Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I don't know what people are to think when they watch this or hear this debate--he said, she said, they said, we said. At the end, the question is, What is real? What are the facts? So let me see if I can uncomplicate this. This isn't like trying to connect two plates of spaghetti. This is a place of public interest about what should we do to try to create jobs in this country. My colleagues say we are worried because there is so much foreign income overseas. That is not our worry. Our worry is that they have decided to take hundreds and hundreds of billions of overseas income that is required to pay an income tax when it comes back to this country and have said let's give those companies an 85-percent tax cut if they do what they had previously promised they were going to have to do anyway, and that is repatriate this income. That is what we are concerned about. So let me see if I can put it in the frame of a company--Huffy bicycles. A lot of people worked at Huffy bicycles for a long time. They made $11 an hour making Huffy bicycles, sold in Wal-Mart, Sears, and Kmart, capturing 20 percent of the American bicycle market. But they all got fired. They all lost their job because that company moved to China in search of 30-cent labor in Shenzhen, China. The last day of work at the Huffy plant in Ohio, the workers, as they left their jobs and pulled out of their parking space, left a pair of empty shoes where their car used to park. Their jobs were gone, but it was the only way they could say to their employer, who moved their jobs to China: You can ship our jobs overseas, but, by God, you are not going to fill our shoes. That was the plaintiff cry of all the folks who lost their jobs who loved to make bicycles. Guess what. Our Tax Code gives a tax break for shipping those jobs overseas. This amendment continues that very approach and says: By the way, if you ship your jobs overseas and then repatriate the income from what you have earned overseas, we will give you an 85-percent tax break. I am telling you, it makes no sense. There is no evidence anywhere, no matter what charts you put up, that this created jobs in 2004. It did not. It cost jobs. Allen Sinai, noted economist, yes, he made the same claims then, and then backpedaled. He makes the same claims now. But let's talk a year or so from now, and he will backpedal again. The fact is, this is a giant tax break to some of the largest companies that cut their tax bill by 85 percent without any evidence they will create jobs. In fact, exactly the opposite evidence exists because we have experienced it, and we lost jobs as a result. This also will cost the American taxpayers $29 billion in lost tax revenue at a time when we are up to our neck in debt. So you know, let's think of what we are debating. We are debating an economic recovery program. We are going to promote recovery by dragging out a shop-worn, tired old argument that the way to do that is to give an 85-percent tax cut to companies that have earned income overseas, many of whom have fired their American workers and shipped the jobs overseas. I don't think that makes any sense at all. In fact, if this happens--it happened 5 years ago--if it happens now and it happens 5 years from now, every company will understand, you can move jobs overseas and you will never ever have to pay the corporate tax rate when you bring foreign earnings back. You will always have somebody standing up to say we have a sweetheart deal for you. Oh, it doesn't apply to the Joneses or the Olsens or the Larsons or the Christiansens, it just applies to the big companies that decided to park that income overseas. I say this: How about a 5.25-percent income tax rate for every American, rather than just a few of the biggest companies? How about all of us get a chance to get some of this 5.25 percent income tax rate? I don't think that is being proposed. Let me propose that.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Ten minutes.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, let me thank my colleague, the Senator from Vermont, the chairman of the committee, for his work on the Judiciary Committee. I do not serve on that committee, but I come to talk just a bit about the nomination of the new Attorney General and about the Department of Justice. The reason I say I appreciate the Senator from Vermont is because he waged a relentless struggle at a time when the Justice Department was involved in the long shadow of scandal, at a time when words from the Justice Department, from the Attorney General at that point, seemed to suggest torture was OK. It was a time when the Department of Justice seemed to say that people could be detained on the streets of America and held incommunicado without a right to an attorney. These were things that I believed were far afield from what we expect as basic rights in our country and the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee waged a long and brave battle against them. And, I want to thank him for that. But, let me talk about Eric Holder in the context of what I just described and why I think this nomination is so important. You have heard a lot about how highly qualified Eric Holder is--about his lifetime of impressive public service, about his history as an independent, tough-as-nails prosecutor, about the long list of organizations that support him as very qualified, and about the many prominent Democrats and Republicans that support him. But, I want to talk about Eric Holder as a key part of restoring justice to the Department of Justice. We have been through a long period of difficulty at the Justice Department. I am not talking now about the stewardship of Mr. Mukasey. I am talking about specifically a period when Attorney General Gonzales was in charge. The Attorney General is the senior person in our country responsible for ensuring that justice is done. That means many things. It means, certainly, evenhandedness; it means justice under the law; it means occasionally saying no to those who want to do the wrong thing, no matter how powerful or important they might be. It means everyone, from the lowest to the highest, gets treated equally and fairly under the law in this country. The Attorney General is the senior most Government official responsible for justice. That is the person who has to stand for, and stand up for, our country as a nation of laws. That is the person who needs to be the defender of human rights, who must believe in America as a beacon of hope in the world, a beacon that shines from America into the darkest places at the darkest times. The Attorney General, as the head of the Justice Department, is the one who is involved in that kind of activity and sends that message from our country. An Attorney General should be someone who can say torture is un-American because it is. No splitting hairs, no fancy words, no legal distinctions--just these simple words: Torture is wrong. Mr. Holder has said that to us in his nomination hearings. He said, ``Torture is wrong'' and ``No one is above the law.'' Those are very simple and straightforward words from this nominee, but I think they are timeless principles, timeless truths that America has exhibited now for nearly 200 years. Why is that important for us? The most powerful weapon in our country is what we stand for. That has always been the most powerful weapon in America. We had a long struggle in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and totalitarianism. The Cold War occasionally flared up to a hot war with bombs and bullets. But, it was not the bombs and bullets that won the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It was American values that won that Cold War. That is why we prevailed. We must never forget that American values were so strong that they shined the light of hope into the darkest cells of the gulag prisons in the outermost reaches of the Soviet Union. Many of those prisoners died in their cells, but some survived and talked about how inspired they were by the ideas and values of what was America. Our country gave them hope. The idea of America, as I said, reached to the farthest and darkest places on this Earth and offered hope to people--people struggling, people in grave difficulty. There was a very clear and distinct difference between us and the Soviet Union during that Cold War, and everyone knew what it was. It wasn't our military might or the comparison of our military capabilities. It wasn't our bombs or bullets. It was what each country stood for. When the people of the Soviet Union and their client states finally had a choice, they chose democracy and freedom and liberty. That is how powerful the idea of America has become. This moral ground has always been our country's strength. We must insist on keeping that high moral ground--not only because it is effective, but because it is right and because it is our birthright as Americans. From the very beginning our country has held itself to a higher standard, as in the story of George Washington and the fight to found America. He led the Continental Army in the war for independence. It is a pretty interesting story, if you go back and read it. Madam President, 5,000 were in the Continental Army that George Washington commanded, 5,000--but not trained soldiers. They were shopkeepers, farmers and tradesmen going up against a 50,000-man trained army of British soldiers. We know the result, but we don't always remember the battles along the way, military battles and, yes, battles over values and ideals. There were many difficult periods during that war, and there were some very dark days. During one very difficult period, at a time when a large number of his troops were captured, Gen. Washington and his troops saw the Hessian mercenaries, who at that point were fighting along with the British, slaughtering unarmed prisoners. Washington, when he captured Hessian prisoners, refused to do the same. Washington insisted we were different; we were going to treat people the way they should be treated not the way they treated us. That was George Washington's notion about who we are and why we are different. That has been America's birthright since the beginning of our country. It is why this issue of torture is so important. It is why the discussions about detainee treatment and enemy combatants and habeas corpus are so important. These issues are about who we are as a country, as a people, and who we want to be. I remember reading one day that a man was picked up at a New York City airport and then sent away, not to be heard from for a long while by his family or by anybody. It turns out he was sent to Syria where he was tortured for 8 to 9 months, kept underground in concrete cells in isolation. It turns out it was a huge mistake. This person was not who he was thought to be; he was not a terrorist. Yet, on American soil, he was detained and then sent away to be tortured. He was a Canadian. The Government of Canada, by the way, has apologized to that citizen for that situation. But it describes why it is so important that the rule of law always be applied. So this discussion about the Attorney General, about this nomination, about the Department of Justice, is about much more than just nominating someone for a Cabinet position. It is about what do we aspire to for our country and ourselves. What kind of Government do we want? What kind of Government will we allow? What kind of country do we want? I go back again, as I said, to the long, dark shadow that was cast for a period of time over the Justice Department, when it was engaged in scandals and scandalous conduct. There were very important questions about what was happening at the Department of Justice. Frankly, there were grave questions of what was happening to justice at the Department of Justice. The Senate Judiciary Committee was relentless in trying to understand it and hold hearings and get answers. Very few answers, frankly, were forthcoming. Thankfully, those days are over. We now have the nomination of Eric Holder. The Judiciary Committee voted 17 to 2 to support his nomination. Like them, I believe Eric Holder represents an opportunity for our country to have someone at the Justice Department who does understand what the Department of Justice stands for and where it fits in our value system. I am pleased to come to the floor of the Senate today to say, when we discuss these issues we must discuss what are the values, the ideals, that this country stands for and how those whom we intend to put in very high places--how do they comport to those standards and values? How will they conduct the office for which they are nominated? I believe strongly in the nomination of Eric Holder. As you have heard, he is highly qualified in experience, skills and temperament. As important, he understands the values of our country and the importance of justice. I have no doubt that Eric Holder will be an excellent Attorney General, will restore justice to the Department of Justice, and will uphold and further the historic values and ideals of our country, which will again be a bright shining light for justice and hope throughout the world. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we are debating the subject of children's health care at a time when our economy is in desperate trouble. Most all of us understand that 20,000 people today and 20,000 people tomorrow will have lost their jobs. Think of that. We are experiencing 20,000 people a day losing their jobs in this country right now during this economic difficulty. It was one thing at a time when the folks at the bottom of the economic ladder had a job and then had to worry about the issues understanding second job, second shift, second mortgage. But now it is not even that. Now they do not have a job at all. Last month, over half a million people lost their jobs. As that happens, the question is about the necessities of life. How do you provide for the necessities of life? How about your children's health care? I don't know what is second or third in everybody's life. I don't know what might be in second, third or fourth place in people's lives. But I know what ought to be in first place, and is for most people, and that is their children, their well-being, the health of their children. This legislation deals with that subject, trying to provide health care to children who do not have health care, expanding the number of children under the Children's Health Insurance Program. Nearly seven million children are now enrolled. This expands it. Four million additional children who do not have health care would receive health care under this expansion. It makes a lot of sense. In my State, we have 3,500 children receiving benefits under the Children's Health Insurance Program. There are another 14,000 who are uninsured in North Dakota. So surely this ought to represent one of the significant priorities for the children of our country and for the children of our individual States. I have come to the floor talking a lot about health care for American Indians. I have put up a couple charts on the floor talking about Avis Little Wind. She lost her life. I have talked about Ta'Shon Rain Little Light. She was 6 years old. She lost her life. The fact is, these are children for whom we would expect health care would be available, and it was not. Multiply that by a million or 10 million children who determine whether their health care needs are met when they are sick by whether their parents have money in their pockets. That ought not be a criteria by which we treat sick children in this country ever--not ever. One hundred years from now, we will all be gone and historians will look back and evaluate us--who we were, what we did, what our values were if you take a look at what we decided to spend money on, what kind of a budget did we have. Historians 100 years from now can take a look back and evaluate, at least in part, what our value system was. What did we think was important? What was valuable to us? What was most important to us? The question that is begged by this legislation is, Are our children important to us? Do we care about our children's health? Don't tell me children are important if you are not willing to do almost anything necessary to provide for your children's health. We must do this. This is not difficult. A lot of issues come to the floor of the Senate that are difficult and complicated and complex. You have to try to evaluate all the nuances to try to figure how do we put this together. This is not any of that. This is not difficult in terms of the mechanics, how it works. We know it works. It is not difficult in terms of the value system. Can you name two other things we do on the floor of the Senate that are more important than preserving the health of our children or treating a sick child who has no other options to get treatment or go to a doctor or go to a health clinic? Name something more important than that for your children or for the children you love. This is not difficult, and we should not make it difficult. What we ought to decide is that this is a priority for this country. It is a long-delayed priority. We passed it twice, and President George W. Bush vetoed it twice. But its delay ought not concern us at this moment. What ought concern us now is that we move and move quickly to address this problem and say to America's children: You rank at the top of our priorities, yes, in our personal lives and also in our public lives. You rank at the top, and we are going to provide health care to America's children who are uninsured. That ought to represent the best of our country and the best of what we can do in both political parties that serve in the Congress. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for 10 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this morning the Washington Post has a front-page story that says ``Buy American Rider Sparks Trade Debate, Proviso Limits Steel and Iron from Abroad.'' This is a story about a provision that is in both the House stimulus bill and the Senate stimulus bill that encourages, to the extent we are stimulating investment in infrastructure projects--building roads and bridges and dams and schools and repairing libraries and so on in order to try to put people back to work--that the acquisitions to come from American sources, where possible. If you are going to buy steel, buy iron, skid steer loaders, any number of different kinds of equipment, it ought to be coming from American factories so that we put people back on factory floors and back to work. The Washington Post has editorialized in opposition to this. The story itself almost sounds a bit like an opinion piece. It talks about ``opponents say it amounts to a declaration of war against free trade'' and ``will spark retaliation'' and so on. I wanted to make a comment about this, because I think it is an important issue and one we ought to discuss. If today is like most other days recently, 20,000 people will have lost their jobs; 20,000 people will come home tonight and have to tell someone in the family that they lost their job. And 20,000 people every day are losing their jobs, 500,000 to 600,000 people a month. We don't know exactly what the menu is to try to put this economy back on track, but we know that doing nothing is not a solution. So the Congress is putting together a stimulus proposal, an economic recovery proposal to try to do things that would put people back on payrolls. The quickest way to restore confidence is to put people back to work so they are earning a salary, have a job, and can provide for their families. And in the context of creating legislation that would put people back to work, building roads and bridges and building water projects and repairing schools and so on, the question is, we should spend American taxpayer money on U.S.-made products in order to make these repairs and build these projects. It's just common sense. The Washington Post story had a number of things attached to it that were not accurate. I want to talk about it for a moment. This provision in the Senate bill says that public works projects that are funded by this stimulus bill should use American steel, iron, and manufactured goods. That is not radical. We ought not be embarrassed to suggest that we try to use, where we can, products that are built in this country so that we put people back to work on the manufacturing floors and the plant floors building these products. That is the purpose of this legislation. The Washington Post suggests that the proposal has few exceptions. That is not true. The proposal has a broad public interest exemption, one that allows the administration to waive the ``Buy America'' program if it deems it to be in the public interest to waive it. There are exceptions where the products are not available. There are exceptions where using domestic material would increase the cost of the project by over 25 percent. There are plenty of exemptions and exceptions here-- public interest, 25 percent, not available. But in circumstances where a domestic product is available, where it is available at a price that is within the bounds of reason, and where we want to try to find a way to acquire products that are made in this country in order to put people back to work, that is a perfectly reasonable and important thing to do. The Washington Post also suggested and had other people suggest as well that asking that we would purchase iron and steel and manufactured products in this stimulus bill made in America would somehow violate our trade agreements. That is simply untrue again. The Federal grant programs that are in this stimulus bill to the States for infrastructure investments, construction, repair and so on are not covered by our international trade agreements. So it is not true that what we are doing here would somehow violate trade agreements. I had a reporter say to me: Some economists have said this harkens back to 1920s protectionism. I said: Give me a break. I am so tired of that nonsense. It cannot possibly be a sober economist. This country has a $700 billion a year trade deficit. We buy $2 billion more each day than we sell to foreign countries. We consume 3 percent more than we produce. We have a giant trade deficit. How could anyone in their right mind suggest this country is protectionist? It is absurd. How can anybody decide that when we put together a stimulus package to try to put people back to work, that we ought not buy things, to the extent we can, that are manufactured and produced in this country? It makes no sense to me. The Washington Post also indicated that the foreign Governments could retaliate if we did this. Again, we have a $700 billion trade deficit, so it's hard to see how our trade imbalance could be less favorable. But at any rate, let me say that Mr. Sarkozy in France said last month, with respect to their stimulus package, they want to make sure they are purchasing things that are made in France. It is a perfectly logical thing. No, this is not creating a trade war. This is an emergency situation in which each of our countries is trying to put people back to work. That is a perfectly logical thing to do. The Washington Post story also pointed out that the previous stimulus package, of which a fair amount was provided in tax cuts, went to stimulate manufacturing in China. A fair amount of it went to Wal-Mart. Eighty percent of the products in the Wal-Mart store shelves are made in China. So we are not going to stimulate economic jobs by purchasing Chinese goods. I am not suggesting somebody ought to stop their car at the moment and not walk into Wal-Mart. That is not my point at all. My point is, if we want to put people back on payrolls to try to put this country back on track and give people some confidence at a time when 20,000 people are losing their jobs every single day, the way to do that, with the hundreds of billions of dollars that are in this bill, is to say, at least try to buy things that are made in America. That is not unfair. It is not selfish. It is the right thing to do. It is only in areas of the rarified air of our Nation's capital and some other areas where we have ground our heads to such a point that we don't understand what is logical. I understand it is a global economy. I fully understand that. There are circumstances where you perhaps cannot buy a product that is made here because there aren't any made here. There are circumstances where the domestic product's price is truly exorbitant. We don't want to do that. I understand all of that. All of that is provided for in this Buy American provision. Yet you see folks out in the hallways here having an apoplectic seizure over what some economist is saying about something that is so fundamentally sound in terms of what we ought to be doing to try to strengthen the economy of this country, to reach out to American citizens and say: We understand a job is important for you. We understand you have lost your job. We understand it wasn't your fault, and we will see if we can help you get a job back on the plant floor, back on the factory floor someplace, producing products made in this country. It is a fair thing to do and a critically important thing to do, if the result of this stimulus program is going to do as advertised, and that is put Americans back to work. We have been through a long and tortured trail in recent months trying to determine what has happened and what needs to happen to try to fix what is wrong. What unites all of us is, none of us has been here before. We have never seen the convergence of the collapse of our financial system, the largest names in American finance sitting there with toxic assets in their financial bellies trying to figure out how they overcome the dreadful mistakes of the last 10 years with asset bubbles and a carnival of greed. At the same time that we see this collapse at the top of the financial system, we read about the subprime loan scandal and the nearly unbelievable circumstances of bad business that created it. In addition to that, we read about companies that have taken massive quantities of money from the American taxpayers in the form of TARP funds, in the form of the Federal Reserve Board. By the way, it is about $7.5 trillion that has now been committed in the name of the American taxpayer in ways that I don't think is written in the Constitution. But we have watched all this happen and we still see what is going on on Wall Street. We hear about airplanes on order. We hear about bonuses. We have watched that for the last 10 years and wondered, how on Earth can this kind of house of cards continue to exist? The answer is, it couldn't and it doesn't, except there is a lot for this Congress to do with respect to oversight, investigation, and to require accountability. One piece of business, an attempt to try to deal with the wreckage of this economy from this past decade of excess, one piece of business is to try to see if we can stimulate the economy to put people back to work. It is interesting how at the top everybody is interested in bringing a pillow and some aspirin to say: Are you comfortable? Can we help you? That is what happens if you are a big bank. But how about at the bottom, the people who lost their job and their house. Anybody around to say: We want to help you? In a stimulus program, if we put together construction projects, projects to create an asset for this country's future, and if we say: We would like you to see if you can buy the products with which you will produce those assets here in America so we can put people back on the payroll and get them working once again, that is not radical; that is the right thing to do. If there is a big, old dust storm and a whole lot of angst about asking people if they can buy in this country during this stimulus, that is too bad. That is exactly what we should do. It is my intent, with respect to this legislation--I believe the intent of many others--that we continue to keep this provision in the stimulus bill as it moves through the Congress. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, how much time remains on each side?

