Bernie Sanders

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Chairman, I have nothing more to add to the discussion, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SANDERS. I do, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. My concern here is to make sure that in what would most likely be a corporate crime, multiple victims are notified. When somebody stabs somebody we know what is going on. If somebody rips off hundreds of people, it is very likely those hundreds of people will not know that they have been ripped off, will not be notified of that, will not have the opportunity to seek redress and that is the purpose of this amendment.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Chairman, I think it is my time to begin with.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment, the amendment numbered 1, printed in the February 6 Congressional Record.

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. For you, Mr. Kaptur, absolutely.

Ms. SANDERS

Ms. SANDERS. All right. What we should appreciate is that this loan guarantee to Mexico puts us at risk for over double what our entire foreign aid package is today. Is that correct?

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. There is lot of debate. Many people throughout this country think that is too much.

Mr. SANDERS. My recollection--and help me out here--is that foreign aid that we do vote on is about what, $15 or $16 billion?

Mr. SANDERS. If the gentleman knows, Mr. Speaker, if I had the opportunity to, I could and I would, but I do not have the opportunity. Unfortunately, as we have been discussing, we do not have that opportunity.

Mr. SANDERS. If the gentlewoman will yield further, Mr. Speaker, the gentleman makes a very important point. There almost seems to be an inverse relationship between the amount of money that is being spent and the level of discussion that takes place here. We are seeing a whole lot of discussion on the National Council on the Humanities and Public Broadcasting, right? Every day people are down here, some on one position, some on the other. It is a matter of a few hundred million dollars. What we are talking about is more than $20 billion, and as of this moment, we do not have a vote on that, and that is clearly an outrage.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, if the gentlewoman will yield, in Sunday's Washington Post Raul Avila, president of the National Maquiladora Industry Council, said that during the first 10 months of 1994 maquiladora employment increased 6.2 percent, over 600,000 employees, and importantly enough, as the gentlewoman has just indicated, ``The industry forecasts the opening of another 600 assembly plants this year.''

Mr. SANDERS. The gentleman is exactly right. With cheaper labor it becomes a better investment in the maquiladoras, and we can expect more American companies to be going down there. The gentleman and the gentlewoman raised interesting points a while ago. I am a member of the Banking Committee that dealt with the S&L fiasco, and as my colleagues will recall the concept ``too big to fail.'' Do my colleagues remember that concept? What too big to fail means is that the taxpayers of America were obligated to bail out very, very large banks because if they failed, the repercussions of that failure were supposedly so great that it would have been worse than bailing them out. I would like my colleagues to comment on this thought. It seems to me that that is precisely what is happening with regard to Mexico. We are now asked, well, not asked, but the President is proposing to put $40 billion of loan guarantees into Mexico. Maybe the President is right and we do not know. Maybe, in fact, this will improve the Mexican economy, everything will work out well, and there will not be a loss of taxpayer money. That may be true. But let us look at the other side of the story. Maybe in fact the Mexican economy will not improve and we will lose that $40 billion. What I would like to ask my colleagues is this: Is it not possible that a year from now or 2 years from now a President will come back and say we have got to provide even more loan guarantees to Mexico because we already have $40 billion in the hopper there; we cannot afford to lose that. We have to protect that investment and, therefore, we need to put even more money into Mexico? And I think the implications of that are very, very frightening. This Congress and this President are having a difficult enough time running the American economy that we know something about on behalf of American workers. We are not doing very well at that. The idea that we have the knowledge or the ability to sustain the Mexican economy, upon which we are dependent, is really quite beyond me. But I am afraid that we are going to have this too-big-to-fail concept once again. Then we are going to have to pump more and more money into Mexico, because if it fails, then we have lost all the money we put into them last year.

Mr. SANDERS. I thank the gentlewoman from Ohio. We are back together again, right.

Mr. SANDERS. Fourteen months ago many of us, all of us, and many other of our colleagues told the American people that we thought the NAFTA Agreement was going to be a disaster. On the other side we had the President, we had the Republican leadership, we had virtually every major corporate newspaper in America, who were telling us what a wonderful deal NAFTA was going to be for American workers, for Mexican workers, and for the people in general. Fourteen months have come and gone, and sadly, sadly, virtually every concern that we had at that time has proven to be true. And after the 14 months, instead of our friends who supported NAFTA coming forward and saying, ``OK, we admit it, we made a mistake, we were wrong, everybody is wrong, they were wrong''; but instead of coming forward and saying they were wrong, what they now come forward and say is, ``Hey, we need a $40-plus billion loan guarantee to Mexico, becuase NAFTA has been such a success that the Mexican economy is disintegrating, their Government is extremely unstable, and therefore, at a time when small business in America is in trouble and we do not offer them loan guarantees, family farmers in America, we do not offer them loan guarantees, we have a $200 billion deficit.'' And what irritates me very much is every single day on the floor of this House Members of Congress say, ``Hey, we have got to cut back on Social Security, on Medicare, on Medicaid, on nutrition programs for hungry children and hungry senior citizens. We have got to do that.'' We do not have enough money. And yet apparently there is not quite that concern for putting $40 billion of taxpayers' money at risk for this bailout. The first point I would like to make this evening in terms of this bailout is it is very interesting who is for it and who is against it. Polls indicate, I think the latest poll I saw is that some 80 percent of the American people are against this bailout. Maybe some of the viewers would say, well, obviously all the Mexican people are for this bailout. Wrong. Polls indicate, as I understand it, that a healthy majority of Mexicans are against the bailout because they are concerned about the sovereignty of their nation.

