Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent that the time of the quorum call be charged equally to both sides. We are in a time agreement.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, let me yield myself such time as I may consume. I will be brief this morning, but I wish to make a couple points. The appropriations bill that is on the floor of the Senate represents the bills that were not completed last year but were worked through in the individual subcommittees, and the full Appropriations Committee of the Senate, passed, as I indicated earlier, almost unanimously, for every piece of legislation, by all Republicans and all Democrats in the Appropriations Committee. So it is not as if there is something strange here. The question is, Do we want to pass an appropriations bill, at least for the last half of this year, that funds the agencies the way Congress has determined they should be funded? Or do we want to defeat this bill and go on autopilot and say: Whatever was done last year, that is what we will do next year. That does not make much sense to me. What we might have done last year should be judged on the basis: Did it work? Did it not work? Where are the increases we probably ought to make some additional appropriations for? Or where are some areas that ought to be cut? All these things represent a matter of judgment by Members of the Senate and particularly members of the Appropriations Committee who are funding the individual agencies. I mentioned, a moment ago, there is an account I cut in the subcommittee I chair by $100 million because I felt it was not needed in the coming fiscal year, and I would move that $100 million to fund something else I thought was very important. Well, that is the kind of thing that will not exist if we decide: Whatever was spent last year in all those accounts, that is what we will spend going forward. That is devoid of any kind of judgment at all. Let me mention some areas we have felt should be increased. I will give you some examples. One is the funding to prepare for a potential pandemic flu. Obviously, it is a very significant issue. This country needs to be prepared in the event we suffer in our lifetimes a pandemic flu. An influenza, pandemic epidemic that would move around this world would be very serious, kill a lot of people. The need to be prepared for that is very important. There are funds available in this legislation to begin that preparation. The efforts to improve the warning systems to notify communities about severe weather: This deals with the funding that is necessary for the next-generation satellites. This is not just something that is convenient. When killer storms and hurricanes and other things are threatening population centers, it is a need to have the very finest capability to warn people. This is the money that is needed to continue that progress in improving warning systems through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather and climate satellites. That is in this bill to continue that work. In my subcommittee, nonproliferation programs--and that is the issue of trying to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the programs we have to try to prevent terrorist groups from acquiring the kind of material with which they can produce nuclear weapons--we provide funding for that and increased funding for that, which is very necessary. It is funding to the National Nuclear Security Administration, and it is critical to our efforts to secure weapons- grade nuclear material around the world that even today, as I speak, terrorists are trying to acquire. So that issue of nonproliferation--we have increased some funding for it. If we decide we are not going to proceed with the normal appropriations bills that have now been put in this omnibus and instead we are going to go with a continuing resolution, that extra funding to try to protect us and stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons is gone. There are so many areas. The area of science: our National Laboratories. You know the Bell Labs, which used to be the jewels in our country of scientific inquiry and discovery, and all the unbelievable inventions and new knowledge, those labs are largely gone. Now our science laboratories in this country--and the three weapons laboratories and the array of science laboratories--represent the repository of the best and brightest Ph.D.s in physics and engineering and mathematics and so on. We have to keep our lead in the world in these areas. This legislation provides the increased funding for our science labs that our country has already made a decision to do. If we do not go forward, then we go backward, we lose some of those best and brightest scientists and engineers. At one of our laboratories, we have something called the Roadrunner, which is the most powerful computer in the world. That is not elsewhere; that is here in our country. They were telling me one day about the roadrunner, what is called a petaflop, which is a thousand teraflops. A teraflop is a computer that has capacity to do 1 trillion distinct functions per second. That is a teraflop. We reached that 11 years ago. Now we have done a thousand teraflops, or what is called a petaflop. One thousand trillion functions per second in this world's most powerful computer. What can you do with that? Well, they are talking about studying the synapses--1 billion synapses of the brain to work how it works together to produce what we call vision. We don't know that. With supercomputing, the potential to know a lot of things is breathtaking. That exists here. It is the most powerful computer in the world here. We have to continue to keep our edge in science and knowledge and invention. Part of that will be dependent upon how we fund our national laboratories and whether we keep that group of scientists and engineers working on these breathtaking inventions and the development of new knowledge. We can only do that if we continue the commitment we have made to fund our science in our national laboratories. Those are a few of the things I wanted to mention. Again, these were appropriation bills considered individually by a subcommittee of Appropriations, Republicans and Democrats, and then brought to the full Committee on Appropriations, Republicans and Democrats, and passed in every case, except two, unanimously, 29 to 0. In two cases, it was 26 to 3 and 28 to 1. Essentially, all of these pieces of legislation were passed unanimously. So when someone says, you know, this legislation is mysterious, new, and it has been thrust upon the Senate--that is not true. This legislation was prepared in June and July of last year. This Congress cannot continue to do appropriations this way. The majority leader has made a commitment and one that I think makes a lot of sense. This year, this has to stop. We bring individual appropriation bills to the floor, vote on them, go to conference, have a conference report and send the bill to the President, one by one. That is the way this should work. It didn't work last year, or the year before, that way. As a result, for the last 6 months of the year, we were confronted with nine appropriation bills that were worked through on a bipartisan basis last summer and now need to be enacted. My hope is that the Senate, working its will this week, will do the right thing and pass what is, for the most part, bipartisan legislation dealing with funding for Homeland Security, Justice, Energy, and so many different areas that are important to the functioning of our Government--and important to the American people as well. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. The minority leader indicated somehow or suggested that this is some new information, some large piece of legislation brought to the floor of the Senate without much scrutiny. Isn't it the case that the appropriations bills that are included in this omnibus were passed out of each individual subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, most of them worked on for months, then passed out of the subcommittee, and then worked on in the full committee and, in most cases, passed unanimously by Republicans and Democrats? This is the normal funding of Federal agencies that should have been done last year. It wasn't, for a lot of reasons. It is now being packaged into an omnibus bill to get done. But the ingredients of that bill are not something new. Isn't it the case that most of these individual bills were passed in a bipartisan basis, many of them unanimously, after having been worked on for some months? There is nothing strange in here, is there?

