Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we have learned this morning that the unemployment rate has gone to 7.2 percent. Percentages don't mean much to a household in which one spouse comes home and says: Honey, I lost my job. We have seen now more than 2.5 million people lose their jobs in the last 12 months. We face a very severe and deep financial crisis. There is no question about that. There has not been a debate in the Senate about whether there is a problem. This is probably the first area of agreement. There is a big problem with this economy. The question is, What do we do about it? What can give people confidence that we can pull this economy out of the ditch and try to provide for growth and opportunity and expansion once again? It is interesting. I read in the newspaper yesterday that the New York Yankees offered a pitcher $22 million a year to pitch for the next 8 years. So not all of the economy is in deep trouble, apparently. There is at least one baseball team and one pitcher smiling today. But even as we read those kinds of stories, many American families are worried about losing their jobs and their homes, concerned about what the future holds. I wanted to talk about that today. All of us understand the economic engine of America has stalled. All of us understand the mechanics of starting an engine. If the engine of the ship of state is stalled, I am all for hooking up jumper cables and trying to start it. That is the discussion we had in our caucus for 2 hours yesterday--about what kind of emergency actions can jump-start the economy, what kind of jumper cables or hand crank or whatever effort one wants to make will help get the economy up and running again. The point I made yesterday was, that is important to do, and I support it. But we ought to focus like a laser if we are going to spend money we don't have to put together an emergency plan for some sort of economic recovery. That means we are going to borrow money. If we are going to borrow money at a time of escalating substantial Federal deficits, I want every single penny to go toward creating a job that will put somebody back on the payroll and give their family hope for the future. This is all about building confidence. But even as we do that, if we ignore the fundamental requirement to rewire this engine, then we have missed the boat. By rewiring, I mean this financial system has collapsed. The biggest names in finance have collapsed. They have been the recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars of Federal help. We have to rewire the whole thing. If we don't rewire that system and make basic fundamental reforms, we will not restore confidence in the American people about the financial system going forward. That means accountability looking back and accountability looking ahead. It means making certain we end what we have seen created in recent years--a house of cards. I have the house on top because this starts with an unbelievable scandal in the mortgage industry, subprime lending, and so on. I know we read in the papers about Mr. Madoff having absconded with $50 billion of investor money by building a Ponzi scheme. The tongue and groove of all of the rest of this fits and is no different than the Ponzi scheme of Mr. Madoff. It was brokers, mortgage bankers, investment banks and hedge funds. It was collateralized debt. It was securitized instruments. It was exotic structured financial instruments created for one purpose: to give everybody a lot of money as they all wallowed in the creek. So the fact is, we have to fix it. Everybody is talking about jump-starting economy, putting people back to work. I am all in favor of doing that, but I want to make certain we rewire this system. I want to talk a little about what needs to be done. Let me say also that people who created this wreck, the people who steered this country into the ditch, are not going to be the ones who show up with an ambulance. They will not be the ones we will turn to for advice on how to fix it. That is just a fact. My great worry is we have already authorized $700 billion for the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program. Isn't it interesting that the title of that program has nothing to do with what is happening? I didn't vote for it because I didn't think those who requested it had the foggiest idea what they were going to do with it. The request came from the Secretary of the Treasury saying: I need $700 billion in emergency money, and I need it in 3 days. Here is a three-page bill to do it. That made no sense. He wanted to relieve financial institutions of troubled assets. Why did they have all these troubled assets? Because they were greedy and dumb, buying things that now in retrospect had very little value and very big risk. So we ended up with the biggest financial institutions in the country having massive amounts of assets on their balance sheets that have lost value. So the Treasury Secretary said: Give me $700 billion of taxpayer money so I can go buy those bad assets and relieve those poor companies of these failed assets. So the Congress voted for $700 billion, $350 billion of which was made available right away. The Treasury Secretary then decided: I really don't want to do that at all. I don't want to buy troubled assets, despite the fact that is in the name of the program. What I would like to do is provide capital for big banking institutions so they can expand lending because that is the circulatory system of our economy. We need to expand lending. So a rather substantial amount of money was given to the biggest financial institutions, $125 billion in one tranche to nine of the big financial institutions. It was essentially no-strings-attached money. The money was provided to those financial institutions without saying to them: By the way, you have to use this to expand lending in order to deal with the credit freeze. There were no restrictions that said: If you take this money, you can't then give it out in executive bonuses. In fact, we now have a report from December of last year on the Troubled Asset Relief Program by the GAO. It says: The standard agreement between Treasury and the participating institutions does not require that these institutions either track or report how they plan to use or do use this money. Isn't that unbelievable? We gave all this money to the biggest banks, and there is no requirement that they track or report on how they plan to use or do use the money? Then when a number of them were asked what they did with the money by the GAO, many executives of those companies said: Well, money is fungible. They don't intend to track or report what they did with that capital. That is unbelievable to me. This is apparently some sort of no- accountability Government. There is nothing I am aware of, of course, in the U.S. Constitution that decides this is the way that representative Government ought to perform. But when the Treasury Secretary came to the Congress, along with the Chairman of the Federal Serve Board--talk about secrecy, by the way, that is another institution that has another story attached to it--but they came to the Congress--the two of them; the head of the Fed and the Treasury Secretary--and here are the kinds of things we heard from them: We need oversight. We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it. Well, the administration the Treasury Secretary works for--after he told us that--has failed. This is a Washington Post report: The administration has failed to establish sufficient oversight over its $700 billion program and must move rapidly to guarantee that banks are complying with the limits on conflict of interest, lavish executive compensation. So they say, yes, we agree. Give us the money. There will be oversight. And we discover: Well, there is no oversight at all. The Federal Reserve Board, they are refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of assistance backed emergency loans from American taxpayers. They refuse to identify the troubled assets they are accepting as collateral. The Federal Reserve opened it window for the first time in history to noninsured banks. They have all kinds of programs now to move money out. I understand there is an urgency here, but I do not understand why the American taxpayers are told: By the way, you are the guarantor of a lot of these debts, you are going to pick up the pieces, and you are going to pay for it, but we are not going to tell you what it is we are doing. Mr. President, $2 trillion of emergency loans for troubled assets and they say: You don't deserve to know. We are not going to tell you. In fact, Bloomberg, the news organization, had to sue the Federal government to try to get details about the total has gone out in terms of guarantees and capital which, by the way, is over $8 trillion. It does not mean we are going to lose all that. My point is, why should a news organization have to sue the Government in order to give the American people some information about how much they are on the hook for with all of this emergency activity? About $8.5 trillion is what we have discovered as a result of Bloomberg and the work of some other enterprising reporters. It certainly is not the work of a Federal agency that has come to the Congress to say: Oh, by the way, here is exactly what you need to know. In fact, just the opposite has happened. The Federal Reserve program has about $5.5 trillion now they have engaged. I understand that is an organization that prints money, but I also understand that organization, in the end stage, is an organization created by the U.S. Congress, and any liabilities existing there are liabilities of the American people. The FDIC program is $1.5 trillion; the Treasury Department, $1.1 trillion; and Federal housing, $300 billion. That is, at this point, a compilation of about $8.5 trillion of liability that exists out there. Now, I want to make a couple points before I try to describe what has happened and what I think should happen. This has been a consumer-driven economy. It is not surprising. I brought to the floor of the Congress one day a whole stack of letters. At that point, I had a 12-year-old son, and the Diners Club had written to my son offering him a credit card, preapproved, suggesting perhaps a trip to Europe would be in line. So I brought that and probably a dozen or two dozen other solicitations to my children from credit card companies--from MasterCard and Visa and Diners Club and American Express--all of them writing to my kids. Obviously, they had no idea whose kids they were or how old they were. They were just names in some sort of a name bank. They were writing to them to say: Here is a preapproved credit card for you. Go have a good time. What has happened all across this country is they are wallpapering college campuses with credit cards. It is unbelievable. On most college campuses, many kids don't have a job. They are going to school. Yet credit card companies understand that is the best place to go find a customer. So there are credit cards all around, wallpapering the entire country with credit card solicitations. In fact, if you have another card, get rid of it. Bring it to us. We will charge you zero interest for 3 months. We don't tell you, by the way, if you have a little problem one month, we are going to jack your rate up to 25 percent or whatever it is they are doing these days in rates and fees. The fact is, that dramatic runup in the last couple of decades in credit card debt has been unbelievable, and that is what has been supporting a substantial amount of the consumption. In addition, about $300 to $350 billion a year has been supporting additional American consumption because of the increase in home values which, of course, represents that huge bubble that was created in home values. That allowed people to believe they had more money because their home was more valuable and they could borrow against the home, and that contributed another $350 billion to the economy. But it was a substantial amount of consumer initiative coming from credit card debt and from home values that they could borrow against which it turns out were illusory increases in home values because those values have now collapsed. My point is that our consumer-driven economy was driven by, in some cases, fumes that are not going to be around in the future, and we are not going to be able to replicate that to build a new economy with that same kind of debt consumer-driven initiative. As you know, about at that point, oh, 8, 10 years ago, as the bubble began to develop in home values, there was this issue of thinking that everybody could make a lot of money by developing new and exotic mortgages for homes and putting people into their homes who probably could not buy a home or finding people who were in existing homes and saying to them: You are paying way too much. So what happened was, a huge industry developed in