George Miller

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. . . .

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. It is certainly understandable why the chairman of the committee would not want us to talk about this bill. It is certainly understandable that he would not want the American public to learn from us that this is a trillion-dollar tax bill that plunges this country faster and further into debt than anytime in history. He certainly would not want us to tell the American people that when they did their first tax bill of a trillion dollars 2 years ago, that since that time we lost 2.7 million jobs, the economy has faltered, the market has faltered and the Bush administration and the Republicans in the House and the Senate do nothing. They do nothing but take care of the Bush class in America against the middle class in America. I am sure the gentleman from California would not like to have us tell that to the American public, just as he did not want us to tell the American public when we had a substitute and they denied us time to talk about it, they denied us the right to offer. Why? Because we had a substitute that was fair and fast acting, would have created a million jobs and no long-term deficit. They could not figure out how to construct one. They did not have the discipline to construct it. They did not have the morals to construct it. They did not have the ethics to construct it, so they just dove into the pit of debt and deficits and red ink. And now as they emerge from that pit, it drips off of them, deficits, red ink, muck, to be left to the future generations. That is their plan. And I am sure they would not like us to talk about it. And I am sure that he will beg us to yield back our time. But we think this is the House where the people rule. This is where the people ought to hear what is taking place here. The facts that cannot be buried, as he would say, is the exploding deficit, the cost of these tax bills, a $400 billion deficit this year, a $7 trillion deficit over the long term and the immorality of passing that on to future generations.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee), a member of the committee. (Mr. INSLEE asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on what the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Inslee) said here, because it is a part of the bill that is in fact a subterfuge in the underlying bill of the committee, and that is that they are not prepared to authorize money to be expended for this purpose, so they are going to rely on forest stewardship contracts. We have already been put on notice by the people in the Forest Service in California that they are going to need to log the large trees around Lake Tahoe in Northern California to go down and to do treatments in forests in Southern California where there are no big trees. It will not pay for it. They cannot cut enough trees to pay for it. It costs about $1,500 to $1,800 an acre to treat these lands, and yet there is no money in this. So they rely on forest stewardship. They have got to go out, and they have got to cut the big trees. If the communities do not have the big trees, then they are not going to be in the priority because they have got to pay for the projects. That is why we put up real money in the authorization for this purpose so those communities could be treated and they can cut any size tree they want. There is no limitation on this, and they just balance out the books. Forest stewardship is not about balancing the books. It is about balancing the watersheds. It is about balancing the ecology of the area. It is about balancing the soils. It is about balancing the growth rate. It is about balancing the infestation. It is all of that in determining the health of those forests. But what we have suggested is they just create an accounting system. They have got to treat 1,000 acres. Then they have got to go cut enough big trees somewhere to pay for the treatment of that 1,000 acres. That is not the proper way to do this. There is a public cost to this, and it ought to be authorized. If they are going to spend all the money on infestation, then where are they going to get the money to do the fire treatment that is necessary in forests where fire is the major threat, not necessarily infestation? So that is the weakness in the underlying bill. If we want to deal with the problem that was agreed upon, that there was this area around the cities, around these communities that needed to be treated because that is where the catastrophic fires could break out, that is where the danger was posed; and to protect those watersheds, that is where we were prior to the election. Now that it is decided, they have got those votes, they are going to open the door, and the fact of the matter is we now have a bill with no discipline. There are no priorities, and they simply must pay for it by cutting down late successional old forests or the largest trees they can find in the area. Because if one could make money outside of chipping them, people would take the small trees. They would be happy to have them. But we know that that is not going to happen; and when we look at the budget submissions of this administration, they are planning on treating less land this year than they did the year before. So we have got kind of a cataclysmic event taking place here between the needs of the forest, what many are projecting to be a dramatic fire year, maybe more so than the past year, no budget money, which then pushes them into large forests where the fire treatment in many cases is less needed than around the communities. That is the irrational part of the Republican bill.