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I came to the Chamber and heard my colleague from Iowa speak about the nomination before us and speak about the culture of greed and other events that have resulted in the collapse of our financial system. I want to make a point that the Senator from Iowa is not alone. There are a number of us who feel very strongly about what has happened on Wall Street, what has happened since the financial collapse, and what is happening every single day. You wake up in the morning and you hear of thousands and thousands of people being laid off, with 2.6 million people losing their jobs last year and an estimated 2.5 million people expected to lose their jobs in the first 6 months of this year alone. This is a very serious problem for our economy, which is perched on the edge of a cliff. The question is, Who is going to steer us out of this mess? My notion is that the same people who steered us into the ditch are not likely to show up with an ambulance to get us out. And my great concern is that there needs to be a culture change. I must say I am concerned as well that we have some people coming to Washington who were part of the culture that got us into this mess. It was 10 years ago when the Financial Modernization Act was on the floor of this Senate. My colleague from Iowa voted against it, and so did I. There were eight of us who voted against it in the Senate. That is what caused these big holding companies. Citigroup, or Citicorp at that point, wanted to buy Travelers Insurance but the law wouldn't let them. So they got busy and changed the law. They got Glass-Steagall repealed--the protections put in place after the Great Depression--so that banks could get engaged in riskier enterprises, such as securities and real estate and merged it all together into a big holding company and said it would be fine. I stood here on the floor of the Senate 10 years ago and said: Mark my words, within a decade, we are going to see massive taxpayer bailouts if we pass that bill. I have no pride in being right. But I said at the same time, if you want to gamble, go to Las Vegas. Why on Earth should we have done in 1999 what we did to fuse banking with inherently risky enterprises? It created an unbelievable carnival of greed. People at the top were making money hand over fist, taking it home, and putting it in their big banks. Not everyone was making money, only folks at the top. The highest income in 2007 was $3.6 billion for one person. Think of that. Incomes from outerspace. So what do we have? Well, the fact is some of the same folks in 1999 preached the gospel of deregulation--getting rid of those old-fashioned things put in place after the Great Depression--to get what they called one-stop financial service centers. You would have one-stop financial shopping. Now you would be going to one place to do your real estate and your securities and your banking. That is what they wanted. Well, they got it. Only eight of us voted no, so they got it. Now the American people bear the brunt of this colossal, unbelievable failure. I have to say--and I have told the President this--that I worry some folks coming into this town now were part of the chorus supporting all of that deregulation in what was called modernization--the Financial Modernization Act and a couple of other pieces of legislation that occurred thereafter. So I am going to watch like a hawk the folks who show up around here who were part of the supporters back in 1999 who have taken apart the protections that had existed since the Great Depression. I am going to watch this like a hawk. We have to fix this, but you can't fix it by tightening a few bolts here and there. We need financial reform. We need to ask basic questions: Was it ever in the public interest to begin securitizing everything and passing risk up the line and allowing the most unbelievable mortgages to be written--no documentation of income, you don't have to pay any principal at first or you don't have to pay interest for 12 months. All this sort of thing. And by the way, if you have a bankruptcy in your background, come to us, we want to give you a loan. If you are slow in paying, have bad credit, or a bankruptcy, come to us, we will give you a loan. That is the way it was advertised. Unbelievable. This was a carnival of greed that has now toppled the financial structure of this country. And every single day American families around this country are bearing the burden and paying the price. Somebody is coming home and saying to their spouse, their loved ones, their friends, I lost my job today. It is not because I am a bad worker. It is because there were layoffs at the plant or the office. The price for this greed is unbelievable. Now it has stopped because it has collapsed. But now we have to rebuild it. And the question is, who will be the architects who will give us confidence to rebuild a financial system in which underwriting is really underwriting; in which we soak out some of the greed and get back to basic values; you separate banking from risk; you begin to regulate, and you get rid of the folks around here who boasted about being willfully blind in terms of their responsibility to regulate behavior that long ago should have been regulated? So I wanted to say that the Senator from Iowa speaks for a number of us--certainly myself--in being very concerned and determined to watch like a hawk what happens from this day forward with respect to those who are charged with and asked to help us reconstruct this system--a financial system, a system of employment, a system of production in this country where we put America back on track and give it the opportunity to expand, to grow, and to allow the American people to have confidence in the future once again. Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Maryland for her leadership. It has been a long struggle and she continues that struggle on the floor of the Senate today. I was thinking that the struggle for women's rights has been ongoing for a long time. It was 150 years in this country before women had the right to vote. Think of it. This has been a long and tortured struggle. I say to my colleagues that I think this is the easiest vote to cast. We come to this floor sometimes to cast wrenching, difficult, controversial votes. This is not one of them. This cannot be one of them. Requiring women who have been discriminated against to bring a lawsuit against their employer before they knew they were discriminated against is absurd, and yet that is what the Supreme Court said. It seems to me it is time to correct that Supreme Court decision. Women have been fighting for equality and especially equal pay for a long time. In this Ledbetter case, she was discriminated against by being paid substantially less than a coworker working right beside her, doing exactly the same thing, and they underpaid her for years and years and years. Finally, in the disposition of the Supreme Court, she was told that her case didn't stand because she didn't file that claim within 180 days. She didn't know for 20-some years, let alone 180 days. Why should she not have been able to have the right to continue redressing that wrong? So we must, it seems to me, do the work of the committee here today and pass this legislation. This struggle, as I said, has gone on for so long. Abigail Adams was urging her husband John Adams to protect the rights of women as early as 1776. This struggle has gone on since before the Constitution was written in this country. I was reading some while ago about the struggle of the woman's right to vote. This is about equal pay, but the so-called ``night of terror'' happened in Occoquan Prison. On November 15, 1917, 33 women were severely beaten by over 40 guards in Occoquan Prison. Why? What had they done? They were arrested for obstructing sidewalk traffic in front of the White House. Why were they there? Because they believed that women ought to have the right to vote in this country. So they were arrested and hauled off to prison. Lucy Burn, one of the 33, they say was shackled around both arms and the chain between the shackles was hung on the top of a cell door and that was her position throughout the night as blood ran down her arms. Alice Paul finally went on a hunger strike and they shoved a tube down her throat and her vomit nearly killed her. These women were tortured during the night of terror in Occoquan Prison because they obstructed traffic on a sidewalk? Why did they do that? They demanded, after 150 years, the right to vote. That is what they risked. They nearly died, some of them, to get this right to vote. Think of that struggle and how unbelievable that struggle was, and what heroes they were. But as always, there was push-back, people saying no. My colleague from Maryland brings to us today an issue of fair play-- another long struggle, and it is not even nearly over--but at least today we can take a step in the right direction with respect to the Lilly Ledbetter case. A Supreme Court that says a woman has no right to bring a pay discrimination case before the Court because she didn't know she was being discriminated against? That is an absurdity and one that must be corrected. This long struggle for fairness for American women will not end on the floor of the Senate today, but this should not be a difficult vote at all. I can't conceive of someone who would say the Supreme Court decision has any sort of fairness attached to it. A woman who is working for 25 years or more, beside someone who is doing the same job but paid much more because of that person's gender, that woman doesn't have a right to seek redress? What an unbelievable injustice. Lilly Ledbetter, by the way, was here this week attending the inaugural of a new President. We have tried to solve this problem before in the last Congress, but couldn't. We will solve it now, because it is right, it is fair, it is just, and this struggle ought to continue until we win. This is one right step in the direction of this struggle of fair pay, and it is a step we ought to take today. Again, I thank my colleague from Maryland for being such a leader on this issue. My hope is at the end of this day--this day--we will have passed this legislation and taken a very large step in the direction of justice for women. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, if the Senator will yield for a moment, this issue is about discrimination, but it goes far beyond this case or discrimination in these circumstances. It goes to the fair pay issue which the Senator from Maryland has been fighting for here in this Chamber for months and years. Obviously, we are going to do much more, but today is the first step in the direction of justice for women, and I think it will be a good day today if we are able to pass this legislation.