[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 100 (Monday, July 22, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H5080-H5084]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2245
               MARKET DIVE AND ITS EFFECT ON THE ECONOMY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Osborne). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2001, the gentlewoman from the District of 
Columbia (Ms. Norton) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of 
the minority leader.
  Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I listened attentively to the remarks of the 
gentleman from Colorado. I was certainly in agreement with much of what 
he had to say. What amazed me was how much of his remarks were devoted 
to things that the Congress cannot do anything about. You can preach to 
the board of directors and you can talk about bad apples all you want 
to, but this is the Congress of the United States. We are empowered to 
take action against the fraud and abuse that is driving our market 
down. Only near the end of his remarks did the gentleman even mention 
pending legislation. If a Member of the House gets up on the floor, you 
would think he would discuss what it is we are going to do about it. 
Most of the remarks of the gentleman were devoted to some awfully bad 
apples, some folks who the President has said should go to jail, 
Democrats have said should go to jail, Republicans have said should go 
to jail. But if this problem was only about locking up a few crooks, 
the market would not be responding the way it is. It is about corporate 
greed, to be sure, and the gentleman was very correct in focusing on 
the manifestation of that greed. But there are some questions that the 
public, far more pointed questions that the public is asking the 
Congress now.
  Where was the Congress when Arthur Levitt tried to bar consultants 
from auditing the companies that paid them to consult? The gentleman 
railed about this matter, but did not tell you that it was Congress 
that kept Arthur Levitt from, in fact, going forward with a regulation 
that would have barred precisely that problem which has led to so much 
of the abuses we are seeing now.
  Where was Congress when President Clinton vetoed H.R. 2491, a veto 
that was overridden by the Republican Congress allowing corporations to 
raid workers' pension funds by significantly lowering the safeguards 
that were put in place in 1990 by the Democratic Congress?
  What can Congress do? Congress can look at, and correct, the aura of 
corporate deregulation of the 1990s led by the Republicans in the 
House. In 1995, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, that is a 
fancy name for a provision, a law, which makes it harder for 
shareholders to bring securities fraud suits. In the name of reining in 
the lawyers, what the Republicans did in 1995 was to rein in the 
shareholders who now have a harder time going to court to sue for the 
very abuses that are driving the market down as I speak.
  So if we are going to talk about what is happening out there, by all 
means let us call out names for the bad apples that are running all 
around corporate America today, but let us be clear that this problem 
is far more systemic than a bad CEO here or a terrible accountant 
there.
  Today, of course, WorldCom went where everybody knew it was going, 
down and out, and it took a lot of good folks with them, meaning a lot 
of average Americans, a lot of workers. I know about the workers 
because here in the Washington area is perhaps the largest number of 
WorldCom workers in any one spot, 6,000 workers, lots of whom will not 
have jobs much longer. Some of them will because some of these 
businesses are, in fact, going to stay up and running and WorldCom at 
some point will stabilize. The market was down 235 points. We should be 
grateful for small favors. It was 400 points on Friday. But in a real 
sense, my friends, the instability is worse than the dive. What is 
panicking investors is the sense that this thing has gone wild and is 
out of control, out of control of us, yes, and that we do not know how 
to stabilize and restore confidence in our economy.
  There is only one way to do it. If we deregulated too much, did not 
regulate enough, there is a bill pending before us, not the weak sister 
passed by the House, but the Sarbanes bill which the President has said 
he would sign which passed the Senate of the United States, listen to 
me, 97-to-nothing. The gentleman talked about bipartisanship. That, my 
friend, is bipartisanship. A bill that passes by that margin is not 
about to give in when it comes over to this part of the House. The 
American people want us to put this matter to rest before we march out 
of this Chamber at the end of this week for August recess. The biggest 
bankruptcy in history surely should be enough to make us do just that. 
Bigger than Enron. Twice as big as Enron.
  But, Mr. Speaker, I do not conceive the problems we have in quite the 
same way as is being discussed by the pundits and, for that matter, by 
the gentleman who preceded me. It is not about corporate misconduct 
alone. It is not about income restatements alone, even though the 
combination of the corporate misconduct and the restatements of 
earnings, meaning that the earnings are not nearly what we said they 
were when we put out our last statement, those two factors, the 
restatements, the misconduct, seem to be in the driver's seat of the 
economy now, driving it as productivity is not driving it, driving it 
as nothing else is driving it. But the market decline is so serious and 
is so unpredictable that it could take us into a longer recession if we 
do not get a grip. One way to get a grip is to pass the Sarbanes bill 
out of here before the end of the week.