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I would just say that I think that this process that we have seen with this bill is indicative. It gives us warning about the Forest Service process. Here we see this bill being rammed through the House of Representatives, no amendments being offered, on a day when we do not have a full schedule; but the intent and the purpose is to ram it through without the full participation and the deliberations of this body. It is reflective of what is in this bill. It is an effort to ram through these treatment programs, the cutting programs, the logging programs, the fire treatment programs, and limit the public participation to the greatest extent possible. That is what is wrong with this legislation. The suggestion that somehow we are going to unilaterally turn over the decision on whether or not to protect old forests, or protect old growth, to protect large trees, to mark gray unilaterally without review, is like turning the banking system over to Bonnie and Clyde. It just does not make any sense in terms of the well-being of these forests, in the long-term, multiple use of these forests. If you are just out there hunting for large trees to cut and you need a rationale to cut them, then this bill will give you the ability to do that, because it throws open the doors to logging of those large trees that matter the most to the communities in the West, matter to the citizens that we represent, matter to the citizens sense in our State; and that is what this bill does.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. But it also happens to be accurate.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Udall). (Mr. UDALL of Colorado asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Solis).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Grijalva).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. Already today we have heard a lot of heated exchange on the subject of fire policy. Our Republican colleagues will make impassioned speeches about the need to pass this legislation to protect communities. The President has implored the Congress to act. And without question Democrats and Republicans agree that this is a critically important issue to so many of our western communities, to the health of our forests, to the safety of those communities and to those who are engaged in firefighting during the fire year in the western United States. But there is a big difference between these pieces of legislation. There is a big difference between talking about catastrophic wildfires and really helping communities that are at risk. There is a world of difference between wildfire legislation put forth by my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle and the alternative that we are proposing on this side of the aisle. That really comes down to an issue about the priorities of these communities. Yes, we have drawn an area around these communities of a half mile which we have slated for fire treatment; and if we treated all those communities we would use up all of the money that is in the budget for the treatment of those fires, those where we engage in catastrophic fires, not necessarily the largest fires that take place in the western United States or in the United States, including Alaska, where huge fires rage very far from communities, far from where people live. Those are destructive fires in many ways, but they are not the catastrophic fires where we engage in the intensity of firefighting, the risk of human life, and the risk to property. So we think in our legislation that we have made a decision that we will concentrate the resources on that, we will do it in a bill that is essentially noncontroversial, that addresses the problem, that can go to work right away, can create the jobs in the community that are necessary to provide for the health of our forests and the safety of our communities. It is very clear, I think, when we look at both bills. Westerners understand the difference between smoke and fire, and I would suggest that the Republican bill is a lot of smoke if we are talking about protecting those communities. I think it is important to understand what are the distinctions in the bill. We provide direct aid to local communities to treat private lands and public lands because they are intermingled. To suggest you are going to do one without the other is to put the other at risk. In fact, we find that there is not the aid to local communities in the Republican bill. Our provisions are noncontroversial and will speed up the thinning projects. I think when my colleagues read the legislation presented by the committees, they will see, as we have already heard comments from so many organizations that are deeply concerned about the due process provisions of this law, that will make it much more difficult, certainly delay its consideration in the Senate. We create the new jobs quickly, providing that aid for the treatment on public and private lands, and we target the resources to those communities that are at risk and to the watersheds in those communities that are at risk. That is what we should be doing. That is what we should be doing. And we should especially be doing that when we consider the budget requests of this administration, which requested less money in this budget for hazardous fuel treatment than in the previous year. The Department of the Interior requested stable funding in this year. The fact of the matter is, in total, what we see is there is less money to treat fewer acres. That is why we had to set some priorities. Yes, we would like to think that we could second-guess nature, that we could go out to where lightning is going to strike, treat that area this year, and we would not have a fire there next year. But the fact of the matter is, in the urban-suburban interface, where communities have moved into the forest, where there is a risk, where there is a different urgency about fighting a fire because of properties and threats to communities where we put people most at risk in fighting those fires, that is where we ought to have the priority. That is really what this legislation does. It makes a decision that the Congress, living within the budget constraints, and I hope the Committee on Appropriations will add additional money to this, but living within those constraints, let us treat those lands where we have the most critical need on this. The suggestion in the Republican bill is that if we just cut down enough big trees, enough big valuable trees that are not the problem with fire, therefore we can pay for the treatment of more lands. In California, it is suggested that we could cut down many of the areas of the giant sequoia monuments, where we are preserving some of the oldest trees on the face of the earth, that we could cut down these trees and pay for treatment in Southern California or Northern California. That is a Faustian bargain the public does not want. We have heard much discussion here about how fires used to creep along the forestlands. The suggestion we have to cut down the biggest trees so fires will once again creep along the forestlands is a mistake. What we need in many instances, and what many communities can do on a priority basis, is mechanical treatment and controlled burns to get rid of that understudy of brush that then allows those fires to jump into the crowns. But that is not what the Republican legislation does. It does not put the priority in the protection of those communities.