Jeff Merkley

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I am honored to rise to address the Volcker amendment, which I am pleased to be able to cosponsor with my colleague and friend who is now presiding over the Senate. I thank Senator Levin for the outstanding job he has done in shining the light on the need for financial reform through his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. I also wish to thank Senator Dodd for shepherding this important financial reform and bringing such a significant and solid bill to the floor of the Senate, and I thank him for working with several of us to strengthen the approach proposed in the Volcker amendment. I look forward to having a chance to present that on the floor and appreciate very much Senator Dodd's support. The goal of our financial system is to efficiently aggregate and allocate capital. That is sometimes done through banks that make loans, and that is sometimes done through pools of investors who put their money together and ask managers to find the highest return. But these two functions of lending and high-risk investing, although both critical to the capital system of aggregating and allocating our dollars, are in fact very different. This Volcker amendment is all about creating the right balance between these two so they work collectively to make a more efficient, stronger financial system rather than working at odds with each other. This bill has three components. The first is to get high-risk trading out of our banks on which families and small businesses depend. The second is to establish higher capital requirements for high-risk investing or hedge funds. The third is to eliminate conflicts of interest, conflicts of interest that have proceeded to undermine the integrity of our securities system. I want to try to give kind of an analogy so we can all get our hands around these functions; that is, to try to imagine you are collecting fireworks. Fireworks are a wonderful thing, and you might want to have them for the Fourth of July or for New Year's. But you do not store them in your living room because, if they were to accidentally go off, you would burn down your house. The fireworks in this example is your high-risk investing, and your living room represents the lending depository banks that power up our economy by making their loans in our communities to our businesses and our families. To continue that analogy, you would want those fireworks stored not only not in your living room but not in any of the bedrooms of your house or any of the other rooms. You would want them stored out in your shed, in this case outside the bank holding company, so if the high- risk investments do explode or go down you don't burn down your house. This leads to the second part of the Volcker amendment which says, while you are storing them in your shed, you should make it more fire resistant. Maybe that means putting in a sprinkler system or some other system. That is the second part. But the third part is to say those who design and sell the fireworks should not simultaneously be developing and designing fuses designed to fail and then taking bets that the fireworks would go off prematurely. This is a conflict-of-interest issue on which recent hearings have shined such a bright light. Turning, then, to this high-risk trading and the challenges it presented to our financial system, what I am putting up right now is a chart that shows the impact of high-risk trading on the meltdown that occurred in 2008 and 2009. We have Lehman Brothers that lost $30 billion in trading; Merrill Lynch lost $20 billion in trading; Morgan Stanley over $10 billion; JPMorgan Chase over $10 billion, Goldman Sachs over $4 billion, and Bank of America over $7 billion. High-risk trading primarily on mortgage securities and derivatives of those securities blew a hole through almost every major Wall Street financial investment institution. I do not think anyone should, in light of these facts, be able to say that high-risk investing has nothing to do with the current crisis. It has pretty much everything to do with it, and that is why the Government stepped in to provide financial relief to these firms--huge amounts of money. Lehman Brothers went down because we didn't step in to assist them. Merrill Lynch basically was saved by being purchased by Bank of America which had a tremendous bailout; that is, $45 billion. Morgan Stanley got $10 billion in TARP funds; JPMorgan Chase, $25 billion; Goldman Sachs, $10 billion; and, of course, the list goes on. This high-risk investing does not belong in our lending depository institutions. A bank that has access to the discount window of the Fed, a bank that has access to insured deposits, deposits insured by Uncle Sam, that bank should not be diverting those funds into the temptation of high-risk investing. Similarly, they should not be proceeding to allow the high-risk investing to blow up the lending side of a financial organization. The risk of an investment house going down is certainly higher during a recession. It is very high in a severe recession. That is just the time we need banks to be able to continue lending, to not let lending seize up. I can tell you, back home in Oregon business after business has come forward and said: Our credit line was cut in half or we went to refinance a commercial loan and the bank said we will not do it because the value has dropped or we can't make any more loans in that sector or perhaps we can't make any more loans at all because we have reached our leverage limits. Lending seized up in America, and it is a key factor in prolonging this recession. These are the reasons that, if you want to have high- risk investing with the money from pools of investors--that is an important part of the capital allocation but do it at a safe distance from the lending depository function. The second piece of this--and back to my analogy that this is when you put the high-risk investing in the woodshed--is that you also make the woodshed more resilient, and that is enabling the regulators to say that as an investment house becomes more systemically significant those regulators can raise or will raise the capital requirements necessary so that the leverage decreases as the firms become larger. This greatly reduces the chance that an investment house will go down during a recession or go down because of bad loans because they are putting up more capital against those investments. I want to come to the third part, the conflict-of-interest provisions. They will also be addressed at greater length by my colleague. By the way, I ask unanimous consent Senator Levin be allowed to follow directly behind me.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, he will elaborate on these provisions, but I want to put up my third chart because at the hearings my colleague had focused attention on a real challenge. Through those hearings some have observed that Goldman Sachs has become an ``iconic image of bankers with conflicts of interest.'' Let me try to again address that. If you are selling fireworks, you should not be in the business of designing bad fuses to put on those fireworks and then betting the fireworks will go off accidentally or, as another person has put it, if you are selling cars, you should not be selling cars without brakes and taking out insurance on the owners. That fundamentally undermines the integrity of the market, whether it is the fireworks market or car market. But those are analogies for our financial market. Integrity is so important. International capital flows to systems with integrity. It was after the Great Depression that we established reforms on Wall Street that led to decades in which the international community saw the American markets as the best organized, best policed safe place--no scams or minimal scams--that they could put their money. We want Wall Street to be able to continue to attract and aggregate and allocate that capital. That is an essential function. I note that this group of three commonsense reforms on this chart, going back to these three pieces--getting the high-risk trading out of the banks, increasing the capital requirements for investment firms that become systemically significant, and ending the conflicts of interest in securities--these commonsense reforms have a lot of support. In addition to Senator Levin, I thank 15 cosponsors who have jumped in to join this effort: Senator Brown, Senator Kaufman, Senator Shaheen, Senator Feinstein, Senator Casey, Senator Bill Nelson, Senator Burris, Senator Begich, Senator Inouye, Senator Whitehouse, Senator McCaskill, Senator Mark Udall, Senator Mikulski, Senator Sanders, and Senator Tom Udall. I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to consider jumping in to support these commonsense reforms. I note also that the supporters for this amendment include Paul Volcker; they include John Reed, the former chair and CEO of Citibank; they include the Independent Community Bankers of America, who recognize that community banks do better if the Wall Street system has integrity in allocating capital. The Main Street Alliance of Small Businesses supports this amendment, the AFL/CIO supports it, Americans for Financial Reform, and a dozen other organizations. I also note that a group has solicited support online. Here I have 25,000 individuals from across the country, all 50 States, who sent this petition to the Senate. This is from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and these 25,000 citizens say: The big Wall Street banks gambled away our money on a reckless housing bubble and then insisted we spend more money bailing them out. We need you to support the Merkley-Levin proposal to end this risky gambling and other conflicts of interest. I conclude by saying we have a responsibility, following this great recession we are in now, to redesign the rules of the road for Wall Street, to increase integrity, to increase transparency, to decrease the conflicts of interest, and to make it work in the most efficient possible way. It is with that spirit these three commonsense proposals have been laid out. It has been a privilege to partner with the Presiding Officer, Senator Carl Levin, in this effort. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Certainly.