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today I am introducing legislation called the Main Street Recovery Act to boost business investment and help jumpstart the ailing U.S. economy. We are facing our most serious financial challenge since the Great Depression and we must respond aggressively. Our financial services sector is in shambles and other business sectors are suffering. Employers have been slashing jobs at an alarming rate--including 2.6 million jobs last year--to reduce operating costs. Some economists are predicting that the unemployment rate could jump to 10-percent or more this year in many parts of the country. The manufacturing and construction sectors have been particularly hard hit during this downturn. The manufacturing sector laid off 791,000 workers in 2008. The unemployment rate among construction workers in December was 15.3 percent, eight percentage points higher than for the economy as a whole. More than 1.4 million experienced construction workers are currently unemployed. I believe immediate action is needed to prevent our economy from sliding into a deeper recession that would lead to more bankrupt businesses and massive layoffs of workers across the country. That is why I will support a stimulus program that will create jobs by investing in infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, water projects and more. But I also think we need to provide some targeted tax incentives to encourage the business community to consider making capital investments even during the economic slowdown. The legislation I am introducing today includes the following tax incentives that I believe can stimulate business investment: a temporary 15-percent investment tax credit. To encourage manufacturers and producers not to wait on making crucial equipment and machinery purchases, we should give them every incentive to make these purchases now or in the near future when these investments will most benefit the economy. We can accomplish this by offering a temporary, 15-percent tax credit through June 30, 2010 for businesses that purchase new equipment and machinery that is used as an integral part of manufacturing or production. Investment tax credits have been proven to work and will help generate growth and jobs in the nation's manufacturing and construction sectors. Enhanced 50-percent bonus depreciation. To promote business investment now, when the economy needs it most, we should extend the expiring 50-percent bonus depreciation for eligible assets placed in service over the next 18 months. This will help businesses make capital investments during the economic downturn by allowing businesses to write-off a larger share of their eligible business investments more quickly from their federal income taxes. Increased $250,000 small business expensing. To help small businesses buy the equipment and machinery they need to weather this economic storm and begin to grow again, we should extend the expiring expensing provision that allows small businesses to expense, i.e. immediately deduct, up to $250,000 of their equipment and machinery purchases over the next year and a half. In addition, there are many business owners that do not require new equipment or machinery but instead want to build a new business--maybe a restaurant, perhaps a retail shop or make interior and other improvements to such properties. Expanding the bonus depreciation and small business expensing provisions outlined above to cover investments in commercial real property will help provide business owners with the financial assistance they need to build that building or make long overdue improvements. I am very pleased to have the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association for my proposals as part of a robust economic stimulus package. The Senate is working on a large economic recovery package and I am optimistic that the package will include these important provisions. I am told that the Senate Finance Committee plans to mark up the tax portion of this package next week, and I am pleased that Chairman Baucus has recognized the need to help our Main Street businesses. In my judgment, including the tax incentives I have proposed will help stimulate much-needed economic activity and get our economy growing and creating jobs once again.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today I am introducing legislation called the Main Street Recovery Act to boost business investment and help jumpstart the ailing U.S. economy. We are facing our most serious financial challenge since the Great Depression and we must respond aggressively. Our financial services sector is in shambles and other business sectors are suffering. Employers have been slashing jobs at an alarming rate--including 2.6 million jobs last year--to reduce operating costs. Some economists are predicting that the unemployment rate could jump to 10-percent or more this year in many parts of the country. The manufacturing and construction sectors have been particularly hard hit during this downturn. The manufacturing sector laid off 791,000 workers in 2008. The unemployment rate among construction workers in December was 15.3 percent, eight percentage points higher than for the economy as a whole. More than 1.4 million experienced construction workers are currently unemployed. I believe immediate action is needed to prevent our economy from sliding into a deeper recession that would lead to more bankrupt businesses and massive layoffs of workers across the country. That is why I will support a stimulus program that will create jobs by investing in infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, water projects and more. But I also think we need to provide some targeted tax incentives to encourage the business community to consider making capital investments even during the economic slowdown. The legislation I am introducing today includes the following tax incentives that I believe can stimulate business investment: a temporary 15-percent investment tax credit. To encourage manufacturers and producers not to wait on making crucial equipment and machinery purchases, we should give them every incentive to make these purchases now or in the near future when these investments will most benefit the economy. We can accomplish this by offering a temporary, 15-percent tax credit through June 30, 2010 for businesses that purchase new equipment and machinery that is used as an integral part of manufacturing or production. Investment tax credits have been proven to work and will help generate growth and jobs in the nation's manufacturing and construction sectors. Enhanced 50-percent bonus depreciation. To promote business investment now, when the economy needs it most, we should extend the expiring 50-percent bonus depreciation for eligible assets placed in service over the next 18 months. This will help businesses make capital investments during the economic downturn by allowing businesses to write-off a larger share of their eligible business investments more quickly from their federal income taxes. Increased $250,000 small business expensing. To help small businesses buy the equipment and machinery they need to weather this economic storm and begin to grow again, we should extend the expiring expensing provision that allows small businesses to expense, i.e. immediately deduct, up to $250,000 of their equipment and machinery purchases over the next year and a half. In addition, there are many business owners that do not require new equipment or machinery but instead want to build a new business--maybe a restaurant, perhaps a retail shop or make interior and other improvements to such properties. Expanding the bonus depreciation and small business expensing provisions outlined above to cover investments in commercial real property will help provide business owners with the financial assistance they need to build that building or make long overdue improvements. I am very pleased to have the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association for my proposals as part of a robust economic stimulus package. The Senate is working on a large economic recovery package and I am optimistic that the package will include these important provisions. I am told that the Senate Finance Committee plans to mark up the tax portion of this package next week, and I am pleased that Chairman Baucus has recognized the need to help our Main Street businesses. In my judgment, including the tax incentives I have proposed will help stimulate much-needed economic activity and get our economy growing and creating jobs once again.

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 as much time as I may consume.

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, yesterday's paper and today's paper describes some pretty ominous news. And yesterday's action in the Senate was prompted as a result of the financial crisis that exists in this country. Each day the paper brings us another chapter of this sad saga. ``Bank of America to Get Billions in U.S. Aid.'' That was the Wall Street Journal's headline. ``Bank of America to Get More Bailout Money,'' the New York Times. Yesterday, this Senate voted to proceed with $350 billion in additional funding for what is called TARP, Troubled Asset Relief Program. In fact, TARP is not being used to purchase trouble assets, but that is what the program is called. I did not support that proposal yesterday. I didn't support the proposal of releasing another $350 billion, but that is not surprising perhaps. I didn't support the proposal on the $700 billion last October. I didn't support that, not because I didn't think there was a crisis--I think there is a financial crisis in this country. But I didn't think there was the foggiest notion of how that was going to be used effectively to address this country's financial problems. It turns out, I believe, I was right. Since the $700 billion was authorized last October, we have seen the first $350 billion made available spread around in almost every direction. It is almost as if you turned a ceiling fan on to a stack of money. The Secretary of the Treasury said: We have a financial crisis. And he said: Here is a three-page piece of legislation, and I want you to pass a $700 billion bill in 3 days. The Congress didn't do that, but in relatively short order, the Congress authorized $700 billion for the Treasury Secretary to do as he wanted to do: buy troubled assets from the largest financial firms in the country. He got the money. But it turns out that he did not want to buy troubled assets after all. Instead, he wanted to invest in bank capital. So he began investing in bank capital. The investments in bank capital at one point was $125 billion to nine banks, some of which did not ask for it and did not need it, no strings attached. He said: We are doing it to expand lending because we want to incentivize expanding lending and we want to try to unfreeze these credit markets. Well, $125 billion with no strings. So was lending expanded? Probably not. Nobody knows. Ask the banks what they did with the money and they will say: None of your business; money is fungible; we are not going to tell you. Now the question is the other $350 billion. One of the reasons I was not even interested in starting on the $700 billion or the $350 billion is we don't have any regulations that will close the gate and stop the very kinds of practices that steered this country's economy into the ditch in the first place. I come from a ranching background raising some horses and cattle in a farm State. I understand the notion about closing the gate. You have to close the gate. There is nothing here that closes the gate to stop the kinds of practices that put us in the position we are now in. I talk about these headlines with Bank of America. Let me start out by saying Bank of America apparently has been a good bank. It is an FDIC-insured bank. I don't have particular problems with Bank of America. But I have serious problems with what has happened with respect to government-sponsored failure, and government-sponsored failure is not something of which we ought to be particularly proud. Government-sponsored failure is to stand behind failed financial institutions with taxpayers' money. Winston Churchill once said success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. There sure ought to be a lot of enthusiastic people around because we are going failure to failure. Let me describe what I mean. You take an FDIC-insured bank--in this case, Bank of America--and the Federal Government watches while the FDIC-insured bank buys the biggest mortgage company in this country which was failing, Countrywide Mortgage. I have described that Countrywide was led by a man named Mozilo, largely celebrated as one of the great CEOs in America. He received the Horatio Alger Award. By the way, he got out of Countrywide with about $200 million, it appears, and Countrywide was failing. So Bank of America buys Countrywide, an FDIC-insured bank that the taxpayers are responsible for, is allowed to buy a failed mortgage company called Countrywide. By the way, I have shown this many times. Let me show you what Countrywide was doing and why it was a spectacular failure. This big mortgage company was advertising this to the American people all the time they were running up this unbelievable amount of speculation and debt: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? Have you been denied by other lenders? Call us . . . ``Call us.'' You wonder why a business such as this fails-- advertising if you have bad credit, trouble paying your bills, call us, let me give you a loan. So Bank of America bought Countrywide. I don't have the foggiest idea why they bought Countrywide. But 8 months later, the Federal Government encouraged Bank of America to buy Merrill Lynch, a failing investment bank, that was about to go bankrupt, we guess, on about the same weekend Lehman went bankrupt. The Federal Government helped an arranged marriage, apparently, without even any dating--at least you would think they would date a little bit. On a weekend, Bank of America, one of the biggest FDIC- insured banks in America that had picked up, 8 months earlier, a bad mortgage company that helped steer this country into the ditch, was now told: We want you to pick up a failed investment bank, Merrill Lynch. So they did. What is the result? This arranged corporate marriage now gives us headlines and a deal overnight last week by which that parent company, Bank of America, needs billions more in order to keep going. What otherwise had been a healthy bank and what we are told this morning in news accounts that without Countrywide and without Merrill Lynch, Bank of America would be fine, now they need $20 billion. That is on top of another $25 billion last fall. This company now needs to be bailed out by the American taxpayers. Why? Because they put together FDIC-insured banks with more risks coming from, in this case, Merrill Lynch and Countrywide. You think that is success? I don't. The question is: When do we stop doing things that fail? So we wake up in the morning, and we discover that as a country, we