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Udall). (Mr. UDALL of New Mexico asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, I too rise in opposition to the previous question so that we would have an opportunity to offer an extension of unemployment benefits. As the minority leader has said, this is the most efficient economic stimulus that we can provide to our economy. It helps people who are out of work. It helps the economy because they must spend the money on the necessities and what our economy needs is demand. My colleagues do not have to believe me. Just look at the figures that were published yesterday. And that is, in fact, that consumers are running out of gas, retail demand is down in the country, and the stock market was down yesterday as a result of that. That comes on the heels of what the Republicans have offered and that is additional tax cuts. It is rather interesting, though, when we see the people who are now commenting on the tax cuts in terms of the economy, we see that the Republican-controlled Joint Committee on Taxation says that even under dynamic scoring, the tax cut will lead only to more job loss, higher deficits, more debt for our children and grandchildren. Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute was quoted in The Washington Post yesterday as saying that the dividend plan is one of the most patently absurd tax policies ever proposed. Then today the senior economist for Goldman Sachs says that these tax cuts being offered are not stimulative. What is that telling us? That is telling us that people are going to continue to be unemployed, that the economy is going to continue to soften; and the Republicans are not concerned. The Republicans simply do not share a concern for people who have lost their jobs. Their number one priority since the Bush administration has come to town was and always has been tax cuts, tax cuts for the wealthy. The unemployed are incidental to their concerns. That is why my colleagues ought to vote against the previous question on this rule so we can immediately offer unemployment extension benefits for millions of Americans who are out of work to help their families. The last time the Republicans did this, they dropped the ball. They did not get them reauthorized at the end of December, so these families had weeks of uncertainty before they knew whether or not they were going to be able to continue to pay the mortgage, to try to keep their car from being repossessed, to educate their children. We owe these families better than this. The Republicans ought to start showing a little bit of compassion for these families who are in very hard times because of the lousy Bush economy.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. I am, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Emanuel). (Mr. EMANUEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, this motion to recommit provides that workers with 10 years of service with a company would have the choice of whether or not to accept a cash balance retirement plan or a defined benefit plan when a corporation decides that they want to switch from a defined benefit plan to a cash balance plan. We do nothing about the corporation's right to do so. That is simply up to the corporations. Many corporations are doing this in an attempt to save money. The question that my colleagues must answer is should they be able to save that money by dramatically jeopardizing the retirement nest egg and the retirement benefits of older workers in that corporation. The last time corporations did this before the moratorium, workers lost somewhere up to 50 percent. Last time, according to the GAO, older workers lost up to 50 percent of their retirement benefits. Individuals that were 50, 55, 60 years old, they had no ability to recapture those benefits. They could not work long enough. They could not make enough money. They could not save enough in those jobs. The question is whether we will allow them the election. Secretary Treasurer Snow said that when he was chairman of the board at CSX Corporation, he recommended and the corporation did this because it was fair. He reminded us that when Congress switched its retirement plan, we allowed every Member in Congress at that time to have an election. He said that was the fair thing to do. He said when he was on the board of Verizon, that he insisted that they allow workers to have a choice in that plan to see which one they would do better under. The company could save the money for all new workers, and older workers would be made whole. The gentleman from Ohio will tell my colleagues that some 500 corporations have converted, and they have made workers whole. That is because that is the law. They are changing the law. They will no longer be required to do that under the law. When Jesse James and Billy the Kid and Bonnie and Clyde stole the life savings of people in this country, we hunted them down like dogs. Right now there are 300 corporations that have filed notice all over the country, all different sizes, affecting thousands of workers, that they are going to convert immediately upon the new Treasury ruling to a cash balance system. The question is whether or not we will protect these people against having their retirement benefits looted. After a person gives this kind of service to a company, and they are too old to recoup it, they ought to make sure that they do not lose that benefit. That is what this amendment does, and I am going to tell my colleagues, for those who do not think this will affect them, several years ago we had this operation before the moratorium, IBM, Kodak and others, and it blew up. On a bipartisan vote of over 300 Members of Congress, we sought to end that practice. The Clinton administration put on a moratorium. Those companies ended up giving their workers an election. It is the just and fair thing to do. There is no other remedy other than this amendment for those workers if the Treasury Department decides, as their original proposal did, that it did not matter whether we gave workers a choice or not.