this country. Even as they were securitizing credit card debt and selling it back upstream, they began to develop a new industry to finance homes, and then found a way to securtize those home mortgages and sell those back upstream as well. This is what we began to see in this country. Everybody saw it. All you had to do was watch your television set and you saw the commercial come across. This was Countrywide, which was the biggest bank: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? Have you been denied by other lenders? Call us. The biggest mortgage company in the country said: Are you a bad person because you can't pay your bills? Are you a bad credit risk? Do you have lots of trouble? Are you buying things you can't pay for? Hey, I tell you what, we have a deal for you. Come. We will give you a loan. That is Countrywide. By the way, this company failed and has been purchased by someone else. But the head of this company, Mr. Mozilo, was given the Horatio Alger award as one of the best executives in America, and from what I can tell, he it appears to have walked away with about $200 million. So even though his company is gone and he does not have the job he had, he certainly cannot be weeping, or if he is, he is wiping his tears with $200 million of cold cash. So it was not just Countrywide. Millenia Mortgage--again, we saw all these. This was not some dark secret: Twelve months no mortgage payment. That's right. We will give you the money to make your first 12 payments on your home. Just call in 7 days. We will pay it for you. Our loan program could reduce your current monthly payment by 50 percent and allow you to make no payments for the first 12 months. Just call us. Pretty enticing, right? You want a home, you want a mortgage, you don't want to make a payment for a year. No problem. Just call us up. ZoomCredit. ZoomCredit says in their advertisement: Credit approval is seconds away. Get on the fast track at ZoomCredit. At the speed of light, ZoomCredit will preapprove you for a car loan, a home loan, or a credit card. Even if your credit is in the tank, ZoomCredit is like money in the bank. ZoomCredit specializes in credit repair, and debt consolidation, too. Bankruptcy, slow credit, no credit--who cares? Can you imagine a company that says: I have a new model. We are so proud of our company, we actually specialize in giving credit to people who don't deserve it? Now, does one wonder--when companies such as this sprang up all over the country--why our economy is in a wreck, why we have experienced this economy being driven into the ditch by a lot of bad people? Three mortgage companies--and, oh, by the way, just in case you are wondering, is it over? No. This is from the Internet: Low-doc loans and no-doc loans. What does that mean? It means if you go to the Internet, you can still find a company that says, just as the others did: We have a new financial instrument for you that is really intriguing--no documentation of your income. That is right. We will loan you money without you having to document your income to us. Does that sound ignorant? It does to me. But we will charge you a higher interest rate in exchange for your deciding not to document your income. No-doc loans: no doc, no payments for the first 12 months. And, oh, by the way, when you do first start making payments, you don't have to make any payments on principal, just interest. If that is not good enough, we will give you a no-doc loan, no payments for 12 months, no principal, and you don't have to pay all the interest because we will wrap the principal and some of the interest on the back side. Does anybody wonder why we had a financial wreck? So we had all these companies put out this sort of Ponzi scheme. Yes, Madoff is apparently a pretty awful guy because he ran a Ponzi scheme of $50 billion, it appears to me. This was all a Ponzi scheme as well, and everybody was involved in it. So these mortgage companies put people in these mortgages called subprime mortgages, and then the broker made a lot of money because the broker was able to get people into these mortgages. And I did not mention, they put prepayment penalties into the mortgages so you could not pay it off early or you had a big penalty? Then they wrapped it into a big security. They put all of them together, like you put a snowball together, in a big security--that is called securitization--and then you sell it. So you sell it to perhaps an intermediary or perhaps you sell it to a Wall Street firm that takes a look at it and says: That is pretty good. That has a high rate of return because you have prepayment penalties and all these things, and the interest rates were really low, but they reset in 3 years to be really high. What a good deal. So I am going to buy these securities. Everybody is buying securities like hogs in a trough. The brokers are making money. The mortgage company is making massive amounts of money. The people who are securitizing it are making money. The big investment banks are making money. In fact, the current Secretary of the Treasury--his firm and four other firms came to the Securities and Exchange Commission one day in 2004 and said: What we need you to provide is some relaxation for us so we can take on more debt to buy more of these kinds of securitized instruments and make more money. In the basement, deep in the bowels of the Securities and Exchange Commission, after a hearing, by unanimous vote, the SEC, for the company that was headed by the current Treasury Secretary and four other of the largest investment banks, said: It is OK. We will allow you to take some of this money you set aside in the event of failure of your assets--the reserves--and you can take some of those reserves and use them now to make more money by these investments. That meant some of those firms went from 12 times leverage to 30 times leverage. Isn't that unbelievable? They were all fat and happy, making money left and right. And then the whole thing crashed. That financial scandal, this subprime scandal, took this country right to the edge of a cliff. It was not just this, but it was led by this, and it was especially this. At the same time all of this carnival of greed was going on in this country--at the same time we were spending, in budget policy--President Bush leading the charge; and Congress, Republicans and Democrats, a part of it--spending in fiscal policy way beyond our means, $600 billion a year. Oh, I know the reported budget deficit was $400 billion last year. It was not $400 billion. What your deficit really is is what you had to borrow for the year. That was over $600 billion. So we were $600 billion out of balance in fiscal policy, and that is going to be over $1 trillion this year. Then add to that a trade problem of $700-plus billion a year, consuming 3 percent more than you produce every year--year after year after year--and then energy prices on a roller coaster. Oil runs way up to $147 a barrel in day trading, just like that, and then collapses right back down, and now goes back up because of the circumstances in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. Then health care is busting everybody's budget--the family budget, the business budget, the Government budget. All of those together is an almost perfect storm. So the question is, What do we do about all that because this economy is a mess? It is in very serious trouble, and the one thing that unites me and the smartest economist or the most prescient business mind in this country is that neither of us have ever been here before. We are walking in woods that have no maps. We do not know. None of us know exactly how you are going to move people out of this situation, how you move this country. I taught economics in college ever so briefly but I do know this: This is not about charts and bar graphs, and it is not about supply demand curves. It is all about confidence. Will we see the restoration of confidence? Because if people are confident about the future, they do things that manifest that confidence. If they are confident about themselves and their jobs, they buy a suit, they buy a car, buy a home, take a trip; they do the things that expand America's economy. If they are not confident, they do exactly the opposite. They defer the purchase. They decide not to take the trip, not to buy the car. That is the contractional side of the business cycle, but this is much more than a business cycle. Still, confidence is at the root of our opportunity to put this country back on track. I have great hope for this country, but I wish to say this again. I have described some of the unbelievable circumstances of the carnival of greed that has led us into this economic trap, and if we don't address both sides of this issue--first, to try to jump start this engine of ours and rewire it at the same time--but if we don't at the same time, then, make those in this kind of financial industry accountable for past actions and for future actions, we will not in any way give the American people confidence about the future. So the question of what do you do in addition to a recovery package or stimulus program--which I will speak about in a moment--the question of what you do in addition to that leads me to the discussion I had with my colleagues last evening. I said we must revisit unbelievably bad decisions and judgments that have been made in the last 10 and 15 years. For example, in 1999, the Financial Modernization Act was passed by this Congress; financial modernization to help create the large financial holding companies, to take away the Glass-Steagall Act-- abolish the very act that was put together following the Great Depression that said: You have to separate banking interests from risk interests. You have to separate securities and you have to separate real estate. That was Glass-Steagall. You have to keep them separate. In 1999, this Congress, in legislation called Gramm-Leach-Bliley, after Senator Phil Gramm from Texas, said: You know what. We have to do something that modernizes our financial system. We have to get rid of Glass-Steagall. We have to create big bank holding companies. We have to allow that to be the case, and we have to allow banks to merge with real estate, with insurance, with securities. Now, I was one of eight Senators to vote no. On the floor of the Senate, here is what I said in 1999: This bill will, in my judgment, raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts. I regret I was right. It will fuel consolidation and mergers in the banking and financial services and it will be done at the expense of the American people. I said at the same time in that debate: I say to people who own banks--talking about the folks who pushed this--and, by the way, this was pushed because one large bank wanted to merge with one large insurance company and they couldn't do it because the law wouldn't allow it. What is the response? We will go get the law changed. It wasn't just this Congress; it was President Clinton and his advisers-- some of whom, by the way, are going to work in this new administration. They said all of this is good. We are going to modernize the system. I thought it was nuts. Three years before this, I had written a cover story for the Washington Monthly Magazine, talking about derivatives and what I had previously described as securities sold upstream by the big mortgage companies, and the title of my cover story, in 1994, I believe it was, in Washington Monthly Magazine: ``Very Risky Business.'' From that time, I have introduced five pieces of legislation to require the regulation of derivatives and to prohibit banks from trading on derivatives on their own proprietary accounts but to no avail because there were too many people who believed we need to modernize the system--meaning, they said, take away the restrictions that were put in place after the Great Depression. Take away the restrictions that prohibited banks from engaging with real estate and securities and other things that were risky. Well, they succeeded. I failed in stopping it. The fact is, it is what set up this unbelievable, spectacular financial collapse in this country. The question is: Now what? I am going to introduce some legislation today, and I wish to talk about, specifically, the requirements of the legislation. I am not willing--as I was not willing last fall on the $700 billion proposal--I am not willing to advance assistance proposals unless the American people are protected. I am going to introduce the Taxpayer Protection Act that does four things that are tough, certain, and require accountability. I don't know whether there is the support or the stomach to pass this kind of legislation, but I will not be advancing support for additional taxpayers' money until and unless we have some assurance that these things are done. First of all, establishing a Financial Market Investigation and Reform Commission. Back at the end of the Roaring