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I applaud my colleague from California who has been an extraordinary champion of consumers throughout her career. She understands that the basis of a successful nation is successful families. That depends on them having a strong financial foundation. We should not measure the success of our country by the million-dollar bonuses or the billion-dollar quarterly profits on Wall Street. We should measure it by the success of our families. This bill is absolutely essential to restoring those financial foundations; whereas this amendment before us does the opposite. The Shelby amendment No. 3826 carves the heart out of this bill. This dog don't hunt. In fact, this dog doesn't bite. I don't even think this dog barks. For that matter, I am not so sure it is a dog. That is how bad the Shelby amendment is. The background is this: Predatory mortgages and securitization of those mortgages on Wall Street built a house-of-cards economy that came falling down last year. The predatory mortgages were done at the retail level, but the securitization and selling of those packages occurred on Wall Street. They built investments that were taken in by every major financial house practically in the world, and those investments, those securities had a 2-year fuse on them, essentially a 2-year teaser rate on every underlying mortgage. At the end of the 2 years, interest rates doubled, families could not make the payments, securities went bad, and we had financial firms one after another collapse. We had Lehman collapsing. We had Bear Stearns collapsing. We had Merrill Lynch collapsing. We had major problems at Bank of America needing a bailout, a $4 billion TARP bailout. We had Citibank collapsing. We had Washington Mutual collapsing--all built on predatory mortgage practices, every single piece. That is why consumer protection is so important. That is why it is at the very heart of this bill. And that is why we need a Federal consumer protection agency. I have friends back in Oregon who write to me, citizens back in Oregon, constituents who will say: Here is what went on, and how can that be fair? Let me just give an example. A woman from Salem wrote to me and said: I always pay my credit card on time, always have for years and years. But I got my credit card statement, and it had a late fee. So I called up the credit card company, and I said: How is it possible? I always mail my payment on this day. It should have had plenty of time to get there. The credit card company said: Yes, as a matter of fact, your payment did come on time. But you know, Madam, we are not required to post your payment on the day we receive it. In fact, in the contract we have, we can sit on your payment for 10 days and then post it, and then your payment is late and we get to charge you this fee. We are just following the rules. She said: How can that be fair? It is not fair. Everyone knows it is not fair. Let me give another example. Citizens wrote saying: Hey, I had a whole series of transactions with my bank, and then the bank changed the order of those transactions to put the biggest transaction first. It so happened that biggest transaction made me $10 over the funds I had in the bank. I had an overdraft. By putting that big transaction first, it meant instead of one overdraft fee, I have 10 overdraft fees. Instead of only $35 for one overdraft, I owe $350 for an overdraft series. How can it be fair that the order of the transactions was changed in order to multiply the fees I owe tenfold? Everyone knows that is not fair. Everyone knows it. We simply need to have an agency that is able to say that is not OK. We do not want to have a process where something that is unfair goes on for 10 years or 15 years or 20 years before there is legislation to address it. You cannot address a consumer product's choking hazard by doing it in legislation. You have to empower an agency to say: No, that part is too small. You cannot address lead paint by doing legislation every time something is painted. No, you have to have an agency that says they will test that paint and say lead paint is not OK. It is the same with consumer financial products. We need the same power to fix traps and tricks in real time for fairness to America's families so they can rebuild their financial foundations because that is what a strong country is, families with strong financial foundations, not million-dollar bonuses, not billion-dollar quarterly profits based on stripping funds from working Americans. It all comes down to the heart of it: fairness in consumer financial documents. Let's take a look at amendment No. 3826 and why it carves the heart out of this important bill for America's families, America's Main Street families and businesses. Here is what it does: First, it says virtually no one is covered. Let's look at the list. What is covered under the language of the amendment are large nonbank mortgage originators. Large nonbank mortgage originators do not exist anymore. So it covers firms that do not exist anymore. It is kind of like saying we are going to have the regulation of safety on cars, but it is only for cars that are powered by gasoline and were built before 1850. No such cars exist. All the other cars, the ones actually on the road, we are not going to cover them. We have a list. We have commercial banks, not covered; investment banks, not covered; credit card companies, not covered; car lenders, not covered; payday lenders, not covered; nonbanks that sell financial products of a whole sort, not covered. I think you get the picture that this amendment is meant to make sure nothing is covered. Then, just in case there is some little piece that does get covered, it says: You know what. This agency is not independent. It cannot write rules. It has to have everything it does approved by the financial world--the financial world that brought us all these problems, that brought us to tricks and traps, that stripped wealth from working Americans. They are going to decide what is covered. I echo my constituent from Salem and say: Where is the fairness in that?

Mr. MERKLEY. My colleague is absolutely right. Because predatory mortgage practices were at the heart of this crisis that led to securities that blew up the economy and led to the loss of millions of jobs around our Nation, with an unemployment rate in my State that has been over 12 percent. We not only have the risk of going back there, we are perhaps more at risk because we have fewer larger banks. Many investment houses that were independent are now inside those banks, in a position where, if they blow up, they will blow up the banks as well. So unless we have this strong consumer financial protection agency, it is like taking this bill before us and sticking it in the shredder, and with it shredding the hopes and aspirations of America's working families to build strong finances in the future.

Mr. MERKLEY. Yes.

Mr. MERKLEY. My friend and colleague is absolutely correct; that, indeed, my colleagues across the aisle, the Republicans, voted three times to say they did not want to proceed to the bill, where their ideas would bear public scrutiny. Instead, they wanted to talk behind closed doors. You know what they were looking to do was not to strengthen this bill. Now that the amendment has come out and been placed before us publicly, we do see that it does what we feared. It is designed to take a knife and carve the heart out of this financial reform.