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 8 minutes. Mr. Speaker, today we will have a choice about what to do on behalf of America's future retirees, the employees of America's corporations and the protection of their pensions. We can do, as has been suggested in the Republican bill, a bill that essentially does nothing for retirees and for employees. What it says is that employees should be offered advice, and then it also suggests that that advice can be conflicted, it can be biased, it can be compromised, because under the current law, if we are given investment advice, we cannot be given conflicted advice. And yet in the wake of Enron and Global Crossing, the answer to the Republicans is to change the current law to allow advice to be given to employees about their retirement futures but to allow that advice to be conflicted, to allow that advice to be conflicted by the very same institutions that just recently settled for $1.4 billion because they had offered conflicted advice and bad advice to their clients. $1.4 billion, that is what those companies agreed to pay. That does not even begin to speak to the hundreds of billions of dollars that the shareholders lost, that employees lost in their mutual funds, their retirement plans because of those conflicts and that essentially criminal behavior. Yes, the deal was struck for $1.4 billion. Now along comes the Republicans 2 years after Enron, and they say we are going to give them the right to have advice, but that advice gets to be conflict. How tone deaf can one be? How shocked will the American public be when they find out they took their retirement plans and put them exactly in the hands of people who just copped a plea for a billion and a half dollars for giving people bad advice, maybe illegal advice, almost criminal activity, if the Members will. The Republicans' answer is to take America's retirees and turn them over to those firms. One has to fail to understand what America saw after Enron, what they saw after the bust in the stock market of their retirement plans being depleted, the same kind of outrage that Americans felt when they saw the CEOs and executive officers of American Airlines guarantee their pensions at the same time they were negotiating several billions in givebacks from pilots and flight attendants and workers. They were shocked when they heard this. So shocked and so bad was the reaction, that the CEO of American Airlines had to resign, and they had to give back their compensation package. Delta Airlines, going through givebacks of billions of dollars from their workers, secures and guarantees their compensation and pension for the CEOs, where former Delta executives, corporate executives, write Delta and say it is a shameless act, an embarrassing act that they would do this. And yet today, after all of those actions, after that public response to that failure to protect the employees, the reaction of the Congress is to essentially do nothing. But the Democrats offer a different alternative because I think we are listening to the public and to the employees. Yes, pensions is a dull subject. It has not captured the imagination of all the politicians. But the fact of the matter is it has moved from the back pages of the business section to the cover of every major business magazine and every major business; journal, and Fortune Magazine got it about right and that is the oink factor. How far will these corporate executives go? How far will these pigs go at the trough to grab hold of the assets of a corporation at the same time that they are letting their employees go down the tubes? Yes, it is the oink factor. It is CEO pay, it is guaranteed pension plans. These captains of capitalists, these crusaders of the capitalist system, what do they want out of the system? They want a guarantee that no matter if the company goes bankrupt, no matter if they run the company into the ground, no matter if the company is successful, they want a guarantee that they will be protected financially forever into the future. That is what they wanted at American Airlines. That is what they wanted at Delta Airlines. That is what they wanted at Enron. Today, the Republican bill is silent on that greed, on that oink factor. But the Democratic bill offers something different to the Members of this House, who have heard from their constituents about the devastation of their retirement plans. There is none of us in this House that have not gone to a picnic, have not gone to a family gathering, have not gone to a graduation where people have not said that they are postponing their retirement because the retirement plan is not all they thought it would be, who say their spouse is going to have to work a little longer than they thought, who thought the place they were going to retire to in another State or in the country is not available to them any longer because their retirement plans have been devastated because of the activities of so many corporations. Today we have a chance to take the oink, to take the oink, out of this pension system. We will be given the opportunity to vote on a substitute to where the problem is when executives loot, as the Delta people tried to loot the pension plan of the Delta workers, but to guarantee and insure their own pension plans. The Republican answer is oink. The answer in the Democratic bill is equity for employees. As the President said at the beginning of the Enron scandal, what is good for the captain is good for the sailor. But the Republicans in Congress do not think so, and the Delta executives did not think so 2 years later, where executives lie to their employees and do not provide full disclosure about what the executives are doing with the corporate assets and with the pension assets. Once again, there is nothing in their bill, just a big oink for those executives. We require full disclosure for those employees. With regard to the conflicts of interest on investment advice, the heart of the Republican bill is to provide that conflicted investment advice to flow to those employees; not independent investment counselors, but the very people who will be earning commissions and fees from the