Mr. DORGAN. I wonder if the Senator from Illinois will excuse me and respond to an additional question.

Mr. DORGAN. The point that is going to be discussed on the floor today and this week on this appropriations bill is very important. I just received the votes on the individual bills that have now been packaged together. If I might read them, the appropriations bill for Agriculture, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nutrition programs, farm programs, and so on, passed 29 to 0 by the full Appropriations Committee. That passed on July 18 of last year. Commerce, Justice, and Science passed, on June 19, 29 to 0, funds for Justice programs and so on. Energy and Water, which is the subcommittee I chair, passed 29 to 0. Financial Services passed, 29 to 0. Homeland Security passed 29 to 0. Virtually all of them passed unanimously. To give you an example, in my subcommittee--that passed it unanimously, with Republicans and Democrats, by the subcommittee and the full Appropriations Committee--I, for example, in one account cut $100 million. Why? Because I felt that was not needed. I cut from previous years' expenditures $100 million. Now, if this piece of legislation fails, that extra $100 million is going to be spent by that account. It shouldn't be, in my judgment, but will be. I used some of that money to increase carbon capture so we can protect the environment and continue to use coal. We have to find a way to capture carbon and decarbonize the use of coal. I invested some of that money in carbon capture research and technology. But these are the kinds of things that if we defeat this legislation--we have what is called a continuing resolution. That will be the first amendment this morning. That continuing resolution means we are effectively on autopilot, and the things that have been cut, the spending that has been cut in these subcommittees, and the spending that has been added because things need doing, that will be voided and we will instead be on an autopilot with previous years' judgments having prevailed when, in fact, all these bills passed the subcommittee, with the exception, I believe, of two of them. One was 28 ``yes'' and 1 ``no'' by the full Appropriations Committee, and the other was 26 ``yes'' and 3 ``no.'' With those two exceptions, every other piece of legislation that is included in this omnibus was passed unanimously by Republicans and Democrats in the full Appropriations Committee of the Senate. Isn't it the case that to suggest somehow this is some mysterious bill that has not been seen, has not been considered, has not been heard, has not been reviewed--that is just not the case. This has been available since last June and July, and most of it passed unanimously on a bipartisan basis.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, let me withhold.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this morning's newspapers, once again, chronicle the difficulty that exists in this country. There is obviously a financial crisis, a collapse of the banking system, particularly on Wall Street. Just to name two, today's paper says there is a place in the budget that is a holding pattern for a potential $750 billion of additional funding that might be necessary for the big bank bailouts in this country. We also know from the newspapers and from news this morning that Citigroup has reached some sort of a deal with the Federal Government in order to make Citigroup viable. So each day we see more and more discussion about these kinds of issues. It begs the question about who is doing what? What do we know about all of this? How open is this? How much should the American people know about how their money is used? I have come to the Senate floor today to talk about just one part of it. At a time when there is so much discussion here about hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, and now trillions of dollars, I wish to trace just $3.6 billion. That is a lot of money: $3.6 billion that the American taxpayers paid in bonuses to some big shot executives that steered their institution into the ground. Let me tell my colleagues about the story. This is a story about Bank of America buying Merrill Lynch. Our previous Secretary of the Treasury was concerned about Merrill Lynch having serious problems. He let Lehman go bankrupt, believed that was a mistake, and so Merrill Lynch is adrift and we have to find a marriage for Merrill Lynch. Apparently, the Treasury Department worked to get Bank of America to agree to buy Merrill Lynch. By the way, Bank of America had already purchased Countrywide Mortgage, which was a complete mess and a collapse and one of the big mortgage companies that, in my judgment, has caused much of this problem. Bank of America already had purchased Countrywide and the assets of Countrywide Mortgage. Now it was being encouraged to purchase Merrill Lynch. So that marriage was arranged by the Treasury Secretary and others, and that marriage was announced, by the way, last September and consummated in early January of this year. Now what we discover is that Bank of America got substantial amounts of taxpayers' money in TARP funds and other guarantees. So Bank of America has taxpayers' money, and $10 billion of the taxpayers' money that went to Bank of America would have been destined for Merrill Lynch had Bank of America not purchased it. Merrill Lynch, it turns out, when they were taken over, had just suffered a loss of some $15 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008. That caused problems for Bank of America which had agreed to purchase Merrill Lynch because Bank of America, before buying Countrywide and Merrill Lynch, was a healthy company, and now all of a sudden it is not a healthy company and needs substantial funds from the American taxpayers. But now we find that Merrill Lynch paid bonuses to its employees in December of last year just before the takeover by Bank of America was completed. Now, as I indicated, Merrill Lynch lost $15 billion late last year, and they paid $3.6 billion in bonuses in December. Let me describe the magnitude of these bonuses. Six hundred ninety-four employees at Merrill Lynch, according to reports, received bonuses in excess of $1 million. Let me say that again. Nearly 700 employees in that failed company--a company that lost $15 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008 received bonuses of over $1 million. It is unbelievable. Four top executives in that bank received $121 million. The top 14 employees in that institution got $250 million. Think of that: $3.6 billion paid in bonuses in December to people at an institution that lost $25 billion in the year. That $3.6 billion could have just as well been transported through a pipeline from the pockets of the American taxpayers to these 700 people who got over $1 million apiece because that is taxpayers' money. That money from TARP funds--$25 billion and further money which guaranteed bad assets--that comes from the American taxpayers. Had they not paid the $3.6 billion in bonuses to these folks, their loss in the fourth quarter of 2008 would not have been $15 billion, it would have been $11.4 billion. Taxpayers would not have had to come up with that kind of funding through the TARP program. So I know where $3.6 billion went; American taxpayers were asked to pay that $3.6 billion in bonuses to the 700 people who got $1 million apiece from a failed institution. Now Bank of America has this issue because Bank of America purchased Merrill Lynch. Bank of America now has serious financial trouble, and they have received even more funds as well. One of the questions about this is, How do we know the details about these bonuses? It