Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Let me thank the Senator from California, Mrs. Boxer, and certainly Senator Reid and others. This vote was very important. The question for the Senate and the Congress is when 25, 26 million people wake up in this country and go looking for a job and can't find it--the numbers I know are 16 to 17 million people, but the real number of people who are unemployed in America is much higher than that. There are many who have given up hope. At a time when that many Americans are looking for work and can't find it, they need some hope. This Senate has a choice of doing nothing or doing something. There are too many in this Senate who have always been satisfied to do nothing. Tonight, finally, in a piece of legislation that will put people to work, we know, for example, that the private sector hires people, small and medium-size businesses. But we also know that when you spend money for highways, highway contractors are going to put people on payrolls immediately, because those programs and those projects are already engineered, already designed, ready to go. The money doesn't exist for them. When the money is made available, people will be hired immediately. The same is true with respect to the wage tax credits in this piece of legislation. I held a hearing in the policy committee. We had three small to medium-size businesses there, all of which are profitable, all wonderful businesses, all ready to expand. But none of them could because none of them could find capital or they had no access to capital from their banks. Money was not available. These are successful businesses, profitable businesses, businesses wanting to and ready to expand, wanting to hire more people and can't do it. The fact is, this legislation is another step in the direction of saying to small to medium-size businesses, when you are ready to begin hiring again, here is an additional incentive to hire that next worker. Slowly but surely we have to find a way to give people confidence, give the American people confidence that this economy is improving, that there will be a job, there will be opportunity and hope in the future. We don't so much spend our days with people who are out of work. Most people serving in the Senate have a pretty wonderful opportunity. They put on a suit in the morning. We are the kind of people, we shower in the morning, put on a suit, are dressed up all day, come here. Our jobs are not being shipped overseas. In most cases, people in this Chamber have not been so much subject to the deep recession. But a lot of people have. Five-and-a-half million people who used to work in manufacturing making things have lost their jobs in recent years. The question for most of those people who are looking for some hope from their leaders is: Will somebody do something, or is the government going to be content to do nothing? The action this evening by which these four pieces of legislation, which include some incentives for small and medium-size businesses, some bonding authority that will increase economic activity, the extension of the highway program that will put people back to work, expensing for small businesses--these are all things that are going to actually put people on payrolls. It is not a case where we will hire somebody as a government worker. It is a case of incentivizing highway contractors to hire people to help build roads and bridges and repair roads and bridges. It is a case of incentivizing small to medium-size businesses to say: If you need that extra little incentive to hire that next person, here it is. Finally, and even more important than the incentive, is the signal this sends, the signal that maybe at least, at long last, we will begin to see some progress, some cooperation, circumstances in which Republicans and Democrats vote together in sufficient numbers that things can get passed and get done. With as deep a recession as we are in, the deepest since the Great Depression, there is an urgency. It ought to be treated as an urgent situation. This vote this evening may well put us on the road to understanding how urgent it is and how important it is that we take action rather than delay. I thank the leader and so many others. Senator Durbin and I worked on a jobs package. These four provisions are in that package. There are other pieces we can implement in the future that will also be substantially important in getting people back to work, putting America back to work. I know the Senator from Ohio will speak next. I know he hopes that perhaps we will not just put people back to work but perhaps will make products that say ``made in America'' once again. Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing. One additional point. I spoke earlier describing the metaphor of filling the bathtub. We are trying to get the faucet going with incentives to put people to work. At the same time you have to plug the drain a little bit. We have a drain of jobs going out of this country. The President, in the State of the Union, said: Let's get rid of that unbelievable tax break that we provide people for moving jobs overseas. I have been in the Senate working on that for a long time. It is unbelievable that we say to somebody: Close up your factory, fire your workers, move the jobs overseas, and you get a big fat tax break. We need to plug the drain, in addition to opening the faucet to try to get additional jobs and work on that in addition to the progress we have made this evening that will give some hope to the American people who want to go to work and need a good job. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, February 25, 2010, at 2:15 p.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct an oversight hearing to Examine Tribal Programs and Initiatives Proposed in the President's fiscal year 2011 Budget. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 202-224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 2:15 p.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a business meeting to consider the nomination of Lillian A. Sparks to be Commissioner of the Administration for Native Americans, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 202-224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I will be brief. The vote that just occurred was a vote on the nomination of Martha Johnson, of Maryland, to head the General Services Administration. That vote was reported by the committee unanimously to the U.S. Senate on June 8 of last year-- June 8 of last year. It has been blocked since that moment, and now we have a vote. We didn't have a vote in July, August, September, October, November, December, or January; we had it now, 7 or 8 months later. After blocking it for 7 or 8 months, 92 Senators voted yes. Explain to the American people how you block a nomination for 7 months that you support. Try to explain that. In my judgment, it is a shameful disrespect for good government to block nominations for month after month after month. The same is true with individual issues that are brought to the floor of the Senate. I will give you a couple of examples. An appropriations bill was blocked on the floor of the Senate, and then 80 people voted yes. A credit card holders' bill of rights was blocked in the Senate, and then 90 people voted yes. The Department of Defense appropriations was filibustered in the Senate, and then 88 Senators voted yes on that. If ever there were a demonstration for all to see how unbelievably broken this process is, it is today, once again, that after 7 or 8 months, a very qualified candidate, reported out unanimously from the committee of jurisdiction to head the GSA now gets 92 people to vote yes, which means we have a lot of people who block things they intend to vote for later. It is an unbelievable example of why this place doesn't work. A minimum amount of cooperation, in my judgment, would go a long way to helping make this place work the way it should. This nomination should have taken 10 minutes on the floor of the Senate last June after it was reported out unanimously by the committee of jurisdiction. If I sound irritated by what is going on, I think a good many Members of the Senate are irritated by what I believe is a show of disrespect for good government. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I make a point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, we are approaching the 1-year anniversary of the fatal crash of Continental Connection flight 3407 in Buffalo, NY, and today the National Transportation Safety Board is actually holding a public meeting to consider the final report they are making on that crash. I think almost everyone has heard the tragic story of that crash last February 12. Two pilots, two flight attendants, 45 passengers on that airplane, and 1 person on the ground lost their lives. This flight was operated by Colgan Air. The plane was a Bombardier Dash 8-Q400 operated by a captain and a copilot, both of whom had commuted long distances to get to work to make that flight, both of whom had been found to have very little rest before that flight. The copilot revealed her inexperience in the cockpit recording that I listened to--inexperience in flying in icy conditions--in the transcript of the voice recordings. The captain failed a number of tests in his career as a pilot. The NTSB is now considering 45 findings and conclusions at a public meeting as I speak. This morning the NTSB members said the plane and the flight crew were properly certified, and the plane was in good condition before takeoff. They also said the ice buildup that night flying into Buffalo was typical and did not affect the ability of the flight crew to fly the airplane. So while we are waiting for the final conclusions of the National Transportation Safety Board, the members of that board spoke about crew training, pilot fatigue, and pilot error as reasons for the crash. These are the issues I have been holding some hearings on this past year. The NTSB is going to make recommendations to the FAA. We already know that when they make recommendations, the appropriate agencies don't always pay attention to those recommendations. For example, pilot fatigue has continually been on the National Transportation Safety Board's most wanted list for 19 years; that is, most wanted list of safety recommendations. Let me say that again. For 19 straight years, the National Transportation Safety Board has said ``pilot fatigue'' is on the most wanted safety recommendations list. Yet no one has been listening. Nobody seemed to ring the bell on those issues. I have held seven hearings on safety in the aviation subcommittee that I chair in this Congress. We have heard from the FAA, the NTSB, pilots, regional airlines, major carriers, and safety experts. We have heard especially from the families who lost their loved ones in that fatal crash, that tragic crash in Buffalo, NY. Let me be quick to say, we have had, fortunately, reasonably few airline crashes in this country in recent years. It is, generally, a very safe way to travel. But there isn't room for error with respect to these commercially airplane flights. I am going to be holding followup hearings with Senator Rockefeller and others in the Commerce Committee with respect to the NTSB recommendations. We are supposed to have what is called ``one level of safety.'' The NTSB said, in the middle of the 1990s, there is one level of safety for commercial airplane flights in this country. The big, major trunk carriers that are national and international and the regional carriers shall have one level of safety. But it is the case that regional airlines often employ pilots with much less experience, much lower pay, which forces difficult conditions. In many cases, when you get on a small airplane for a regional flight, you see a crew with obviously much less experience. There are questions, from time to time, raised about the training--questions raised in this investigation, as a matter of fact. We know there are a lot of factors that play into this one level of safety. But I think most people believe that one level of safety standard, at this point, doesn't quite measure up. That is the reason we will examine the recommendations from the NTSB as a result of this crash. At the time of the crash outside Buffalo, NY, Colgan Air didn't have a remedial training program for pilots. The captain of the flight had failed numerous performance checks over the course of his career and would have made an excellent candidate for remedial training. I know the FAA has been working on the industry to try to get them to do this for a long while. If the traveling public ever begins to have very significant concerns about safety on a commercial airline flight, it will be devastating to that industry. So safety must not just be a perception. Safety on commercial airlines, whether they be the major trunk carriers or regional airlines, has to be something everybody takes seriously and that the American people believe is taken seriously. I wish to show you a chart that shows something that common sense would tell you doesn't work. This chart shows where Colgan Air pilots were commuting to. You will see they were commuting to Newark, their base of operations. On that fateful flight going into Buffalo, NY, the copilot flew all night long from her home in Seattle, WA, I believe deadheaded on a FedEx plane, stopped in Memphis, TN, changed planes, and got to Newark Airport. After flying all night long, she is now ready to take an airplane on its flight. There is no record of evidence of that copilot having a crash pad or someplace to find a bed and sleep. That is the copilot. The pilot, on the other hand, came from Florida to Newark Airport. There is no evidence, outside of being in the crew lounge at the airport, that the pilot had a bed in which to sleep or that he had rest. So you have a pilot and a copilot who get on that airplane to take, in this case, those 45 passengers on that airplane on its flight to Buffalo, NY. On that flight, ice built up on the wings, and there is what is called a stick shaker on that airplane. There was rapid shaking of the control stick, which would have said to the pilot you must put the nose down in order to gain additional speed. The pilot didn't put the nose down but pulled the nose up, as I understand it, which is apparently a training issue as well. So you have a pilot and copilot traveling across the country all night long just to get to their duty station, and things happened in the cockpit. In the transcript, the copilot said she had very little experience flying in icing. Both the pilot and copilot lost their lives. I take no joy in reciting what happened in that cockpit. Their loss of life was a tragedy for their families as well. My point is simply this: What happened here--by the way, I believe five out of the most recent seven airline crashes in our country have been on commuter carriers. This, it