  I want to focus this evening on the effect on the national economy in 
a number of different ways of the market dive, of the instability on 
the average American. I suspect that all over America, these cable 
shows, these news reports about the market are bringing two reactions, 
confusion and panic. I want to do what I can to help break this down, 
at least as I see it. We had best be very careful. The latest measure 
shows that most Americans have now switched to saying that the country 
is on the wrong track. On the wrong track is not your usual kind of 
poll: Are you for it or against it? Is it doing right or doing wrong? 
It is used to measure such things as confidence in the economy, and 
when people check off the box saying that the country is on the wrong 
track, they are checking off several different other boxes as well. 
They are checking off the box that says I'm going to stop spending; 
this, even though the economy is growing. I'm going to stop spending. 
I'm going to go away for a while. I'm going to flee the market. This is 
serious. Because the economy we have experienced over the last dozen or 
more years, to the extent that it was a good economy was driven by 
consumer spending. Consumer spending drives, what is it, two-thirds of 
a good economy in this country. So when people say it is on the wrong 
track, we have got to work together. Here is where I am at one with the 
gentleman from Colorado. We have got to work together to restore this 
confidence and

[[Page H5081]]

not bickering over whether the Senate bill, a very strong bill, 
supported across this country in most press reports, or the House bill 
which, to be fair, came out very quickly before this market had turned 
down as badly as it has. There is every reason for Republicans to say, 
look, it has gotten worse, I now know why the Senate bill which was 
passed later in the midst of this problem is stronger. Let's wipe this 
thing away. Let's follow what the gentleman says and use bipartisanship 
in the name of true recovery of the market and of the economy.
  This is no longer a story, however, about the market. It is a story 
about what is happening to the American economy. It is no longer even a 
story about restoring confidence in the market, as important an element 
of the story as that is. It is a story now also about the dollar, which 
has dropped. It is a story about the loss of confidence in corporate 
governance itself, those who stand above and are supposed to see that 
the corporation does right, many of whom are supposed to come from the 
outside of the corporation. It is a story about phony accounting 
practices. It is also a story about the growth of the deficit. We got 
another shock last week when the deficit figures came out 56 percent 
above what had been projected. That is not a matter of miscalculation 
or mistake. There is something terribly wrong here. The reason for this 
huge rise in the deficit is that we are experiencing the sharpest 
decline in receipts by our government since 1955. Today, the deficit is 
$165.5 billion. Last year it was a $124 billion surplus. When you see 
that kind of turn-on-its-head phenomenon from surplus to deficit, it is 
time to start paying attention. This is all part of the same picture, 
my friends, the same economy, the same problem.
  The causes of this deficit, of course, are not alone what has 
happened recently here with the market. The deficit comes from spending 
for the war, from spending for recession, it comes from corporate and 
market decline. But those who can count agree that the greatest cause 
was the $1.35 trillion tax cut. That is all in the same equation I have 
just enumerated.
  We are focused today on corporate fraud and abuse as part of the 
problem, because it is so clearly a part of the problem that Congress 
can fix. Mere mortals cannot fix market economies. They do have minds 
of their own. But there are certain things you can do to help correct 
flaws that are there because men and women have put them there, and 
abuse is an example of such a flaw. Anytime we see the nouveau 
companies like Enron and WorldCom, on the one hand, and the old giants 
like Johnson & Johnson and Xerox on the other, we know that we have an 
across-the-board problem, we have a culture that has accepted certain 
practices as normal when the average person would regard them as 
abusive. That is why to characterize this as just some rich guys buying 
houses is to greatly detract from what at least the Congress can do. I 
cannot go out and get all of these guys now. Most of them will not go 
to jail. We are only now changing the law that might put some of them 
in jail. But I can do something about the system that gave them a 
license to steal. That is our job as Members of Congress.
  I want to focus on who is losing. There has been too little talk 
about who exactly is losing. If hundreds of companies have done, quote, 
restatements of earnings, what that means is that your profits in your 
401(k) have been erased. What your earnings were as stated 6 months ago 
turn out to be far greater on paper than the company now comes forward 
and says they are. Last year, investors lost $30 billion, that is 
billion with a ``B,'' because of restatements of financial statements 
alone. Erased. As I speak, there are people sitting down with their 
401(k) looking at the result of corporations cutting corners, hyping 
profits, now restating and downgrading people's portfolios.