is because an attorney general in the State government in New York had the guts and the intelligence to subpoena this information and demand that it be turned over to him. Question: Why is it that some committee in the Congress doesn't have this information? Why is no subpoena coming from the Congress on these issues? Why is there no systematic, significant investigation here? After all, this Congress is the institution that has triggered the funding. Yet these investigations are occurring with an attorney general in State government. This Congress needs to do a lot more. There needs to be investigations and accountability. I have offered those amendments. We ought to get to the bottom of who did what, who got the money, and who left town with the cash from the American taxpayers. This morning's news about Citigroup being rescued--do you know what? We are told Citigroup is too big to fail. How did it become too big? The Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, Treasury folks, and both Republican and Democratic Members pushed legislation that allowed them to create big holding companies and become too big to fail. I understand you need banks, and I understand you need big banks. But the big banks don't have to be so big that they are too big to fail, so when they make reckless decisions, the American taxpayers are told: We are too big to fail and you must bail us out. There is no inherent right for the biggest financial institutions in this country to continue to exist. I understand the circulatory system in this country and that a necessary part of it is the banking institutions. I understand how critical that is. My point is not that we can do without banking institutions. My point is that there is no inherent right to exist for those banks that have their current names and are declared too big to fail. What about putting them through some sort of a ``bank carwash'' and getting rid of all that tar--those bad assets--and sell the good assets to an institution that is reconstituted as a new bank? What inherent right is there for banks that have run this country into the ditch and destroyed their financial capability--what inherent right do they have for them to continue to exist? I am not suggesting we shut down the banking system. But perhaps this lesson ought to suggest to us that ``too big to fail'' is a doctrine that is a failure, because if you have decided you are going to allow institutions to become too big to fail, you have sent yourself down a road that is a dead end, in my judgment. The culture, it seems to me, that is on Wall Street, and the culture in this town--precisely in Treasury and some in Congress--is a culture that suggests that what was is what has to be in the future. That is not the case at all. I have talked ad nauseam about 1999 on the floor of this Senate, when both Republicans and Democrats steered a different course and said let's get rid of those old protections we put in place after the Great Depression--Glass-Steagall and those things, those old- fashioned notions--and let's dump them and create the Nation of one- stop shopping for securities and virtually everything you want to do in securities, real estate, and finance. So the Congress did dump all those old-fashioned rules and laws that were put into place after the Great Depression. I was one of eight Senators who stood on the floor and said no--one of eight who voted no. I said then on the floor of the Senate that I think within a decade we are going to see massive taxpayer bailouts. It was a disastrous decision to have done it. Now we must reconnect it. There is no discussion here, and there needs to be about what do you reconnect? Do you go back to some semblance of whether it is Glass-Steagall, or some approach to Glass-Steagall, in which you begin to separate the essential functions of banking from other areas of substantial risk? If you don't do that, what do you do to provide protections that this would not happen again? There is a culture here that suggests you cannot do that, it is impossible. There is a culture here that suggests we have to keep bailing out whatever it is. We have pumped $700 billion out of this Chamber into something called a TARP fund to be used for the big banks. Now we are told there needs to be a marker to protect the potential of another $750 billion. That is nearly $1.5 trillion pumped into the top of our banking institutions, like putting oil in a crank case--and these are failed institutions. Yet the only investigation I see happening is coming out of an office in the attorney general's office in Albany, NY. It is unbelievable to me. Does anybody here understand that $3.6 billion was put in a hose directly from the taxpayers' pockets to bonuses for 700 people in a failed banking institution, so each of those 700 people got $1 million or more, and the 4 top people, by the way, got $120 million. By the way, let me point out that one of those top four people in Merrill Lynch, according to a news article in New York, got $24.9 million and was just hired in September of last year. So he got almost $25 million for 3 months of work. Then he quit. The day he quit, according to the news record, his wife closed on a $36 million luxury co-op on Park Avenue. Pretty unbelievable. By the way, another top executive, Thomas Montage, who headed global sales and trading at Merrill Lynch, was reportedly given a guaranteed payment of $39.4 million for 2008. Does this sound like fiction? It does to me. This week, we were treated to a rant on television by a guy I saw standing on a trading floor, a derivatives trader, who was ranting about losers and about reckless behavior, about the losers who might get help to stay in their homes. We have had millions of people lose their jobs, some 2.6 million people last year. A good number of them are also losing their homes. Somebody says maybe you can try to find a way to help some of them stay in their homes, and that derivatives trader stood and ranted about the losers who have lost jobs and are about to lose their homes. I wonder if that derivatives trader might stand on the floor of an exchange and describe losers as people who make $24.9 million for 3 months of work in a failed institution. Are they losers? How about the nearly 700 people who got over $1 million each in bonuses from the American taxpayer? Are they losers? Or is it just the little folks, the casualties at the bottom of this economic wreckage, the people who lost their jobs, their homes, and who are losing hope? Then they see these stories about ``too big to fail.'' When 700 people get bonuses of $1 million each in an institution that lost $15 billion in just one quarter last year and the institution pays $3.6 billion in bonuses, I wonder if the folks who are having an itch to rant today might want to rant about that kind of nonsense. How about laying off the folks who don't have it so good, the folks who are struggling and trying to get by, hoping beyond hope that maybe they are not going to get laid off; or if they just got laid off, hoping beyond hope they might be able to find another job; or hoping beyond hope that if they got laid off and haven't yet found a job, they can find some way to scrape up enough money to make the next house payment so they will not be kicked out of their house. These people are losers, you say? I mean, of all the unbelievable things I have heard, for a derivatives trader to stand on the exchange floor and rant about the losers at the bottom of the economic scale, shame on him, in my judgment. I will tell you where the losers are. The losers are the folks who have wallowed in big bucks, getting bonuses from institutions that have failed