Mr. MERKLEY. Well, my colleague is absolutely correct. The failure of financial rules has become so obvious and had such devastating impact for our families--as my colleague put it, $17 trillion worth of damage. That means families lost their retirements, families lost their savings for their children to go to college, and it means families have houses under water, if they are lucky. For many families, it means the loss of a job, the loss of income, and the inability to make those mortgage payments, which means they are in foreclosure and have lost their dream at every single level. That is the damage $17 trillion did to our families, and that is why every amendment to the bill we have before us should seek to say: Here is the bill and here is how we should make it stronger. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise to praise my colleague from Rhode Island for producing this amendment. I look forward to seeing it offered. I certainly am honored to be able to cosponsor it. I thought I would share with him a story that goes back to my days as a member of the Oregon legislature. When I came to the Oregon legislature, I had a lot of folks in my house district saying: Wouldn't you do something about payday lending and other high-interest lending? How is it possibly reasonable to have payday loans, which are secured by the next paycheck at over 500 percent interest; and how is it reasonable or fair that I am being lent money through my credit card at 25 or 30 percent when the interest I am earning is just 1 or 2 percent? And I had no good answer for why it was fair, because it wasn't fair. It wasn't right. So I proceeded to start working on this issue. When I went down to legal counsel, they advised me: Well, Representative Merkley, it works like this. You, at the State level, can apply rules to payday lending and to pawnbrokers and to title loans and to local consumer lending companies but not when it comes to credit cards. They explained to me the story that the Senator from Rhode Island just shared, that those rules are set by the States issuing the credit cards. Well, certainly any State that has reasonable standards for a credit card, they are not going to be issued from within that State. Thus, we come to the race to the bottom my colleague was describing. So I proceeded to carry the fight and the battle over the payday lending, the title loans, the pawnbrokers and the local consumer loans, and we largely won that battle in Oregon, but we couldn't take on credit cards. In the back of my mind, when I was running for the Senate, I thought, this will be an opportunity, if I join this body, to be able to weigh in on the issue of States rights in favor of consumers, in favor of common sense. So it is for all these reasons I am pleased to join Senator Whitehouse as a cosponsor of his amendment.

Mr. MERKLEY. If I might chime in at this point and say that in terms of the discussion I saw at the State level in Oregon, this is a bipartisan discussion, because it is indeed deeply rooted in traditions and wisdom that extends back not just generations but thousands of years. Indeed, time after time after time the leaders--the philosophical and the religious leaders, as well as political leaders--saw the damage that was done to the foundation of societies from extraordinarily high interest rates. I think it goes back to understanding that the strength of a society is in the strength of its families. You do not build strong families when wealth is stripped away by usurious interest rates, by extraordinary interest rates, rates that exceed by many times the earnings on interest that a family can get by putting their money into a bank or lending their money into a financial system. There is a very small return there, but borrowing out of that financial system, very high charges. If our goal is to build families, then this has all the wisdom in the world. I certainly want to note that the other aspect of this that helps tie together Democrats and Republicans is that it is an issue of local control. There was never a moment when this Chamber, or the Chamber a few yards from here, the House Chamber, proceeded to say we are going to take away States rights to control their own interest rates on cards. There was never a moment like that. Such a law was never passed. Indeed, you have not just the fact that Federal law has trumped State law but has trumped it without any deliberate act of Congress and in the most bizarre of fashions. So I should think the reach in favor of building strong families, building strong communities, and local control will be high. I certainly look forward to a bipartisan effort to pass this legislation.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I thank the chairman of the Banking Committee for the time to address an issue that I think is essential in this bill and for all of the good work he has done to bring this reform bill to the floor of the Senate. It is time that we have an open debate on the floor of the Senate about provisions that affect the financial foundations of our entire economy. I know the chairman has been working hard. We held the vote yesterday to try to proceed with an open debate. We will hold another vote today and one tomorrow to say let's have this conversation about reforming Wall Street. Today, I wish to address a particular point, which is limiting the ability of high-risk investments to blow up our economy. My colleague and friend, Senator Levin, did a monumental service to this institution today by holding a hearing with the executives of the large investment firm Goldman Sachs, discussing practices that misled clients and bundled huge risks into our financial system. The SEC currently has an investigation underway. The courts will determine the merit of that case. But today I want to address what the SEC could not charge Goldman Sachs with: they could not charge them with the clear conflict of interest for holding a financial stake in a position completely opposite to the very security that they themselves put together and were selling to their clients. The reason the SEC could not address this issue is because there is currently no law that says such a conflict of interest is unacceptable. This gets to the heart of what is wrong on Wall Street today. The executives at Goldman Sachs are insisting up and down that they were not making high-risk bets themselves; instead, they were only ``market makers'' underwriting these deals. Well, no matter how often someone repeats something, that doesn't make it so. As others have said, facts are stubborn. Goldman was holding positions for its own benefit--large positions. They were betting the market would go one way or another. But that is not making a market, where you bring buyers and sellers together; that is proprietary trading, plain and simple. Proprietary trading, or high-risk investing, cost investment firms and commercial banks billions of dollars in losses because they bet big on housing securities, and the bets went bad. Those losses were eventually covered, in large part, by the taxpayers through TARP. This isn't a side issue to the financial meltdown; it is a core issue. That is why we need to begin debate on Wall Street reform right now. We cannot let Goldman and other firms continue to pretend they weren't placing high-risk bets. We cannot let financial firms continue to get away with selling bad products to unsuspecting clients while betting against those products. This issue goes to the heart of the integrity of the system, and integrity is essential for folks who have capital and want to put that capital at risk. They need to know they have a fair market into which they can invest that capital. This goes right to the core of the role of Wall Street in aggregating capital and allocating that capital to the places where it would have the highest return. The bill before us is a very good bill. I think we can make it even stronger by including an amendment that Senator Levin and I have sponsored on high-risk investments and conflicts of interest. But to consider that amendment, we have to begin the debate; and that debate should begin now. Let's not let lobbyists confuse the issue. They will try to argue that high-stakes investing was not implicated in this crisis, or that the sky will fall if we move high-risk investing outside of the banking system--I am talking about those banks that take insured deposits and make loans--but that is not the case. I wish to read from a letter sent to me and Senator Carl Levin by John Reed. John Reed is former chairman and CEO of Citigroup. He speaks to those false arguments. This is what he wrote: I write to support your efforts to rein in the high risk activities that helped cause the collapse of the world's financial system. The recent financial crisis demonstrated all too clearly the twenty year deregulatory experiment in combining critical commercial banking with equally critical, but riskier investment banking, failed. In 2007 and 2008, losses from risky proprietary trades in the major financial firms quickly decimated the availability of credit and seriously damaged the economy far beyond the concrete canyons where those bets were made. When a firm is focused on market gain through proprietary trading, it too often will employ every available device to achieve those gains--including taking advantage of clients and putting the firm at risk. As recent cases in the media demonstrate, risk management and conflicts of interest systems do not alone accomplish those goals. John Reed, the former chairman and CEO of Citigroup, concludes with this: I strongly support your efforts to put the provisions that Chairman Paul Volcker has advocated firmly into law. I believe that the PROP Trading Act (S. 3098) and your proposed Floor amendment based on that does that. The legislation provides reasonable exceptions for client-oriented services while including the necessary safeguards to protect against the dangers of high-risk assets and high-risk trading strategies. Putting these restrictions firmly into law will be good for our economy and good for our financial services industry--even though they may now argue to the contrary. Refocusing our financial firms on client services will help them restore the global leadership position that has been seriously undermined by the recent crisis. Certainly, we need many other important reforms, including creating a strong consumer protection agency, imposing the duty of care to customers on financial providers, and reestablishing a well-regulated market for derivatives. But a strong Volcker Rule is one of the most important provisions to prevent ``too big to fail'' financial institutions, stop conflicts of interest, and support credit in our economy. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the entire letter from John Reed be printed in the Record.