Twenties, which, by the way, the history books will certainly compare the era of the Roaring Twenties with the Gay Nineties and the unbelievable excess and greed--but at the end of the twenties and early thirties, the Congress put together a committee that investigated and subpoenaed and brought people here to find out what happened, who did it, how did it happen, and what do we do to stop it from ever happening again. That needs to be done again. There ought to be a select committee of the Congress doing that right now, and I hope we will do that. Some will say: Well, we have existing authorizing committees in the Congress that can do that. The fact is they are not going to do it. They have never done it and will not do it. If we don't put together those kinds of committees or commissions here and now and issue subpoenas and discover what happened, we will not know how to prevent it from happening again. We need to establish that reform commission to investigate and then propose reforms. That is the rewiring portion of what I described. Second: I want all emergency economic assistance programs, including the troubled asset relief program--the $700 billion that I didn't vote for, but others did--to have oversight, accountability, and transparency. That needs to be required for all of that. There is no oversight for $7.8 trillion in emergency economic assistance at this point that has been issued by the Federal Reserve Board. No oversight at all. None. The same requirements in the TARP program ought to be applied to every other bailout by the Fed or by the Treasury or others providing similar help. Third: we should make conditions imposed on one company receiving emergency economic aid applicable to all companies, and that is limits on executive compensation, prohibiting bonuses and golden parachutes, and payment of dividends and private aircraft ownership, and more. We should require those private entities receiving the emergency economic assistance to be subject to audit, provide detailed monthly reports, tell us: What did you do with that money? Is that money advancing the economic interests of this country to put this country back on track? Finally, we should create a Taxpayer Protection Prosecution Task Force to investigate and prosecute financial fraud cases and other violations of laws that contributed to the collapse of this country's economy. It is unbelievable to me that a couple things conspired at the same time. One, Congress passes the Financial Modernization Act, which was a complete disaster for this country. Two years later, President Bush came to town and hired a bunch of folks who were supposed to be regulators who, actually, in some cases, boasted: We don't intend to regulate. We want to be willfully blind. That combination has injured this country in a very significant way. Our country's financial markets--the Wall Street Journal said in an article by Arthur Levitt on October 23--are in their darkest hours in 76 years. We are in this situation because of an adherence to a deregulatory approach. Our regulatory system failed. I know there are people I serve with who think regulation is a four- letter word. It is essential. The free market must, in certain areas, have proper regulatory authority. Alan Greenspan, who bears a significant part of this responsibility as then chairman of the Fed, here is what he says now: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations--specifically banks and others--were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity. What he was saying, if I translate this to English, he was saying: I believed in self-regulation, or I believed in no one regulating because they will self-regulate. I come from a small town and a small school. I graduated in a high school class of nine. That wouldn't pass a laugh test in second grade. Just let them all go and they will do what is in the country's best interests? That is unbelievable to me. So we have a lot of work to do. The banking system after 1999 evolved so that we had a lot of banks that were considered too big to fail, but they weren't big enough to regulate, apparently. Too big to fail, which means that if they get in trouble, we are the ones who are going to pick up the costs. We bear the burden. We will be responsible. But they are not big enough to regulate, so they get the best of all worlds. They get taxpayer protection with no requirements, no accountability. This is just a few of them. Let me make an aside. Even as I have described on the floor of the Senate in the past, some of the same firms that, by the way, require bailouts are firms that have been so irresponsible in other areas. Yes, I am upset about the way these mortgages were put out. I am upset about the greed and the avarice and all the money people were making; one guy making $20 million a year and his buddy making $30 million a year, running one of the biggest investment banks into the ground, by the way. One of the biggest bailouts has been of one of the biggest investment banks. To my knowledge, nobody lost their jobs, nobody parked their airplanes. Wachovia Bank. Wachovia Bank went sour, so they had to be purchased, but it wasn't just because they were involved in toxic assets. Wachovia Bank--it is a culture apparently here. They had bought a German sewer system. You might ask the question: Why would an American bank buy the sewer system of a German city? Because they like sewers? Because they have a sewer department in the bank? Because they have special knowledge of sewers? No. They bought a German city's sewer system and leased it right back to the city because you are not going to dig up the sewer pipes of a German city, right? Why would you want to own it in a German city? Because you can lease it right back. It is a big scam because you can reduce your U.S. tax bill to the U.S. Government by hundreds of million of dollars. I shouldn't pick on Wachovia because there are plenty of others who did it. This happens to be a convenient case. A big old bank buying a sewer system of a German city so they can avoid paying U.S. taxes. By the way, the same company got in trouble with bad assets; part of the whole scam in terms of what happened with the scandal of the subprime system that steered this country into the ditch. Now, let me say that this issue of President-elect Obama proposing to us a stimulus program or economic recovery program is a very important issue for us to consider. I am a chairman of one of the subcommittees on appropriations. We are working on my portion of this effort to find out what could we invest in, in what some call ``shovel ready jobs'' that will put people to work immediately. There are water programs, highways, bridges, schools, things we can do that will put people to work and do it immediately, put people back on payrolls. At the end of that expenditure, you have better schools, better roads, better bridges, and water projects that will enhance life. So those are the right things to do. But we all know there are plenty of people who have proposals that have nothing to do with putting people back to work. I am very concerned about that. I am also concerned about the tax side of this. We are talking about 40 percent of this proposal representing the tax side. I think there are some things we can do in the tax system to encourage investment which encourages employment. Here are some of the proposals I have made: $250,000 expensing for small business equipment so we encourage the decisions to make or buy or build equipment right now. That puts people to work. So there are some things on the tax side that I think make some sense, but I worry about 40 percent on the tax cut side. No one is going to have a problem saying: Yes, give us a tax cut. Everybody likes that. But the proposition on the expenditure side, a whole lot of folks are coming in with projects that have nothing to do with creating jobs. I don't want to be part of that. Money is going to be borrowed in any event. We need to get this right. I am willing to participate, and I am willing to support the kinds of investments that will put people back to work and create an asset for our country--better roads, better bridges, better schools, water projects that we need for the future. I am willing to do all that if it puts people back to work. But we ought to be looking with a laser at what is it that will put people on payrolls to try to jump-start the economy. Even if we do that, if we don't rewire this system and do the financial reform I described in the legislation I am introducing today, we are not going to succeed because the people will not be confident about the future. We have to fix what has helped cause this scandal, and that includes fixing a trade system where we consume 3 percent more per year than we produce, fixing a trade system where we have $700 billion a year trade deficit, fixing a fiscal policy budget situation that is way out of balance. We have to do all those things. I would not be able to come to work in the morning if I were not hopeful. I still have great hope for this country. I am an optimist. Yes, I want to look back and hold people accountable. I want subpoenas, and I want to prosecute wrongdoing. I want to do all those things with respect to this financial scandal. I think it is big. I think a whole lot of folks took the $30 million, and they are at home and they are wiping their tears with American currency while a lot of other people have lost their homes and their jobs. I want us to investigate. I want accountability looking back, and I want accountability going forward. All of that is very important to me. But I do want to say this: I am somebody inspired by the ability of this country to recover and to ask the American people to be a part of something bigger than themselves and to come together and do things that will pull up this country, lift this country. The other day, I was reading a news report of a guy, and I was so inspired by it. It is so typically American of somebody out there--way out there thinking: I can do this. I read about a guy named Ken Mink. I don't know Ken Mink from a cord of wood. Ken Mink comes into the house one night and says to his wife: Honey, it is back. She said: What is back? He is 73 years old. Honey it is back. What is back? My shot. He had been out shooting baskets in the backyard. My shot--I am shooting baskets. I am not missing any. He had been a college basketball player, and because of a prank, he got kicked out of college. At the age of 73, he is shooting baskets in his backyard and says: Honey, it is back. So he sat down and wrote applications to college. A junior college said: Yes, we will give you a shot; you can come to school here and try out for the basketball team. At the age of 73, Ken Mink played basketball with a junior college team just a month ago and made two free throws. He was the oldest man, I think, by 42 years to ever score a point in a college basketball game. Isn't that wonderful? It is so inspiring that people don't know what they can't do. As an aside, my Uncle Harold is 88 years old, and he is training for the Senior Olympics because he qualified to go to San Francisco to run in the 100-meter dash. He runs it in under 19 seconds, by the way, at age 88. My aunt thinks he had a stroke, she thinks he has gone crazy because he runs all over the country running races. My uncle is 88 and can run faster than most people his age and has 100 medals. I am inspired by my Uncle Harold and by Ken Mink, and I am inspired by people who don't know what they can't do. I hope in the coming days when we talk about all the ingredients of all the issues, the proposals that are complicated and difficult, I hope all of us will understand, if we ask the American people to be a part of something bigger than themselves, to help this country recover and put this country back on track. You go back over two centuries of history, and there is not much this country cannot do. There is just not much America cannot do. This is a country that rolls up its sleeves and has great hope for the future. I know my colleague from Oklahoma is here to speak. I appreciate his forbearance. I will be back Monday to talk some more about these issues. There is no social program in this country as important as a good job that pays well. The reason I say that is the root of giving people hope about the future is to have opportunities for the American people to find a good-paying job, keep a job that has some benefits, to give them an opportunity to take care of their families. That is where we start. I hope in the coming days, as we discuss and work on these issues, we will have the opportunity to call on what is the best in this country rather than the worst and come together and do what we can to restore to America the kinds of opportunities we have always felt will exist for our children. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for up to 40 minutes.