and then asking for taxpayer money and then asking us to pry those bonus numbers out of the bowels of their financial records. They didn't give them up exactly voluntarily. It was an attorney general of New York who forced that information into the open. Well, where is the outrage about these things? Where is the outrage? Let me hear a rant from somebody standing on a trading floor about that--just one. This Congress has a lot of work to do. This Congress has not begun to do the investigations that are necessary. We should not learn these things from an attorney general in New York who is issuing subpoenas. We should learn them by substantial investigations here to find out what happened, who got the money, and what happened to the first $700 billion. I have used the term ``bank robbery,'' and I understand it is a pejorative term. When we think of bank robbers, we think of Jesse James in Northfield, MN, with a mask over his face and a gun and a fast horse. Well, a whole lot of folks have robbed big banks in this country of their financial viability and of their strength, through horrible, bad decisions--even as they have taken massive amounts of money from the banks for themselves. That is bank robbery. I know it is a different kind--with no violence and they are wearing suits and flying in private jets--but it is robbing America's financial institutions. As I have described, I think it also robs American taxpayers. I want this country to do well. I want this financial wreckage to end. I want us to put America back on track. I want us to do the things that are necessary to prevent this from ever happening again. But you cannot do that unless you understand what happened. Accountability is looking backward and forward. I am talking about all this because when we have to discover by reading the newspaper that a State official has finally subpoenaed records to find out that a company that lost 25 billion last year gave out $3.6 billion in bonuses, probably from $10 billion of the American taxpayers' money, we have a right to know that. I have indicated on the floor of the Senate before that much of this is about economic recovery. If we are going to get by this and through this--and I think we will--it is about confidence. It is about restoring confidence in the American people about their future. When the American people are confident about their future, they do things that expand the economy. When they are not confident, they do things that contract the economy. It is as simple as that. I ask, how can Americans be confident when, day after day, they read these stories about how folks at the top get off with a lot of money and then their friends call the folks at the bottom losers. That is hardly inspiring, in my judgment. We have a lot of things to do. First, is to investigate all this and, at the same time, to understand what has happened; we need to begin working to figure out what kind of a banking and financial future we want. We are going to try to put people back to work with the economic recovery package, building infrastructure, trying to put people back on the payroll. That will give confidence and also build an asset for our country. All those things are necessary. The other steps that are necessary is for us to think, what did we do in 1999 to say let's allow big bank holding companies to be created and grow banks that are too big to fail, and let's decide we don't want to regulate anything. How are we going to put that back together? Should we not revisit that decision that turned out to be so wrong and the issue of Glass-Steagall or some form of it? Shouldn't we revisit exactly what we want in terms of future regulatory oversight? Let me make one other point while I talk about this. I sat across the table from a North Dakota banker some while ago at what was called a sauerkraut festival. I said to him--this is a town of 1,200 people or so. I said to this community banker: Do you have money to lend? He said: Oh, sure. I said: If the biggest company in your town--which is a small manufacturing company--if that company needed some funding for an expansion, would you have money? He said: Oh, sure, we have money. We have done banking the old- fashioned way. We take deposits and we make loans, but we do underwriting for those loans. We sit across the table from someone who wants a loan to be sure they are able to pay that loan. That is called underwriting. We bank the old-fashioned way. Would it not have been nice if some of the biggest institutions banked the old-fashioned way? I got a call the other day from a woman who runs a company that makes steel buildings. She has lost 80 percent of her business; 80 percent of her business is gone. Maybe they won't make it. But she asked the question: Is there any help for us? Is there any program out there that would help bail out our company because we were doing pretty well; this was a good economy for us; we were selling steel buildings, and it was not our fault this thing took a bad turn. Is there anything that can help us stay in business? We have people on our payroll. Is there anything that can help us because every day, she said, I read about the big banks getting all this money. I assume she will probably read something I have said that not only do they get all that money in Merrill Lynch, they got $3.6 billion in bonuses for the very executives who helped lose $25 billion last year. The answer to that woman is, no, there is nobody here who has a program that says: You know what, let's pay as much attention to the Main Street business that is struggling this morning as is being paid to the biggest banks that are too big to fail. Nobody is talking about that small business. By the way, when they lose, they lose everything. That small business, that dream, that risk of, in most cases, all the assets that family has, when that is gone, it is gone. Is there anybody here who has put together some structure that says: Let's help those folks. Maybe the economic engine also runs well when you help folks at the bottom. Maybe things percolate up in America. I think it is a fair question to ask. It is a fair question to ask that many ask about rewarding reckless behavior, about what do you do in a country to try to put an economy that has been so savaged by bad decisions and, in some cases, bad luck, but also greed, a carnival of greed, what do you do to put it on track, to give people confidence about the future? There is not one solution. There is not one answer. There are a series of things to be done. It seems to me, first and foremost, we have to try to understand that the American people cannot continue to read this. They cannot continue to read that they are asked to come up with another $750 billion because these institutions are too big to fail but apparently not smart enough to understand you don't need to give $3.6 billion in bonuses to people who lost $25 billion. There is no Main Street in America where that decision would be made. As I conclude, let me say that I want this country to succeed so badly. The President said it the other day. He had a room full of Republicans and Democrats in a joint session of Congress, and he said: I know everybody in this room loves their country. And we do. This country is in a lot of difficulty. It is not some natural disaster. This was not some Hurricane Katrina. This difficulty was caused by a lot of terrible decisions. Some people can call our offices and look at this Government and they can say: It was all Government policies. Let me just make this case as well that the consumer debt by the American people has gone up, up, up, straight up. That is not Government debt; that is consumer debt. That is also a problem. Giant trade deficits through unbelievably incompetent trade agreements, at $700 billion a year. We have a lot of problems, and we need to address them all right now and begin fixing them and putting this country on course so that we have an economy people can believe in and so they can believe life will be better for their kids than it was for them because this is a country that cares about expanding the middle class and lifting everybody up. We can do this. We can do it. But we won't do it by ignoring the things about which I just talked. We ought to face them and face them now. Mr. President, 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, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for such time as I may consume.