                              {time}  2300

  What we have got to ask ourselves is what does this mean to the 
average person? And let us indicate who the average person is. At one 
point we would say the average person is a worker. Today the average 
person is a worker and an investor. The average person, average person, 
is in the market. The average person has lost by what has happened in 
the last several weeks because more than 93 percent of stocks have lost 
value. Forty percent of the market are simply mutual fund investors. 
That is pension funds. When an average Joe out there reads that the 
drop in the NASDAQ is the worst since the Great Depression, what he is 
hearing is that the average person has lost money, and a lot of money. 
Every time the market precipitously drops or goes up and down and back 
as it did today, it went wild today and ended way down, every time that 
happens, part of somebody's pension or life savings is gone.
  The ultimate insult is those who lose their jobs and their savings, 
like folks at Enron who lost their job and had invested in their 
company and so lost their savings as well. The Sarbanes bill would help 
to get at that unjust enrichment if the conferees over here listen. I 
cannot help but wonder where Mr. and Mrs. America would be if they had 
privatized Social Security. I mean if they were sitting with a 
privatized Social Security account today, where in the world would they 
be? It is one thing to have invested some of their disposable income in 
the market that goes down. It is another thing to have been encouraged 
by the President and the Republican Congress to invest part of their 
Social Security and be left without that, the ultimate fail-safe. If 
this episode does not kill privatization of Social Security, then it is 
immortal.
  The value of the average stock dropped 11 percent during the last 
quarter. That means that the average person probably lost at least that 
much. Do not look at the 401(k) before going to bed at night. This 
thing is going to get better. I support entirely what the President is 
doing to try to encourage people to match up an economy that is growing 
with what they hear about what is happening to individual stocks and to 
believe in the American economy. So the whole notion of thinking that 
this economy is going south and is going to stay there for a long time 
is, I think, tragically mistaken. One thing we do not want to do is to 
panic ourselves down and panic ourselves needlessly. We want to 
understand what is happening, do not want to soft-pedal it. Most people 
cannot just run out of the market now. If they run out of the market 
now, they often do not have any other place to go. We take our losses. 
I think the advice that most analysts are giving, which is stay in 
there for the long haul if one possibly can, is something most people 
should do.
  So I have not lost my faith in the American economy, but I know good 
and well that the only way to restore the faith of the American people 
in the American economy is for this body to do what it can to help 
restore that confidence. So far we have not done that.
  Look at what is happening at the top of corporate America while the 
investors, the workers, are being wiped out at the bottom. Twenty years 
ago corporate executives received 40 times what employees earned. Today 
it is 500 times what employees earn. I mean they can lose a lot of 
money and still be in good shape compared with somebody with a pension 
fund or a 401(k). I must say that I think this reflects in part on the 
decline in union membership. I think that if the average worker had a 
union leader who could sit there and say, look, your salary is 500 
times what this worker's salary is, there would be less of a disparity 
between workers and CEOs, and we have the greatest disparity in the 
world. We also have the greatest disparity not coincidentally between 
the rich and the poor. Some of them have golden parachutes. They are 
routine in corporate America, but what has really gotten the average 
person, the average investor who turns out to be an average worker, 
outraged is that one can get these golden parachutes when one leaves 
the company, regardless of the condition of many companies. These are 
the same executives who are responsible for the accounting tricks and 
the aggressive accounting, as it is called, that has led one former 
Republican chair of the SEC to predict that there will be hundreds upon 
hundreds of companies that will do corporate restatements. That means 
everybody should get ready to understand that there is less in our 
little old portfolio than we thought. Some of these executives have 
been particularly brazen, hiding debt, as

[[Page H5082]]

with Enron, to make profits look greater.
  I know a little bit about corporate governance. Before I came to 
Congress, I served on the boards of three Fortune 500 companies, 
proudly so. I must say that in each of them, usually the only inside 
member of the board was a CEO. These were companies which just as a 
matter of good corporate governance almost exclusively relied on 
outside members for their boards. One would think that that would be 
one thing a CEO would want. They would want somebody on the inside to 
pull their coattail if things were looking a little strange. Very often 
we cannot see this from the inside. We get too ensconced with it. 
Virtually all of the board members were outside board members. I was 
not on an audit committee. We met almost every month. There were a 
couple of months in the summer where we did not meet. I came to 
Congress, elected in 1990. Of course I had to give up all corporate 
boards, but I was on corporate boards during the flamboyant 1980s which 
in their own way reflected some of what is happening today. These were 
very conservative companies in the way they were governed.