Mr. SANDERS. So you have the American people against the bailout, you have the Mexican people against the bailout. And one of the frustrations that all of us share is that we know that, if that vote had come to the floor of the House, the U.S. Congress, House and Senate, Republicans and Democrats, and the only independent, were all against the bailout.

Mr. SANDERS. Well, that is a very interesting question. I was about to vote no for the bailout. Unfortunately, it never came to the floor of the House. I have not yet voted on it.

Mr. SANDERS. My friend from Oregon is exactly right, as is my friend from Mississippi. My friend from Mississippi makes an interesting point, if he will allow me to amplify his statement a little bit, that all over this country there are people who work for $5 an hour and $6 an hour and $8 an hour. And they go to work every day and many of them do not have any health insurance, and we are told that the Government does not have the money to provide health insurance. Their jobs are uprooted and taken to Mexico or to China and we are told, ``Hey, that is the way life goes, that is what the market system is about, no security, you are out on the street.'' They pay unfairly too much in taxes, that is the way the system goes. And nobody is hearing their pain. And then suddenly our friends from Wall Street, who by the way, let us be honest about this, in the last few years have made out like bandits in their investments in Mexico. In the city of Burlington, VT, people put their money in the savings bank to make 3 percent, 4 percent, 5 percent, safe investment; in Mexico people were making 50 percent, people were make 100 percent of their investments. And then suddenly, for reasons that we do not fully know, we know some of them, the economy of Mexico took a tumble and their investments went sour. And how amazing it is, and I remember this when I was mayor of the city of Burlington, it was not the poor people and the working people who came into my office to ask for help. It was always the powerful and the wealthy who tell us, ``What can you do for us?'' and they are back again. These people who have the money, who have made out like bandits, have suddenly taken a loss. Well, when you invest in a risky proposition, that is the nature of the game, is it not? You stand to win a lot if things go well, you stand to lose if things go badly. I absolutely agree with my friend from Mississippi that it is an outrage to go back to the working people in this country, some of them who have lost their jobs from these very same folks who have taken their plants to Mexico, and then to ask working people of America to bail them out. To pick up on the point from my friend from Oregon, what makes me really sad is not only the horror of this whole agreement, but in fact as a result of it there will be even more people giving up on the democratic process. We just had an election recently and 62 percent of the people did not come out to vote. They no longer believe that the Government of the United States represents their interests. President is going to do to the political process? You are standing up from Oregon, you are standing up from Mississippi, you are standing up from Ohio, many of us are standing up and the people are saying ``What difference does it make? Thanks for standing up for us, but you don't have any power. We send you here to represent us but you can't do anything about it. Why do you want me to come out and vote for you or vote for anybody else?'' I think one of the other aspects about this agreement which disturbs me is not only the agreement itself, which we disagree with, but the process which denies the elected officials of this country to stand up and do what is best for their districts.

Mr. SANDERS. Essentially what we want is two things. We need far more information about this bailout and, second of all, and most importantly, we want the U.S. Congress, which presumably was elected to represent the American people, to be able to vote this thing up or down, and in my view, the Congress would vote it down. Now, I think if the American people are upset about this process, it is terribly important that they stand up, they tell the President and the Republican leadership that they understand what is going on, that they want a vote on the floor of the House, they want the Members of Congress to represent their interest and not put $40 billion at risk. So we hope very much that the people will stand up, fight back, and start callng their Members of Congress, the President's office, and the leadership to demand a vote on this important issue.

Mr. SANDERS. The main point I wanted to make very briefly is that it is not for sure that this $40 billion loan guarantee is without significant risk, and that is the main point I wanted to make.

Mr. SANDERS. I was on a national television program the other day and one of the proponents of his bailout was saying, well, the Mexican economy is basically in good shape; they are having a short-term cash flow problem. But basically it is strong. One of my Mexico. Is, in fact, the Mexican economy strong and stable?

Mr. SANDERS

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Chairman, I have no argument with my friend that it is important for us to know the costs of the legislation we are proposing, no argument about that. But I think my friends would also not deny that some legislation is cost effective. If one could make the case that by promoting x policy that cost us $1 million we save $10 million in increased health care costs, I am sure all three of the gentlemen would be in agreement that was a good piece of legislation.

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Chairman, I fully support the current provisions that require a CBO estimate of the costs to State and local governments of unfunded mandates. That is very important. That is very important. But these estimates alone misrepresent the true cost of legislation and ignore its benefits. This amendment corrects that fatal flaw. This amendment helps us fulfill the laudable purposes spelled out in the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act. Its purposes include, and I quote from the bill, ``to end the imposition, in the absence of full consideration by Congress, of Federal mandates,'' and ``to assist Congress in its consideration of the proposed legislation * * * by establishing a mechanism to bring such information to the attention of the Senate and House * * * and to promote informed and deliberate decisions by Congress.'' If Members support these purposes, I urge Members to support this amendment. The CBO will not always be able to provide a quantitative cost- benefit analysis. This amendment recognizes this limitation and only requires quantitative analyses when practicable, but when it is practicable, we need to be aware of all essential pieces of information. Uninformed decisions do not lead to cost-effective decisions. Let us save money and pass intelligent legislation that is not shortsighted. I urge the Members to vote for this amendment, and vote for full and unbiased information.