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to add my congratulations to Senator Robert C. Byrd for his historic achievement today. Senator Byrd arrived in the Senate 50 years ago. For decades, he has defended the Constitution and the principles upon which it stands. Senator Byrd is truly a statesman, a patriot, a proud son of West Virginia, and an important voice in the history of this country. The people of West Virginia definitely know that they have a champion who will stand up for them. Senator Byrd has never forgotten the hard life that he had as a boy growing up in poverty in the southern West Virginia coalfields. He has always remained true to his faith and his family and has worked to build a better future for West Virginia and the Nation. In the history of our great Nation, Senator Byrd has served longer than all but one Member of Congress and has been a committed public servant. Senator Byrd first came to Washington in 1953 as a Congressman and served three terms in the House before being elected to the Senate. Senator Byrd quickly learned the rules and procedures that make the Senate run. He used these to his advantage while serving as the Senate majority leader and in other key leadership positions. On June 11, 2006, Senator Byrd became the longest serving U.S. Senator in history, and in November 2006, he was elected to an unprecedented ninth full term. During his tenure, his colleagues have elected him to more leadership positions than any other Senator in history. This includes Senate majority whip, chairman of the Democratic Conference, Senate minority leader, and Senate majority leader. Currently, Byrd is the President pro tempore. Throughout his career, Senator Byrd has cast more than 18,100 roll call votes in five decades of service in the Senate. Senator Byrd is also the longest serving member of the esteemed Appropriations Committee. He has served as its chairman or ranking member since 1989. After many distinguished years of service, he has stepped down from his leadership position but will remain an important voice on this committee. I have enjoyed serving with him on the Appropriations Committee and have learned a tremendous amount under his leadership. There are other sides to Senator Byrd that have contributed to his life's accomplishments, his achievements as a musician and author. Senator Byrd learned to play the fiddle at a young age and carried it with him everywhere he went. His skill with the instrument led to performances at the Kennedy Center and on a national television appearance on ``Hee Haw.'' He even recorded his own album, ``Mountain Fiddler.'' He is also the author of a magisterial four volume set about this body entitled ``The Senate, 1789-1989'' and other works. No tribute to Senator Byrd would be complete without mentioning his life's love, Erma Ora James. For nearly 69 years, the Byrds were inseparable, traveling throughout their native West Virginia and crossing the globe together. Sadly, Mrs. Byrd passed away on March 25, 2006, but Senator Byrd speaks lovingly of her and their life together each day. The times have changed considerably since Senator Byrd was first elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates and eventually the U.S. Senate. We have seen a man walk on the Moon. We have mapped the human genome, and we have seen unbelievable technological advances that have changed the way we live, work and communicate. But through it all, the one constant is Senator Byrd's steadfast championing of our Constitution and the people of West Virginia. I join my colleagues in offering my hardy congratulations to him on this important day.

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 for 20 minutes in morning business.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, all of us in this country are nervous and very worried about the American economy. This is an economic engine that has been the wonder of the world. It has provided so much good for so many people, expanding opportunities for jobs and careers, and for people to own homes. This is an extraordinary place, this place called the United States. We have been through tough times and good times, and this turns out to be one of those pretty difficult times for our economy. This ship of state has sort of stopped in the water, the engine isn't working very well, and we have a lot of trouble. Since the first of this year, nearly 2 million people have lost their jobs. That sounds like just a statistic, but in a home where one spouse had to tell the other that they had lost their job, that is a disaster. So almost 2 million people have lost their jobs, and the question is, How many more will lose their jobs before we find a way to provide a foundation for building this economy back to an economy of strength and opportunity once again? We are discussing here in the Senate and in the Congress a proposed $15 billion bridge loan for the automobile industry. My colleagues have been speaking about that, and there are a lot of jobs at stake, so there is a lot of passion on both sides of this issue. It appears to me that there are somewhere around 3 to 4 million jobs at stake with the automobile industry. I think the question is, at this precarious moment, teetering on the edge of a cliff with this economy, what would it mean if somehow we decide whatever happens will happen and we will let it happen, watch it happen, but we won't take action? What would it mean if a couple of million American people lost their jobs on top of what we have just seen? So I don't think the prospect is for us to sit around and be observers. We have to be active. We have to be involved, and we have to try to find ways to provide confidence that there will be an economic recovery. Now, I am concerned about this recession, which is very deep. It is devastating to American families who have lost a substantial part of their assets and their 401(k)s and their retirement accounts. It is devastating to those who have lost their jobs. But I am concerned about something else as well: I am concerned about a government and a constitution that somehow seems to have invented a completely separate approach to governing. And let me describe what I mean. I am perfectly understanding of those that need to take and want to take emergency action to try to provide opportunities for the recovery of this economy. I understand that. I have studied economics. I taught economics briefly. I understand, having studied what happened in the Great Depression, the need to take aggressive action. But no one, in my judgment, has ever suggested that the need to take aggressive action should somehow obliterate the requirement for oversight and for accountability. But that is exactly what I think is happening today with an extraordinary kind of government outside of the regular process that we understand government to adopt based on our Constitution. Let me describe what I mean and my concern about it. As I look at what has happened with bailout funds, rescue funds, all kinds of emergency actions, there is about $8.5 trillion in taxpayer funds that has now been put at risk. I am not talking billions, I am not talking about millions or thousands, I am talking about $8.5 trillion of taxpayer funds that appears to me to have been placed at risk. In almost all cases, this was done without the consent of the Congress, outside of any vote that occurred here in the Congress. Now, I am not suggesting that the emergency powers, for example, at the Federal Reserve Board that Chairman Bernanke is using--should not have been a significant part of this effort to try to create emergency measures to address the economic trouble we face. I am not suggesting that at all. What I am saying is this: We have people huddled in rooms around here for days and days and days talking about what kinds of conditions should you put on the proposal of $15 billion that would be a bridge loan for the automobile industry, what kinds of tough conditions should they be, spell them out, make sure they are there. Well, guess what. With almost all of the Wall Street bailout money, there are no conditions, no real accountability that I am aware of. Nobody was sitting in a room saying: You know what, let's establish tough conditions when we open the Fed's window for the first time in history for the investment banks to come and get direct lending from the Federal Reserve Board. I didn't see any conditions attached to that. You go down the list of things, and the Federal Reserve programs are $5.55 trillion. Now, I am not suggesting the taxpayers are going to lose that money. They will perhaps lose some of it for sure, but some of it represents mortgages that likely will be good in the long term. The guarantee of certain kinds of mortgage securities, the funding for certain investment bank operations--you know I am not suggesting all of this is going to be lost, but clearly some will be lost. The taxpayers are at risk. Did anyone talk about what kinds of conditions should exist for that? As I said, for a week now there have been people huddling about what are the strict and strong conditions you can attach to this $15 billion. I am in favor of strict and strong conditions to the things we do to move money into these circumstances. I am in favor of that. But why is it just here? Why not the $5.5 trillion? The FDIC program, $1.5 trillion, the Treasury Department, $1.1 trillion, $700 billion of which is called the Troubled Asset Relief Program--that, by the way, is a misnomer. That is what the Secretary of the Treasury asked for. He asked for $700 billion to buy troubled assets from financial firms. The Congress gave him the $700 billion. I did not vote for that, but the Congress gave him $700 billion, and very quickly he said: Well, that is not what I meant. I have changed my mind. We are not going to buy troubled assets, we are going to invest in capital in banks. So he promptly put $125 billion into nine banks--some of which apparently didn't want it--in order to, as the Treasury Secretary said, expand lending because the credit markets were frozen. Well, guess what. That $125 billion called troubled asset relief money was put into banks instead as capital investments with no requirement at all that they expand lending. The purpose of the investment was to expand lending, but there was no requirement that they expand lending. Pretty inexplicable to me. But the point is, $700 billion of this $1.1 trillion is the troubled asset relief fund, and then Federal housing has about $300 billion. By the way, this has not been easy information to get. Some enterprising work by a number of reporters--Bloomberg, for example--was first to try to figure out what is out here in terms of liability. What are the risks? What are the American taxpayers being asked to assume with respect to a burden? The fact is, it was hard to find. And despite the promises and pledges of transparency and accountability, it doesn't exist. We are told: Well, this is not transparent because it is difficult to do that, to tell folks at so-and-so that this company got a loan and this company didn't. I don't understand that. The promise of transparency was not some sort of tepid promise; it was a promise that what was going to be done would be available to be observed by the American people. That regrettably has not been the case. So the Troubled Asset Relief Program was a program that actually was the only portion of this $700 billion that was considered by the Congress. Despite the fact that the Secretary of the Treasury wanted $700 billion with a three-page piece of legislation, those who worked on that did put some conditions, accountability and oversight requirements in the legislation. These requirements that have existed for the TARP program don't exist for any other program. What I suggest we do is this: I am going to introduce legislation that would the apply the conditions and other safeguards that exist for the TARP program--the Troubled Asset Relief Program--to all of the other federal lending activities so that we have tough conditions attached to all of these activities and some accountability and transparency and oversight. It is almost unbelievable to me that we have this massive amount of money being moved around with no one--except for the $700 billion--in an elective position responsive to the American people. The American people, after all, are the ones who assume the risk of all of this-- with no one in an elective position making these judgments. This is kind of an extraordinary form of government we are seeing. It is one I do not think you read in the Constitution. Again, my criticism is not to those who are interested in being active to address an economic crisis. I believe you have to be active to address a crisis. But I think those who are working now on the auto issue, who are insisting on strict conditions, are completely at odds with virtually everything else that has been done without conditions or oversight at all. That makes no sense to me at all. The TARP