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, it is very helpful to have a former CEO of a company such as Citigroup weigh in on the challenges before us. John Reed, as former chairman and CEO of Citigroup, is in a position to reflect on the deregulation and the combination of the roles of lending banks and investment houses and how it contributed to creating the economic catastrophe that became the great recession. I speak now to my colleagues to say that we need your help in creating a firewall between highly risky proprietary investments and the basic lending functions of banks. It is like storing fireworks in your living room. Fireworks are wonderful, and there is no problem with utilizing them on the Fourth of July or New Years. But you don't store them in your living room where they might end up burning down your house. Second, we need clear conflict of interest rules that make sure that the investment houses maintain integrity with their customers, so that if they are promoting a security to their customers, they are not doing so while separately and secretly betting against it. These reforms are important. They are an important part of the financial rules of the road that will be healthy for Wall Street and for the foundation of our economy. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, tonight we had a vote in which 57 Members of this body said we should proceed to have a fully public debate and votes on issues related to Wall Street and Main Street; 57, far more than a majority, said it is time for us to come to this floor, now well more than a year after our bubbled economy burst, and wrestle with the right rules of the road and lane markers for our financial system. But, unfortunately, 57 votes are not enough. We need additional votes from our colleagues across the aisle in order to have that debate on this floor. We need additional votes from our colleagues across the aisle to consider what the lane markers should be and what the traffic signals should be in our financial regulatory system. Tonight we did not get those votes. Instead, tonight my colleagues across the aisle said they do not want a debate in public on how to reform Wall Street. They want a conversation behind closed doors instead. Quite frankly, I don't think the American people agree with them. There are many parts of this story, but it is a story that can be told in millions, billions, and trillions. The millions are the size of the Wall Street bonuses. A single bonus can equal what a working family can expect to earn in an entire career. Then we have the billions, the billions of dollars of quarterly profits of many Wall Street firms. Then we have the trillions. That is the trillions of dollars of damages to working families in America. What happened when the bubble burst more than a year ago? We had a tremendous loss in the value of retirement savings. We had a tremendous loss in the family savings for children to go to college. We had an enormous drop in employment. We had a tremendous drop in families covered by health care because of the loss of employment. We had damage on every part of a family's finances, including the value of their home, so that millions of American families today owe more on their home than their home is worth. Quite frankly, I don't believe a system of million-dollar bonuses and billion-dollar profits and trillions of dollars of damage to American working families is a system we need in America. Tonight's vote was about whether to have a public debate on the rules of the road for Wall Street, but it was also about whose side are we on. Are we on the side of some Wall Street firms which don't believe that any additional rules of the road are necessary? They are happy with the status quo. Bonuses have rebounded on Wall Street. Profits have rebounded on Wall Street. But if you are not paying attention, let me clue you in. The American working family has not rebounded. Ten percent of American working families are unemployed. Houses are still underwater, savings still decimated. It is very important we have this debate on the floor of the Senate, that we ask ourselves about and we adopt the right rules of the road, the right traffic signals, the right lane markers to create a solid financial foundation for our economy to thrive. That is what happened after the Great Depression. New rules were adopted that restored the integrity of the American financial system, that restored the integrity of the stock market. Why was that important? It meant that people throughout America and around the world said: We can trust to invest in the United States because their system has integrity, it has transparency. That solid foundation has served our Nation well for decades until deregulation dismantled it, allowed wild speculation. Wild speculation and wild risk led to a spectacular collapse of the economy, and working families are still paying the price. So what is the way to be on the side of working families? It is to say: We will adopt those rules to provide that new foundation, that new muscular set of rules that will allow Wall Street to prosper but will also set the foundation for the American economy to prosper. How should we measure the success of that economy? This economy should not be measured by the size of the bonuses on Wall Street. The success of our economy should not be measured by the billion-dollar quarterly profits of Wall Street firms. The success of this economy needs to be measured by how well we build the financial foundations for working families throughout the Nation. Do we create the ability to have the next generation do better than we did? Do we create living-wage jobs that enable a family to have significant opportunities for their children? Do we proceed to strengthen, as we have been working at in this Chamber, the structure of health care? Do families in America have a share in the increased productivity of our Nation which has not been the case since 1974, the year I came out of high school? Yes, our Nation had a huge surge in productivity, a huge surge in national wealth. But that has not been shared with working families. That is a diversion from what happened in the earlier era. How do we rebuild our economy so it builds working families? That is what we are about. We can proceed to look at the pieces of this bill. Senator Dodd, who is here tonight, the chair of our Banking Committee, has put so many strong steps forward on the work that came out of his committee. A lot of folks don't realize the humble family mortgage and a new product that came out in 2003 is right at the center of the fiasco in our economy. What happened? A new mortgage called a subprime came out. It was designed differently than subprimes in the past. It was designed with a 2-year teaser rate--that is a low interest rate--then with a prepayment penalty that prevented families, once the ink had dried on the mortgage, from ever escaping that mortgage without giving many pounds of flesh, and then an exploding interest rate that soared from perhaps 4.5 percent or 5 percent to 9 percent or maybe even 11 percent, interest rates that could never be sustained. This diabolical device was worth a lot of money on Wall Street because it was going to make a lot of money pulling those exploding interest rates out of American families. So Wall Street paid bonuses back to brokers to say to them: I am your financial adviser. I recommend this subprime loan, instead of recommending a loan that was best for the family. So a vicious circle resulted in exploding subprime mortgages. This bill that has come out of the Banking Committee says: No longer. Prepayment penalties will not be allowed on subprime mortgages. We will break the cycle that led us into this economic fiasco, this financial fiasco. If my colleagues across the aisle have some ways to improve on that, then let's have a public debate. Let's have that amendment on the Senate floor. If my colleagues across the aisle think they don't want to protect a fair deal for consumers and they want to continue a diabolical subprime exploding interest rate trap that has destroyed millions of families, then go ahead and propose that amendment. I doubt the majority of people will support it. I certainly will oppose it vigorously. But if my colleagues want to do that, then have the debate on the Senate floor. This bill is designed to end the taxpayer from ever being on the hook for bailing out financial firms again. It does it by assessing financial firms for the cost of unwinding or, to put it a little bit more directly, dismantling a financial firm when it fails. To make sure the taxpayer isn't on the hook, it creates a fee on the financial industry to pay to make sure those costs are covered by the financial industry itself. This is a buffer that protects the American taxpayer. My colleagues across the aisle have said: No, here is a fund. It looks like a bailout fund. Quite frankly, it is amazing what we hear on this floor. Here is a fund designed to ensure that taxpayers are protected, to ensure the financial industry pays their own cost of dismantling their firms. Yet it is spun 180 degrees until north is south and south is north, trying to confuse the American public. I don't think the American public is going to be all that confused about this. They want to see the financial industry pay for the cost of dismantling their own failures. They don't want to be on the hook again. You can try to keep pulling the wool over the eyes of the American people, but it will not work. I say to my colleagues across the aisle, if you want to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people, come here and propose that amendment that puts the taxpayers back on the hook, when we are taking them off the hook. See how it fares. Make your case, make your fair debate on this floor. But come and face and present and debate and vote so that we can proceed to put the rules of the road back in place for Wall Street. This bill takes a huge stride forward on proprietary trading. It says we should not put fireworks in our living rooms. That is pretty straightforward. Fireworks are wonderful. I love fireworks on the Fourth of July. This bill says they should not be stored in the living room. I have an amendment that I think will further strengthen that concept. I applaud my colleague, Carl Levin from Michigan, my cosponsor, who has brought forward a part of that amendment and emphasized it, saying we need to address the conflict of interest in financial firms. What is that conflict of interest? You should not be in the position of designing and selling securities, telling your customers that they are the best thing since sliced bread over here, when at the same time you are betting against those securities because you think they are going to fail. That is a conflict of interest. It should not be allowed. Under the Merkley-Levin amendment, we will address that as well as strengthen proprietary trading. I am comfortable bringing that to the floor of the Senate and having that debate. It may have a majority; it may not. But that is the type of debate we need to have on this floor. I could go on through the treatment of derivatives--and I applaud my colleague, Blanche Lincoln--the discussion of a consumer financial protection agency that provides the same fairness in financial contracts that the Consumer Product Safety Commission provides on toasters, making sure that tricks and traps and scams are taken out of financial products so that a consumer can make a fair choice without being misled by something hidden in the fine print. That is the type of option citizens in this country want. Wall Street plays a very important role in aggregating and allocating capital, but we need to make sure the rules are done such that that role is done well, that conflicts of interest are removed, that transparency is provided, that tricks and traps and scams are taken out of financial products. These are the sorts of things this bill does. This is a bill that is all about fighting for fairness for Main Street which, in the long term, will be a very good business model for Wall Street as well. Let's, as a Chamber, recognize our responsibility to build an economic system that strengthens the financial foundation of our families--that is what this bill is all about--and puts our country on a firm basis for decades to come. International investors will want to invest back here in America. They will trust the integrity of our system. I encourage my colleagues to come together when we have the next cloture vote and decide it is time to fight for the people of this country and fight for the economic future of our country by proceeding to the debate on this bill and the passage of this bill and getting it to the President's desk. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Is that my full allocation of time?