investment of those funds. The question is, are the American public and employees not entitled to better? These are the same people who will allow corporate executives to dedicate hundreds of thousands of dollars to giving investment advice of all different kinds to the executives of those corporations, but do not want to give that kind of advice or help those people out with respect to advice for the employees. Finally, with regard to older workers, now with hundreds of companies poised to move from a defined benefit plan to a cash balance plan, where the shorthand is this, that older workers in their fifties who have been with companies 10 or 15 years stand to lose 30 to 50 percent of their retirement assets. This is not speculation, this is what happened last time they did this. We have a bar on them doing that again. This administration wants to remove that bar. There are hundreds of corporations who are poised to make this conversion, and those employees will lose those pension assets. If you are 50 or 55 years old, there is no place you can go to make that up. But the company thinks that they can loot your pension assets to help out their bottom line. So there is a stark contrast to be offered to the Members of Congress. There is a stark contrast to be offered to the workers of this country about the protection and the security of America's pensions, about the protection and the security, because that is the issue here today. It is not whether or not employees should have access to conflicted information. That is of no real value to those employees.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from New York for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, today we confront an issue that is absolutely fundamental to the interests of our constituents, to their well-being, and the question of whether or not they will have the assets to properly retire in the future, and that is because we address the issues of the security of the American pension system. In the wake of the worst pension scandals in recent history, the response of the Republican congressional leadership is to see no evil, hear no evil and do no good. Once again, in the shadow of the failures of Enron and Global Crossing, and with the new disclosures about Delta and American Airlines, the Republicans bring forward a pension bill that does nothing to help employees, but includes lucrative benefits for corporate interests. How tone-deaf can they be? Pension scandals that move from page 3 of the business section to page 1 in every newspaper and magazine of popular nature of this country, but it is still the business as usual for Republicans in Congress. The only problem they see is that the investment companies are making even more money, while pensions and 401(k)s of employees dwindle with less and less. The pension bill the Republicans want to steamroll through the House today fails to address the pension scandals that have outraged Americans and left so many Americans destitute. It is as though Enron and Global Crossing and these other pension scandals never happened. It is business as usual for business, and let the employees fend for themselves. The heart of the Republican bill would change the law to allow investment firms for the first time to give biased and conflicted financial advice to employees, something that is currently prohibited under the law. Does this make sense when many of these same investment firms that would be giving the employees this advice just copped a plea to Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, if firms like Credit Suisse, First Boston, Bear Stearns, JP Morgan, Chase, Goldman Sachs and many others just paid out over a billion and a half dollars in committing these kinds of abuses? Now, I recognize that they do not think they copped a plea, because they said they did not admit any wrongdoing. But they paid $1.5 billion just in case they might have. That $1.5 billion is chump change alongside the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that people lost in their pension plans during the stock market bubble and because of conflicted advice and bad advice. Now, here we are 2 years after Enron, and we are coming back to simply allow the same thing to happen that happened in those corporate scandals. It is no wonder that the American public, the small investor is reluctant to return to the stock market. It is no wonder they are reluctant to invest again in mutual funds, because they recognize the devastation that they received at the hands of what was essentially criminal activity. Today, the Republican bill makes that activity legal. That is why the Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, of New York said this about this legislation: ``This legislation opens the loophole that will sharply erode, rather than enhance, the safeguards for employees seeking independent and untainted advice about how to invest their retirement savings. Clearly, this bill puts the interests of Wall Street firms far ahead of the interests of millions of working Americans who simply want a fair shake in making sound decisions about their retirement investments.'' That is what the American public is entitled to. That is what the people are entitled to as they contemplate how to provide for their future retirement. That is not what this legislation does. That is not what the Republican legislation proposes. It now says that those firms can provide that conflicted advice to our constituents and to the workers, and that is what we should not allow in this legislation.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews), the senior Democrat on the subcommittee. (Mr. ANDREWS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Grijalva), a member of the committee.