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. My vote on the DeMint amendment, No. 573, should not be construed as a vote in favor of restoring the fairness doctrine. I do not favor restoring the fairness doctrine. However, the DeMint amendment went much further than legislating on the fairness doctrine. His amendment would have prohibited the FCC from establishing any program guidelines at all no matter how reasonable. For example, his amendment would have prohibited the FCC from establishing guidelines for children's programs or guidelines to prohibit violent programming during a family viewing hour in the evening. These are just two examples that the DeMint amendment would have prohibited. To be clear, I support the provision in the DeMint amendment that would have precluded the restoration of the fairness doctrine. My view is that the fairness doctrine is not appropriate for today's market. I do support the creation of reasonable public interest standards that attach to a broadcast license dealing with localism issues and community responsibility. But, I could not vote for such a broad amendment that would have stripped from FCC reasonable and appropriate regulation of the type described above. Amendment No. 591

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate recess until 8:30 p.m., and that at 8:40 p.m., the Senate proceed as a body to the Hall of the House of Representatives to receive a message from the President of the United States; that upon disposition of the joint session, the Senate adjourn until 9:30 Wednesday, February 25; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate resume consideration of S. 106, the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 10 a.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct an oversight hearing on Youth Suicide in Indian Country. Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 202-224-2251.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for 20 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, there has been a generous amount of discussion on the floor today about the economic recovery package that has been put together and about the dire conditions of our economy. If you listen, they have been described in so many different ways-- financial crisis, deep recession, economic trouble, a wreck, a dire condition--and I suspect almost anybody who has been experiencing trouble in the workplace as a result of this rather steep economic decline would understand all of those terms. I have been listening to the debate on the floor of the Senate, and I had to come to see if we could add a little clarity to what has caused all this. It is pretty hard to describe a remedy unless you understand what has caused it. I understand from a lot of discussion a bit ago that there are a lot of people who don't want to do anything or they want to do something much less or they are not sure. In any event, I was thinking of how many people in the Senate lined up to help the banks. The Treasury Secretary said we have to pass legislation to help the big Wall Street banks. He said we have to pass a 3-page bill in 3 days for $750 billion. Boy, there was a big-old traffic jam trying to get up here to the well to vote in favor of that legislation, helping out all the big banks with hundreds of billions of dollars. Now we are talking about helping someone else out, helping out folks who need jobs, and all of a sudden, there is a big problem. Mr. President, $700 billion to bail out big banks and steer this economy in the ditch--that is OK, big traffic jam to do that, but some money to help put people get back on payrolls, no, that is deficit spending, we are told. I showed this chart the other day on the floor of the Senate. There were 35 jobs available in Miami for firefighters, and 1,000 people showed up on the sidewalk and lined up to apply. For some, it may be easy to come to the floor of the Senate and talk about the 598,000 people who lost their jobs last month, the 1 million people who lost their jobs in the last 2 months, and the 3.6 million people who lost their jobs since this recession began. But name 1, name 10, name 1,000, name 1 million or look at their picture and see the faces of people who want to work but cannot because they were told their jobs no longer exist. Then ask whether this is important, and ask yourself: What are you going to do about it? What do you think the remedy is? What do you think the priority ought to be with respect to putting people, such as these people, back to work: giving them an opportunity with a job or lining up in the well of the Senate to say to the big banks: Here I come; here is $700 billion. Big difference, in my judgment. The difficulties we face in this country today are not some natural disaster. This is not Hurricane Katrina that came raging through our country. This is not some disaster over which we had no control. This is an economy which is collapsing and has very serious trouble as a result of specific things that have been done that have been irresponsible. How on Earth do you describe a solution unless you are willing to admit what has caused it? Let me go through some of it. It is not a question of pointing fingers, it is just a matter of deciding, let's be straight about where we are and how we got here. They will write in the history books about this era and this age. We studied the Gay Nineties. We studied the Roaring Twenties. Somebody will study this age, this age of excess, this carnival of greed in the history books in the future. So how did we get here? Let me describe it by saying we got, in my judgment, several fundamentally flawed policy changes that happened over a long period of time. Trade. First of all, you cannot suggest this problem we have does not lay right on the doorstep of those who have allowed this trade deficit in this country to rise to $700 billion to $800 billion a year, buying $2 billion more each day than we sell abroad and racking up a giant deficit for this country that we must repay to other countries. Most of the Members of this body have been perfectly willing to be brain dead on that subject for a long time. Trade doesn't matter, the deficits don't count. Don't worry about jobs going overseas, don't worry about unfair trade agreements, just ignore it and just keep chanting about free trade. That is one big mistake that has been made for a very long time and no more so than during the past 8 years of the past administration. With a trade deficit of $700 billion to $800 billion a year, add to that budget deficits. I know what they say about the budget deficit in the newspaper. OMB puts out a number. I think the last administration said it is some $450 billion. That is not true at all. It is not $450 billion. The question is how much did we have to borrow last year. That is the impact. It is between $700 billion and $800 billion, even more depending on whose counting. So with an economy of $14 trillion or so, a $700 billion to $800 billion trade deficit, a budget deficit of somewhere around $700 billion to $800 billion, that is 10-percent or so indebtedness in 1 single year. But it is not just the fact we have this budget deficit that has been so out of whack ever since the last administration took office--and by the way, they inherited a budget surplus. We had a big debate on the floor of the Senate, and those now saying: Let's not do much to remedy this economy, were standing on the floor of the Senate saying: We want to get rid of the budget surplus; we want very big tax cuts for a very long time, most of which will go to the very wealthy. Some of us said: Let's be careful, let's be conservative. No. Katy, bar the door. They passed their legislation. We ran into very big budget deficits in a very big hurry. Trade deficits, budget deficits--and by the way, a budget deficit that was, in part, constructed by deciding to fight a war and not paying for it. Can you imagine, fighting a war and saying we are going to charge every penny. We say to the American people: You go shopping. That is what President Bush said: Your job is to go shopping. We are going to fight this war. We are going to spend $10 billion, $12 billion a month, and we don't intend to pay a penny of it. Some of us who wanted to pay for part of it were told: We will veto the legislation if you try. He said: I will veto the legislation if you try. Trade deficits and budget deficits have weighed this economy down in a very significant way. And the very folks who have come today to talk about spending and deficits are the ones who supported all along a fiscal policy that created the most significant budget deficits in the history of this country. Those are not the only two things. They are significant--trade deficit, a budget deficit, reckless fiscal policy. They are significant, but something else happened, something very significant, and I talked about it frequently on the floor of the Senate. The same people who are so concerned about these issues now joined forces to say: You know what, we need to modernize America's banking system. It is way old-fashioned, way out of date. We put in place all kinds of things since the Great Depression to prevent banks from being modernized, and we need to have one-stop shopping. We need to let banks get involved in real estate investments again. We need banks to get involved in securities investments again. And so they passed--yes, the Congress did; incidentally, there was bipartisan support for it--a piece of legislation called the Financial Services Modernization Act. It got rid of old-fashioned things that were put in place after the Great Depression and helped create the big bank holding companies that could get involved in securities, real estate, and all kinds of risk ventures attached to banking which we had prevented for 80 years. All of a sudden, we saw the pyramid created, the big holding companies, and it was Katy, bar the door. What we saw was the buildup of unbelievable leveraged debt in these institutions and a substantial amount of risk brought into America's banking system. Almost immediately, that system allowed greed to permeate. Here is how it manifested itself in one significant part of the contributor to this economic malaise, and that is the housing bubble and the subprime loan scandal. I have spoken about it at great length--I am sure people are tired of hearing it--the subprime loan scandal. We know people who were cold-called by brokers to say: We know you are paying a 7-percent interest rate. We will give you a 2-percent interest rate, and by the way, you don't have to pay any principal; 2-percent interest rate and no principal, and you don't have to document your income to us. No-doc loan, no principal, 2-percent rate. They put people in subprime loans not telling or emphasizing that it is going to reset in 2 years to 10 percent or 11 percent and you can't prepay because there is a prepayment penalty for doing it. They larded up a whole lot of securities because they wrapped these into securities with bad loans, bad mortgages, and then sold them upstream to mortgage banks, hedge funds, investment banks. They were all fat and happy, and that included the rating agencies that would take a look at that security and say: That is a good security; that is AAA. They were all in on the take. By ``the take,'' I mean infected with greed. So we had the housing bubble. We had all of these mortgages out there. Consider this: A $14,000-a-year strawberry picker buying a $720,000 home placed by a broker who got a big bonus for placing the mortgage without any chance of that person being able to make payments. But that mortgage then becomes a mortgage wrapped into a security sold to a hedge fund, rated as a security as AAA, sold to an investment bank. Now all of a sudden you have brokers who are happy because they are making massive amounts of money; you have the mortgage banks, they love it, they are making lots of money; hedge funds, they are making so much money they can't count it. By the way, the top hedge fund manager a year and a half ago earned $3.7 billion. By my calculation, that is $300 million a month, about $10 million a day. Honey, how are you doing at work? I am doing pretty well, $10 million a day. I make as much in 3 minutes as the average American worker does in a year. They were all happy, all making massive amounts of money. The problem is, they built a pyramid. The scheme of this pyramid is not much different from Mr. Madoff, who apparently allegedly got away with a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. This scheme was not much different. All of a sudden, it began to collapse. Huge trade debt, big federal debt, reckless fiscal policy, fighting a war and not paying for it, charging every penny, in fact, insisting on continuing tax cuts even during the war, and then this unbelievable banking scandal by removing the protections that existed since the Great Depression and saying to the big banks: You can create holding companies, you can attach risk, such as securities and other issues, and it will be just fine. You can do that. And so they did. All of it was built on leverage--trade debt, budget debt, leverage debt in the private sector, almost unparalleled in the history of this country. Then the tent pole began to come down. All of a sudden, we discover a very serious problem. To describe how significant the money that was being paid was, there was a discussion in the last couple of days in the Congress about maybe doing what President Obama suggested; that is, to those big companies that got bailout funds, for the top 25 people in those companies, their compensation should be limited to half a million dollars a year. It is interesting, when they tried to do that, my understanding is there was a budget cost to that of something close to $10 billion. Why would there be a budget cost? Because they were all making so much money that the income tax they would pay as a result of that money was so significant that you had a $10 billion budget cost if you limited the income of the top people on Wall Street in these firms to $500,000 a year. That is almost unbelievable to me. But having done some work to study how much income exists in those areas, that is exactly true. There was an investigative story in the Washington Post about the failure of one of the largest investment banks. They described the top trader in that organization, a person trading securities and the person who was in charge of risk management. It turns out they carpooled every day from Connecticut to New York. It wasn't very hard to have the top trader deal with his best