota once again may resemble the Great Lake of the Midwest.

South Dakotans clearly are experiencing hard times. The Governor’s office has informed me that the State is

using all the resources it can to assist

those in need. Federal help is critical.

As South Dakota’s senior Senator, I intend to do all I can to ensure that the

President and our Federal agencies respond to South Dakota’s disaster needs

swiftly and diligently. The people of

South Dakota deserve and should expect no less from their Government.

I already have written to the President, the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], and the Small

Business Administration [SBA], and

the Federal Highway Administration,

alerting them of South Dakota’s urgent situation and urging quick approval of the Governor’s aid request.

I also invited the Administrator of

the Federal Highway Administration,

Rodney Slater, to personally assess the

damage of our flood-damaged roads and

bridges and to give immediate consideration to a request from the State for

assistance. Having endured $1.2 million

of damage to roads and bridges last

year, additional damage to roads and

bridges makes FHWA assistance even

more critical this year.

Administrator Slater for some time

has planned to survey damaged roads

and bridges in South Dakota. Unfortunately, he has not scheduled a visit.

Now is as good a time as any for him to

see just how serious the situation is.

South Dakotans have no time to

waste. The Federal Government should

act, and act fast. South Dakota deserves the same response other areas of

the Nation receive in times of need. I

intend to see that this action is taken.

What kind of action can be taken at

the Federal level? Plenty. In fact, a

number of initiatives can be taken

without a Presidential disaster declaration—initiatives that are critical

to South Dakota farmers and ranchers.

First and foremost, the Department of

Agriculture and the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation must provide far

greater flexibility in the administration of the Crop Insurance Program to

South Dakota farmers.

The Crop Insurance Program, which

has replaced disaster payments as the

central means for emergency relief, is

predicated on the planting of crops.

However, as we all know, the clear

problem caused by the recent rain and

floods for crop farmers is that they are

unable to plant. Consider the percentage of crops planted, as of May 8, 1995,

as compared to the 5-year average:

corn—1 percent, 5-year average—19 percent; spring wheat—17 percent, 5-year

average—89 percent; oats—12 percent,

5-year average—85 percent; barley—6

percent, 5-year average—84 percent.

I already have written to Agriculture

Secretary Glickman, urging administrative flexibility for the Crop Insurance Program. Specifically the Secretary needs to take the following

steps:

First, provide prevent planting coverage on crops that producers paid premiums on. If a producer was unable to

plant the insured crop by the final

planting date, crop insurance should

pay the prevented planted indemnity

and permit the producers to plant any

subsequent crop possible and insure

that crop.

Second, provide crop insurance coverage for producers who aerial seed this

year’s crop. With the degree of wet conditions occurring in South Dakota, aerial seeding needs to be considered a

usual practice.

Third, withhold penalties against

producers by permitting prevented

planting coverage even if a producer

enters the 0/92 program.

Fourth, release Conservation Reserve

Program [CRP] acres for haying and

grazing.

Fifth, extend immediately the May 15

deadline for calving on CRP acres. I am

pleased that Secretary Glickman has

responded to this request, and has extended the deadline.

Sixth, permit the following crops to

be planted this year without the loss of

farm program benefits: millet, soybeans, buckwheat, sunflowers.

FEMA, SBA, and the FHWA also

should be equally responsive, fair, and

flexible to the needs of South Dakotans

should the Governor request Federal

assistance.

The need for equitable treatment in

response to disasters is very important

to me. In recent years, I have been very

critical of what I believe to be the apparent discriminatory administration

of Federal emergency assistance. It

seems that disaster aid is always quick

in coming to States and localities with

major media markets and big electoral

votes. However, whether you are from

Humboldt, CA, or Humboldt, SD, a disaster is a disaster—a lost home, business, or income due to Mother Nature

is hard for all Americans, regardless of

where they live. Thus, treatment of

these disasters should be fair.

Once again, the wrath of Mother Nature is challenging the people of our

great State. Times are tough, but I

know South Dakotans will persevere.

The pioneer spirit and sense of community within all South Dakotans will

rise to the occasion. In the last few

days, my wife Harriet and I have

talked to a number of our friends in

South Dakota. We have heard the difficulties they have faced. Our hearts

and our prayers are with them—the

farmers, ranchers, business men and

women, and the families impacted by

the flooding. I intend to do all I can to

ensure that the Federal Government

stands side-by-side with all South Dakotans during this difficult time. The

President can begin this effort by approving Governor Janklow’s request

and send assistance where needed. I

urge him to do so without delay.

Again, the people of South Dakota

should expect and deserve no less.

CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE OF ED

fROBERTS

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, it was

with profound sadness that I learned of

Ed’s death. On March 14, 1995, not only

did the world lose one of our most dynamic and forceful advocates for the

rights and empowerment of people with

disabilities; on that day, I lost a friend

and confidant.

Ed Roberts was a kid who lived for

baseball when he contracted polio at

age 14. He became severely disabled almost overnight, needing large equipment and assistance simply to breathe.

Ed overheard the doctor tell his mother that it would be better if he died because he was going to be a vegetable.

He decided right then that if he was

going to be a vegetable, he would be an

artichoke: prickly on the outside with

a tender heart.

A lot of people told Ed there were a

lot of things he could not do.

They told him he could not graduate

from high school because he could not

pass PE or driver’s education, so he