  I have seen it from the inside. It does not have to be this way. It 
does not have to be the way it has been in the last couple of years.
  So here I stand, a Member of Congress. I think the average investor, 
the average worker I have been talking about has a right to say to me 
so what are you going to do about it? I dissent from the view that this 
has been about corporate greed alone. As I have said when I began these 
remarks, that would be easy to deal with. If somebody steals my 
pocketbook and I catch him, I lock him up. My pocketbook is going to be 
in better shape the next time. This is about corporate greed. Corporate 
greed was given a license to steal because nobody was watching the 
store in the way they should have been, and we of the Congress of the 
United States are deeply implicated in that problem. Inadequate 
regulation, inadequate laws, repeal and relaxing of many regulations 
and laws in the 1990s, some at the direction of the Congress of the 
United States.

                              {time}  2310

  So we better fix it, because we are part of why it is broken.
  I will not go line by line down the bill, the strong bill that has 
been passed in the Senate; but let me give some illustrations of what 
it would do that I think the average American in a second would want us 
to do. It extends the statute of limitations so that defrauded 
investors can seek redress before all the cash is gone. The House bill 
does not do that; it would eliminate that provision. It requires 
corporate wrongdoers, the abusers themselves, to give up their ill-
gotten gains. That is not in the House bill. You walk out on the street 
in any city and tell folks that that is not in the House bill, they 
will tell you to get back in Congress until it gets in there. Even with 
it in the bill, billions of dollars of lost savings are gone forever; 
at least we ought to make sure that it never happens again.
  Another favorite of mine is a whole new loophole that would be opened 
if we went with the House bill instead of the Senate bill. Do we really 
want to permit foreign accounting firms to be exempted from the 
oversight board, the Oversight Accounting Board? Would that not be a 
loophole that one could drive a Mack truck through, since this is one 
world?
  Not only are corporations global, so are accounting firms global. We 
certainly do not want a U.S. accounting firm to do business through 
foreign operations and, therefore, avoid all of the regulations and the 
law that we are putting in place. That is what will happen if the House 
version rather than the Senate version becomes law. If we cannot fix 
the economy, we can fix some of the abuses. We can fix those abuses if 
the Sarbanes bill becomes the bill of the Congress of the United 
States.
  Mr. Speaker, as I have been speaking about the average worker who is 
today the average investor, because one way or another, the average 
worker is in this market, either through their pension or through their 
401(k), one has to be awfully poor and jobless not to be in the market 
one way or the other.
  But there are people who are wondering whether or not the effect that 
this period of abuse has had on markets has now also affected jobs. 
People are beginning to use the words again, words that we heard about 
a decade ago, ``jobless recovery.'' The words ``jobless recovery'' 
ought to be an oxymoron. I thought recovery was all about getting 
people employed again. But that is not what is happening, and that is 
what is scary.
  We now are seeing, for example, in June, the long-term jobless rate 
rose for the third month in a row. We are told that the unemployment 
rate is 5.7 percent, that is 8.4 million people. But the true jobless 
rate is more than 9 percent in May, if we count 1.5 million people who 
are marginally attached or discouraged because they have looked for so 
long for jobs; they have just given up.
  Now, some of the reason we are told for the unemployment is that 
employers are doing more work through greater productivity. They are 
using machines; they are using computers. We have a wonderfully 
productive economy. I agree. This is not all due to the failure of the 
economy to recover. But I do know this: we are not sharing the gains in 
productivity with workers, and the reason I know this is I have looked 
at the average hourly earnings and found that they are still 5 percent 
below the rate workers earned in 1973. We are talking 25 years ago. So 
no matter how we look at it, workers are getting the short end, and 
that is something which, when paired with what has happened to these 
same workers as investors, is dangerous for the economy and is 
dangerous for this Congress.
  The analysts have looked at the recessions in recent years, in 1982, 
in 1980, in 1975 and noted that if we looked at the first year of 
recovery from those recessions, job development and increase was 2.4 
million. They count March 2001 as the beginning of this recession, and 
there is no analyst that thinks we will get to 2 million jobs in the 
first year after this recession. That is why at least some are saying 
it is a jobless recovery. I step forward to say I hope that is not the 
case. This is what I care most about. I think the only thing as bad as 
losing your savings is losing your job.
  Most people will not believe that there is a recovery at all unless 
they see that their neighbor, who lost their job, got their job back. 
They did not lose theirs, but as long as their neighbor is still out of 
work or going back only on a temporary job, they are not going to go 
out and spend any money. That, of course, feeds on itself and keeps the 
market down. That does not help anything, and that does not help 
anybody; and we have to help change that in this Congress, yes, by 
working together. The way to work together is a bill on the table. Let 
us pick it up off of the table and pass it and see if we do not get an 
immediate reaction from the market.
  We are on track, according to all of the figures, to recover at below 
the average employment rate. Now, one does not have to be an economist 
to know that employment is a lagging indicator. From the point of view 
of the employer, one can understand that. He does several things as he 
sees the economy recovering, and about the last thing he does is to 
hire back his workers. He uses all kinds of other ways to get his work 
out, including the encouragement to improve your own productivity so 
you need fewer workers. But ultimately, the test of a recovery, the 
test of a good economy is that people are working. There is no way to 
get around that test. We can talk like an economist and say oh, it is 
fine, the economy is doing just great; but if people are out of work, 
we will never convince them of that; and we should not be able to.
  We have to get people back to work. If unemployment is 5.7 percent 
for the population at large, do understand that that it is twice that 
for people of color, because that is the way it goes in this country; 
and over 10 percent unemployment is crisis in minority communities. 
Jobs count, and yet we hear so little about jobs. Jobs are not 
unrelated to the market, and the market can recover all it wants to; 
but if there is joblessness, there is no recovery.
  When we had the booming 1990s, there were both jobs and a market; 
yes, an overvalued market, but by no means was it simply overvalued. It 
was a time