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, this morning I met a friend who is visiting, and he told me he was planning to go out and visit the FDR Memorial. I thought maybe the entire membership of the Senate should go out and visit the FDR Memorial. Essentially, FDR did three things in response to the Great Depression: one was to create jobs, a second was to fix housing, and a third was to repair the banking system. All three were essential. We have been immersed in all three components now, responding to the great recession we experienced and the great explosion of the economy in 2008 that we are dealing with every day. What did Roosevelt do in response to the banking challenge? Two main things: First, he made sure American families could safely put their money back into banks. That is the origination of the deposit insurance. Second, President Roosevelt made sure banks didn't engage in high-risk speculation that would put the banks and the American economy at risk because he understood the critical role of banks in lending to families and lending to small businesses, and the last thing one wants in a recession is to have investment houses making speculative investments go down and then take the banks down with them. So you compromise the lending to small businesses and to families at the same time that the investments go awry. That is why he separated those activities--highly risky investments separate from the lending that would continue to fuel our economy. Well, because of these regulations in the Roosevelt administration, the wages of American families grew steadily right alongside the productivity of our economy. Our economy was thriving and our middle class was thriving. Indeed, we should judge the success of our economy not by the gross domestic product, not by the size of the bonuses in boardrooms on Wall Street; we should judge the success of our economy by the living wages paid to working families and whether those wages are keeping pace with productivity our workers are bringing to the economy. By that standard, we are not doing well. By the 1980s and 1990s, Wall Street convinced Washington that we don't need those Roosevelt-era regulations anymore, we don't need those walls that protect lending from high-risk investing. Instead of having oversight and accountability, we should just let Wall Street make their own rules. This is a little bit like a traffic system in which we say we are kind of tired of those traffic lights. We don't really like those stop signs and lane markers. It is a waste of paint. We can do without them. For a short time, everybody can just kind of speed down the road and not worry about any rules to abide by until shortly thereafter when everyone crashes. That is exactly what happened in our financial system over this last decade. The SEC took down the leverage limits. The five largest investment banks were told to set their leverage wherever they wanted. We had Bear Stearns in a single year going from leverage of 21 to 41. So for every dollar they were investing, they were betting $20 by the start of the year, but by the end of the year, as the SEC granted them permission, for every dollar they held, they were betting $40. They make a tremendous amount of money on the way up when they can bet $40 for every dollar they hold, but they crash in a spectacular fashion when the market goes down in that situation. Then, again, we had the Fed. The Fed puts monetary policy in the penthouse and safety and soundness on the upper floors. But what do they do with their responsibility for consumer protection? They put it down in the basement and they seal the doors. They let no daylight in and they let little communication occur between the consumer protection side and the safety and soundness and the monetary side. They did absolutely nothing when a new product was invented in 2003, a new form of subprime that had a 2-year teaser rate, a prepayment penalty that locked the family into that loan and prevented the family from escaping from that loan, and that had exploding interest rates that would destroy the family. The Fed did absolutely nothing. Then Wall Street said: You know what. These loans are worth so much because we can pull so much money out of families with these loans, so we are going to pay a bonus to a broker if the broker ties a family into one of these loans. And those steering payments resulted in tons of families who qualified for prime mortgages being steered into subprime mortgages. By a Wall Street Journal study, 60 percent of families who were in subprime mortgages qualified for prime mortgages, but their broker persuaded them that the best mortgage was one that was not in their best interests. Then we had the rating agencies. The rating agencies had magic all their own. They didn't develop their own models to evaluate BBB bonds that were mixed and sliced and diced into new packages of bonds. No. They took their models from Wall Street, and based on those models they said: If you take BBB bonds from over here and BBB bonds from over here and you mix them together, we will rate 80 percent of the resulting bonds as AAA. Well, that is a money-making machine, but it also undermined one of the key instruments the financial world depends on; that is, accurate credit ratings. Then we had lots of tricks and traps buried in the small print, stripping families of their capital. Things were happening in the credit card industry such as sitting on a person's payment for 10 days even though it had arrived on time, sitting on it for 10 days and then posting it as late and charging a late fee. As a constituent from Salem said to me, where is the fairness in that? American citizens are saying time and time again, when clauses written in the fine print defy fundamental fairness, where is the fairness in this? So at every level we had a breakdown in our financial system. We know what happened. The deck was stacked against the ordinary citizen. It turned a banking system that is designed to help families, strengthen families, strengthen small businesses into a casino for Wall Street's big bets. When those bets went bad, the taxpayers--you and I--were left holding the bag. Now, as the effort to restore fair rules of the road to Wall Street heats up here on the floor of the Senate, there are those on Wall Street and those on this floor who want to block reform. They don't want to fix any of these things I have been describing. Indeed, recently the minority leader met with more than two dozen Wall Street executives and hedge fund managers and urged them to elect members of his party who would stop these reforms that serve the American people. Then he came back down here and he whipped out his talking points from Frank Luntz and he said: This bill won't work. Why did he say that? Because he doesn't want a bill to reform Wall Street and fix these rules and restore prosperity to our economy. He wants to take this election year instead and serve a powerful constituency that doesn't want any rules restored to the road. Folks, that is just wrong. We have a responsibility. Just as our ancestors not so long ago fixed the problems of the Great Depression, fixed the banking system, and restored a banking system that would take us forward in an orderly fashion and allow business to thrive in America, to be the envy of the world in America, we have the responsibility to do that today. There are some who have said: Well, we want a free market. Let me tell my colleagues, a free market thrives with rules that allow orderly conduct because those rules create the integrity that gives people the faith to utilize those markets. We saw with the stock market reforms that people believe stocks are traded fairly in America, and therefore they are willing to invest and, by investing, power up the companies that are issuing public stock. It works when there is integrity in the market. Foreign investors will come and put their dollars in America if they believe there is integrity in our system. That is what these rules are about--rules that create a free market with integrity so that it can power up the economy of America. That is what this is about. We are not talking about what some of my colleagues across the aisle are talking about: preserving the status quo, which means freedom from oversight, freedom from accountability, freedom to translate BBB bonds and AAA bonds with a magic evaluation system; free to blow up the economy, which destroyed families' savings, families' retirements, families' jobs, often families' health care, and pretty much tore the foundation out from under the American working family. This bill creates a consumer financial agency that will say: No more trips and traps on basic financial products. We need to have that mission no longer locked in the basement. We need to have that mission in an agency that says we will not allow those tricks and traps and scams that have been perpetuated over the last decade, so that Americans will not say: Where is the fairness in that? Instead, they will say: Thank goodness these contracts are fair and serving our families and our economy.