friend risk manager and get things done pretty easily. The top trader, they said, was making $20 million to $30 million a year. So that company turns out to be loaded with toxic assets, as were most of the other institutions engaged in exactly the same business because they were making so much money. Now we are told the taxpayers have to come to the rescue of these banking institutions. So $700 billion has been voted in what is called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP. I did not support that legislation. I didn't think the Treasury Secretary had the foggiest idea what he was doing, and I think history shows that to be the case. But one of the questions I think needs to be asked at this moment, is: Is there a requirement that we bail out these specific banks? Is that some divine right of existing institutions, to come to the Government to say: We are in trouble, you need to help us. Well, what has happened is the Government has allowed them to become so big they are referred to as being too big to fail. That is an actual specific category at the Federal Reserve Board--too big to fail. Despite the fact that they are bailing them out, our Government--the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury, which have said these institutions are too big to fail, and have in fact failed and need taxpayer money to bail them out--our Government is actually pursuing mergers to make them bigger. It is unbelievably ignorant, in my judgment, as a policy matter. But I think it is important for us to ask some basic questions here. Do we care about too big to fail; and should we, at some point, decide to take apart those institutions and create different entities, smaller institutions? I understand we can't tomorrow decide there will not be any major banking institutions in this country. Our country can't function like that. Credit is critical to every business in this country. I know many profitable Main Street businesses that are having great difficulty finding credit from established credit sources they have had for decades. So I understand the urgency and the need for credit from banking institutions. My only observation is this: If we are pushing $700 billion after failed institutions in order to try to make them well, even as we are saying to them, we want you to become bigger, and when, in fact, they are already too big to fail, I am saying that doesn't add up to me. I think maybe we should have a discussion here in this Congress about whether there is some inherent right to preserve institutions, or whether those that are too big to fail should be perhaps taken apart and create institutions that will better serve this country's interest. Now, some say there are only two choices in the future as we try to take a look at financial reform. And by the way, there is very little action on that at this point, and I believe it ought to go concurrent with all the discussion about trying to put people back to work and so on. But it seems to me the two choices are: You go back to a world in which you had Glass-Steagall and separation of banks from other inherently risky things, such as securities and real estate. And I believe we should do that. That means banks essentially become very much like a utility. That is the way it was. They were regulated, but generally performing traditional banking functions and making money. Then risky enterprises are over here, regulated in a different way but nonetheless able to engage in substantial amounts of risk with securities, real estate, and other items. We have to make that choice, and the sooner the better. I think to ignore that is to suggest, as some are now doing, that what we are going to do is we are going to have taxpayer money chase current institutions that have failed, and perhaps even make them bigger when they are already too big to fail. That makes no sense to me at all. And that brings me to this issue today of the economic recovery plan that has been negotiated. I don't think anyone comes willingly to this either starting line or finish line with this kind of a plan to say, I am pleased to be here. But I do think this: I see all of the energy of people who rush to try to help the big banks with $700 billion, and then see so much concern about trying to help people who are out of work, and I say: Wait a second; maybe we have our priorities wrong here. I believe that the economic engine in this country works best when people have something to work with, when American families have a job to go to, a job that pays well and allows them to take care of their family. I think that is a percolating-up kind of strategy with the economic engine, and I think it is perfectly appropriate and important. In fact, I think it is essential for us to worry about trying to put people back to work during a very deep recession. No one can say that what happened last month doesn't matter. You can't say that 598,000 people coming home at night and telling their loved ones they lost their job doesn't matter to this place. If it mattered to this place that the biggest banks in the country were having some difficulty, and they had to get $700 billion, why doesn't it matter that we care a little bit about the people who lined up in Miami, FL, a thousand of them, trying to get a little shot at 35 firefighting jobs? This too ought to matter. It is not unfair, as some have suggested last week when I showed this chart, and said I was playing on sympathy. This isn't sympathy. This is reality. Isn't it important that we talk a little about reality and a little less about theory here in the Chamber of the Senate? The fact is these people got up, stood in line, because they need a job, and we ought to be able to do something about that, to try to put people back to work and give this economy a lift. I think it is pretty clear that no one knows exactly what the medicine is or the menu is to try to make this economy well and healthy once again. But this legislation we are going to be considering contains a couple of things that I put in during this past week when it was considered. One is very simple: If we are going to put people back to work building roads and dams and bridges and so on and so forth, putting people on payrolls to do these projects that will invest in America's infrastructure, then let's try to buy American products while we do it so that we are putting people on factory floors to produce those products. I am talking about steel and iron and manufactured projects. When I suggested that we buy American for the major purchases that we are going to make to put people back to work, I did that because I know when we buy those products we will put our people back to work in those factories. But you would have thought I was talking the most radical kind of talk in the world, by the reaction of some--you are going to upset the international balance of trade. That is absurd. We are already so out of balance in trade. We are $700 billion to $800 billion in red in trade. At any rate, my legislation is here. So as we try to put people back to work and invest in our infrastructure to create jobs, we should buy American. It is common sense. The second amendment I put in this piece of legislation is different than anything that has been required with all the other money that has been shoved out the door by the Federal Reserve Board, by the Treasury Department, by the FDIC, and, yes, with TARP, supported by the Congress, and that is a provision that says: I want accountability. If you get money from this economic recovery package, you have to report to us on a quarterly basis that says: Here is who I am, here is the money I got, here is how I used it, and here is how