program has conditions of oversight, accountability, and transparency. None of them are applicable to the other portions--which is about $7.8 trillion. Is anybody asking why? Is anybody asking why should they not be applicable? I am going to introduce legislation that would make these same conditions applicable to all these areas. It doesn't matter whether it is an open Fed window or some other guarantee--we have $7.8 trillion of other guarantees that put the taxpayers at risk. In one way or another the American people deserve to be able to see what is happening to them. I am going to introduce a number of pieces of legislation. One of them will be to impose the same conditions and oversight in the troubled asset program to all the other programs that exist here. Second, I am going to propose a piece of legislation called the Financial Reform Commission, creating a high-level commission that would report back to the Congress in about 6 months about how we would reform our system of finance in this country. We can't continue this. The fact is, what happened threw this country's economy into the ditch. It caused an enormous wreck. And we are going to keep doing it? I don't think so. It has to change. It has to be reformed. Some of the largest financial enterprises in this country have gotten massive amounts of money, hundreds of billions of dollars, but no one has shut the gate, as I described yesterday. I come from a rural background where we had cattle and horses. I understand about closing the gate. No one has closed the gate here. I described yesterday what caused all this--unbelievable reckless behavior, unbelievable greed. Lots of interests were making lots of money. The story the other day was about someone who was in charge of risk management for one of the big investment banks. One guy is in charge of risk management, the other guy is in charge of trading CDOs-- collateralized debt obligations. The guy in charge of trading CDOs didn't have a very difficult time getting his activities through the risk manager and they loaded up. Both of them were making over $20 million a year. Let me say that again--both of them make over $20 million a year. This company loads up with massive quantities of toxic assets. Now we are all stuck with the proposition of the Federal Reserve Board, the Treasury Department, and others, including the FDIC, trying to come to the rescue but coming to the rescue without any notion of how you close the gate on that kind of behavior, first of all; and, second, what kind of conditions attach to that rescue. Again, I say about all this effort today and in the last week about imposing conditions on the automobile industry--sign me up. I am for that. I am not for using taxpayers' money without substantial limitations and conditions. But then why are we standing here with $7.8 trillion having been put at risk for the American taxpayer with few or no conditions, with little or no transparency, with almost no accountability, when Treasury comes up and says we will stick $45 billion into a big financing agency, one of the biggest in the country, and, by the way, you don't have to get rid of anybody. Nobody loses his job. We don't impose a requirement that you cannot pay big bonuses. We will just give you the money. The question is, What caused the requirement to give them the money? The answer is unbelievable recklessness by people who were greedy, making lots and lots of money. Why would you provide money to an enterprise of that type without very substantial restrictions and conditions attached to that money? That is a question I think the Treasury Secretary should answer, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board should answer. The American people deserve that answer. We need a financial reform commission that decides how do we reform this going forward. Let me tell you about the reform that happened 9 years ago. The reform 9 years ago, by the ``smartest guys in the room,'' was: We are hopelessly old-fashioned in our finance, hopelessly out of date. Leading up to the Great Depression--the 1920s, leading up to the 1930s--we saw banks that were engaged in very risky enterprises: Real estate, securities, a whole series of things that were risky. The country plunged into a big old depression, banks closed all over the country, and emergency legislation was put together--Glass-Steagall among them--that said: You know what. It is nuts to have banks engaged in risky enterprises. We are going to separate them, and we are going to make sure you can never do it again. That is why legislation such as Glass-Steagall was passed. It protected that banking system whose not only reality of safety and soundness is important, but the perception of safety and soundness is critical, because without that perception, a run on the bank can bring a bank down. We went on after the Great Depression, having separated those kind of risk activities from banking. Then, in 1999, Senator Phil Gramm from Texas led the effort in the Senate, and the effort was in the House as well, to say: This is hopelessly old-fashioned. Are you kidding me? We can't create big financial institutions, holding companies that allow us to merge investment banks with real banks and get involved in the issues of real estate and securities and so on? Let's pass a piece of legislation called the Financial Modernization Act and get rid of all this obstruction that has been put in place after the Great Depression. I wish to put up what I said during the debate in 1999 on the floor of the Senate. When the Financial Modernization Act left the Senate, the conference report, eight of us voted no. I was one of the eight who voted no. Here is what I said in a speech on the floor of the Senate: ``This bill will also in my judgment raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts.'' I am not prescient. I am not someone who can see the future. But I believed what we were doing in 1999 was unbelievably ignorant of the lessons we should have learned from the Great Depression. ``The bill will also in my judgment raise the likelihood of future massive taxpayer bailouts,'' I said in May of 1999. I wish I was wrong. Nine years later, here we are on the floor of the Senate, and we are seeing bailouts in every direction from the Federal Reserve Board, the Treasury, and others. I also said during that same debate: ``I say to the people who own banks, if you want to gamble, go to Las Vegas.'' But that wasn't enough. We had a lot of folks who decided, you know what, we need to get banking, once again, involved in some of the more profitable enterprises such as real estate and securities. We ought to be able, they said, to pass a financial modernization act that allows the creation of big financial holding companies with a homogenization of all kinds of different enterprises under one roof. They said we will put up firewalls, apparently firewalls made of balsa wood or paper, but we will put up firewalls, and things will be great, and so it passed. Only eight of us voted no in the Senate when that conference report left. Yesterday, I described what happened as a result. It was similar to hogs in a corncrib, grunting and shoving and snorting. You heard it for a decade, especially in recent years. The most egregious part of it started with the subprime loans, but it was also with derivatives and credit default swaps. I said this back in 1999: If you want to trade in derivatives, God bless you. Do it with your own money. Do not do it through the deposits that are guaranteed by the American people. There were four pieces of legislation I introduced during the interim going back to 1995 to try to prohibit banks from trading in derivatives. Let me put up a chart that shows what has happened with derivatives. The top five bailed-out banks: JPMorgan Chase got $25 billion in bailout funds from the U.S. Government. They have a notional value of derivatives of $91.3 trillion. The Bank of America got $15 billion in bailout funds. They have a $39.7 trillion notional value of derivatives. The list goes on. Citigroup, $45 billion in bailout funds, $37 trillion in notional value of derivatives. This sort of mixes the terms. There is something called credit default swaps out there, something over $50 trillion of credit default swaps. If someone wants to know what they are, look at the AIG story. You will understand what brought them down. It was run by a little operation over in London with several hundred people. All this represented an unbelievable amount of reckless speculation that should never have been allowed to happen. That bill passed the Congress. President Clinton signed it. We have people--some of whom will come into this new administration--who were supportive of it. I think it was a horrible mistake. If we do not recognize it now, even as we are trying to dig out of this hole, we are going to head right back to the next hole. We need to have the Financial Reform Commission that develops the recommendations similar to what happened post-depression that will allow us to put together the kind of protections, once again, to make sure this will never again happen. Let me also say I am going to introduce legislation calling for a National Financial Crimes Task Force. There needs to be accountability. I am not suggesting all of it is criminal or even a major part of it is criminal, but some of it undoubtedly represents criminal behavior. Yet there is virtually no investigation going on, on these issues. It is so unbelievable. I chaired the hearings in the Senate on the Enron Corporation. You remember Enron. That was a criminal enterprise that bilked particularly the west coast taxpayers and ratepayers for electricity out of billions of dollars. I chaired the hearing when Ken Lay, the chairman of Enron, came and lifted his hand to tell the truth and then took the fifth amendment. Think of this, Enron was a big deal, a big scam and, in part, a criminal enterprise. In retrospect, the amount of money involved there is minuscule compared to the trillions of dollars we are talking about here that resulted from reckless business management and reckless practices. I talked about derivatives and credit default swaps. I'll just mention, once again, the issue of subprime loans, when companies were advertising to the American people they should come to their company to get a loan, because if you were bankrupt, if you had slow pay, if you had bad credit, they wanted you to get a loan with them. In fact, they would encourage you to get a loan with them, and you wouldn't have to document it. That is called a no doc loan. You don't have to document your loan. Come to us, Zoom Credit said, come to us and get a loan. Slow pay? Bankruptcy? Troubles? It doesn't matter--come to us. That is just an example. In fact, yesterday I showed that the largest mortgage banker in the country was engaged in the same sort of thing and that has already collapsed as well and the guy who ran it got off with a couple hundred million dollars, at least as I understand it. My time is about up. My interest is in protecting the economy and protecting this country and protecting American taxpayers. We need to try to give some protection to American jobs and to protect taxpayers and that means strong conditions, strong oversight, transparency, and accountability. I am for taking emergency action. I am for doing what we can to pull this country out of this hole. But we ought not decide we are going to impose very strict conditions on this tiny little piece and on all the rest of trillions of dollars, it is Katy bar the door; whatever happens, happens; and don't complain. That is not what the role of the Congress should be. This Congress should insist on every dollar that is committed on behalf of the American taxpayers that we have accountability, responsibility and transparency and strong conditions. That has not been the case to this point and I intend to introduce legislation that requires it. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate to conduct a hearing on December 10, 2008, at 9:30 a.m., in room SD366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education Labor, and Pensions be authorized to meet, during the session of the Senate, to conduct a hearing entitled ``Prevention and Public Health: The Key to Transforming our Sickcare System'' on Wednesday, December 10, 2008. The hearing will commence at 10 a.m. in room 192 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