seems to me, raises a series of questions that must be addressed--and now I believe will be addressed in recommendations from the NTSB by the FAA, dealing with the issue of fatigue. Who is flying the planes? Are they getting proper rest? It deals with the issue of compensation. Is it the case that you get on a small jet and know that the copilot is making $18,000 a year or $20,000 a year, doing two jobs and flying across the country at night in order to get into an airplane cockpit? Does that give you confidence? The fact is, all these issues are now coming to the forefront--not just of this crash but other circumstances as well--and that requires the FAA to take a hard look at what happened. At one of my hearings, I showed a Wall Street Journal article, in which Mr. Wychor, an 18-year veteran pilot described the routine commuter flights with short layovers in the middle of the night. He said: Take a shower, brush your teeth, and pretend you slept. That is not what you want in the cockpit of an airplane. A 737 pilot flying to Denver said this, and this is an NBC News quote: I have been doing everything in my power to stay awake-- coffee, gum, candy. But as we entered one of the most critical phases of the flight, I had been up for 20 straight hours. That is an issue with me. It is one we have to address. I think all thoughtful people in that industry--and I have great admiration for people in the airplane industry. They do a great job. They understand we have to address these issues of fatigue, training, and compensation. That is just the fact. All I wished to do today was to say the National Transportation Safety Board, I think, does a great job investigating accidents. The family members of the victims of that flight that crashed in Buffalo, NY, have been extraordinary. They have come to every single hearing held on Capitol Hill. They are witnessing, on behalf of their brothers and sisters and wives and children, saying: I don't want Congress or the FAA to let up. We want you to address these issues. That crash didn't have to happen. Our loved ones did not have to die. That is their message. I say to them: You are doing exactly the right thing. What you are doing--showing up here at all these hearings and keeping the pressure on the Congress and, yes, on the FAA--will save lives. You will not know their names, but you are saving lives. Good for you. Cloture Motions Madam President, the issue of cloture motions sounds like a foreign language to a lot of people. If you are back home someplace and are getting up in the morning and struggling to get to work and putting in a full day and trying to make enough money to raise your family and get along in life, you don't know about cloture motions or the 2-day ripening or 30 hours postcloture. That sounds foreign to almost everybody. This is a graph of cloture motions in Congress. In the 1950s, there were two cloture motions filed in the entire decade. What does cloture mean? If you decide in this body--and you are the most junior Member of this body, you are the last one elected, you are the 100th in seniority and you sit back by the candy door because that is the last desk--I guess we should not talk about a candy drawer, perhaps, but you sit way back in the corner and you are No. 100 in the Senate. Once you are on your feet and recognized by the Presiding Officer, nobody else can take the floor from you--not the majority leader, not the most senior Member of the Senate. The floor is yours and you can speak until you are physically and mentally exhausted. That is the way the rules are; it is the way the Senate works. Washington described the Senate as a saucer that cools the coffee. You pour the coffee into the saucer and it cools. The Senate isn't supposed to work quickly or efficiently. It is supposed to slow things down, take a better look at it, and have more evaluation and ask: Does this make sense for the country? That is the way the Senate was created. It is hard to get things done. But it is near impossible to get things done these days because of something called a filibuster and cloture motions. I wish to provide some interesting statistics. This could not happen and wouldn't happen in any city council in America. There is no city council in America where this sort of thing could happen, no matter what the rules were, because they would be laughed out of town. We have people blocking bills they support. Can you imagine that? If you were on the city council and your business was to block things you support and your neighbor said: What are you doing, are you nuts? No, I am blocking things I support because it has a strategy attached to it. What is the strategy, they would say. Here is the situation: In 2009 and 2010, it is projected we will have 146 cloture motions to shut off debate in this Congress. Let me describe what we are involved with next. We are on one now, by the way. We are now in what is called 30 hours postcloture. We had a nomination that should have been approved in 5 minutes. Those who want to vote against the nomination should vote no. But we could not do that. Instead, those who oppose the nomination for the Solicitor for the Department of Labor, a nomination--instead of having an up-or-down vote, during which those who don't like this nominee should vote no, they said you cannot even have a vote. You have to file a cloture motion and then wait for 2 days and then have a vote and see if you get 60. If you get 60, after you get the 60, we are going to insist you bleed off 30 more hours because the rules allow us to do that. Only then can you have a vote. That is where we are now. We had a cloture vote. It prevailed. Now we are waiting for 30 hours to elapse so nothing can be done during the 30 hours. It is just stalling. So then the 30 hours is done, and we will vote on this. Then we will go to the next nomination. So this week we will do two nominations, both of which should have taken 5 minutes, if people of goodwill worked together and decided: Here is the agenda; let's bring up these candidates for a vote. And if you like the candidate vote yes; if you don't, vote no. So the next one is going to be Martha Johnson, GSA Administrator. By the way, this one has been objected to, and it has waited for 7 months. So 7 months ago this President nominated Martha Johnson to be GSA Administrator. April 3, 2009, was her nomination. June 8, the nomination passed through the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously. So this nomination was voted on unanimously and approved by the committee, and that was June 8. Here it is February of the year following, and we now are going to get to vote on this nomination that passed the committee unanimously, but not until we are able to shut off a filibuster and then have 30 hours postcloture. It is the most unbelievable thing in the world. Is this person qualified? Yes, absolutely. She served as the head of GSA during the Clinton administration and is hailed by former and current GSA employees as the ``golden heir of GSA.'' She was the chief of staff back during the Clinton administration. She would be a vast improvement, by the way, over the previous head of the GSA, the previous head of the GSA--and I spoke about her on the floor of the Senate--Lurita Doan. On April 29, 2008, the Office of Special Counsel for the United States asked that she be disciplined to the full extent for the most pernicious of political activity prohibited by the Hatch Act. She then submitted her resignation, in accordance with that request by the White House. She had been accused of providing no-bid contracts to friends with whom she had extensive personal and business relationships. She and a deputy in Karl Rove's office at the White House had joined in a video conference with 40 regional GSA Administrators after a PowerPoint on polling about the 2006 election, and she said: ``How can we help our candidates?'' This is a nonpolitical office--heading the GSA--in our country. This person got drummed out of office--and should have gotten drummed out of office--and resigned under pressure. So here is someone who is fully qualified and it is 7, 8 months later and we are finally going to get to have a vote, but only if we go through the motion of filing a cloture petition to end a filibuster. That is unbelievable to me. Let me give some other examples of what is happening. Here is a bill that was filibustered--the credit card holders bill of rights. There is a filibuster against that by the other side, the Republicans. They filibuster everything--everything. So the credit card holders bill of rights, they went through a filibuster, delayed, and after the delay it passed 90 to 5. Obviously, we had a bunch of folks who said: I am going to lay down on the track until it is inconvenient for everybody, and then I will get up and vote for it. We have people blocking things they support. You would get laughed out of town in any town in this country if you tried that on the city council. The Department of Defense appropriations--filibuster. Had to go through the motion of filing--2 days, 30 hours--and then it passed 88 to 10. So, obviously, we had a bunch of folks on the other side who decided they were going to block something they supported, kind of a curious strategy. The Energy and Water appropriations bill--that was my bill that I chaired--went through filibuster, cloture, and in the end 80 people voted yes. The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act was filibustered by the Republicans. Then when it was finally voted upon, after they had delayed it, 92 of them voted yes. Again, we see people blocking things they support. Only in the United States Congress, I guess. Unemployment compensation extension was the subject of a filibuster, and then 98 people voted yes. People blocking things they support. What a curious thing. I mean, what do you tell your children if they ask: What was your role, Dad or Mom? My role was to slow things down. I just wanted to sort of spread glue around the Senate. Not that we don't think it is slow enough the way it is, we want to slow it down even further. The fact is, people send men and women of goodwill to this Chamber. One of the things I have learned in many years in this Chamber is that almost every desk is occupied by someone who has pretty unique and interesting and special skills to get here. In almost every case, there are people here with very substantial skills. But they are not sent here with an agenda that says: You know what I would like you to do? I would like you to block everything and then vote for it in the end. That is not a message that comes from any State that I am aware of. They are sent here to try to do good things for this country. All of us are. We might have a disagreement about what that means and how to do it, but there shouldn't be any disagreement about these kinds of things. In the middle of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, seven of this President's high-level nominees for the Treasury Department are not yet confirmed--seven of them. How do you justify that? How do you justify deciding, in the middle of the deepest recession since the 1930s, that you are going to prevent the U.S. Treasury Department from having a full complement of people who can think through and work through trying to put this country back on track; who can restart the economic engine and put people back to work again? How do you justify deciding we shouldn't have a full complement of people to do that? We had a fully qualified Surgeon General who was nominated, and that Surgeon General nominee was blocked. And this was after the H1N1 flu had been declared a major health threat. Think of that. That nominee was blocked even after we had a major health threat. We had the Ambassador of Iraq--obviously an important position--blocked during a time of war just when we most needed to resolve some political issues there. One single Senator on the other side held up the nomination of the Deputy U.S. Trade Representative for 9 months--9 months that was held up--to try to force that U.S. Trade Representative's Office to file a complaint against Canada on some issue. I don't have the foggiest idea what that issue was, but I will tell you this: I would never, and have never, held up a nomination for 9 months in order to try to force something that I insist should happen. That is not the way the Senate is supposed to work. One Senator on the other side blocked a highly qualified nominee to be Assistant Under Secretary for the Western Hemisphere at the State Department, and it had to do with our relationship with Hugo Chavez, which left us without the person who was supposed to be responsible for coordinating our response to the difficulty in Honduras last year. One Senator held up that nomination on and on and on. Again, the fact is, as I said, this is called the great debating body, the most exclusive club in the world, and all of those descriptions. But this is not the way it is supposed to work. We have some models of how it is supposed to work. In the old days--and when I say the old days, I mean some decades ago--people would get together and decide what is the major challenge facing our country and how do we work together to find a way to resolve it; not who gets the credit or who gets the blame, but what is needed to be done to fix what is wrong in America. That is the way the Senate used to work. Regrettably, these days, it does not. Our country rests on the precipice of a very significant cliff. We are still not out of this financial and economic crisis, although I think there has been some stability and we have, hopefully, found some foundation. But at a time when we most need cooperation, we see almost none--almost none. It doesn't. Just read the record: An estimated 146 cloture petitions are filed to shut off filibusters, and on issue after issue after issue we have the minority in this Chamber blocking things they ultimately vote for. How do you explain that--I was against it before I was for it? Madam President, this country deserves and expects a whole lot better. This country is going through tough times. While I speak here, and while my colleagues are objecting to proceeding on anything--while we are in a 30-hour period where nothing is happening on the floor of the Senate--nothing--a whole lot of people are out looking for work. They are stopping by business after business with their resume, and thinking: Can I find a way? Can I please find a way to get on a payroll and get a job to help my family? There are a whole lot of folks who need a job, need some hope, need to keep their house, who are struggling. They deserve a lot better from this Congress. The last thing they deserve is a Congress that decides its mission in life is to stop things from happening. The mission for every Senator ought to be to get up in the morning and reach out and see how we can work together to get the best ideas of what both parties have to offer this country. That is happening far too seldom in this Chamber. It is not my habit to come to the Senate floor to be critical of the Republican side of the Senate. I don't do that often, but I see what is happening. We are sitting here today--and this is a good example of it--for 30 hours doing nothing. Why? Is it because there is nothing to do? No. It is because the other side insists on cloture, insists on the 2 days, then insists on the 30 hours. So what they will have done this week is insist that we will only be able to confirm two Presidential nominees--one is a Solicitor General in the Labor Department and the second is to head the GSA. That is what we will get done this week. That should have been done in 5 minutes, having a vote on those nominations. If you don't like the nominee, vote no; if you like the nominee, vote yes. Dispose of the nominations. In my judgment, this system is broken, and it can't be 1 person or 10 people who fix it. It has to be 100 people with reasonably goodwill who want to make good things happen for the future of this country. Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, on Wednesday of last week the President gave his State of the Union Address and talked about a lot of issues. One of the issues he mentioned that is especially important to me is one I have worked on for some long while here in the Senate, and that is changing the Tax Code to begin cutting out and getting rid of the tax break that is offered to companies that shut their American factories and move their jobs overseas. It is strange to most people to hear, but we actually have in the American Tax Code a reward for companies that would say: You know what I should do? What I want to do is shut down my American factory, I want to fire my American workers, I want to move those jobs to China and hire somebody for 50 cents an hour. By the way, if they do that, they actually get a tax break in this country. They get rewarded by the American tax system for moving American jobs to other countries. That is an unbelievably ignorant and pernicious part of our Tax Code and needs to be changed. I have offered amendment after amendment here on the floor of the Senate on it, and the President in his State of the Union Address last week indicated he believed we needed to do this and do it soon. I could not agree more. We are talking about jobs a lot in this Congress. We have had some discussions today about jobs again. Senator Durbin and I have worked to put together a jobs package that would try to stimulate and incentivize more jobs, especially small and medium-size businesses to be able to hire people and have the incentive to put people on payrolls. We are working on all of that. Senator Baucus and certainly Senator Reid and others have been working together with us to put together a jobs initiative. Even as we try to find a way to create more jobs in our country, we still have this backdoor approach in the Tax Code that rewards people for moving jobs outside of our country. Most of us believe what we want to do is see more of those signs that say ``Made in the USA.'' Made in the USA means there is a job someplace here, particularly in a factory that is producing something, that is putting somebody to work to be able to make a living, to provide for their family. No special program is as important as a good job that pays well. I have both written a book about this issue of moving jobs overseas and I have spoken on the floor so many times people have either nearly or completely gotten tired of it. But the stories are legend of what has happened in recent years. All of the little things we know and have expected to be American made--almost all of those things are gone. Radio Flyer Little Red Wagon--we have all ridden in it. It was a 110- year-old company in this country. They made those wagons for kids in America, made in Illinois. Not anymore. All those Radio Flyer Little Red Wagons are made in China. Huffy Bicycles--all those people in Ohio lost their jobs. They were all fired and all those bicycles are now made in China. In the book I wrote I told the story about the last day at work at Huffy Bicycles in Ohio and those workers. As they left their parking lot, they left an empty pair of shoes in the space where their car was parked. It was a way for them to say to that company, the Huffy Bicycle Company: You can move our jobs if you want, but you are not going to be able to effectively replace us. Those shoes, in an empty parking space in a big parking lot in Ohio when all those people lost their jobs, were a symbol of what is wrong. A little company made something called Etch A Sketch. Every kid used an Etch A Sketch. It was also made in Ohio. Not anymore. It is now made in China. The list goes on and on, those American products that are gone in search of 50-cent labor and higher profits. The people who make these products--Radio Flyer Little Red Wagons or Huffy Bicycles or Etch A Sketch or, yes, even airplanes--the people who make these products ask the question, What is wrong with my work? The answer is nothing is wrong with your work. You just can't compete with somebody who makes 50 cents an hour. The second question is, Should I have to compete with somebody who makes 50 cents an hour? The answer to that is no, you should not. This country needs a vibrant manufacturing base and it needs to fix this unbelievable tax provision that says if you move your jobs overseas, we will give you a tax break. In order to remain with a manufacturing base in this country, we need to reward the production of things in this country. ``Made in the USA'' should not be a distant memory. ``Made in the USA'' ought to be something applied to things made here that we are proud of. The Senator from Washington State is here. She is going to speak in a moment. I will not be long. But in every circumstance in this area of trade and the movement of jobs, other countries take advantage of us because we allow them to. For example, airplanes--Washington State makes some great airplanes in the Boeing Company manufacturing plants. A country such as China that has an unbelievable trade deficit with us, over $200 billion a year, says to us: If you want China to buy your planes you have to build most of it in China. It doesn't make any sense to me. If we are buying all those products from China in this country when we have something they need, they ought to buy American products to be shipped to China, not say to us you must move your product to be produced in China. It is going on all the time and this country doesn't have the backbone or nerve or will to deal with it. What we ought to say to other countries is we are going to hold up a mirror and you treat us as we treat you. If I might make one additional comment on automobile trade. Our automobile industry has been in a very serious problem. We came close to losing our automobile industry in this country, which is so important for our manufacturing capability. This country has a trade agreement with China, with whom we have a $200-plus billion a year deficit in trade. We have a trade agreement with China that says to the Chinese--who are, by the way, ramping up a very large automobile export industry and you will see Chinese cars on the streets of America very soon--we say to China: If you ship Chinese cars to the United States of America you will have a 2.5-percent tariff attached to those cars. But the agreement also says if we ship American cars to be sold in China, they may impose a 25-percent tariff. We have an agreement with the Chinese that says we will give you a 10-to-1 advantage on tariffs in bilateral automobile trade. That is a recipe for undermining America's manufacturing and economic strength and it goes on all the time. Frankly, I am sick and tired of it. One piece of it is something the President talked about last week and that is let's at least cut out this unbelievably ignorant and pernicious provision that says: You move your jobs overseas and we will give you a big tax reward. We will cut your taxes if you move your jobs overseas. I say to the President: Good for you. Help us shut that provision down. Let's have ``Made in America'' be something we see more and more frequently these days. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, let me thank my colleague from the State of Washington. She has been tireless in trying to address these issues, both in legislation and on the floor of the Senate during debate, and it is so important. I, too, voted against Mr. Bernanke's nomination today, and I wish to explain why. It is certainly not that I believe Mr. Bernanke is a bad guy. He is not. He is a well-respected economist. But I wish to talk a little about the issues that persuade me we need a change--a change in culture, a change in personnel--in some respects. If ever there now is a bright line in America between those who are too big to fail and those who are too small to matter;--that is, the too big to fail are the biggest financial institutions in the country that have been making a lot of money, paying large bonuses, and living high off the hog. The too small to matter are the folks on Main Street who sink everything their family has into a business trying to run a grocery store, maybe a drugstore, a gas station, a barbershop, a restaurant, and then they discover they cannot make a go of it because things turn against them, and they are told: Do you know what. That was your risk. If you can't make a go of it, that is your problem. What you do is you lock the door, somebody sells the inventory, and you are out of business. By contrast, the biggest financial institutions that were engaged in wholesale gambling--everything but the Keno tables and the craps tables and the blackjack tables in their lobby, everything but that; it was the same thing--and ran their company and their country into the ground, they were told: Well, do you know what. You are so big, we can't possibly let you fail, so we are going to give you a bailout. So that is the too big to fail versus the too small to matter. Is it any wonder people are furious in this country about that kind of assessment, that kind of value system? Well, Mr. Bernanke is a nice guy. So is my Uncle Harold, by the way. Mr. Bernanke is an economist. My Uncle Harold is not. Mr. Bernanke has now been the Chair of the Fed for a while. Before that, he was part of the economics team in the previous administration that turned, by the way, a big budget surplus in the year 2000--the first budget surplus for the Federal Government in a long, long time. The new administration came in and turned that into the biggest deficits in history up until now. So I am not impressed with the whole scheme of a fiscal policy that turns the country from big budget surpluses to big budget deficits. But with respect to the Federal Reserve Board itself, the Federal Reserve Board has had responsibilities. Those responsibilities, first by Alan Greenspan at the Fed--and by the way, while Alan Greenspan was at the Fed, Mr. Bernanke was at the Fed as well during part of that time, and now it has been Mr. Bernanke's tenure at the Fed--the responsibilities are to supervise the banks, to deal with predatory lending, to address some of the scandalous behavior of some of the brokers in the subprime market. Yet they did nothing. All of this went on under their noses. The question for me in dealing with Mr. Bernanke and others is, How many times do we have to learn the same lesson? I have been here at a time when the savings and loans collapsed in this country. The S&L collapse--it was not surprising why they collapsed because we had a bunch of folks who used the savings and loan like a big piggy bank. They were parking junk bonds at the savings and loans organizations. The savings and loans were actually gathering deposits from around the country, and they were like Roman candles, just taking a small, little, sleepy savings and loan and turning it into a big institution with lots of deposits overnight. Then guys like Mr. Milken were parking junk bonds in the S&Ls, insured by the Federal Government; that is, the American taxpayers, and things collapsed, and it cost hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. The most perverse result was the American taxpayer got stuck with junk bonds in the Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City. Think of that. How did that happen? Well, Donald Trump builds a casino, and whoever it is decides to take the junk bonds from the casino and park them in a savings and loan. The savings and loan is guaranteed by the American taxpayer. The savings and loan goes bankrupt. So the junk bonds in the savings and loan are now at the Resolution Trust Corporation, and the American people end up with junk bonds in a casino. Isn't that unbelievable? Do we have to learn that lesson again? Well, we did then. We learned it a second time after the S&L collapse. We learned it with the Enron Corporation, which in part was a criminal enterprise. They were manipulating wholesale electric markets on the west coast-- schemes such as Get Shorty, Fat Boy, just to name a couple--and then having people, in addition to these schemes, shut off and turn on powerplants in order to manipulate supply so they could fleece taxpayers and fleece ratepayers on the west coast out of billions of dollars. It was one of the greatest robberies in the history of our country. I led the hearings. I chaired the hearings over in the Commerce Committee. Ken Lay came and raised his hand. We swore him in. He took the fifth amendment. He is now dead. But he was on his way to prison. Mr. Jeff Skilling from Enron Corporation came and just talked and talked and talked. It turns out none of it was accurate. He is now in prison. So we had to learn a second time about the fleecing of America--the big S&L scandal that cost the American taxpayers an unbelievable amount of money; then the Enron scandal--a corporation that does not now exist that became, in part, as I said, a criminal enterprise; and now this financial house of cards that collapsed on this country. It is not surprising why it collapsed. What happened was we had some of the biggest financial entrepreneurs in this country--some of the biggest operators, I should call them, not entrepreneurs--some of the biggest financial operators in this country who were engaged in full-scale gambling with their company money, the biggest financial companies in this country. My colleague talked about credit default swaps and CDOs and so on. We had synthetic derivatives. Do you know what synthetic derivatives are? At least a derivative is something you can reasonably explain because it has some value. It is connected to some value on each side of the trade. Synthetic derivatives are simply an artificial device that allows you to place a wager on whether something will happen, unrelated to value on either side of the trade. It is as if to say: Take the