Mr. MERKLEY. Thank you. I will close by saying this bill must get done because we have a responsibility to restore the foundations for our Nation. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, today I recognize the 50th anniversary of Na Haumana O Hawai'i and its annual lu'au. The Na Haumana O Hawai'i is a culture club at Pacific University in Forest Grove, OR. For half a century, Na Haumana O Hawai'i has been spreading the culture and traditions of Hawaii to Pacific University, enriching the school and surrounding communities. Na Haumana O Hawai'i was founded in 1959 by 16 students from the islands of Hawaii. Since then, it has expanded its membership to more than 200 students and includes Native Hawaiians as well as those interested in learning more about Hawaiian culture. One of the ways that Na Haumana O Hawai'i shares the Hawaiian culture with the local community is through its annual lu'au. It is the only completely student-run and student-directed lu'au in the Northwest. Each year, about 2,000 people attend the lu'au and celebrate the Island heritage, which includes an authentic lu'au meal and traditional Polynesian dance, music and entertainment. Na Haumana O Hawai'i has made a tremendous impact on Pacific University, Oregon, and our Nation. By bringing to the mainland a taste of Hawaii's cultural tapestry, Oregonians and Americans have been able to enjoy the State's rich Aloha spirit. I know that all Oregonians will join me in congratulating Na Haumana O Hawai'i on the occasion of its 50th anniversary and annual lu'au.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I join my colleagues in talking about the challenge that is faced by America's working families. Back home in Oregon, our economy has been hit pretty hard. We have a timber industry, and when you aren't building houses across the country, then you can't sell lumber. So we have mills going out of business across the State of Oregon and a lot of people unemployed--a lot of unemployed people who would be working in the woods cutting down the trees as well as working in the mills. Then we have the challenge of our manufacturing industry that has been hit pretty hard too. We build a lot of RVs and light planes, and those products aren't selling too well in this recession. We have a fruit industry and we have a Christmas tree industry. We ship a lot of that overseas, but the foreign demand is down, and domestic demand is down as well. We have those Mexican tariffs that have been applied to Christmas trees and fruit as well, which has had a pretty strong impact. You pile up all of this on a State that is on the Pacific Rim and add to that the fact that the entire Pacific Rim economy is depressed, and you have a State that not so long ago was second in the Nation only to Michigan in terms of unemployment. Well, things have improved a little in Oregon. We are no longer second worst, partly because many other States have continued to get worse. We are at about 11 percent. That is just about twice the unemployment we had not so long ago. That is a lot of struggling families. Unemployment is a program that helps keep the economy in gear during a difficult recession. It helps break the headlong rush into a depression. It helps families stabilize while they are looking for a job. Unemployment compensation is not a sweet deal. You don't get paid a great deal with unemployment but maybe just enough to get by so your house isn't one more foreclosed property; so you are not one more family on the street, wondering where you are going to live; so there isn't one more set of children whose schooling has been disrupted and their path in life has been disrupted and as a parent you wonder how it will impact them down the road. This is about us watching out for each other here in America. I can tell you it has been very frustrating to me to watch Members of this body during the last two administrations decide to do things in which they said: You know what, we are going to give away the Treasury to the wealthiest Americans, and we are not going to have any way of paying for it because we just to want give away money to the wealthy. So the wealthy are doing very well in America. But what about the workers in our Nation? The average compensation for a working family plateaued the year I graduated from high school--1974. During the 36 years since, working families have been earning the same amount. Yet the productivity of our Nation has gone up enormously. Where did all that wealth go? All that wealth went to the wealthiest Americans. Then my colleagues across the aisle are going to stand up tonight and self- righteously proclaim we should not do this without paying.