have $20 billion less money in our hands, we have $20 billion less because somebody decided this company that bought Countrywide and Merrill Lynch now needs $20 billion to keep going. By the way, last month, the CEO for Merrill Lynch was trying to get Merrill Lynch to give him a big million bonus for 2008. It was reported there was a proposal somewhere in that system to give him a $30 million bonus. The CEO was apparently trying to get Merrill Lynch to give him a bonus after he sold Merrill Lynch to the Bank of America but before the bank actually took over Merrill Lynch. Not only that, that CEO of Merrill Lynch had just joined Merrill Lynch the year before and received a $15 million signing bonus and a pay package valued at between $50 million and $120 million. I didn't know failure paid so well in this country. The reason I am describing this specific case, and I have talked about this at length, and I am going to talk about it again, this all results from now almost 10 years ago on the Senate floor. Our friend from Texas, Senator Phil Gramm, authored a piece of legislation called Gramm-Leach-Bliley and, to be fair, supported by the Clinton administration, supported by the then-Treasury Secretary and some of the same people who are now being consulted on this crisis, they got something called financial modernization passed through this Congress. What was financial modernization? Financial modernization was legislation that said: You know what, we have all these old-fashioned rules around here, for God's sake; let's dump them so we can move into the future with some modernization. Why should we still, 70 years after the last Great Depression, have on the books the laws that were put in place after the Great Depression that prevent banks from being involved in real estate and securities and insurance? Let's get rid of those laws. Let's allow our banks to be modern. Why can't our banks be involved in real estate and securities and so on? That was the sermon that was being preached on the floor of the Senate and elsewhere. What was a stimulant for it, by the way, was Citicorp wanted to buy Travelers Insurance, one of the biggest merger acquisitions in history, but they couldn't do it because the law prevented it. Why did the law prevent it? Because after the Great Depression, where banks failed all across this country, because in the roaring twenties, everybody was making lots of money doing stupid things, a lot of speculation, everybody was getting rich, like hogs in a corncrib, they were all making all this money and loading up banks with risks. Banks were up to their necks in risky real estate. They were up to their necks in risky securities. And then the whole thing came tumbling down and banks failed in large numbers. So after the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came in and said: By the way, we are going to fix this. We are going to put in things that prevent that from ever happening again. We are going to separate banks from risky enterprises. Banks are not going to be engaged in real estate and securities. Banks are about FDIC-insured deposits of the American people, and you are not going to be engaged in those kinds of risks. We will prevent it. We will pass something called the Glass-Steagall Act, saying to banks you can't do it. In 1999, Senator Phil Gramm and a whole lot of others who joined a big chorus to sing the same song said: You know what, those things are hopelessly old-fashioned. We have to get rid of those restrictions. Those were put in place in the 1930s. They don't apply in this modern age. Eight of us on the floor of the Senate voted no. I wish to describe what I said on the floor of the Senate in 1999, when I opposed that legislation. I said: Fusing together the idea of banking, 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 . . . That is what I said on the floor of the Senate almost 10 years ago. I also said this: 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. Don't do it through the deposits that are guaranteed by the American people and by deposit insurance. I said this 10 years ago: This bill will also, in my judgment, raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts. I sure wish I had not been right. This bill will raise the likelihood of massive taxpayer bailouts. It will fuel the consolidation and mergers in the banking and financial services industry at the expense of customers and others. And I said this during the debate; that we will look back in 10 years' time and say: We shouldn't have done that because we forgot the lessons of the past. I take no pride in believing, 10 years ago, that what was preached on this floor--and, yes, in the administration and elsewhere--about modernization was something that I felt would undermine this country's interest. But it has, and it will continue to. The point I make today is none of these lessons has been learned. If when we went to bed last night someone was working to tell us this morning that $20 billion of American taxpayers' money has been taken in order to shore up a bank, one of the biggest banks in America because they are in trouble because they were allowed to buy an investment bank with toxic assets, if that is the lesson we learned from waking up this morning of what the people in charge of our money are doing with our money, I tell you, we haven't learned any lessons at all. Is there anything that will remind us of the absurdity of fusing together basically risky things with banking, which requires just the perception of safety and soundness? If people think a bank isn't safe and sound, it doesn't matter how much money that bank has, there will be a run on that bank and the bank will fail. Perception of safety and soundness is critical. How do you retain that perception--in fact, more importantly, how do you have the reality of safety and soundness--if you have the biggest banks in the country merging through corporate marriages with some unbelievably bad mergers--in this case a very good bank, Bank of America, buying Countrywide Mortgage, and then purchasing Merrill Lynch? How do we justify that? The reason I voted against the proposition of releasing the $350 billion yesterday is I am not prepared to move forward with any of these things until and unless there is a commitment by the people running these operations that they have learned the lesson and they are going to close the gate and this sort of thing can't happen. Now, I have a chart to show you that we have now committed $8.5 trillion of the taxpayers' money--$8.5 trillion--and here is how it has been committed. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that describes this kind of governing--nothing. The Federal Reserve has contributed about $5.5 trillion. They have opened their window for the first time to loan money directly to investment banks. Never been done before in the history of the country. And if you try to find out who got the money and how much, you can't--$5.5 trillion. FDIC programs, $1.5 trillion, Treasury Department programs, $1.1 trillion, and Federal Housing Administration, $300 billion. All this taxpayer money shoved out the door with no accountability, no transparency, and much of it without strings. I am not willing to be a part of that. If I felt that those who steered us into this ditch were going to show up with an ambulance, or if those who steered us in this ditch had learned their lesson that you can't continue to do this sort of thing, I would feel differently. But yesterday's and today's newspapers tell me they haven't learned a thing. So my notion is that we are still going down the same road. And to believe that while America sleeps we will keep throwing money at failure--because we merge banking with risk--and somehow people will believe that we don't have this risk attached to banking is not going to work. Let me talk for a second about Citigroup. One of the largest banking institutions in America--in the world, in fact--is coming apart. It lost $8.2 billion in the last 3 months, and it lost $18.7 billion in 2008. Citigroup is a bank. It is an investment bank, it is a brokerage business, it is an insurance company. It is almost everything. How does all that happen? It happened because in 1999 the Financial Modernization Act said: You know what, to be modern you have to allow big holding companies and gather all this stuff together in one place. You put it in a big holding company and then you can build firewalls. It turns out they were tissue paper firewalls, but nonetheless we have all these mergers and holding companies, and now Citigroup is completely coming apart. In the meantime, these companies are judged by our country--by the Federal Reserve and others--to be too big to fail. It doesn't matter how incompetent they might be, they are too big to fail. Interestingly, they have not been big enough to regulate. I am talking about the investment banks. It seems to me if you are too big to fail, you surely are not too small to regulate. Why would we not have regulatory authority to prevent this sort of thing? Five banks that are deemed too big to fail, by the way, hold $171 trillion in what are called derivatives. Most people don't understand the lexicon of derivatives, CDOs, collateralized debt obligations, swaps, or credit default swaps. Most of that doesn't even sound like the English language. It is like some foreign language. In fact, some is so complicated that those engaged in it don't understand it. But again, these banks--too big to fail--hold a notional value of $171 trillion in derivatives. Going back to the mid 1990s, I have offered five pieces of legislation here in the Congress to regulate derivative trading and also to regulate hedge funds. Obviously, there is enormous resistance by Wall Street and others to anybody who wants to regulate anything they do, and so I have not been successful. It is not because I haven't tried, but there is a massive amount of dividends out there. And what prompted me to do that is that banks--FDIC-insured banks--were trading on derivatives on their own proprietary accounts. They might as well have put some craps tables or blackjack tables right in the lobby of the bank because that is what you are doing exposing that kind of risk to basic banking. But everybody was fat and happy around here. Regulators were willfully blind. They would come to town and say: Let me be a regulator so I can put blinders on. Or as one of them said at the SEC: There is a new sheriff in town. This is a business-friendly place now, which meant that those who were supposed to look out for the public interest didn't give a rip. In fact, Alan Greenspan was right in front of the parade. He believed in what is called self-regulation. Isn't that interesting. If we don't look, don't pay attention, don't worry, and be happy, self-regulation will be fine. Well, it is about $8.5 trillion short of being fine. And the question is, When--when--at last, at long, long last--will this Congress, this administration and the new administration, decide that we are going to regulate these activities in the future; that we are going to close the gate; that this cannot happen again. When will we decide if you want to trade in derivatives, then it will have to be not in the dark--no more dark money--it will have to be transparent and regulated. If you have an FDIC-insured bank, you are not going to be able to buy a Merrill Lynch because you can't fuse risky enterprises with FDIC insured banks. Now, let me say that is not unbelievable criticism of Bank of America because, as I said, that was a corporate sponsored marriage. Apparently, the folks down at Treasury went to Bank of America and said: You know what, we have this pretty little corporation called Merrill Lynch that is in some trouble and we would like you to marry it. So as I said, with apparently not too much thought, they decided to hitch up. Turns out to have been a pretty bad marriage. My point is it is not only this. I mention Citi and I have mentioned Bank of America. The fact is this river runs deep, the river of failure here. And the question is, When--when--will we get to the point where we are going to say yes, that we are willing to make investments to steer us out of this problem in exchange for regulation and in exchange for coming back to pass a piece of legislation similar to Glass-Steagall, similar to the protections that were put in place after the Great Depression. Unbelievably, there are a whole lot of folks who are not even willing to entertain that. They say: No, no, no, you don't understand what you are talking about. We still need to be modern, we still need to compete, and we still need these new financial, exotic instruments. What they are is a new wrapper; kind of like sheep intestines, a new casing for sausage. They wrapped around something called a securitized product that began securitizing everything. All of them did. They were giving bad mortgages to people who couldn't pay them, no documentation of income, teaser rates at maybe 2 or 3 percent that will triple or quadruple in 3 years and lock in prepayment penalties, and then wrap them in a security and sell them upstream with everybody making fat bonuses and lots of income. The problem is, the whole thing was a Ponzi scheme. The Ponzi scheme is not just Mr. Madoff having breakfast in his $7 million apartment jail in Manhattan. Yes, that was a Ponzi, apparently by $50 billion. But this whole approach was a Ponzi scheme--wallpaper the country with credit cards. Wallpaper everything with credit cards. The other day I