biggest investment banks in America and put a craps table in their lobbies and let them gamble from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. and let the American taxpayer pay their losses. That is exactly what has happened. Now, what is happening today? Well, this is Bloomberg News: Wall Street is marketing derivatives last seen before credit markets froze in 2007. . . . Actually, I have it on a bigger chart here. Wall Street is [now back] marketing derivatives last seen before credit markets froze in 2007, as the record bond rally prompts investors to take more risks to boost returns. Bank of America Corp. and Morgan Stanley are encouraging clients to buy swaps that pay higher yields for speculating on the extent of losses in corporate defaults. And again: Banks Reviving Synthetic Bets as [Paul] Volcker Blasts Default Swaps. Bloomberg. So here we are. The financial system collapsed, steered this economy right into a ditch. Millions and millions of Americans lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost hope, and are still struggling. The biggest interests got bailed out and made whole and now are making record profits again and are prepared to pay $140 billion, I am told, in bonuses. And now we see they are back to trading synthetic derivatives--the very same firms. How often do we have to learn this lesson--once, twice, three times, or ten times--before the Congress will decide: No more of it. My point is, just like with kids, you say: Do you know what. You better hope your kids are running around in a good crowd. That is the success, isn't it, having them run around in a good crowd as opposed to a bad crowd? As I take a look at all these nominations and appointments, the question for me is, What kind of crowd do they run around in? And do you know what. There is a kind of insular crowd that all comes from the same locations, and they all believe the same thing, and the fact is none of them have the stomach or the interest or the courage to decide to shut down what is essentially gambling on Wall Street and firms that are too big to fail, which means it is no-fault capitalism and the American people will pay the consequences. None of them have the courage to do that. In fact, they have now been given a year to organize to try to stop anything that is done here in the U.S. Congress. I will say once again, it was 10 years ago when I stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate and was one of eight Senators to vote against the piece of legislation that created these big holding companies--the Financial Services Modernization Act, it was called--to repeal the protections that were put in place after the Great Depression. I said, 10 years ago, I think that is going to set this country up for massive taxpayer bailouts. No, I do not have a crystal ball, and I do not necessarily prognosticate very well. But I knew that if we allowed those who wanted to do one-stop financial shopping--putting together securities with banking, investment banking with FDIC-insured banking--we were headed directly toward a cliff. And 10 years later, it is the biggest financial scandal in the history of this country, and this economy barely survived it. The American people lost $15 trillion in value as a result of this economic collapse--$15 trillion. So who is accountable? Well, there have never been the kinds of hearings I think there should have been developing a master narrative of what happened and who was responsible and who was accountable and where the buck ought to stop. But we know some of it. We know who had some responsibility: the Federal Reserve Board. Mr. Greenspan has since come to Congress and apologized because he said he was mistaken. He thought self-regulation would be just fine. Well, that is not why we have regulators. We have regulators because we know self-regulation does not work. The free market system is wonderful, but you need effective regulators who take a look at what is going on and call the fouls and blow the whistle when they see the fouls. We went through a period where it was, ``Katy, bar the door,'' do anything you like, and that is what happened. The big banks took leverage from 10 times capital to 30 times capital. They began selling derivatives and credit default swaps and, pretty soon, synthetic derivatives, which were just instruments of gaming, and nobody seemed to care. At the same time, in another area of financial enterprise, we began to see the development of this new, aggressive orgy in mortgage scams to say to people: If you can't afford to buy a home, we have a mortgage for you. If you have bad credit, we have a mortgage for you. If you have been bankrupt--slow pay, no pay--come to us; we will help you buy a home. By the way, everybody was getting big fees. They wrapped it into a security, sold the security from the mortgage bank to a hedge fund, to an investment bank, and everybody knew better. Pretty soon, the whole thing collapsed, and the American people were told: Now you pay the cost. You pay the cost to clean up this mess. Well, at every step along the way, the Federal Reserve Board had a responsibility. Bad behavior by brokers, bad behavior by mortgage banks--they had a responsibility to oversee those things. And today we read that synthetic derivatives are now being pushed by Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. So what is the Federal Reserve Board doing about that? What about that buildup of additional bubbles of risk? Does anybody care? Is there anybody who is going to do anything about that? Mr. Bernanke is a good guy, but the fact is, he is part of the crowd that I think helped cause these problems. I think--and I have said candidly--during the darkest period, where there was the question of whether this economy would completely collapse, Mr. Bernanke made some fine decisions. I do not think he is a bad person at all. But I do not think he--by the way, this would apply to some others in areas of responsibility--I do not think he comes from the culture to say that this whole set of activities has to change and change now and change aggressively. Let me complete my thought by simply saying that I understand how important banking is. I understand how important investment banking is. I understand the financing system of our country is important and needs to be strong. I am not suggesting that somehow you can finance all the things we want to do in our country out of somebody's garage. That is not my point. My point is, however, there is the right way and the wrong way to construct a system of financing. We have, over 200 years, seen this back-and-forth between those who produce and those who finance production. Sometimes one has the edge in terms of strength and power, and sometimes the other does. In the last 20 or 30 years, in my judgment, those who finance production have really been pulling the strings in this country as opposed to those who produce. That is why we have fewer good jobs in this country, and it is why we see more and more of the profits and more and more of the gross incomes that swell the paychecks of a lot of people at the top coming from investment banking and some of the biggest financial firms in the country. I do not think that is healthy for the country, as a matter of fact. So I voted against Mr. Bernanke. I voted for cloture because I am not somebody who wanted to prevent a vote on it. But I did decide long ago that I was not going to be supportive. Let me make one final point. That is this: Mr. Bernanke, during the height of the crisis, opened, for the first time in history, the Federal Reserve Board to give direct loans to investment banks-- the first time ever they have given direct loans to commercial banks but never before to investment banks. He opened the window to say we are going to give direct loans to investment banks. My guess is trillions of dollars went out in direct loans. In my judgment, the American people and the Congress have a responsibility to know who got those loans, how much, and what were the terms. We have written to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board--myself, Senator Grassley, and eight others--to say: You now have a responsibility to tell us who got that money and what were the terms. His answer to us was: I have no intention of telling you. That is not acceptable to me and should not be acceptable to the Congress or to the American people, and that is another reason that I would not advance this nomination. Madam President, I yield the floor, and I make a point of order that a quorum is not present.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this weekend there was some discussion and writing in the papers and elsewhere in journals about the nomination of Mr. Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, for another term as chair on that Board. The Washington Post had an editorial entitled ``Scapegoat at the Fed.'' I don't normally come to the floor of the Senate to respond to the Washington Post editorials, but I do wish to respond to a portion of this editorial, and then in a broader way describe why I think this is an important moment for the Senate. ``Scapegoat at the Fed.'' The editorial begins: There are many ways to interpret the election results in Massachusetts last week . . . But one thing Massachusetts did not represent was a mandate to make a national scapegoat out of Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Board chairman. Yet two Democratic Senators seeking reelection in November . . . plus another planning to retire . . . appear to read it that way. They took the occasion of last week's political upheaval to announce their opposition to another four-year term for Mr. Bernanke, whose current one expires January 31. These senators' attempt to burnish their populist credentials by making Mr. Bernanke the fall guy for all the sins, real and perceived, of Wall Street fuels the right-left anti-Fed chorus in Congress that has already produced troubling attempts to subject the Fed to intrusive and counterproductive audits of its monetary policy. Well, that is a partial recitation of the editorial. I can just condense the editorial by saying the editorial board at the Washington Post, as is always the case, has taken the position that if anybody wants to know anything about what the Federal Reserve Board is doing, it is none of their business. It is none of Congress's business; it is none of the American people's business. Stay out of it. Keep your nose out of the Federal Reserve Board. That is kind of the position of the Washington Post. It is not since the Massachusetts election, however, that I have expressed reservations about the Federal Reserve Board. In fact, on six occasions I have given speeches on the floor of the Senate just since December 10, 2008. That day, plus on five additional occasions, I came to the floor to talk about the issues that persuaded me to say, as I did last week, that I don't even believe we should vote on Mr. Bernanke's nomination until he has decided to provide the Senate and the American people with information that he is now withholding. Let me describe what that is. This is a Bloomberg report. It says: The U.S. has lent, spent, or guaranteed $11.6 trillion to bolster banks and to fight the longest recession in 70 years. I have not come to the floor of the Senate critical of the Fed's policies by which they have lent, spent, or guaranteed $11.6 trillion; although it is fair to say the $11.6 trillion is not theirs. That represents the risks of the American people. That is the full faith and credit of this great country of ours. The Federal Reserve Board has taken a number of actions to try to address this economic crisis. However, I would suggest this economic crisis was caused, at least in significant part, by the malfeasance of the Federal Reserve Board and its previous Chairman, and, in some respects, this Chairman, who were content to take a long slumber, a very long nap, while the predatory lending was going on, the housing bubble was growing, and a massive amount of bad securities were finding their way--along with the payment of a lot of generous bonuses and fees--into the financial background of a lot of financial institutions in this country. It says: The Federal last year began extending credit directly to companies that aren't banks for the first time since it was created in 1913 . . . it has refused to divulge the details about the companies participating in the 10 lending programs. For the first time in the history of this country, during this response to the economic crisis, the Federal Reserve Board did this, which previously has only lent money directly to FDIC-insured commercial banks. That is the only group of interests that can come to the Fed and get direct money from them. For the first time in history, the Fed said, during this crisis, we will open that window to allow investment banks to come and get money directly from us. So I began coming to the floor of the Senate, and I didn't come criticizing the Fed at that point because I don't know if what they did was necessary, but they did it. I wasn't critical. We were in the middle of a crisis. Then I began coming to the floor and saying: All right. Now that we have some amount of stability, let's at least make certain the Federal Reserve Board tells the American people who got the money, who ended up with the money, and what were the terms of its being made available to these investment banks. Well, a Federal court, as a result of a FOIA request and a lawsuit said this, and it was reported in Bloomberg: The Federal Reserve must, for the first time, identify the companies in its emergency lending programs after losing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The judge said the central bank improperly withheld agency records. He said you have to disclose who got the money. The Federal Reserve Board said we are going to appeal the judge's ruling. We don't intend to comply with that. We are going to appeal it and get a stay. The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion in emergency loans from the American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral. The Federal court says you have to do it, and they appealed the court ruling and got a stay and they are saying we don't intend to do it. In the meantime, I and Senator Grassley authored a letter with eight of our colleagues to the Federal Reserve Board last July and said: We want you to disclose to the Congress and the American people who got the money and how much and what the terms were. We got a letter back from the Federal Reserve Board, dated September 16. It has a lot of paragraphs in it, but you can summarize it this way: No. It is interesting to me that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board has said: We believe one of the hallmarks of what we are doing is transparency. I don't understand, if transparency means you are going to disclose things and give people the