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 that the Senator from New Mexico be recognized for 1 minute, I believe, and following which I would be recognized.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that morning business be extended for 1 hour, with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent to be recognized as in morning business for 20 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this week there will be a lot of discussion on the floor of the Senate about a bridge loan to the automobile industry in this country. I wish to speak about a bit of it here. It is quite clear that this country faces very serious financial problems--perhaps the most serious in my lifetime. We know that thoughtful leadership can help move this country past these problems and to address these problems, but they indeed are very serious. Here is a description of the jobs that have been lost since the first of this year. Nearly 2 million private sector jobs have been lost this year. This is kind of sanitary and doesn't mean so much in terms of numbers. But every one of those nearly 2 million people had to go home this year to tell a loved one or their family that they didn't have a job any longer. A job is what makes much of the other things that are good in our life possible. Nearly 2 million have lost jobs. Most Americans who have some sort of retirement savings, whether it is a 401(k) or an IRA, if they have looked--and some have not--they have discovered that 30 to 40 percent of that is now gone, washed away by a serious financial crisis. Millions of people have lost their homes and millions more will unless something is done. It is one thing to lose a home, it is another thing to lose a job; but to lose a job and a home is a devastating blow to the American family. This is more than some sort of normal contraction of the business cycle. I have said before that I taught economics in college. When you teach economics, you teach about the business cycle. There is a contraction phase and an expansion phase of the business cycle. This is not a recession that is a result of a contraction phase of the business cycle. This is something very different. This is a financial collapse, a financial crisis. This is manmade. This is not some force of nature that is visited upon a population. This is a result of reckless business practices by some of the largest financial firms in this country. Unfortunately, instead of dealing with the cause, there is much effort now to throw money at the biggest firms in the country that helped steer our economy into the ditch. I am not suggesting there is not a requirement to make a very significant investment in portions of the economy to try to provide buoyancy and some lift to steer this country out of the recession. But there is an old country saying that the water won't clear up until you get the hogs out of the creek. What I see day after day is the movement of money to the very interests that steered this country into the ditch and caused the wreck in the first place. This morning, I read in the Wall Street Journal about the CEO of Merrill Lynch, who is suggesting to the directors that he get a 2008 bonus of as much as $10 million. Merrill Lynch is one of the companies that has been in some difficulty. In fact, Merrill Lynch has been purchased and, as you will note from this chart, the top five banks that received taxpayer funds--I have not only listed them, but I talked about the amount of derivatives holdings they have. A substantial part of this recklessness has been hedge fund and CDOs and credit default swaps. J.P. Morgan got $25 billion in bailout funds, with $91.3 trillion in notional value as their derivatives holdings. Citigroup got $45 billion in bailout funds, plus we have guaranteed $306 billion of their toxic assets as well; and they have $37 trillion in derivatives holdings. The list goes on. Bank of America got $15 billion, and they have $39 trillion in notional value of derivatives. This is what I call ``dark money.'' Nobody knows where it is; nobody knows who is liable for it; nobody knows what kind of exposure this rancid, reckless dark money imposes on the balance sheets of America's financial institutions. We are discovering that some of the largest financial institutions in the country failed, and the Treasury Secretary came to the Congress about a month and a half ago and said: I want $700 billion, and I want it in 3 days; otherwise, the economy will collapse. He got the $700 billion but not in 3 days. He said: I want the $700 billion in order to buy toxic assets from the balance sheets of some of the largest financial institutions. I said at that time that I would not vote for it unless provisions require rulemaking to regulate the kinds of institutions that have steered this country into the ditch. They said that was not possible. Then I said that it is not possible for me to vote for $700 billion if we are not putting regulations into place to give us the protection the American taxpayer needs. So what we have seen now in recent days and weeks is the Treasury Secretary decide: Well, I am not going to do what I said I was going to do with the $700 billion. Instead of buying toxic assets from the balance sheets of the largest financial institutions, I am going to invest capital in some of America's largest banks, with the thought that they will expand lending. The credit markets are frozen, and we can get the economy moving again. The Treasury Secretary said: I am not going to do what I told the Congress I was going to do. Instead, I am going to increase the capital in banks. He got $125 billion and put it into nine banks, some of which didn't want it. He didn't say that as a result of this you have to expand lending or as a result of this you cannot provide bonuses or as a result of this you cannot provide dividends. He gave them the money with no strings attached. It made no sense to me at all. Some of this money is moving around into the dark crevasses of the financial institutions that were engaged in some of the most reckless financial practices I have seen in my lifetime, and with no conditions at all. It is interesting to me--and I am not here to make the case for the auto loan. I think the bridge loan to the automobile industry is probably something you have to do to avoid putting 2, 3, or 4 million people on the unemployment rolls at a time when the economy is teetering on the edge of a cliff. But the fact is, when the automobile industry executives came to this town, I came to the floor and said it was ham-handed what they did and that they ought to agree to work for a dollar a year. They have been making $2 million a month. They have been doing right well. I thought it was a ham-handed approach the first time they showed up here. But the discussion about any bridge loan to the automobile industry is a different discussion than the one that happened with all of the financial industries. When the Treasury Secretary anted up $45 billion in total to Citigroup--and they said, by the way, we will also guarantee $306 billion of bad assets that you have on your books--did he ask for any conditions on that? Were there any restrictions? Did anybody get fired or lose their job in this company? Were there any restrictions on the use of that money? Were there any restrictions that they cannot pay bonuses? Did anybody say that they ought to park their private jets? No, not at all. The biggest financial institutions have been showered with massive quantities of money, with no significant conditions. So today one of the failed institutions--at least one of the institutions that had to be purchased in order to be saved--the CEO says to the board of directors: I want a $10 million bonus for this year. This is a company that suffered $11.6 billion in losses this year, and the CEO says he wants a $10 million bonus. You talk about bone-headed. Are they not learning anything? We are talking about American taxpayer dollars being spent around this Wall Street crowd by the Treasury Secretary in massive quantities, without any restrictions that I am aware of. There is no accountability. By the way, you cannot even find transparency. Here is what we think is happening. By the way, this comes from pretty good reporting from Bloomberg and some others. So far, the federal financial bailout has put $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money at risk. The Federal Reserve programs, we are told at this point, guarantee about $5.5 trillion. As you know, they opened their window for the first time in history for direct lending to investment banks at the Federal Reserve Board. We don't know what the taxpayers are on the hook for. Here is what some people have been forced to dig up, after we were promised there was going to be complete transparency, that the American people are going to be part of it. Some reporters have done some work. The Federal Reserve Program has $5.5 trillion pledged; FDIC pledges $1.5 trillion; Treasury Department, $1.1 trillion; Federal Housing Administration, $300 billion. So that is $8.5 trillion put at risk so far. The question is, where is the accountability? Where is the oversight? Where is the regulatory schematic that says we are not going to allow this to happen again? I come from ranching country, southwestern North Dakota. We raise cattle and horses. I understand the notion about closing the gate. You cannot forget to close the gate. Nobody is closing the gate--nobody. I want to remind some folks that part of the origin of this goes back almost 10 years to the Financial Modernization Act. We were hopelessly old-fashioned, we were told. Senator Gramm from Texas led the effort. It was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley financial modernization bill. There were restrictions in place, such as Glass- Steagall and others, relative to investments in real estate and securities. They said let's get rid of those restrictions. They are hopelessly old-fashioned. So Congress got rid of all those restrictions. President Clinton signed it. A good number in his administration supported getting rid of those restrictions. I was one of eight Senators on the floor of the Senate who voted no. I said I think we will see massive taxpayer bailouts within a decade. When you put together real estate, securities and insurance with banking, you are asking for trouble. By the way, add to that a new administration that came in and, for the last 8 years, said we are interested in being willfully blind with respect to regulation. So the Financial Modernization Act was passed, and it was let them do what they want. They loaded up companies with massive amounts of risk. One other thing, and I have described this before. I want to remind people. This is Countrywide, the biggest mortgage bank in the country. They told people this: Do you have less than perfect credit? Do you have late mortgage payments? Have you been denied by other lenders? Call us. They said: Come here if you have bad credit. We will give you a loan. Milennia Mortgage said: 12 months, no mortgage payments. That's right, we will give you the money to make the first 12 months' payments. We will pay for it. Here is Zoom Credit: Credit approval is seconds away. At the speed of light we will preapprove you for a loan. Even if your credit is in the tank, Zoom Credit is like money in the bank. We specialize in credit repair and debt consolidation. Bankruptcy, slow credit, no credit, who cares. Come to us. They will all be making a fortune. Mr. Mozilo ran Countrywide, and he left with $200 million when the whole thing collapsed. They said: Get a loan from us. It is called a subprime loan. It is called a no- documentation-of-income loan, or a no-doc loan. If you want a no-doc loan, we have it. How about a loan where you don't have to pay any principle at all? Or, even better, you don't have to pay on the principle or even all of the interest. We will put it on the back side of the note. Isn't that unbelievable? Why did they do that? They were making a massive amount of money. They put these loans out, and then they would securitize them and slice them and dice them like sawdust in sausage and then sell them up the line. The mortgage banks sell them to a hedge fund, or an investment bank sells it to a hedge fund. They are all making big fees, grunting and shoving like hogs in a corn crib, massive amounts of money, big bonuses. They built a house of cards. Meanwhile, regulators are dead from the neck up, content to be willfully blind. The house of cards began to collapse. When it began to collapse, it caused a significant problem with this entire economy. As I have described, millions of people lost their homes, millions are out of work, and there will be more in the future. Unfortunately, the question is, What do we do next? I am all for doing emergency things, and I believe it is very important to do as President- elect Obama has suggested. You need to invest to try to get the economy moving again. It makes a lot of sense to me to invest in the kinds of things that produce an asset for the future. We should build roads and bridges and repair infrastructure and schools and libraries and water projects--the kinds of things that invest in this country's future-- because all of that puts American people back to work, on payrolls. And when people are working again, people are consumers again and they are going into the stores and creating an economy that is vibrant and expanding once again. That is what we have to do. There are more things I think that would make some sense, and one of the