many jobs I created. That kind of accountability, demanding that kind of reporting, is essential for my support for this bill. And that is in this piece of legislation because I put it there last week. Now, one final point, if I might. I understand, as I have said many times, that in most ways the issue of trying to promote economic recovery in this country is not about some menu. It is not about a menu of tax cuts or more spending. It is not about a menu of M1B or anything of that sort in fiscal or monetary policy. It is about trying to give the American people some increased confidence about the future. That is critical in order to have an expansion of our economy. People have to feel confident about the future in order to act on that confidence--to buy a suit, buy a new washing machine, buy a car, buy a home, take a trip. It is the kind of things people do when they are working and they feel good about the future and their job is secure. They do things that expand the economy. When people aren't confident, they do the exact opposite, and that causes a contraction of the economy. That is where we are today. People aren't confident about the future. I understand that. I mean, I think all of us know why. They have seen the most significant era of greed perhaps since the 1920s, and they do not like it. They have seen a collapse of the housing bubble, they have seen big investment bankers get rich, they have seen all these things--the scandals--and it is hard to be confident. They have seen the country fight a war without paying for it. Some people have given their lives. So I understand that we have a lack of confidence. The question is not whether that exists; the question is what do we do about it? Do we decide to do something about it? And if so, what? I have described often the response of Mark Twain when asked if he would engage in a debate at this organization, and he said: Oh yes, if I can take the negative side. They said, but we haven't even told you the subject yet. He said: Oh, the subject doesn't matter. The negative side will take no preparation. So I understand how easy it is to simply be opposed to everything. The question now, however, is: What do we do to lift this country? What do we do to help lift this country out of this deep recession and give people some confidence that we are on the right road? Perhaps a trade policy that begins to insist on some balance in trade so we are not deep in the red; a budget policy that at some point says you can't spend what you don't have on what you don't need. You have to have some balance in fiscal policy and you have to recognize that. And you have to have a policy on banking and finance that says we're not going to allow you to do this anymore. We are not going to merge the safety and soundness of banking with speculation and risk in real estate and securities. We are not going to do it. If we would take those steps, it seems to me we would give some substantial confidence to the American people. Passing the legislation that is going to be proposed today or tomorrow--the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--is not the easiest thing, I understand, because it is counterintuitive to somehow believe that the way out, when you are deep in debt, is to spend some money. Well, I understand that is counterintuitive. Yet all of the lessons we have learned are that you have to prime the pump to put people back on a payroll. If you have half a million people a month losing their jobs, you have to find a way to put people back on the payroll and to inspire some confidence in the economy again. I have heard discussions today about, well, I worry about this piece or that piece, and people won't go back to work. I am telling you, I think there are a lot of things in this bill that will put people back to work. I chair the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water. We have $4.6 billion in this with the Corps of Engineers, and the Corps of Engineers will be repairing mostly bridges and water projects--that are designed, engineered, and ready to go. They will be being hiring contractors who will be hiring workers. The fact is there will be a lot of jobs created with this package--we believe 3.5 to 4 million jobs. That is going to make a difference, I believe. Having described in some cases our disagreements, let me say that I do think every single person in this Chamber wants the same thing for this country. We perhaps have different approaches to how to get there, but we all want this country to prosper, the economy to be lifted and to recover, for people to go back to work, and for us to have the kind of future that we expect for our children. I believe that is possible. If I didn't believe it was possible, I would hardly be able to go to work in the morning. Let me tell one story, if I might--I have mentioned it before, a couple of weeks ago--and some people have heard of this. I talked about this guy named Ken Mink from Kentucky, because it is so inspiring. It is so indicative of people in this country who think we can do anything and they can do anything. Ken Mink, from a news report I read, was 73 years old. He was out in the back yard shooting baskets, and he came in and said to his wife: Honey, it is back. She said what is back? He said: My shot. My basketball shot is back. No matter where I shoot in the back yard, I don't miss. So he sat down that night and wrote applications to colleges--junior colleges--at age 73. He got into a junior college and tried out for the basketball team, at age 73, and made the basketball team. About a month and a half ago, he made two points in a college basketball game. The oldest man, by 40 years, ever to score at a college basketball game, at age 73. I was thinking about that the other day, and I thought: What a wonderful inspirational story, of somebody who didn't understand what he couldn't do. Who says you can't play basketball at age 73 for a junior college some place in Kentucky? My point is: I think that represents the story of our country. We have so many stories of people who, against the odds, do things that make this a better place. And if we work together and believe in ourselves, and believe in what we have accomplished in decades past and will accomplish in the future, this country is going to be fine. So we are going to get through this week, and hopefully we will give some boost to this economy, and after which I believe we will see an economy that provides more jobs and begins to expand and provides opportunity for American families once again. Mr. President, 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 Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 12, 2009, at 9:30 a.m.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on February 12, 2009 at 10 a.m.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 12, 2009, immediately following the Committee's business meeting at 10 a.m., in room 253 of the Russell Senate Office Building.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate to conduct a hearing on Thursday, February 12, 2009, at 10 a.m., in room SD366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Environment and Public Works be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 12, 2009, at 10 a.m. in room 406 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 12, 2009, at 2 p.m.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 12, 2009, at 10 a.m. to conduct a hearing entitled ``Structuring National Security and Homeland Security at the White House.''

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Indian Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 9:30 a.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.