opportunity to understand what happened, why is there no transparency? Even after a Federal court said you improperly withheld records, even after Members of the Senate said make this information available, even after the American people said we deserve to know who got our money, the Federal Reserve Board said: We don't intend to tell you a thing. There are a couple trillion dollars out there that the Fed has made available. It was a risk to the American taxpayer, and $2 trillion is not a small amount; it is a very large amount. The Fed said: That is our business, not yours. That is the business of the Federal Reserve Board. We, in effect, have a right to operate in secret and we intend to continue to do that. My problem with Mr. Bernanke--as I have said last week, I don't think his nomination should be voted on in the Senate until and unless he discloses to us and the American people the details about this $2 trillion and who got it. What were the terms? We now see some of the investment banks reporting the largest profits in their history, and they are preparing now to provide bonuses, we are told, of $120 billion to $140 billion. These are firms, by the way, that would no longer exist were it not for the Federal Government. These are firms perched on the edge of a financial cliff, ready to go under, except for the guarantee of the Federal Government in all kinds of ways. Of course, they are the first to get well. No, it is not a company back on Main Street, not a company back in my hometown. The first to get well in this new economy are the investment banks. Did they get well because they were able to get a couple trillion dollars from the Federal Reserve Board, probably at zero interest rate--I don't know--and invest back into Treasury securities and get paid interest on it? Were they arbitraging money? I don't know. I think we ought to know. We have a right to know. Mr. President, the issue, from my standpoint especially, is, we have a right to know, and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board has a responsibility to tell us and the American people. I noticed last weekend, when these writers, including editorial writers and others, were having an apoplectic seizure over this issue: Oh, My God, somebody might vote against Bernanke. Then they say: You know what. More than that being what they call Fed bashing--it is not--it is also the case that this Congress is thinking of tightening the rules on financial regulations to prevent those who were doing what they did to create this crisis from ever doing it again. Shame on them. That is antibusiness. Isn't it interesting how this has morphed into a situation where, if we want to close the gate and create rules that prevent the kind of nonsense that happened from ever happening again, which drove this country into the ditch, somehow that is antibusiness. I don't think so. I think what is antibusiness is this notion of Alan Greenspan--and I will put up his quote--came to Congress after the fact, after the collapse, and he said: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their own equity in the firms. His point was, we don't need to regulate or oversee anything. Self- regulation will work best. They will be fine. Leave them alone and they will come home. What an unbelievable, tragic mistake by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests . . . were best capable-- It is a suggestion that somehow capitalism works and you don't need any regulatory oversight at all because the free market is best left to its own devices. The free market is the best allocator of goods and services I know of by far, and I support the free market. I also understand that, such as in any other area of competition, you need a referee, somebody with a striped shirt who blows the whistle when there is a foul. There are plenty of fouls in the free market system. That is why you need a referee. You need regulation. That is not a 4-letter word. It is called regulation. You need effective regulation to make sure the free market system works the way it was supposed to work. There are a lot of interests in this free market system that want to clog the arteries of the free market and cause some sort of substantial problem in the free market, as long as it exists in their self- interests to do so. There are plenty of interests wanting to do it. That is why effective regulation is important. I am not talking about overregulation or underregulation; I am talking about effective regulation that is anticipated and which, for about 8 years, took a vacation by the hiring of regulators who actually boasted they were going to be willfully blind and say: You all do what you want to do in this system because we will not look. I brought, again--and I know it is repeating--some of the things nobody looked at. The biggest mortgage company in the country that helped set up the subprime scandal that fed itself into the balance sheets of banks--commercial banks and investment banks--and caused a massive collapse and about $15 trillion of lost value to the American people. We all have seen Countrywide's advertisements: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? Have you been denied by other lenders? Call us. . . . That is unbelievable. You may think: How on Earth can that be a business model? They were advertising to say: Are you a bad credit risk? We want to do business with you. If you have missed payments or been bankrupt, come see us. This is Zoom Credit. Here is their advertisement. We saw these on television and heard them on the radio and saw them in newspapers. We thought: How did this work? They said this: Credit approval is just seconds away. Get on the fast track at Zoom Credit. At the speed of light, Zoom Credit will preapprove you for a car loan, a home loan, or a credit card. Even if your credit's in the tank. Zoom Credit's like money in the bank. Zoom Credit specializes in credit repair and debt consolidation, too. Bankruptcy, slow credit, no credit-- who cares? Can you imagine that? This is an advertisement from a mortgage company saying if you have been bankrupt or have slow or no credit, who cares. Finally, this is Millennia Mortgage: 12 months, no mortgage payment. That's right. We will give you the money to make your first 12 payments if you call within the next 2 days. We pay it for you. Our loan program may reduce your current monthly payments by 50 percent and allow you no payments for the first 12 months. We saw all these things as they were creating the rot at the bottom of this system from which the house of cards collapsed. By the way, all this put mortgages out there in the country and the result was those mortgages were wrapped into securities and those securities were then sold from mortgage companies to hedge funds and investment banks, selling the risk north so they didn't have the risk anymore. There is no underwriting at the bottom because you don't have to underwrite if you sell the risk ahead. Then we saw the spectacle of very large commercial banks with their financial belly loaded with this rot--CDOs, credit default swaps, you name it. There were securities rated AAA that were worthless. Then we all stood around scratching our heads wondering: How did this happen? It was unbelievable, unprecedented greed. A lot of people at the top made massive amounts of money. The guy who ran Countrywide got away with about $200 million, I believe. That is now under investigation. A lot of them got away with a lot of money. Then this country and the American people got stuck with about a $15 trillion bill and an economy that has been limping ever since. One asks the questions: Is it Fed bashing? Is it antibusiness? Is it Fed bashing to say the Fed owes the American people information about who got the $2 trillion and what the terms were? Is it antibusiness for those of us who are trying to put together rules and regulations that say this cannot happen again, we will not allow that? I wish to close with one additional quote. This one is from me. It was almost 10\1/2\ years ago on the floor of the Senate when we passed legislation at the request of all those big financial institutions, the investment banks, you name it. They wanted to strip away protections that were put into place after the Great Depression, saying it was old- fashioned; let's compete with the Japanese and Asians and others in commercial finance--one-stop financial service centers, create big holding companies and put it together, commercial and investment and securities, all in one big tub and put up firewalls and we guarantee you will never be hurt and we will be able to better compete. On the floor of the Senate I said this: This bill will, in my judgment, raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts. It will fuel the consolidation and mergers in the banking and financial services industry at the expense of customers and others. It certainly did that. For those of us who decide: You know what, let's begin to put some of these pieces back together, let's begin to provide some protection for this country's economy, let's get rid of this orgy of speculation, that unbelievable greed, this bubble of incompetence of people who were supposed to be regulating but didn't-- yes, that includes the Federal Reserve Board. Let's do this right and put it back together. That is not antibusiness; that is probusiness. The businesspeople in this country who go to work in the morning and put a key in the door and open are going to work all day, risking everything they have. They want an economy that is working, not in collapse but one that is providing opportunity. That certainly cannot happen, and it doesn't happen, when you allow this kind of unbelievable speculation and the rancid behavior and the things that happened at the bottom with the predatory lending and exotic things such as CDOs and credit default swaps, so complicated that those on both ends of them, in many cases, didn't understand them. Will Rogers once described, a long time ago, people who bought things they will never get from people who never had them and both smiled because both made money. That is the sort of thing that was going on in this country, and that does not work. The real economic health and the real wealth of this country is what we produce, not trading paper and especially not trading paper as a matter of speculation to try to build the bubbles we saw in the last decade or so. We have a lot to do to fix what is wrong. I say to those who wrote the Washington Post editorial, the smallest amount of effort could have avoided that mistake in terms of the six speeches I have given on the floor of the Senate on this subject. This is not a revelation since the Massachusetts election. I have been coming to the Senate floor for a long time to talk about these problems. Let me finally say, I think as we move from here to the issue of financial reform, aside from the Bernanke nomination, the question is: Are we going to do that right? Are we going to allow the kind of pressures that have built on the outside to influence what we do? We should certainly know by now that if you are too big to fail in the financial industry, then you are too big and we ought to do something about it. We ought to know by now that putting together commercial banks that are insured by the taxpayers with investment banks is a recipe for disaster, and there is a way to separate them. That ought to be our business as we turn to financial reform in the years ahead. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, yesterday President Obama made some recommendations that have caused quite a stir, especially on the morning shows on television today. The President suggested something that is called radical by some of the commentators: he suggested that banks--commercial banks, FDIC-insured banks, insured by the American taxpayers--should not be essentially gambling or investing in risky instruments, risky securities on their own proprietary accounts. It has been going on for a long time. This President said let's stop that. We have seen such a financial wreck, in which our economy was steered right into the ditch, where something like $15 trillion of value had been lost by American households. The President said we need to make some fundamental changes. One change, which isn't even, in my judgment, a significant change--at least not in the context of what must be done and should be done--is to limit the ability of FDIC-insured financial institutions to invest in, speculate in, and buy and trade derivatives on their own proprietary accounts. That should not have been going on at all. Fifteen years ago, I wrote the cover story for the Washington Monthly magazine on this very subject. The title of the article was ``Very Risky Business.'' I talked then about how FDIC-insured banks in this country were trading on their own proprietary accounts in derivatives-- $16 trillion of value in derivatives at that time. They were trading on their own proprietary accounts, which puts taxpayers at risk. They might as well put a Keno table or a craps table in their lobby. It is flatout gambling. The President said yesterday: Let's have legislation that stops that. I agree. The President said something else that is very important: Let's limit the size of financial organizations that are ``too big to fail.'' We have a category in this capitalistic system of ours called ``too big to fail''--a category that is managed by the Federal Reserve Board. They have a list of which institutions are too big to fail. I thought this system of ours--capitalism--is that you succeed or fail based on your own merit. That is not the case. We have now witnessed in the last year and a half which institutions are not allowed to fail. We have people who go to work every day to a business they started with their own capital. They and their family have invested in a shoe store or a hardware store or gas station, and they open the door in the morning and they are open for business that day and the risk is all theirs. By the way, they are allowed to fail, and many have done so during this economic downturn, but not the biggest financial interests--they are too big to fail. That is called no-fault capitalism. They can gamble in their lobby, and the American taxpayer will pay the bill. That is what has been going on. This President says--and he is right--if you are too big to fail, you are too big. Let's begin limiting the size. This morning, I listened to some of the commentators have an apoplectic seizure. They said that if we cannot be bigger and bigger, how do we compete with the Europeans? That is exactly what we heard 10\1/2\ years ago now--when the Congress passed legislation that took apart the protections put into place after the Great Depression. This legislation gave free rein to this unbelievable orgy of speculation in high finance that led this country right into the ditch, led this country's economy into a colossal wreck. The result of all of that has been catastrophic for the American people. The result of all of that has been trillions of dollars of lost value for American families and an unbelievable unemployment problem--people by the millions losing their jobs, their homes, and losing hope. The President made two recommendations yesterday, which I support. You would think he was suggesting somehow that he is going to completely take apart the American free enterprise system. That is absolutely absurd. I decided I wanted to give a little bit of history this morning because it is so easy for people to forget. Let's understand how we got to this place and what caused these recommendations to be made. Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, was involved in all of this. I know he wrote a book later implying he was exploring the surface of the Moon while all this was going on, but he wasn't. He was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He had a responsibility to provide oversight and to rein in these excesses, and he didn't. Here is what he said in testimony before the Congress: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms. That notion that people will behave in their own self-interests and protect the shareholders and our country was pretty unbelievable because this occurred at the same time that the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Board itself had responsibilities to provide a regulatory oversight to what was going on in our financial system. At the same time that was the case, and they were doing nothing, we had new people come to Washington, DC, in the aftermath of the passage of the disastrous bill in 1999, the Financial Services Modernization Act, to be regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the CFTC--all of those organizations. People came here to assume those jobs, and they were boasting that they would be willfully blind: Let's take these regulatory jobs, and we promise not to look, we promise to close our eyes, and by the way, we are business friendly, so do what you want. It doesn't matter to us. In fact, we have circumstances where people came to the Securities and Exchange Commission with Mr. Madoff's issue going on, and they said: This guy is running a Ponzi scheme, a scam. We had people show up to the SEC and say: Investigate this, it is a massive scam. The SEC couldn't even investigate it when they had people saying, here is what is happening. It is unbelievable. During that entire time period, we had regulators, starting with the Federal Reserve Board and Mr. Greenspan and others, in regulatory capacities who boasted about not being willing to regulate. The result is that big financial firms in this country, and a lot of others, were engaged in an unbelievable orgy of greed. Let me show a little of what was going on. The Fed should have been attentive to this. It was their responsibility, among others. We all see these kinds of ads when we wake up and brush our teeth in the morning if we have a television set on. Here is one where Countrywide Mortgage said: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? Have you ever been denied by other lenders? Call us. We would like to loan you money. If you are a bad credit risk, call us. How can that work? It didn't work. This company went bankrupt. The owner of the company is now under investigation, at long last. He went away with about $200 million, I believe. He left the party with a couple hundred million dollars. These advertisements saying: If you have bad credit, come to us--this is the biggest mortgage company, not some fly-by-night company. This one is an Internet company. It is called speedybadcreditloans.com. Isn't that great? What a country. What a system. Apparently, somebody has a business model to advertise speedy bad credit loans. It says: Bad credit, no problem. No credit, no problem. Bankruptcy, no problem. Get guaranteed bad credit personal loans now. Does it surprise anybody, having watched over a decade of this, that this collapses? I won't go through all of them. Here is Millennium Mortgage: Twelve months, no mortgage payments. That's right. We will give you the money to make your first 12 payments if you call in the next 7 days. We pay it for you. Our loan program may reduce your current monthly payment by as much as 50 percent and allow you no payments for the first 12 months. Call us today. Too good to be true? Get a loan from these guys and they will make the payment for you. They didn't tell you that they will put that around the back side of the loan and wrap it around higher interest rates. This is Zoom Credit: Credit approval is seconds away. Get on the fast track at Zoom Credit. At the speed of light, Zoom Credit will preapprove you for a car loan, home loan, or a credit card, even if your credit is in the tank. Zoom Credit is like money in the bank. Zoom Credit specializes in credit repair and debt consolidation, too. Bankruptcy, slow credit, no credit, who cares? We have all heard these for a long period of time and wondered: How does this work? What kind of business model is this? It was not a business model. It was a scam and a scheme that undermined the American economy and went on under the nose of, yes, Mr. Greenspan and so many others who had promised us they were interested in being regulators. The list goes on and on. Let me go back to 1999. We were told in this Chamber--and I was here then--we were told: America has to modernize its financial system, for if we do not, the Europeans and others are going to win this debate and win the economic competition. So we have to modernize. The things that were put in place after the Great Depression were probably important at some point but no longer necessary. We now have Mr. Greenspan protecting us and others. It is a sophisticated system. We need to be able to compete. They said: We need to have a financial modernization system to allow very large holding companies to put together all the financial systems--investment banks, commercial banks, real estate, and securities operations. By the way, if we can do all that, we can create one-stop financial shopping for the American people. I stood on the floor of the Senate at great length in 1999 and opposed this. I know it is a little cheesy probably to quote yourself, but I do want to provide some description of what concerned me prior to the passage of this legislation. Here are some of the things I said at that point. I said: I will bet one day somebody is going to look back at this and they are going to say: How on Earth could we have thought it made sense to allow the banking industry to concentrate, through merger and acquisition, to become bigger and bigger and bigger, far more firms in the category of too big to fail? How did we think that was going to help this country? That was May 6, 1999. The same day I said: I say to the people who own banks: If you want to gamble, go to Las Vegas. If you want to trade in derivatives, God bless you. Do it with your own money. Do not do it through deposits that are guaranteed by the American people and by deposit insurance. The same day I said: This bill-- The Financial Services Modernization Act-- will, in my judgment, raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts. It will fuel the consolidation and mergers in the bank and financial services industry at the expense of customers, farm businesses, family farmers, and others. I said: I think it is a fundamental mistake to decide to repeal Glass-Steagall and allow banks and all of their financial industries to merge into a smorgasbord of financial services. Those who were around to vote to bail out the failed savings and loan industry, $500 billion of taxpayers' money, are they going to want to be around 10, 15 years from now when we see bailouts of hedge funds putting banks at risk? Or how about banks not just bailing out hedge funds, but banks having ownership of hedge funds? I said: We also have another doctrine at the Federal Reserve Board called too big to fail. Remember that term ``too big to fail''? They cannot be allowed to fail because the consequences to the economy are catastrophic and therefore these banks are too big to fail. That is no-fault capitalism. Does the Federal Reserve care about that? Apparently not. Fusing together the idea of banks which requires not just safety and soundness to be successful but the perception of safety and soundness with other inherently risky speculative activity is, in my judgment, unwise. Finally--these are about four or five speeches I gave in 1999: We will, in 10 years' time, look back and say: We should not have done that because we forgot the lessons of the past. So here we are, trillions and trillions of dollars. There have been, we believe, $11 trillion or so lent, spent or committed by the Federal Government to try to keep afloat some of the largest financial firms in our country because they did what they wanted to do. They engaged in unbelievable amounts of risk. I showed the examples of advertising to people who come to get mortgages when they had bad credit. That was not just people who had bad credit. People who had existing loans were enticed by these companies that said: Are you paying 7 percent or 8 or 9 percent interest? Come to us. We want to give you a loan in which you do not have to pay the first 12 months. Come to us. We are going to give you what we call a no-doc loan. You do not even have to document your income to us. Come to us. We will give you a liar's loan. They did not call it a liar's loan, but that is a no-doc loan. Come to us. We will give you a loan where you do not pay any of the interest. We will give a loan where you do not pay any of the interest or any of the principal. All these were entreaties to people to come to these companies and redo their mortgages. What happened to these mortgages when they were put together? They wrapped them into a security, a mortgage security, and then the mortgage company, Countrywide, for example, would sell it. They would sell it perhaps to a hedge fund or an investment bank. It was rated as a security. By the way, most of them were rated triple A. The ones that went bad were rated triple A. What happened was those who placed the mortgages no longer had the risk because they sold the risk to others. They sold it to hedge funds, investment banks. All the brokers making money, the people putting out the mortgages at the bottom, they were making $5,000, $10,000, $25,000 in bonuses, brokers' fees. The mortgage companies were awash in cash. I mentioned Countrywide's CEO left with a couple hundred million dollars, now under investigation, by the way. The hedge funds were making massive amounts of money. They could not count it fast enough. Just before the economy collapsed, the highest earner in the country was a hedge fund manager who earned $3.6 billion--$3.6 billion. Think about that person coming home from work and the spouse says: How are you doing? I am doing pretty well; $300 million a month. By the way, I am only paying 15 percent income tax because I get a special deal. I pay a 15-percent rate. Nobody else does. I get to pay some of the lowest income tax rates in America. These folks do because they have a deal called carried interest. They were all making money, all awash in cash, giant bonuses, bonuses that were unreal--$15 million, $20 million a year, some of the folks who were running the security agencies, some of the salespeople, and others in these investment banks. By the way, all these institutions would have collapsed and failed. Even the ones that this morning are reporting record profits, they were about to collapse were it not for the American people who, through their government, saved them. Now they are willing to complain about everything, and they are ramping up a huge effort in this town to prevent any effort to change the way things were. This President has said: Let's decide, at least, to stop the pernicious practice of having FDIC-insured banks trading in derivatives and other risky instruments on their own proprietary accounts. I think that is nuts to allow that to continue, and this President is right to try to stop it. They are even now gathering an army to try to oppose it. This issue of too big to fail, the President is right about that, absolutely right. This shows the house of cards. We have all seen it. We saw it collapsed or nearly collapsed. Were it not for the Congress, the President, the American people in backstopping these largest investment banks, they would be gone. Now, all of a sudden, they are reporting record profits and are on the edge and verge of providing record bonuses at a time when a whole lot of folks are in lines trying to get to a soup kitchen or in lines trying to find a job. The President of the Dallas Federal Reserve Board, in an editorial review in the Dallas Morning News, said: Too bill to fail is not a policy. It's a problem. Too big to fail means too big. I am glad he said that. I say that. I am glad he said that. He is president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Board. Joseph Stiglitz--I believe he was a Nobel Prize winner--said: We have much to gain by breaking up these behemoths. Talking about the large financial institutions. We need to begin now the admittedly gargantuan task of breaking out their commingled activities. There has been discussion in the last couple days about Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman. I had an opportunity to meet with him in the last several weeks. Paul Volcker has spoken very strongly in support of the policy the President has now embraced. Paul Volcker says: I would exclude from commercial banking institutions ownership or sponsorship of hedge funds and private equity funds. So should, in my view, a heavy volume of proprietary trading with its inherent risks. It is common sense for us to begin to shut down those kinds of activities. Let me quickly say, I understand the need for financial institutions. I understand that. It is a very important part of this country's economy. But I also understand, having studied economics and taught economics ever so briefly, that we have in this country, for 200 years, had a contest about who rules the roost--those who produce or those who finance production. I am telling you, in recent decades, those who finance production have had an unbelievable amount of influence in this country. I must say I do not think it contributes one thing to this country's economy to have big financial institutions trading synthetic derivatives. Does anyone know what a synthetic derivative is? A derivative is something that derives value from something else. Presumably, whatever the value on the front end or something elsewhere has some value, something that is tangible. A synthetic derivative is wagering, gambling, a derivative that is created with nothing on either side of it, except you are making a wager or a bet. That is going on in this country with