things I think, in addition to the stimulus program the President- elect is talking about, which I intend to be very supportive of, are some tax incentives we should also consider. These things, if you put an end date on them, if you make these investments before the end date, they can stimulate economic activity in the short term. For example, a temporary 15-percent investment tax credit for manufacturers and producers in order to buy crucial equipment and machinery purchases; extending for 18 additional months enhanced 50-percent bonus depreciation; extending enhanced $250,000 business expensing--all of these things are incentives to say, in this case to businesses, if you make this investment now, there is a tax incentive for doing so. That is also what tends to kickstart this economy--a program that would provide an opportunity for a stimulus investment and a program of directed tax incentives that would get this country moving once again. Mr. Arthur Levitt had a piece in the Wall Street Journal a while back titled ``How to Restore Confidence in Our Markets. A Unified Regulator Would Be a Start.'' Let me quote it for a minute. Our Nation's financial markets are in the midst of their darkest hour in 76 years. We are in this situation because of an adherence to a deregulatory approach . . . Our regulatory system failed to adapt to important, dynamic and potentially lethal new financial instruments as the storm clouds gathered. Trust in our institutions and faith in the system are . . . imperative to the functioning of our markets. Creating a regulator that stands on the side of investors and oversees the broad market will help restore that trust. We don't have a choice. We cannot continue to allow that which has happened in the past to happen in the future. Yet there is no urgent discussion here about what kind of regulation is necessary. He talks in this piece about the new financial instruments. What has happened in recent years is we have a lot of financial engineers on Wall Street who create these exotic products. It is all about making money. They create all these exotic products that turn out to be unregulated, many of which you cannot even understand. The question is, are we going to continue to allow that or will we do something that requires a reform of that system. I think we need a financial reform commission that would report back in 6 months on how you reconstruct this system, because we can't continue to allow the system that existed to exist going forward. We have to make changes; otherwise we will be back here in another decade with the same kind of problems. Obviously, we have to pull this country's economy out of the hole. There is no question. That is going to be a hard lift, but I am convinced this country will do that. And it won't be so much what happens in this Chamber as it will be out in the country. I have described previously many times that this economy, in my judgment, is all about confidence. When the American people are confident in the future, they do the things that manifest that confidence. They buy a suit of clothes, they take a trip, they buy a car or buy a house. They do the things that represent their confidence in their job, their family, and their security. That is the expansion side of this economy. It is very hard for people to be confident right now in this economy and in the future. We have to do the things that will say to people: You can be confident. We will stop the hemorrhaging of job loss, we will put in place regulations to make sure this never happens again. We have to find a way to make these reforms and changes that are significant and will give people some confidence about the future. The things we have seen over a long period of time are pretty disgusting. I have described on the floor of the Senate one of the companies--I know one should perhaps not always use company names. I try not to, but from time to time it is worthy to do so. One of the companies that got in trouble here was a bank called Wachovia; a big bank, as a matter of fact. They loaded themselves up with lots of bad assets and had to be purchased. They got in a lot of trouble. Well, you know what, this wasn't the first time. Wachovia, at the same time it was loading up with bad assets, was buying sewer systems in Germany. Now, why would an American bank want to buy a sewer system in a city in Germany? Why? Because they did a sale-leaseback. They bought a sewer system of underground sewer pipes in a German city and leased the pipes back to the city. So there was never any change in the way the sewer was used, but it allowed an American bank to depreciate sewage pipes in a German city and save themselves hundreds of millions of dollars on their U.S. tax bill. You know, if you have that kind of mindset going in, it is not surprising to me you are going to buy a bunch of bad assets in pursuit of maximum profits. If your pursuit of profits as an American company is to buy a sewage system in a German city, it is not surprising to me that they ran into the ditch with bad assets. It is the kind of thing that destroys any confidence people have about this system of ours. This economic system has been a miracle. This economic engine of ours has been the envy of the world. But we simply can't continue in the direction we have seen in recent decades. It is not all one party's fault, for sure, but those who have counseled self-regulation of some of the biggest financial institutions in this country have done the American people no favor. Regulation is necessary with respect to the marketplace. That's just a fact. I know of nothing more important to allocate goods and resources than the marketplace. And I am a big advocate of the free market, but the free market needs a regulator. It needs someone who wears a striped shirt with a whistle and calls the fouls. What we have seen is some of the biggest financial institutions in this country engage in the most reckless, bizarre behavior I have ever seen. Now the American taxpayer is stuck with the bill and the economy is in the ditch, and we are trying to figure out how to pull it out. Let me conclude by talking for a moment about the automobile industry. I want to show a chart. This chart shows what has happened to auto industry sales this month versus the same month a year ago. General Motors is down 41 percent, Ford down 31 percent, Nissan down 42 percent, Toyota down 34 percent, and Honda down 32 percent. As I indicated earlier, I am not a big fan of the automobile industry. I don't think they have been particularly innovative or on the cutting edge in some areas. I think in some areas they have made some real progress. But I think it is very difficult, when you go into this kind of economic trouble with a pretty weak balance sheet, and then face the loss of 40 percent of your product sales, to then skate through that. So the question is this: Does this industry matter to the country? I don't think you long remain a world-class economic power unless you have a world-class manufacturing capability, and a significant part of that capability in this country is in the automobile industry. I am not someone who would support saying: Yes, let us provide money to the auto sector, such as the money that has been provided to the financial sector. This is a small fraction of what has been provided to the biggest banks in the country, with no strings. We have not seen one of those people in front of a committee being questioned about how they got here, what airplane they took to Washington, DC, who is going to lose their job, who is accountable, how much of a bonus did you get, and how much do you want for next year. None of those questions for the big financial industries. But the auto executives have been here and they have been told there is no bridge loan for you unless there are specific plans, a roadmap, of how you are going to get out of this. The only question I ask is this: In a country where we have lost nearly 2 million jobs since January of this year, and are teetering on the edge of a cliff with our economy, if we see a bankruptcy, or a series of bankruptcies here, and we see 2 or 3 million more people on the unemployment rolls, what does it mean to this economy? How much deeper will this recession be? How much more difficult will it be to pull this country out of a steep decline? That is the question. When Secretary Paulson came to us saying he wanted $700 billion in 3 days, I was one of those who said no, and I am glad I did because I don't think that money has been used appropriately. I don't think there is any accountability or transparency with respect to the use of that money. That has to change. We are going to decide in the coming couple of days whether we are going to do something here with a bridge loan for the auto industry, with substantial conditions. And if those conditions are appropriate, I believe there is a road to a better future for this industry. I want us to come down on the side of preserving millions of jobs. But that responsibility rests with this industry to give us the plans that provide us with some assurance and some confidence about the future. These are extraordinarily difficult times. When I started, I talked about a debate on Wall Street once again about $10 million bonuses for a failed firm executives. Imagine, there is no culture change here when we have had the kind of financial wreckage that exists in this country, and a company that lost $11 billion last year has a CEO asking for a $10 million bonus. I ask: Have you lost all common sense? Are you totally disconnected from the world? It makes no sense to me. We have to have a deep reservoir of common sense in the way we deal with these issues if we are going to get through this, and I believe we will get through this. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Under the previous order, the Senate stands in recess until Wednesday, November 26, 2008, at 10 a.m. Thereupon, the Senate, at 9:30 and 41 seconds a.m., recessed until Wednesday, November 26, 2008, at 10 a.m.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today there has been much discussion once again here on the floor of the Senate and certainly in the news and in various other venues, I am sure at the Secretary of the Treasury's office, about the economy and what is happening in this country. One only has to look at the stock market--today it moved down very quickly and very aggressively once again; it has happened many times in recent days. There are very serious problems. But it is not just the stock market that reflects those problems. It is perhaps if you were sitting in a home tonight or last night or last week or last month to hear someone come home from work to stay to the spouse: Honey, I have lost my job. And 1.2 million people did that in the last 10 months, half of them in the last quarter. There were 240,000 last month who came home and said: I have lost my job. No, not because they are bad workers; because people are being laid off. This economy is in a recession. It appears to be a very deep recession, with a great deal of trouble coming from a range of activities that went way beyond the pale. The subprime loan scandal, an almost unbelievable economy that was providing substantial additional benefits and salaries and bonuses to people at the top of the economic ladder. It is almost unbelievable what has happened with the reckless behavior with respect to some of the financial firms in this country. The result is that the amount of leverage and the development of a house of cards built on an illusion of assets has caused a collapse, and it is affecting virtually every corner of this country. Tonight there are people who will ask the question: What has happened to my retirement account? What about my 401(k) account? What about my individual retirement account? How far has it gone down? How much have I lost? What will it mean to my retirement? How much longer will I have to work? I have been on this floor plenty of times talking about what has caused all of this. If you do not think about it and talk about it and take steps to correct it, it will happen again. The only way the American people will have confidence about the future is if they believe we are taking steps to correct that which caused this problem. I have talked about the companies that started this mess, the brokers, the mortgage companies, the folks who buy and sell securities, the hedge funds, those who trade in derivatives such as credit default swaps. I have talked about all of them. All of them made massive amounts of money. Do you know the highest income earner in the country last year earned $3.7 billion? One person. That is $10 million a day. If the spouse said: How did it go today? That person had to say, pretty well, I made $10 million. That day and every day. That is unbelievable to me. It is an example of what has been happening at the top. Massive bonuses and salaries; everybody making money hand over fist by creating this financial house of cards. It collapses and