Mr. MERKLEY. We need to extend this unemployment for working families, not kick them when they are down.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. I thank the Senator so much. It is a pleasure to come here with my colleagues on the floor. I know when all of my colleagues go home, they hear stories from their constituents about our broken health care system. That certainly is what I hear. I hear it in my townhalls. I hear it on the street, as people stop me and share their story. And I certainly hear it in my mail. I have in my hand a few of the stories citizens in Oregon have sent to me. To give you a sense of the type of frustration we are hearing, Don writes: Last year my premium went up 65 percent even though I've made no significant claims against my policy. Or we can turn to Jane, who says: . . . we are subject to being turned down for health insurance [because] I have a chronic illness. . . . Or we can turn to Adrienne, who observes: The medical debt was crushing, and we were forced to file for bankruptcy. Or we can turn to Amanda, who says: My daughter cut her finger. I took her to emergency, the hospital is a network provider. The ER Physician said she needed surgery. Okay, what do I know, they are the experts. It turns out that the Surgeon is not a network provider. She bills [me] over $9,000.00. . . . . . . I have little hope. Do I file [for] bankruptcy? Or we can turn to Art, who says: In less than 5 years, I had to change my health insurance 5 times. It was never a matter of choice; I simply had to take whatever plan my employer decided to offer. Or Dagne, who observes: When I started to fill out my insurance form, I had ``Questions such as `Have you ever had . . . ' ''--for instance, I had asthma. And he goes on to describe his challenges. And the list goes on and on and on. That is why we are in this health care dialog. Because we need to fix our health care system that is broken for working Americans. The bill we have passed and the President has signed has three terrific provisions. It creates State-based markets for health care policies, where consumers can shop for the best policy. These markets will increase choice and competition. Second, the bill ends insurance company practices that victimize our working families--practices such as turning people down for preexisting conditions or dumping them off of their policies when they are injured or when they have a disease. And, third, it invests in our provider workforce to counter the rapid retirement of baby boomers. Out in Oregon, we are going to lose 20 percent of our primary care physicians in the next 5 years, while many of us, as baby boomers ourselves, are going to need more health care. So those things are huge challenges. This bill takes a stride that is very significant, and this week we will work to pass--with an up-or- down vote--a bill that will make further improvements to the bill the President signed yesterday. I am pleased to join my colleagues in this fight to repair a broken health care system that is not working for our working citizens. Thank you.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise today to decry the attack of my Republican colleagues on the executive branch of the United States of America. The Constitution, which we are sworn to uphold, calls for a balance of power between three branches of government--the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch. In it, it gives us a certain ability to test the fitness of high appointees to the executive branch. That is the advise and consent clause of the Constitution. The Constitution does not have a delay and obstruct clause. It has an advise and consent clause. That means we have the responsibility, on a timely basis, to review high appointees to the executive branch and give our opinion. If we vote a person down, then indeed that nomination does not go forward. What we have here is not a sincere application of advise and consent. We have a systematic effort underway to undermine the credibility and the capability of the President's team here in America. This is a list of nominations that is being held up. This is not one nomination here and one nomination there. These are dozens and dozens of key appointees who will make the executive branch operate. Let's look at some of these. The Federal Election Commission, the Department of Energy, the Small Business Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Legal Services Corporation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Army, the Executive Office of the President, the Amtrak Board of Directors, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Farm Credit Administration, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of State, the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Council on Disability, the Tennessee Valley Authority. Fellow Americans, I think you get the picture that this is a list in a systematic effort to undermine the ability of the executive branch to do its job. If we simply look back at the nominations on which we have had to file cloture and hold a vote in this Chamber, two-thirds of those nominees have passed by more than 70 of this body. Many of them had 80 or 90 votes because there was no sincere objection to this individual, be it he or she, in a number of these departments. But it was a systematic effort to delay the capability of the executive branch of the United States of America. That is unacceptable. We are not empowered as a Chamber, in this Constitution, to delay and obstruct and prevent the executive branch from doing its job. I call upon my Republican colleagues who are conducting this attack on the President and his team to honor their constitutional responsibilities to advise and consent, to take this list and if there are a couple of key nominees that you have serious concerns about, then indeed let's have that debate here on the floor. But these dozens need to be set free to do their job. That is how the balance of powers is envisioned in the Constitution.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise tonight to tell you a tale about the Klamath Basin. It is really two stories about the Klamath Basin. One is of a terrific vision that has come together between fishermen and ranchers and tribes, and the second is a story about a terrible drought. So I want to start with the good news and share a little bit of the vision. First, let me tell you about the magical place that is the Klamath Basin. It is in southern Oregon and northern California. It is an area of the country that is rich with agricultural resources and exceptional wildlife populations. The basin contains approximately 1,400 family farms and ranches and encompasses over 200,000 acres of farmland irrigated with water from the Klamath River and Klamath Lake. In 2009, the basin's agricultural industry produced over $440 million in revenue. The Klamath is sometimes referred to as the ``Western Everglades.'' The basin attracts 80 percent of the Pacific Flyway's waterfowl and supports the largest over-wintering population of bald eagles anywhere in the Lower 48 States. It is also home to one of the most productive salmon river systems in the country. Let me tell you that the allocation of water in this basin has always been a source of enormous tension between the farmers and ranchers, the fishermen--both the instream fishermen and the offshore fishermen--and the tribes. These groups that have traditionally been in contest with each other have come together over the last few years to say that this situation--the uncertainty about water and the poor health of the river--is not sustainable into the future; that all of us could benefit, all of the parties could benefit, if we worked together for a different vision, for a vision that shared a little more regularity with water, that took out some dams that increased the water flow, that had colder water for the salmon, that avoided some of the terrible calamities that occurred, including the worst die-off of fish we have had in the United States of America that happened about a decade ago. So these stakeholders have developed a collaborative agreement and signed it, called the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement or KBRA. That agreement is designed to benefit farmers and ranchers as well as the Klamath tribe and fishermen up and down the west coast by offering more certainty about access to water. At the same time, it restores the river and improves habitat and riverflows for native fish species and wildlife refuges. The development of the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement is a historic step forward for the region. If it were already in place, it would provide a powerful set of collaborative tools for dealing with drought, for dealing with years when there is a shortage of water. But Congress has not yet acted and those tools are not in place. That brings us to this current year and the second half of the story. To help me address that, I am going to put up a chart in the Chamber. This black line on the chart shows what had been the lowest level of Klamath Lake since it has been recorded in Oregon history--the lowest level, which is shown by the black line. This red line represents the level of the lake this year. As you can readily see, the level of the lake is far below the worst ever year that had been recorded--the calamity of 1992. These red dots on the chart represent the level the lake needs to be to provide irrigation water to farmers. There is no conceivable way we are going to get from this red line, as shown on the chart, to these red dots in order to provide water in the normal fashion. That is why we are facing such a calamity this year. With spring planting season already upon us, it is critical that we take immediate action to respond to this crisis. We have the advantage of tracking this and knowing the crisis is coming. So together we can work to mitigate the worst effects of the drought rather than waiting for the drought to simply play itself out. A drought of this magnitude requires an unprecedented, integrated, expansive set of responses from the Federal agencies and a dedicated effort to coordinate response efforts along with local and State governments. Along with Senator Wyden, I have requested the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, and Commerce to dedicate all required resources to address this crisis swiftly. My team has been working with the teams at those Departments, and they are making a lot of progress. But we have to continue pushing forward as fast and as quickly as possible. There are several key strategies that could help address this: first, acquiring upstream water rights from willing sellers to increase the amount of water that is available in the Klamath Basin; second, to pursue extensive flexibility within the boundaries of law and science to utilize surface water in the most effective possible manner; third, help farmers activate emergency drought wells and otherwise access ground water; and fourth, set up crop idling programs to conserve water. The worst thing we can do is simply stand by, watch farmers plant their crops, and then watch those crops fail. So I want to say now that there is a big compliment owed to the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Interior for their prompt and engaged action. I know Senator Wyden and I will stay equally engaged. It is no exaggeration to say that without Federal assistance and cooperation with local and State officials, the impending drought will result in disaster for Klamath Basin communities. So I urge my colleagues to work with me to meet this challenge and avoid this calamity. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I rise today to honor my colleague and my good friend, Oregon's State treasurer, Ben Westlund, who passed away this last Sunday after a protracted battle with lung cancer. A true independent voice in Oregon politics, Ben entered the legislature to improve the lives of all Oregonians and he remained committed to that cause. I first met him in 1997 when I was working for the World Affairs Council and went down to talk to the legislature about education in Oregon. I was fortunate to start serving with him 2 years later, in 1999. Ben was an unwavering advocate for affordable and available health care. He helped stabilize Oregon's college savings plan. He increased the State's credit rating. Over the years, I worked with Ben on many issues, including setting up Oregon's Rainy Day Fund, a savings account to protect Oregon's solvency and critical programs when the economy turned down. I also worked with my friend Ben Westlund to create Individual Development Accounts to help empower low-income families. It is a savings program matched by grants that help families buy homes, start small businesses, return to college-- pathways from poverty into middle class. It speaks to Ben's belief in helping families succeed that he took a lead role in that program. Ben's political affiliations ranged at times from Republican to Independent to Democrat. But no matter what party he belonged to, his focus first and foremost was always on creating a better Oregon. In 2003, Ben gave one of the most passionate and moving speeches I have ever witnessed in my life. He gave his speech shortly after being diagnosed with cancer. He was not sure he would return to the legislature, and he wanted us to know we could not retreat in the face of the challenge of passing reforms for affordable and quality health care. He knew it was an enormous challenge, but he took his personal story and turned it to the cause. His work ethic was unmatched. Ben was working as recently as just last week. It was an honor to serve with Ben in the Oregon Legislature and to consult with him as he took on new challenges as Oregon's treasurer. If you knew Ben, you knew he was gregarious. He lit up the room. Every moment, his enthusiasm for improving our State and our world was inspiring. I will miss him. I am sure his passion and his presence will be missed throughout our State, and I know all Oregonians join me today in honoring the legacy of Ben Westlund. I yield the floor.