talked about my son, when he was 12 years old, getting a credit card solicitation from a dozen different companies. They offered him a Diner's Club card to go to Europe. In fact, I brought a bunch of those solicitations to the floor of the Senate at that point. And I said, I am sure my son would love to go to Europe at some point, but he is only 12, and he ought not get a credit card. But these companies wallpapered America with credit cards and then they securitized credit card debt and sold securities upstream. Is there any reason these assets are toxic? Securitized credit card debt, much of which won't be repaid; securitized mortgages by Countrywide and others--Zoom Credit, which says in their advertisements: Is your credit in the tank? It is like money in the bank. Come to us. It seems to me you don't effectively repair a house unless you first begin to strengthen the foundation. And the foundation for all of this, to try to put this country back on track, in my judgment, is to go back and revisit what was done in the last dozen years or so under the rubric of financial modernization--modernization of the financial system, modernization of commodity trading. If we don't go back and revisit that, this country will not be able to steer itself out of this problem. This is a pretty significant financial wreck that has happened in this country. It is one thing for people to put on blue suits and come and talk about it; it is another thing for over a half million people last month to go home and tell the person they love or go home and tell their family they have lost their job--perhaps the same people who had to tell them a month or two ago they lost their home. These are tough times. A lot of people are hurting badly. We need to find a way to steer this country back to economic growth and prosperity again. But it will not happen unless we fix the foundation and reconnect those things that were taken apart over a decade ago. Let me finally say again, while I have talked about this at some length on a number of times, despite it all, if we keep pushing in the right direction, I have hope that this country will prevail. This country has done so many terrific things against the odds, and we will again. But it requires people to be smart and tough. You cannot have a wall of debt out there that you don't care about, an unbelievable wave of speculation that you say doesn't matter. You can't have regulators who refuse to regulate. You can't have an avalanche of dark money that no one can see. The fact is you have to fix all these things, and we can. This problem was created by public policy here and by corporate policy there, and we can fix it and put this country back on a better course, a course that will grow and provide jobs and opportunity and hope once again. But it won't happen by itself. It is going to happen when we as a country decide that we are going to work together to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and steer a legislative course and steer some more responsibility on the corporate side to work together and fix these fundamental problems. I believe that is possible, and it is why I come to the floor so often to talk about what has caused these problems and what we ought to do to fix them. It is not hopeless. I am hopeful. But it is going to take a lot of work. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following interns in my office be granted the privilege of the floor for the duration of today's session of the Senate: Greg Innocent and Matt Hanson.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today I am introducing legislation with Senator Mikulski and 10 of our colleagues that I hope will be added to any economic stimulus package considered by Congress in the coming weeks. This bill will put the brakes on a tax break granted to U.S. companies that move U.S. jobs offshore. The U.S. economy is facing its most serious financial challenge since the Great Depression, and we must respond aggressively. I think a new economic stimulus plan is urgently needed to help prevent the economy from sliding deeper into a long-term recession. I agree with those who say that a major goal of the stimulus package should be to create more jobs, but I think we also have an opportunity to make a change to ensure that we keep the jobs we already have. Employers have been slashing jobs at an alarming rate--2.6 million jobs last year--to reduce operating costs. The manufacturing and construction sectors have been particularly hard hit during this downturn. The manufacturing sector laid off 791,000 workers in 2008, continuing the disturbing loss of more than 4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since the end of 2000. Federal tax laws have contributed to this problem. There is one thing that Congress can do immediately to stem the loss of more manufacturing jobs: repeal the perverse tax subsidy in the Federal Tax Code for U.S. companies that move manufacturing operations and American jobs overseas. Not only will this help keep good-paying manufacturing jobs here at home, it will save American taxpayers more than $15 billion in revenue over the next decade. Unbelievably, there is an insidious tax subsidy that rewards U.S. firms that move their production overseas and then turn around and import those now foreign-made products back to the United States for sale. When a U.S. company closes down a U.S. manufacturing plant such as Huffy bicycles or Radio Flyer little red wagons, fires its American workers and moves those good-paying jobs to China or other locations abroad, U.S. tax law actually provide those companies with a large tax break called deferral--allowing them to avoid paying any U.S. income taxes on their foreign earnings until those profits are returned, if ever, to this country. If a company making the same product decides to stay in this country, on the other hand, it is required to pay immediate U.S. taxes on the profits it earns here. Repealing this jobs export tax subsidy will not hinder the ability of U.S. firms to compete against foreign competitors in foreign markets, as some special interests have claimed. It is targeted only to U.S. firms that move production abroad and then turn around and ship those products back to this country for sale. If there was ever a tax policy change that would help save U.S. manufacturing jobs and should be part of a robust economic stimulus plan, this is it. I urge my colleagues to cosponsor this legislation. With a new Congress and administration in place, now is the time to kill this ill-advised tax subsidy once and for all. I look forward to working with my colleagues on this important tax policy matter in the coming weeks.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today I am introducing legislation with Senator Mikulski and 10 of our colleagues that I hope will be added to any economic stimulus package considered by Congress in the coming weeks. This bill will put the brakes on a tax break granted to U.S. companies that move U.S. jobs offshore. The U.S. economy is facing its most serious financial challenge since the Great Depression, and we must respond aggressively. I think a new economic stimulus plan is urgently needed to help prevent the economy from sliding deeper into a long-term recession. I agree with those who say that a major goal of the stimulus package should be to create more jobs, but I think we also have an opportunity to make a change to ensure that we keep the jobs we already have. Employers have been slashing jobs at an alarming rate--2.6 million jobs last year--to reduce operating costs. The manufacturing and construction sectors have been particularly hard hit during this downturn. The manufacturing sector laid off 791,000 workers in 2008, continuing the disturbing loss of more than 4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since the end of 2000. Federal tax laws have contributed to this problem. There is one thing that Congress can do immediately to stem the loss of more manufacturing jobs: repeal the perverse tax subsidy in the Federal Tax Code for U.S. companies that move manufacturing operations and American jobs overseas. Not only will this help keep good-paying manufacturing jobs here at home, it will save American taxpayers more than $15 billion in revenue over the next decade. Unbelievably, there is an insidious tax subsidy that rewards U.S. firms that move their production overseas and then turn around and import those now foreign-made products back to the United States for sale. When a U.S. company closes down a U.S. manufacturing plant such as Huffy bicycles or Radio Flyer little red wagons, fires its American workers and moves those good-paying jobs to China or other locations abroad, U.S. tax law actually provide those companies with a large tax break called deferral--allowing them to avoid paying any U.S. income taxes on their foreign earnings until those profits are returned, if ever, to this country. If a company making the same product decides to stay in this country, on the other hand, it is required to pay immediate U.S. taxes on the profits it earns here. Repealing this jobs export tax subsidy will not hinder the ability of U.S. firms to compete against foreign competitors in foreign markets, as some special interests have claimed. It is targeted only to U.S. firms that move production abroad and then turn around and ship those products back to this country for sale. If there was ever a tax policy change that would help save U.S. manufacturing jobs and should be part of a robust economic stimulus plan, this is it. I urge my colleagues to cosponsor this legislation. With a new Congress and administration in place, now is the time to kill this ill-advised tax subsidy once and for all. I look forward to working with my colleagues on this important tax policy matter in the coming weeks.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 2:30 p.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct an oversight hearing on Job Creation and Economic Stimulus 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 that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I have been interested for some long while about new technology and the Internet and all those related issues. I recall reading a couple of years ago a statement by the former president of IBM in which he described the unbelievable leapfrog in technology and capability--most of it breathtaking. Most of us understand that because we use the Internet we can go anywhere in the world at our fingertips on the keyboard, but he described something breathtaking to me. He described the issue of storage density and the new capability of storage density. He said that we are on the cusp now of being able to reduce in storage density all of the works that exist in the Library of Congress--I think it is somewhere around 14 or 16 million volumes of work--which is the largest repository of human knowledge that exists anywhere on Earth; to be able to store that on a very small wafer the size of a penny. Think of that: a wafer the size of a penny representing the storage device that contains the largest repository of human knowledge in history. Pretty remarkable. Assume that you are able to walk around with a storage device the size of a penny in your jacket pocket which you can put into a computer and peruse all that human knowledge that has been gained since the start of human history. On that storage device would be a lot of information, but what wouldn't be on that storage device--of all the human knowledge accumulated since the beginning of time--would be how we get out of this financial mess that the country is now in. There is no formula, there is no rule, there is no experience that would give us a roadmap of how we get from here to where we need to be to get out of this financial wreck. We are indeed in a financial crisis. And the one thing that unites the smartest economists in the country or the deepest thinkers or the latest self-proclaimed greatest sage and all the rest of us, the thing that connects us all, is none of us has ever been here before. We are all walking in the woods for which there is no map and all we have is a guess as to how we are to try to put this economy back together. Now, some people say: Well, what does all that mean, this financial crisis? How do we understand that there is this wreckage occurring in the economy? Well, you can look at it a number of ways. You can look at the people who have been saving for a long period of time, investing their 401(k) in a mutual fund or in the stock market. After 30 years of work, they had a nest egg for retirement, but they have lost 40 or 50 percent of it, just like that. Half a lifetime of savings gone, like that. That is one piece of evidence. It is pretty dramatic for every family in this country. But there is other evidence as well. And that evidence especially, it seems to me, describes the crisis in our families in this country. If you look at last month's unemployment report, it says, in a kind of a sanitary way, that 524,000 people lost their jobs. Well, what if you just say 523,999 and then focus on the one, just one person who had to come home, in most cases, and tell a spouse: You know what, I have lost my job today. No, I am not a bad employee. I have worked hard for that company for 10 or 15 years, but they laid employees off today. To that one family, that is 100 percent unemployment, and that is a disaster for that family. Think of it. Last month, over half a million Americans had that discussion some night