injures everybody in this country, and a whole lot of folks are thrown out of work. The source? Subprime loans, companies saying to people: Hey, how about a loan? You do not have to pay even the principal at all. You do not have to pay all of the interest. You have bad credit, you cannot get any credit, you have been bankrupt, you are a slow payer, you do not pay your bills, but it does not matter. Come to us. That was the advertising. Is it any wonder that all of this collapsed? And as they put all of those bad loans together, they securitized them and chopped them all and sold them as securities. They securitize everything these days. They sold them as securities and moved them around the country and around the world. All of a sudden we have a bunch of firms that decided, hey, these are pretty good-paying securities. They have a big return. We are going to buy some of these. So they bought them all up. And now guess what. They have got all of these rotten assets in their portfolio, and it is pulling them all under and causing a massive problem. So here we sit with a collapse of a financial system, names that are household names, the biggest firms in the country going belly up, getting bailed out. The Treasury Secretary comes to us and says: I need $700 billion on an emergency basis in 3 days, and if not, the sky is going to fall in. So the Secretary does not get it in 3 days or with a 3-page bill, but he gets it in a couple of weeks. Now he has $700 billion, but he does not know what he wants to do it with it. He said: I need it and I need it urgently right now because I want to buy toxic assets and I want to get these toxic assets off the balance sheets of these companies. Well, he got the money. Then he said: You know what, that is not right either. I do not want to buy toxic assets. What I want to do is provide money, capital, to big banks. He takes $125 billion and aimed it at nine banks, some of whom did not want it. The problem was, it was the biggest gift in the world. There were no strings attached. Can you imagine taking $125 billion and saying to nine big banks: You take this money, and, by the way, I will not require you to expand your lending. That is the reason I am giving it to you, but I will not require it. I will have no prohibition on you using it for bonuses. Go right ahead. And, by the way, my agency is also going to encourage you to merge because we like bigger banks; merging will be beneficial, we are told. Is it any wonder people do not have confidence? Is it any wonder people are not inspired by this? This is not a consistent, well-managed approach to deal with a crisis, in my judgment. I know it is easy to be critical, but it is hard not to be critical of something that seems so random in terms of policy. Now, I sat with a banker in North Dakota recently at a table. I said to him, a small town banker: Do you have money to lend? I said: They say the credit markets are frozen. Do you have money to lend? Oh, yes, he said. He said: If somebody comes in, I have got money to lend them, because he did business the old-fashioned way. He said: I take deposits and I make loans. But when I make loans, I make sure those to whom I lend the money are going to have a reasonable opportunity and are able to repay the money. That is business the old-fashioned way. He said: I did not get involved in all of those reckless practices. I did not buy those securitized notes with subprime loans. I did not do all of that. Well, the biggest financial companies in this country did. They were like hogs in a corn crib, buying and selling, making lots of money, everybody is wading in cash. Now they are up to their necks in trouble, and the Treasury Secretary says if we do not bail them out, the whole economy is going to collapse. So this bailout occurs without any conditions at all. Did anybody say, with these hundreds of billions of dollars--and by the way, it is not really hundreds of billions. If you take a look at what Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board have done, it is somewhere between $2 and $3 trillion that has been pledged to those big firms. Not many people know that. And you cannot get all of the details. But the Federal Reserve Board opened up its window, first time in history, to say: We will do direct lending with investment banks whose assets are not insured by the Federal Government. First time in history. So we have around $2 to $3 trillion out there extended on behalf of the American people with some of these companies that were engaged in unbelievably reckless practices and behavior. The issue, it seems to me, is what did the Treasury Secretary require of these companies that got this massive amount of money? What did the Federal Reserve Board require of these companies? The answer is nothing. No restrictions. No restrictions on bonuses. We now read that somewhere around $20 to $30 billion of bonuses will be paid in the next month or two. Any restrictions on parking the corporate jets? No. Any restrictions on income at all? No. No restrictions at all. No strings attached. Now, there is a great discussion here on the floor of the Senate and in this town about bailing out the automobile industry. That proposal is $25 billion, about 4 percent of the $700 billion. As far as I am concerned, the automobile industry has plenty to answer for. But if we are talking about a potential loss of 3 to 5 million additional jobs if that industry goes belly up, at a time when this economy is in such desperate condition, putting 3 to 5 million additional people out of work would, I think, be devastating to this economy. So that is a very important consideration. But I am not about to propose bailing out anybody unless there are tough restrictions and conditions. I know those executives from Detroit got a pretty tough time, and should have, yesterday. They flew here in their private jets, making about $20 million a year, saying: We need help from the American taxpayer. Look, if we are going to lose 3 to 5 million jobs, I want to help for a couple of reasons. No. 1, I don't want millions more people out of work that would further jeopardize this economy. No. 2, I want to retain a strong manufacturing base. Part of that is the automobile industry. You don't long remain a strong world economic power unless you have a strong manufacturing base. But I am not about to support a bailout for anybody unless there are strong, tough, and rigorous conditions. Park those corporate jets, 24 roundtrip flights from Detroit to Washington, DC, and they flew in corporate jets, making $20 million a year, saying: Give us a little help. Where is the self- sacrifice? I am not just talking on the part of that industry. They were singled out yesterday, and I am not excusing them. They got what they deserved in the House hearing. But did anybody ask the question, when the Treasury Secretary was ladling money around by the hundreds of billions of dollars or the Federal Reserve Board was ladling money around to the point of $2 to $3 trillion, did anybody say to those biggest financial firms: By the way, here are some restrictions. Maybe you ought to park your airplanes. Maybe you ought to be concerned about these unbelievable incomes. Talk about $20 million a year for people running an automobile company, we are not talking about $20 million when we talk about some of these hedge funds. We are talking about an average of the top 25 hedge funds, somewhere around $700 million a year. Did anybody impose conditions on them? No. Should they have? You darn right they should have. If the automobile industry wants help from the American people and this Congress to preserve 3 to 5 million jobs, then they are going to have to be responsible to adhere to significant restrictions. Those restrictions ought to be rigorous and tough. There must be independent oversight on anything that is given to that industry, or other industries for that matter. They ought to agree to a prohibition on dividend payments so that money going to those companies isn't going to go out in dividends. That would make no sense. There ought to be prohibited golden parachutes for executives as well as executive bonuses during the duration of the loan. Again, I say park those corporate jets. How about announcing that you are willing to take $1 a year for the sake of trying to repair what is wrong with your company and trying to put that company back on track? I understand it wasn't their fault that sales dropped 30 percent. They are victims, as are all Americans, of this economic crisis. It is not their fault that sales dropped 30 percent. So if they need some help to save 3 to 5 million jobs, I think most Americans would say: Let's save those jobs. But most Americans would also ask the question: Where is the self-sacrifice on the part of those folks who are running these companies? Let's see a little and let's hear a little self- sacrifice from people who say: I will own up to this. I will put something significant on the table in terms of trying to turn this economy and these companies we run around. Let me finally say, there are a whole lot of folks across the country who are doing business the right way, Main Street businesses, community banks. They come to work in the morning. They turn the key. They open the lock on that door. They are at risk. They are just trying to make a living. Yet they, too, are victims, not because they got engaged in the kind of behavior in which some of the biggest companies in this country were engaged. Some of the biggest financial companies were engaged in reckless behavior. When the Financial Modernization Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate nine years ago, an act that was a devastating piece of legislation that led us down this path to a financial collapse, I said back then when I voted against it--and I was one of eight Senators to vote no--I said: If you want to gamble, go to Las Vegas. No, instead they were allowed to gamble by creating holding companies and merging bank enterprises with securities and with real estate and other risks. We knew you shouldn't do that. We learned it in the Great Depression. It caused the closure of massive numbers of banks. Some of my colleagues brought a bill to the Congress and got almost everybody to agree to it that said: These lessons are old-fashioned. Let's let these financial institutions merge and fuse together risky things with banking, securities, and real estate. What an unbelievably ignorant thing to do. We had learned that lesson before and forgot it. Guess what. From that day on we began to see the kind of inherent risk established in financial enterprises that someday most of us believed would create the house of cards that would collapse. And it has. Now the question is, how do we put this back together? Let me say this: If I didn't have great hope for the future of this country, I would hardly be able to get up and go to work, but I think this is a resilient, wonderful place. We have made very big mistakes. A lot of people have made very big mistakes, perhaps all of us. But this country is a great place. Think about what America has been through: the Civil War, the Great Depression, beating back the forces of fascism and nazism. We have done so much in this country to prevail. This generation of Americans is not about to lose. This generation of Americans, too, will prevail. But it is going to require all of the effort of every one of us. This isn't about politics. It is certainly not about Republicans and Democrats. It is about creating good public policy that gives the American people confidence and hope in the future. That is what will get us out of this rut. Those who caused the financial wreckage, who drove this economy into the ditch, are not going to get us out. It is good public policy by thoughtful people that will begin mirroring what happens on Main Streets and community banks all across the country, doing business the right way. When that happens, we will put this country back on track. I hope that is sooner rather than later. I hope the American people do not lose hope because we believe, all of us believe, in the great promise of this country. It is true that we face great challenges, but we are turning a page. We will have a new Congress. We will have a new President and a new determination to try to fix what is wrong and put this country on a better path. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Commerce Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 3663 and the Senate proceed to its consideration.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 711, which was submitted earlier today.

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 713, which was introduced earlier today.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I would be pleased to engage in such a colloquy.

Mr. DORGAN. Yes.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Commerce Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. Res. 709 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.