Mr. MERKLEY

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

Mr. MERKLEY

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation that will create jobs and lower energy bills for families and small businesses in rural communities by promoting energy-saving home renovations. I am honored to be joined in this effort by a bipartisan group of colleagues that includes Senator Shaheen, Senator Lugar, Senator Graham, Senator Johnson, and Senator Bennet of Colorado. Our colleagues in the other chamber are introducing companion legislation sponsored by Representatives Clyburn, Perriello, Whitfield, and Spratt. Our proposed Rural Energy Savings Program would assist rural electric co-operatives in offering ``on-bill'' financing to their customers. This concept offers two clear and important benefits for consumers, including homeowners and owners of commercial or industrial property. First, it addresses the challenge of the up-front cost of building renovations. Energy efficiency measures almost always make business sense in the long term, because they lower the energy bill for the family or business. But often, the family or business cannot afford the upfront cost of the renovation. By offering low-cost financing, we can let families and businesses pay for the cost of the renovation on the same time frame that they are getting savings on their energy bill. Second, we avoid complicating consumers' lives with another loan payment by offering a very simple repayment mechanism: under ``on- bill'' financing, the consumer repays the loan through a charge on their electric bill. This bill offers these benefits to Americans across the country by using existing structures in place to provide federal assistance to rural electric co-operatives. Specifically, the Rural Utilities Service will offer loans at zero percent interest to rural co-operatives, who can then offer on-bill financing to their customers at no more than three percent interest. The difference can be used to pay the local nonprofit cooperatives' overhead expenses or to establish a loan loss reserve. There are more than 900 electric co-operatives serving 42 million Americans, so we expect this program to create jobs and help lower energy bills in rural communities all over the country. For our rural communities to recover and thrive in the wake of the economic crisis, we need to put people back to work and lower families' expenses, and the Rural Energy Savings Program does both. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.