around the supper table: What are we going to do? And it is not just the half million people who lost their jobs last month or 2.6 million people who have lost their jobs since this recession started, and which has grown deeper; it is the hundreds of thousands and millions more who have not only had to say I have lost my job but who have had to say I have lost my house as well. It is pretty unbelievable. This is an extraordinary country, with great strength, and an economic engine that has been the wonder of the world. No one in the world has done what we have done to expand the middle class and give everyone a feeling of opportunity. No one has done that. I have described before the unbelievable accomplishments of our country. We have survived the Civil War, survived a Great Depression, and we have been through two World Wars. We represent the beacon of freedom around the world. We have always been a country that represents hope. I have been in so many parts of this world and asked people: What do you desire for your life? I remember being on a helicopter that ran out of gas between Nicaragua and Honduras in a mountainous area. We landed under power but we landed because we had no fuel, and campesinos from around the region came to see who had landed in this helicopter. We were stranded for about 4 hours until we were found. We had an interpreter, and so during a discussion, through an interpreter, I asked a young woman, who walked up with others--she had about three or four children with her, probably in her early 20s--what do you aspire to do for you and your family? Oh, I want to come to the United States, she said. Why? Because the United States is where there is opportunity and freedom, she said. So in a discussion up in the mountains between Honduras and Nicaragua someone who had never seen an American understood America as a place for her and her family, a place of opportunity and freedom. It is unbelievable what this place has represented to the rest of the world. We split the atom, we have spliced genes. As I have said before, we have cloned animals. We invent things--the silicone chip, plastic, and the radar. We cured smallpox and polio. We built the telephone, the television, the Internet, and the computer. We built airplanes and learned to fly them; built rockets to fly to the Moon. It is unbelievable what we have done. Our country is just that resourceful. But we have found ourselves in recent months in a very deep hole. We find ourselves right now perched on the edge of a cliff, and the question is: What do we do to try to restore economic health to this country so that next month the news is not another half million Americans have lost their jobs; so that perhaps next month, or some month in the future the news will be that more Americans are working, more Americans have found jobs, more Americans are owning homes. How do we do all that? The fact is, there is not anything in recorded human history that replicates this and there is not anyone who knows what is the menu to use to restore economic health. This country is in some very severe difficulty. I wish to talk about what all this means and what I think we have to do. President-elect Obama came to the Senate today and spent time with the Democratic caucus. He spent the lunch hour with us and spoke for nearly an hour. It was an extraordinary exchange of views. He is a very gifted person who I think has great promise and, I think, hope that we can restore economic health to this country. He is going to need a lot of help. He is going to need a lot of us, Republican and Democrat. He is going to need the American people to join in an effort to restore economic health to this country. In the Thomas Wolfe book ``You Can't Go Home Again,'' he describes the kind of unique character of the American people. He describes it as a quenchless hope, boundless optimism, indestructible belief. I think these qualities exist in this country and it has gotten us through many difficult periods and will again and will this time. But this will take some effort. This will not be easy. I have described before what has caused much of this. It is not rocket science to describe it. We have seen what I think is an unbelievable carnival of greed, creating and trading exotic financial instruments that had dramatic risks, attaching that risk to some of America's biggest financial institutions and some of America's biggest banks. To go right to the origin of it--I have said it before and I will say it again and again, as long as I have an opportunity to speak about this because you have to close the gate. You cannot restore confidence in this country until you close the gate. Here is the house of cards that was built. We know what happens to house of cards in a high wind and all that, it has come down. I described the other day, and I am going to once again, what is called a subprime mortgage scandal. They were advertising mortgages. We have all seen it. We have seen these advertisements. Here is the Countrywide ad. It was the biggest mortgage bank in the country. It now doesn't exist. It was subsumed into another company. By the way, the CEO of Countrywide, I am told--at least reading the newspaper--got away with a couple hundred million dollars for himself so he is not exactly shedding tears about all this. But here is what they were advertising for the American people: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? Have you been denied by other lenders? Call us. We would like to give you a loan. Does that sound like sound business practices? It doesn't to me. What does it mean? The broker was able to get $10,000, $20,000 in bonuses for the loan. The mortgage company took their cut. Then they securitized it. They sold the security and rolled it into others--like they used to in the old days pack sawdust in sausage and roll it all together--they rolled these loans into a securities instrument, sold it up to hedge funds, sold it to investment banks. And they put prepayment penalties into it so borrowers were locked in, 3 years from the teaser rate, to interest rates that the borrower couldn't possibility repay and everybody was fat and happy and everybody was making a fortune-- millions of dollars. Everybody was making a fortune. The problem is it was a lot of air. It was not just Countrywide. Zoom Credit Company--here is what they said in their advertisements: 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. 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. And then they finished with this: Bankruptcy, slow credit, no credit--who cares? Does that look like a good business practice to you? It looks like a Ponzi scheme to me. This morning the judge in New York said Mr. Madoff, who had a $50 billion alleged Ponzi scheme, was not going to be incarcerated. He apparently bilked people out of $50 billion, but he is spending today in a $7 million penthouse apartment in New York City because the judge says: No, no, he should not be incarcerated. That was a Ponzi scheme, apparently. People thought they had money invested with him. They, in fact, did not. It turns out there was not the money they thought was in their accounts. But it is not just Mr. Madoff who had a Ponzi scheme. Do you think this is not a Ponzi scheme, a company such as this says: If you are bankrupt, you cannot pay your bills, you have slow credit, you have no credit, come to us; do you think that is not a Ponzi scheme? Because what do you think they did with that when they roped this customer into coming to them for a mortgage? They said: Tell you what, we have a sweet little deal for you. We will give you a mortgage called no-doc, that means you don't even have to demonstrate your income to us that will demonstrate you can repay it--no-doc loans. By the way, we will give you a mortgage, no documentation of your income, and we will give you a mortgage in which you don't have to pay any principal at all, just interest. Or, if that is not good enough, you don't have to pay all the interest for the first year. If that is not good enough, we give you a mortgage where we make the first 12 months' payments for you. But wait, we will give you a teaser rate. You can pay 2 percent interest rate. You can cut your home mortgage in half. We don't tell you about the fine lines that say we are going to reset the interest rate to a much higher level in 3 years and you are not going to be able to repay it. And, by the way, we are going to put a prepayment penalty in so you can't get out of this because--do you know what we are going to do with this mortgage? We are going to package it up with others, called securitizing it, and we are going to sell it so we don't have any responsibility for it anymore and a hedge fund is going to buy it. Do you know why a hedge fund is going to buy it? We have a prepayment penalty in there with high interest rates and it will reset in 3 years and we are going to make a lot of money. They were all fat and happy when they built this huge bubble and the bubble burst and it helped cause a collapse in this economy. I say all of that just to say it is not over. Go to the Internet right now, and see if you can find what I found--no-documentation loans. We still have shysters out there advertising this kind of nonsense: We will give you a loan. You don't even have to document it. What happened as a result of this? Some of the biggest financial names in our country, it turns out, were investing deeply in what we now understand is toxic assets. We all understand the word ``toxic.'' It always used to be associated with a waste dump, toxic waste dump. Maybe toxic is an appropriate term. When the Treasury Secretary says toxic assets, it seems to me the bowels of some of the biggest financial institutions represent toxic waste dumps because that is where these bad assets exist. So the Treasury Secretary came to us when it looked like everything was going to collapse and said I need $700 billion from the American taxpayers and I need it in 3 days and I have a three-page bill I want you to pass. Why? What I am going to do, I am going to buy these assets from the biggest financial companies in the country and relieve them from this toxicity deep in the bowels of the banks. I did not vote for it, but sufficient numbers of my colleagues voted for it to authorize $700 billion. Now $350 billion has either been spent or committed. The scandal is we cannot find out how the taxpayers' money has been used. To whom? For what purpose? Under what conditions? We know in total there is about $8.5 trillion that has so far been committed by the Federal Government. That means the taxpayer is on the hook for about $8.5 trillion--the Federal Reserve programs, $5.5 trillion; FDIC, $1.5 trillion; Treasury Department, $1.1. Do you know what? The Bloomberg News Corporation had to sue the Federal Government to get information about this. Isn't that unbelievable? They should not have had to sue anybody. Let me show you the statements that were made by the Treasury Secretary and others. Here is what the Treasury Secretary said on the 23rd of October: We need oversight, we need protection. We need transparency. I want it, we all want it. That is just words. It didn't mean a thing. There is no transparency. You cannot find out what is going on. The Treasury Secretary took $125 billion and shoved it at nine banks and said: I am going to invest in capital. I changed my mind, I am not going to buy any assets. So the TARP program, which got its named for troubled assets--there are no troubled assets purchased by the Secretary. He said: I changed my mind, now I want to give capital to banks. That is not necessarily a bad idea, except he took $125 billion and plugged it into nine banks, some of which didn't want it, and there were no strings attached. He said: I am doing this because I want you to expand lending. There was no requirement they expand lending, no requirement they not use it for bonuses or dividends. If you ask the Treasury Secretary: Did they expand lending with the $125 billion of taxpayers' money you sunk into capital, his answer is: I don't know. Ask the banks. They tell you money is fungible, we are not going to tell you that answer. We know don't know. But ask people wanting to get money from the banks. They will tell you there is no additional lending or expansion of credit. It was just a commitment on behalf of the American taxpayers of $125 billion in search of a solution that didn't exist because he didn't put strings on it or attach some conditions to it, so that is where we are. Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve Board, said on the 24th of October, ``Transparency is a big issue.'' I guess so. It is certainly a much bigger issue, given what he has done. He has moved massive quantities of money through the Fed--by the way the Fed opened its window to direct lending to investment banks for the first time in the history of this country. They used to only do direct lending to FDIC- insured banks. They opened the window to direct lending to investment banks. The question is, Who got the money? Under what conditions? How much? The answer is, We don't know. We are not telling you. That is unbelievable to me. There is nothing in the Constitution about this. The Constitution is a short little document that talks about powers, the powers of the executive branch, the powers of the legislative branch, and judicial branch. You go read the Constitution and try to figure out whether you think the opportunity exists for somebody, even in a crisis, to commit $8.5 trillion, $8.6 trillion on behalf of the American taxpayer and then tell us you will not to get information about this? Go to court. That is unbelievably arrogant, in my judgment. Having said all that--which is, in some ways, therapeutic for me to go through what has caused so much of this and to talk about the folly of the pursuit of a solution. That we cannot possibly succeed unless you have conditions and attachments to those moneys that are being used--all of this, it seems to me, is wrapped in a circumstance where we now find ourselves with a new President. He will be sworn in on the west front of this building next Tuesday. He inherits the most significant set of economic problems I think of any President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I don't think there is much question about that. The question is, Where does this go from here? You know the law of holes: When you are in a hole, stop digging. The question is, How do you stop digging? How do you find a way to put this back on track to some sort of growth? Where is the bottom? How do you stop this from falling off a cliff? There are all these folks, the so-called smartest people in the room, who share with me and with my colleague from Arkansas, who is the Presiding Officer--share the fact that none of us understand the answer. Nobody understands exactly what to do. But I wish to say this: I think at the root of this is always, and will always be, with this economy of ours, the issue of confidence. Do people have confidence about the future? If they are living in a place, in a country and at a time when they can be confident about the future--confident for themselves and their kids, confident that they will have a job, retain their jobs, have job security, have a decent payroll, have benefits in the future--then they are confident and do things that manifest that confidence: buy clothes, take a trip, buy a car, buy a house; they do the things that expand this economy. But when they do not have confidence--and the American people at this point do not--they do exactly the opposite, which contracts this economy. They defer all those purchases and decide, you know what, we don't have confidence that we are going to keep this job, have this income, provide for our kids. We need to cut back, and that contracts the economy. So the question is this: It is not, as I have said often, about how do you tune the engine on the ship of state. How do you go down to the engine room and take a look at every dial, gauge, lever, knob, and just adjust it just right? In fiscal policy or in monetary policy, how do you adjust it? Tax credits? M1B? Fiscal stimulus? It is not that at all, in my judgment, because there is not a perfect menu to provide confidence to the American people. And it does not matter how you adjust those issues if you do not find a way to instill confidence, the economy is going to contract. So I have introduced legislation with a number of pieces that I think are essential to try to provide that kind of confidence. Let me describe them. First and foremost, I do not think you can do this and give the American people confidence unless you look back and look forward. That means accountability, and accountability means looking back and looking ahead, it seems to me. I described the absurdity of Mr. Madoff running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, living in his $7 million apartment in New York City, and the judge saying: That is okay. It seems to me there is an equal absurdity here of having the equivalent type of Ponzi schemes in which you loaded some of the biggest American financial institutions with dramatic amounts of risk and debt and say: Well, now that is past, no one is accountable. It seems to me someone is accountable for that. Are they still around? Were they getting $20 and $30 million a year? Some of them were. There was a recent investigative piece by the Washington Post describing the person in charge of risk management and describing a trader at the same firm, both making somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million a year. Who is accountable for that, for the collapse as a result of the loading up of dramatic risk in an investment bank and then having the American taxpayers bail it out? Here are some of the so-called biggest institutions that were deemed ``too big to fail.'' Until this point, they have not only been ``too big to fail,'' they have been ``too small to regulate'' apparently because we have a lot of folks in this town who do not want to regulate anything. They want to be willfully blind, including those we pay to regulate these entities. They are the ones who helped us decide long ago, as a country: We are not going to look at derivatives, we will not regulate derivatives, and we are not going to regulate hedge funds. We are willing to countenance a lot of dark money out there because we do not need to see it. You know, the high priest of that thought was, of course, Alan Greenspan, whose notion of how you handle all of this is self-regulation. Self-regulation will work just fine, he said. Well, it turns out that was a miscalculation to the tune of some trillions of dollars. It did not work fine. Here is what we need to do--accountability going back. I have just described Alan Greenspan. He came and testified. He said: ``I made a mistake in presuming the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their own equity in the firms.'' You know the old saying that there is no education in the second kick of a mule. We know this. We knew this. We have been through this in the Great Depression. We were through the Gay Nineties and the Roaring Twenties. None of us lived then, but we learned the lessons and put in place the protections to make sure it never happened again. About 10 years ago, the Congress took apart most of those protections. I voted against it. I thought it was a terrible decision. But here we are paying the price for that. Those protections, it seems to me, at this point need to be reconnected. So what should we do? Well, first of all, I think, in addition to a rescue plan of some type, or a stimulus plan, as it is being called, it seems to me you need some type of taxpayer protection. Nobody is looking out for the taxpayer here, and the taxpayer is having to make the commitment through the Treasury Secretary, through the Federal Reserve, and through the Congress. Let's have a taxpayer protection plan or a Taxpayer Protection Act. One, I think we ought to extend the oversight, accountability, audit, and all the reporting provisions that were imposed originally by the Treasury Department under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to cover any financial entity that provides emergency economic assistance to private firms. There ought to be complete transparency, no secrecy, nobody saying: We will not tell you, we will not show you, we will not disclose to you. Second, all private firms receiving emergency financial assistance should be subject to the same set of rules and restrictions relating to executive compensation, golden parachutes, dividend payments, to name a few. You know, we had the auto industry executives come down here, and they were widely pilloried for flying Gulfstream IVs wing tip to wing tip from Detroit to Washington, DC. It turns out that there were over 20 commercial flights that day from here to Detroit and back. One could have sat them in first class and provided them Dr. Pepper in a paper cup, or whatever it is they do in first class, between Detroit and Washington, DC, and they would have been fine. But they flew down wing tip to wing tip in Gulfstreams and, you know, making $2 million, $2.5 million a month, whatever it was. There was a lot of criticism about it--justifiable, in my judgment. I want the auto industry to succeed, but that was not a very smart thing that day. But the question is, Why it is just the auto industry? Where are all of those folks who ran some of those big investment banks into the ditch? Where are the folks who caused that wreckage? How about the people who ran these big mortgage companies that were selling these unbelievable mortgages to people with bad credit and getting big bonuses as a result? When are they going to be brought here under subpoena and asked the same questions and subject to the same requirements? I think we ought to create a taxpayer protection prosecution task force. I believe there is a lot of illegal activity that has not been uncovered. And I do not think it ought to be laid at the feet of some attorney general someplace in some State. There ought to be a Federal prosecution tasks force empaneled, and that task force must make it a top priority to investigate and prosecute financial fraud cases and seek to recover any ill-gotten gains. The task force shall make recommendations to the Congress, within 60 days, about extending the statute of limitation in complicated financial crimes, if necessary. There ought to be a reform commission on the financial system that determines the causes of this financial nightmare. And the commission would report its findings, conclusions and make recommendations for preventing a similar debacle in the future. I do not think it is just a matter of jump-starting the economic engine; I think you have to rewire the system here. You have to rewire the financial system. This does not work. Securitizing instruments for which there was never any decent underwriting because you did not have to underwrite if you were going to send the risk upstairs--that does not work. And you cannot have dark money out there beyond the gaze of regulators. You do have to regulate. It seems to me you have to completely reform the financial system, and I do think the people who caused this wreck are going to be the ones who are going to help us reform the system. So those are four areas that I think we have to do on behalf of the American taxpayer. You know, my sense is that everyone in this country wants this new Government to succeed. President-elect Barack Obama campaigned across this country on the subject of change. We all understand the need for that change. The fact is, there is plenty of blame to go around. Lots of folks, Republicans, Democrats, one administration, another--there is a lot of blame. But it seems to me there are special obligations laid at the feet of those who in the last 8 years have decided to be willfully blind and decided that self-regulation was more important than having people do their jobs who were supposed to be regulating. And the result was the creation of a house of cards or a Ponzi scheme sort of thing that has caused dramatic damage to this country. Now, it is a mess, but I think this country can get out of it. I think it would be hard for anybody in this Chamber to decide to get up and go to work if they did not have an abiding hope about the future of this country. And I do. But that hope is joined, it seems to me, by requirements to find out what happened, take action based on what happened, and make sure it never happens again. That is not rocket science; that is what we are obligated to do. This is, as I said, a great country with a wonderful history of overcoming the odds. We have people who came to this country from different parts of the planet searching for opportunity. Most of us come from immigrants who came from one part of the planet or another, one part of this globe, and came to this country because they believed this is the place where opportunity existed. There was a man named Stanley Newberg who died, and there was a tiny little piece written in the New York Times about him some years ago. It was a piece that intrigued me, so I looked into it to find out what was this about, Stanley Newberg. It said, in this one-paragraph piece, something that I discovered more about. A man came to this country with his parents to flee the persecution by the Nazis of the Jews, and they came here and landed in this country, with nothing, in New York City. His dad had a job peddling fish on the Lower East Side of New York, and Stanley Newberg trailed along, this little tyke with his dad every day peddling fish. Then he went to school, and his parents struggled because they had nothing, and he did well in school. They struggled to get him some loans and try to help him get to college. He went to college, graduated from college, and went to work for an aluminum company. He did very well with the company and rose up to management in the company and then purchased the company. Later, he died. When they opened his will, Stanley Newberg, in his will, left $5.7 million to the United States of America. In his will, he said: For the privilege of living in that great country. Is that not remarkable? Here is a man who came here with nothing, was enormously successful, then at the end of his life left his inheritance to the United States of America. I am not suggesting everyone do that. I am suggesting it inspires me when people--in this case, coming here as a boy with nothing--understand the magic of what this country of ours offers in terms of opportunity and freedom. And I think, with all of the hand-wringing that exists in our country about these very serious troubles we face, I am absolutely convinced, if we work together, with a new President, a new Government, if we call the American people to be part of something bigger than themselves, to say this is a moment to try to put this country back on track and build better opportunity and greater opportunity for all Americans, I have great hope then for this country.