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, the Democratic substitute that we offer today is based on a very simple principle. It is a principle that we all grew up with. It was a principle that was articulated by the President of the United States just days after the Enron catastrophe when America saw that so many people who worked for Enron were trapped in a system during the meltdown of that company, during the corruption in that company, during the unlawfulness in that company, that they were trapped in that system and unable to protect their retirement while corporate executives in the penthouse suites were unloading stock, getting golden parachutes, getting secured pension plans, getting insured pension plans, having pension plans put into trusts. They took good care of themselves even though they took the company over the edge. But down below, just like in the Titanic, just like in the Lusitania, the poor people were trapped as the ship was going down. They were trapped because of a class system. That very simple principle that has been articulated by the President was that if it is okay for the sailor, it ought to be okay for the captain. What the President was saying there was those protections that are in place for the executives should have been in place for the employees, that employees' pensions ought to be treated as executive pensions are treated. We grew up with this. Our parents told us when you got into a fight with our brothers and sisters and maybe it did not go our way, they said, ``What's good for the goose is good for the gander.'' What is good for the captain is good for the sailor. We have said it to our spouse, we have said it to our children, we have said it to our partners in business, we have said it to our staff. It is about fairness. What the Democratic alternative recognizes is the basic dignity of the American worker and the right of that worker to control the pension plan, which is their money. This is money that was given to them for the work that they gave to the corporation. It was figured out by the corporation, how much they would pay them an hour, how much they would give them in health care, how much they would give them in pension benefits, and they went to work for them. When they gave it to them each month, it is theirs. But now they do not want to have them have any control over it. They do not want them to have the same protections as the corporate elite. They do not want them to have the same rights as those individuals. Why? Enron was not just built on the back of Ken Lay. Big parts of that company were built on the utility workers in the Pacific Northwest, the pipeline workers in the Southwest, the power plant workers in California and everybody in between. Why were they not entitled to these protections? Why were they not entitled to these rights? But the Republican bill today, as the Republican bill last year, keeps in place that class system, that the corporate elites will get taken care of, these great captains of capitalists, these crusaders of the free enterprise system, the people who come to Congress and talk about risk, that they take risk. What we now see is the CEO of Delta Airlines, we see the CEO of American Airlines, we see the CEOs of so many companies and the board of directors, they do not want any risk, they want their compensation guaranteed, they want their golden parachute guaranteed, and they want their pension plan guaranteed. Even if they drive the company into the ground, even if they take it into bankruptcy, they will be protected. That is what has so incensed the American public, and the pilots, and the flight attendants, and the machinists, and the workers at American Airlines that they were willing to risk their whole future to say, that is unfair. And America recognized it like that, Wall Street recognized it like that, and the chairman of American Airlines resigned, admitting that he had made a tragic mistake in being so selfish on behalf of the board of directors and himself at a time he was asking workers to give back billions of dollars. So what do we say? We say that workers are entitled to advice about the selling and the coming and going in the corporate suites when they are selling their stock because they do not think the corporation is doing so well; we are entitled to know that on those inside sales. We say that workers are entitled, if they have their pensions guaranteed, that the crew, the workers, will have their pensions guaranteed just like the people in the corporate suites. We are saying for those workers, that they should be represented on the boards of the retirement plan so that they will have the information, because as we saw in Enron, the executive representative on the retirement plan, the captain, so to speak, never told the crew that she was selling her stock because she had investment advice to get out of the company. Those people lost their fortune. She walked away with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars because she did not tell them. We are simply saying, you must tell them, that you must be on the board so you have a chance. That is what this bill does. It is about the equity for the worker, it is about the dignity of the worker, and it is about the rights of the worker to be protected. They say this will cause trouble in corporations, this will cause concern. A little democracy? A little democracy in the corporation? A little recognition that the corporate body is more than just the CEOs and the executives, that it is also the workers? That causes concern? Ladies and gentlemen, that is what we are talking about spreading to the rest of the world, the free enterprise system. We are talking about spreading the democratic system. But somehow when it comes to carving up billions of dollars, we cannot have too much democracy in the workplace. It is simply unfair to the workers. This bill also closes a loophole of having conflicted advice that the Republican bill opens for the first time, and this bill responds to the concerns of the Attorney General of New York, who just settled a case for $1.4 billion, when he said that this bill would open up a huge loophole, a huge loophole for conflicted advice, and put at risk the pensions of these individuals, that this bill goes too far. That conflicted advice, Jane Bryant Quinn, the financial columnist in Newsweek magazine, says they might as well give their money to an Olympic ice-skating judge as give it to this conflicted advice. These are the very same people who just agreed to pay a $1.4 billion fine for their activity. They did not admit that they did anything wrong, but they put up $1.4 billion. We have got to understand that we cannot turn the pension assets, the retirement assets of those workers over to those individuals. The workers in this country and their families and their future and their children and their retirement plans deserve better. They deserve the Democratic substitute.