respect to big financial institutions. It has in the past, aggressively. That is where they made a lot of money. It continues to go on to this day, and it makes no sense. Does anybody think that contributes very much to this economy? It does not. The fact is, it darn near ruined this economy with that unbelievable amount of speculation, starting right down at the broker placing loans that should not have been placed that created the subprime scandal and all the way up with credit default swaps and CDOs and synthetic derivatives and all these issues. A former colleague once described investment banks by saying investment banking is to productive enterprise like mud wrestling is to the performing arts. I do not put it quite that way. But his point was a whole lot of what goes on is pretty worthless. A whole lot of what can go on and should go on is very important in investment banking. That is the part of our banking structure that provides loans in riskier categories. You put loans out there to businesses with ideas and so on. That is very important. Community banks are very important. Commercial FDIC-insured banks are important. Investment banks are important. My point is not to suggest that our economy can exist without them. That is not the case. But I wish to make a very important point. You look at the heyday of production in this country. I am talking about when our manufacturing plants were humming, when we were turning products out, the best in the world. We were expanding the middle class. We were putting men and women in factories with good jobs that paid well, with benefits. Look at that period of time in this country and ask yourself: Under what kind of conditions did that exist? It existed before all these changes were made to the financing system of this country that let the finance industries decide to coagulate and combine and create these behemoth organizations with so-called firewalls that turned out to be made of tissue paper. People suggested somehow we were old-fashioned prior to 1999 and we needed to modernize to compete with somebody else to allow all our financial systems to come together, to merge, to get bigger, to engage in all these activities and create unbelievably exotic instruments, instruments that many of those who trade cannot even explain, thought that was somehow essential to the economic health of this country? The economic health of this country was much better prior to the enactment of those changes. I did not vote for those changes I just described. I stood on the floor and fought like the devil against them. Eight of us in the Senate voted no on the Financial Services Modernization Act. Eight voted no. The fact is, it set this country up for an unbelievable fall. So now here we are. The question is, What next? Where do we go from here? I understand, in this country, it is reasonable for every interest group to organize to support their vested interests. I understand that completely. But I also understand there is a higher purpose and a much larger issue for the American people and for our future. What kind of future do we want? What kinds of activities, what kinds of things can we do to put our country back on track, to restart the economic engine, to put people back on payrolls once again? There is nothing we can do in this Chamber that is much more important, as far as I am concerned, than finding a way to create jobs to put people back to work. There is no social program that is as important as a good job that pays well and allows people to take care of their families. That is just a fact, and we have seen in this country how you expand the middle class--with good jobs that pay well. I am going to speak later in this next couple of months again about the issue of trade. I have written a book about that subject, but I am going to speak at greater length about it because, in the middle of an economic downturn, when we talk about jobs, if we are hemorrhaging jobs once again outside of this country in search of 50-cent-an-hour labor, and we have people lining up here looking for work, that doesn't work for me. That is a lot like filling a bathtub with the drain open. So there are a lot of things that are elements in this. What I wanted to talk about this morning was to say that it is not a coincidence we have ended up at this intersection in deep financial trouble trying to find a way to see if we can rebuild the economy, to start putting people back to work again. It is not a surprise we have wound up here, anybody who watched what happened with the creation of bubbles and unbelievable speculation that was going on, and the massive amount of money ricocheting around and the creation of exotic financial instruments and no regulation at all, with people in regulatory authority who covered their eyes, and the head of the Fed, who actually was a cheerleader for all of it, who said: We don't need to regulate hedge funds or regulate derivatives. I oppose all of that. It isn't a surprise to us that this thing collapsed. It certainly isn't to me. The question is: How do we set it right? This President--though I don't agree with him on everything-- inherited the biggest economic wreck since the Great Depression. That is a plain fact. Had he gone to sleep from January, when he was inaugurated, and done nothing until today, there was going to be a $1.3 trillion budget deficit. That is what he walked into the White House and assumed. It is not just this financial situation, this is most of it, but we went to war and decided not to pay for a penny of it. We sent young men and women to fight and die and risk their lives day after day after day in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, and we decided we weren't going to pay for one penny of it. Some of us in the Senate, by the way, said we ought to at least find a way to pay for some of this cost. We are going to send kids to fight and risk their lives, and we don't have the courage to begin to pay for it? We went 8 years and didn't pay for a penny. Every bit of it went to the debt. To those of us who said let's pay for some of it, the last President said: If you do, and you pass that bill, I will veto it. I don't intend to allow for that at all. So that is another part of this. Look, this country knows better. The American people know better. That is not a policy that works. I talked yesterday about the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Mr. Bernanke. I did not speak ill of him, I mean, despite the fact I think he has some ownership of these issues as well. He was part of the economic team at the Federal Reserve Board as well. I indicated yesterday, and I just want to make the point, his nomination is coming up, and I indicated I was not going to vote in favor of the nomination. When he decided to open the lending window at the Federal Reserve Board for the first time in the history of our country to investment banks, I didn't criticize him for it. I wasn't sure whether it was necessary, but I didn't criticize. We were in the middle of a very difficult time. But when he decided to do that, he put the American taxpayers' funds at risk. We waited, and I and a group of nine other Senators wrote him a letter about 6 months ago and said: All right. Now we want to understand who came to that window and how much money did they get and what were the terms. Who did you give the money to? Who has our money? He wrote back to us and said: I don't intend to tell you that. I don't intend to tell the Congress, and I don't intend to tell the American people, despite the fact that he said transparency is a big issue for him. Apparently not on this issue. So I don't think the Congress should proceed with his nomination until he tells us what was the consequence of opening the loan window at the Federal Reserve Board to investment banks for the first time in history. Well, Mr. President, I see my colleague from Kansas is here and would like to speak, perhaps. This is a long and tortured discussion about this country, its finances, and its future. There is plenty of criticism to go around. I have had kind of a belly full of standing in the Senate and hearing about President Obama and socialism and that sort of thing. The fact is, as I said, he inherited the biggest mess since the Great Depression, and had he done nothing, the budget deficit was going to be $1.3 trillion. So he is trying to do some things that will set this country back on track. We have gone through almost a lost decade in terms of smart, effective, good public policies that invest in this country's future. It has set us back a lot. What we need to do now, it seems to me, is to try to see if we can't find a way that what both political parties offer to this country can be brought together, to links arms and try to lift up this country. We see almost every single day people sawing away and ratcheting away about what is wrong with the country. I can spend a lot of time talking about what is wrong with America. But there is a whole lot right about this country, and it deserves, in my judgment, a lot more cooperation than I have seen in the Senate. It deserves the best of what both political parties have to offer America rather than the worst of each. I hope in the next 6 or 8 months we can find ways to ask people of both political parties to decide to stand up for tough things--for things that are going to require some courage and that will restart this economic engine, put America back on track, and try to make certain what has happened to us in the last couple of years will never happen again. Most importantly, we need to give people an understanding that their future can be better than the past. We need to restore confidence. It is hard for people to have confidence watching the proceedings in this Senate. I understand that. But confidence is everything. If people are confident about the future, they do the things that manifest that confidence and that expand this country's economy. That is just a fact. If they are not confident about the future, they do things that contract the economy--they defer and delay the kinds of things they would otherwise do to expand the economy. I hope in the near future we can find a way to create some jobs initiatives to put people back to work more quickly. But there are just a lot of issues that confront us, and I wanted today especially to talk about the two things this President mentioned yesterday, both of which are so right and so important, both of which this town will organize to oppose. The first is asking or deciding or telling FDIC-insured banks: You can't be investing and trading risky instruments on your own proprietary accounts and putting the American people at risk any longer. You can't do that anymore. That is not radical; it is right and it is long overdue. I wrote the first article about that 15 years ago as a cover story for the Washington monthly magazine titled ``Very Risky Business.'' Second is the issue of too big to fail. If anybody in this Chamber wonders whether we ought to do something about too big to fail, go to any town cafe in this country and sit around and ask folks whether they think this capitalistic system works well when you say to almost everybody else: You risk your savings to start a business, and if you don't make it, tough luck. You are on your own. But, by the way, we have some big financial interests that can make record profits, pay the highest bonuses in history, and we have decided they can't fail. We have a special class for them. We will open loan windows at the Fed, we will lend or make $11 trillion available to them if they need it. We will do anything to prevent them from failing because they are too big to fail. That is no-fault capitalism. That is not what I believe to be the American way. That is something this President wants to change and something I support very strongly. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, January 28, at 2:15 p.m. in Room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a hearing on the nomination of Lillian A. Sparks to be Commissioner of the Administration for Native Americans, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to be followed immediately by an oversight hearing entitled on ``Unemployment on Indian Reservations at 50 percent: the urgent need to create jobs in Indian Country.'' Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, first let me say to my colleague, Senator Casey, his comments about the nearly unspeakable tragedy that has occurred in Haiti strike all of us in a very poignant way. I have been to Haiti. It is one of the poorest regions in the world. We have people in Haiti living in unbelievable poverty. Fly to the airport and near the airport is an area called City Soleil. It is a slum of nearly a half million people living in desperate conditions. The entire country of Haiti has suffered such immense difficulties for so long. The people of Haiti are wonderful people. To be visited now by this great tragedy with an unbelievable loss of life that will exceed 200,000 people is heartbreaking to me, and I know to all Americans who watch this tragedy play out on television as volunteers are digging through rubble and, in some cases, finding people still alive and, in most other cases, finding a lot of people who have lost their lives. The American people are a people full of great generosity, and that expression of generosity in the form of contributions to organizations that are there helping these people is something that is very important. All of us can be proud of the generosity of this country and what is now happening in the outpouring of support.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I rise to briefly explain why I am going to vote against the nomination of Mr. Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Mr. Bernanke has been serving as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. I will be the first to say I think there are things that Mr. Bernanke has done that are very important to this country. He steered our country in a very difficult circumstance. There was a time when our economy could have completely collapsed, which would have been devastating. It was teetering on the precipice of that. Mr. Bernanke and others made decisions, some of which I thought were good decisions. It is the case that Mr. Bernanke worked for the previous administration that in many ways created circumstances that took us to that cliff or near the cliff with economic policies. I will talk about that for a moment. But when Mr. Bernanke became Chairman of the Fed, I understood that his background fit fairly well what we were going through, and I think he did some things that should be commended and supported. I have told him that I supported a number of these actions that were very important. One of those actions was to open, for the first time in history, the window at the Federal Reserve Board to extend credit directly from the Federal Reserve Board to the biggest investment banks in the country. It has always been the case that FDIC-insured banks, commercial banks, would have a window at the Fed to go get direct loans from the Fed, but it has never been the case that the investment banks were able to do that. During this great crisis, Fed Chairman Bernanke and the Board of Governors opened that window for direct lending from the Federal Reserve Board to the investment banks. I wasn't critical at that moment. I didn't come to the floor and express criticism. I don't know exactly what they saw that persuaded them to do that. But some months later, I sent, along with nine of my colleagues who signed the letter, a letter, dated July 31, to Chairman Bernanke and said: The Federal Reserve Board took action to allow all of the major investment banks in the United States to effectively access direct lending from the Federal Reserve Board for the first time in history. Down in the letter I say: We now urge you to release the names of financial institutions that have received the emergency assistance and how much each has received. The American taxpayers' funds were put at risk, and we believe the American people deserve information about the Federal Reserve Board's bailout activities to determine how much and what kind of funds were used, and so on. We received a letter back from the Chairman of the Fed in which he said: Publicly releasing the information on the names of borrowers and amounts borrowed under the Federal Reserve Board liquidity program could seriously undermine our liquidity programs. He essentially said: I don't intend to tell you, and I don't intend to tell the Congress or the American people. It is interesting to me that a Federal judge last year ordered the Fed to release the names of the institutions that received the emergency financial assistance from the Federal Reserve Board and the amount of the assistance. A Federal judge said to the Fed: You must release that information to the American people. The judge in this case, which was an FOIA case, found that the Federal Reserve had ``improperly withheld agency records.'' The judge said that the Fed's argument that borrowers would be hurt if their names were released was ``conjecture without evidence of imminent harm.'' But the Fed went ahead to appeal the judge's ruling and, therefore, it has been stayed. The American people are now in a situation where their Federal Reserve Board said for the first time in history: We will give the biggest investment banking institutions direct access to loan money from the Federal Reserve Board, and we don't intend to tell anybody who got it, how much they got, or what the concessions or prices were. We don't intend to give anybody that information. I find that completely untenable. I just am not going to vote for the nomination of a Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board who says to Congress and the American people: Yes, we opened that window. We decided to do direct lending to the biggest investment banks, which, by the way, steered this country right into a huge wreck. Take a look at what and who caused this financial wreck that cost this economy $15 trillion in wealth. American families had lost $15 trillion in wealth. The Federal Government had either spent or lent or committed $12 trillion to bail out particularly Wall Street and the biggest firms on Wall Street. All of those biggest firms on Wall Street, I believe, and even those that are now the healthiest firms that are experiencing record profits and are preparing to pay out record bonuses of somewhere around $120 to $140 billion, those firms would not have survived. They would have gone under were it not for the help of the American people through their government. The question for the Federal Reserve Board from the Congress and the American people is: What did you do? How much did you do? What was the collateral? Under what conditions? We need to know. The Chairman of the Fed said he supports transparency. If that is the case, show us a little transparency. How is it that someone can possibly argue that telling us now that they gave $200 billion here or $1 trillion there to firms that are now showing record profits and preparing to pay the biggest bonuses, how can that possibly injure those firms? In fact, many of them have apparently paid the TARP funds back, let alone the direct loans from the Federal Reserve Board. My only point is simple. I don't have a beef against Ben Bernanke personally. I kind of like him. I met him a number of times. I think he steered us through some tough times and probably made some good decisions at the right time. I also have some differences with him on economic policy and monetary policy. But I have a very big difference on this question. This question is controlling for me. If the Federal Reserve Board believes it has unlimited capability to decide it will change the rules on everything, open a direct lending window and give it to the biggest investment houses in the country, and they don't intend to ever tell any of us what they did or why or how; they don't intend to disclose any of it, that is not what I call open government. That is not something that is written in the Constitution. It is not something that this Congress should tolerate. This Congress should say to Mr. Bernanke: Your nomination is here in front of the Senate. We will act on it as soon as you provide the information Senators have requested of you--by the way, the information that a Federal judge has already ordered that you disclose. As soon as you comply with that, then your nomination shall have a vote in the Senate. I wanted to explain in more detail my response to people who had asked me what I was going to do on the nomination. That gives adequate explanation. I also wanted to comment briefly that the President today said something quite extraordinary, and I want to compliment him for it. I know he is walking into a thicket of trouble because a whole lot of big interests are going to gang up on these proposals. Let me tell you the two proposals the President offered that make a lot of sense. No. 1, he said big financial institutions that are too big to fail are too big. That is pretty simple. If they are too big to fail, they are just flat out too big. We ought to stop this concentration because too big to fail means no-fault capitalism. If they run themselves into trouble, the taxpayer picks up the tab. The taxpayer bails them out. That is what too big to fail means. The President says no more. Let's get rid of that too-big-to-fail tag and let's decide that if they are that big, let's stop this concentration. The President also has indicated that we ought to have financial institutions that are not trading in derivatives on their own proprietary accounts. I wrote a piece in 1994, 15 years ago, that was the cover story for Washington Monthly magazine. The piece I wrote was ``Very Risky Business.'' I believe at the time there was $16 trillion of notional value of derivatives in our country. I said what is happening is outrageous. We have taxpayer-insured banking institutions that are trading on derivatives in their own proprietary accounts, putting taxpayer money at risk. It is flat out gambling. I said they may just as well have a craps table or a Keno table in their lobby. Oh, they can still call it a bank, but it is a casino. Fifteen years ago, I wrote that article. The fact is, we have gone through this unbelievable collapse of the economy--$15 trillion of wealth lost by the American people--and we still have these institutions trading on proprietary accounts. The President says it ought to stop. I agree with him. The President also says we ought to separate, as Paul Volcker suggests, the FDIC-insured commercial banking institutions from the investment banks over here. They were put back together. I said on the floor of this Senate 10 years ago--five, six, eight times--and gave long speeches predicting that if you do this, if you fuse together commercial banks and investment banks, you are headed for trouble. I said on this floor: Within a decade I think you are going to see massive taxpayer bailouts. People have asked me: How did you find the crystal ball? I just guessed. But I worried that if you put this together, this is a bargain for trouble, this is asking for trouble. Ten years later, we have seen this unbelievable collapse. The President is right; and it takes courage for him to say it--let's decide to separate investment banking from commercial banking. Paul Volcker has talked a lot about that, and he is right about it. So I know what is happening. I just saw, in CongressDailyPM: ``Banks Kick Off Effort Against Volcker Rule.'' ``A furious lobbying effort among large banks was set off today by President Obama's announcement that he will push a rule forcing them to choose between being a commercial institution or an investment bank that focuses primarily on trading for its own profits.'' The President dubbed this plan the ``Volcker Rule.'' I met with Paul Volcker in my office recently. I have talked with him at some length about this. Paul Volcker is dead right, and so is the President. This is going to provoke an unbelievable battle here. I understand that. There is a lot at stake. The big interests--they want to keep doing what they are doing. The big investment banks, at the moment--you take a look at their balance sheet. They are not, by and large, loaning money to the interests in this country that desperately need it. They are trading on proprietary accounts and making a lot of money trading. The fact is, if they are still too big to fail--and they are--that is called no-fault capitalism, and it is our risk, not theirs. None of them would be around anymore had the U.S. Government not stepped in to provide a safety net. Now they are telling us: Well, these changes the President and others suggest, they are radical changes. No, they are not. They are changes that go back to the future in many ways. They are changes that go back to a period--1999--before a piece of legislation that was passed by the Congress to decide: Let's put together these big old holding companies and put everything into one. One-stop financial shopping, they said. Compete with the Europeans. We will put up firewalls. It turned out they were made of tissue paper and the whole thing collapsed. I just say I think the President has made the right call. It is gutsy. It is going to provide a big fight around here. But it is not a secret, perhaps--given my history and what I have said in opposing the kinds of things that were done 10 years ago that set us up for this fall--it is not surprising that I fully intend to support the President's effort. I think it is critically important to get our financial system reformed and done right. Then, it is important to do one other thing; and that is have regulators who do not brag about being willfully blind. We had a bunch of folks in here for a bunch of the last decade who said: Do you know what? We have decided to take this important government job--in any number of these regulatory areas--and we are proud to say we are probusiness. What does that mean? We are proud to say we are at the SEC, we are at this agency or that agency, and you all do whatever you want. We won't look. We won't watch. In fact, some of them were so incompetent that even when people-- whistleblowers--came and said: Bernie Madoff is running a Ponzi scheme, even when somebody told them what was going on, they did not have the guts or the time or the intelligence to investigate it. But being willfully blind ought not be something to boast about anymore. Going forward, we want effective regulation. Regulation is not a four-letter word. The lack of regulation caused this crash in many ways and cost trillions of dollars to American families. I am not suggesting overregulation. I am saying when you have certain areas that are regulatory in this government, to make sure the free market system works, and works well, when people commit fouls in the free market system in this area of competition, you need to have somebody there with a whistle and a striped shirt to blow the whistle and say: That's a foul. If you do not have that, the system does not work and the system gets completely haywire. That is what happened in the last decade. That is not a technical term, that haywire issue. But we have the right and the opportunity to get this right now, and I say to the President, good for you. This proposal is the right proposal. Then, let's see, in the weeks ahead and the months ahead: Whose side are you on? I say to those in public service on these issues: Whose side are you on? Are you on the side of the big investment bankers who helped steer us into the ditch that involved substantial wagering and gambling here, and then we pick up the tab because it is no-fault capitalism on too-big-to-fail issues? Or are you going to stand up for the American people here and decide you have to put this back in place the right way? I hope we will have enough support to follow the President's lead on this issue. Let me just make one final comment. I understand the need for a financial system that works. I admire bankers who do banking the old- fashioned way: take deposits and make loans and do underwriting in between, looking in somebody's eyes to say: You want a loan? What is it for? Let me evaluate that. Can you repay this loan? That is underwriting. That is the way it works. The Presiding Officer, I know, ran a bank and understands that. We need a good financial system. You even need investment banks. I know one of my colleagues once said: Investment banking is to productive enterprise like mud wrestling is to the performing arts. Well, that was tongue in cheek. But we need investment banks to take the riskier investments out there. But our investment banking system went completely off the map. We need good commercial banks that are capitalized. We need investment banks. All of that is important. We need to get it right. I do not mean to denigrate all finance because finance is very important in this system to help this free enterprise system work, to help people who want to start businesses and hire people. That is very important for our country. So we will have that debate in a longer fashion in the weeks ahead. Mr. President, I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S.J. Res. 25 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the joint resolution be read a third time and passed, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and that any statements related to the measure be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 392 submitted earlier today.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening actions or debate, and that any statements related to the resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 391 which was submitted earlier today.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table.