[[Page H5083]]

of great innovation, the birth of the Internet and the spread of 
computers, so there was a very good reason why there were jobs and why 
there was a good market at the same time.
  Consumer spending is the engine of this economy. People do not spend 
money when they do not have jobs or when their neighbors do not have 
jobs, or when they think there is still high unemployment, which is a 
signal to them: it may get you, so do not spend money. That stops the 
economy, at least an economy like ours, two-thirds of which is driven 
by spending by consumers.

                              {time}  2320

  I am discouraged by the payroll increases in the last month, couple 
of months, a paltry 60,000. We need a 150,000 to 200,000 payroll 
increases per month to bring unemployment down. It will not be helped 
by the WorldCom layoffs and the IBM layoffs and the layoffs we have 
been seeing left and right just to compound the matter and make things 
worse.
  We have a horrific situation that Congress has not even paid the 
least attention to and that is the state of unemployment insurance. 
Unemployment is just that, insurance. When you have insurance that 
means you have to pay your premium. So a worker has to pay into the 
unemployment insurance funds. And the employer better pay into the 
unemployment insurance funds, or they both are in grave trouble. But 
only 40 percent of workers actually receive benefits from unemployment 
insurance even though they paid into the funds. How would you like 
those apples? You lost your job, no fault of our own. XYZ is doing 
layoffs because of restatements. Got to let some workers go to get back 
to some sense of stability, and you say, well, goodness, while I am 
looking at least I have unemployment. You better watch out. Lots of 
folks do not get unemployment.
  There is a huge change that Congress has failed to update, a change 
in your economy, a change in who goes to work. Many people are part-
time workers, especially women who have small children. They cannot get 
unemployment insurance in many States, yet the family bought a house 
last year precisely because that mother could go to work part time 
because her children are now in elementary school. Some States do not 
count recent earnings but have to go back a quarter or two. And you 
have got to meet the earnings threshold as of that quarter in order to 
get unemployment insurance. Where does this come from?
  It made perfect sense in the 1950's when it was normal for there to 
be a mother at home and at that point half of the unemployed got 
benefits. But what has happened since is that you have got changes that 
the unemployment laws simply have not accommodated, at least the 
changes have not accommodated at least to the changes we are seeing in 
the workforce itself. There are more single parents working, more two-
income couples who structure their work day around children and child 
care. But all of that may mean that if you lose your job, you cannot 
get unemployment insurance.
  I bet many did not know that if you cannot work nights or weekends 
because you have children at home, you cannot get unemployment 
insurance in ten States. What is this? Is the family-oriented Congress 
going to let this stand? How much longer? What are we going to do with 
TANF workers, former welfare recipients who took these low-wage part-
time jobs to get off of welfare are now going to be the very first to 
go and cannot get unemployment benefits? Why are we not giving some 
priorities to straightening out this antiquated system that is causing 
so much hardship?
  I want to call out the name of some of the States that are worse on 
unemployment insurance, have obsolete requirements that nobody in even 
a 20th-century or late-20th-century economy would abide. These are 
folks that need to change their own unemployment laws; and we, of 
course, need to make changes that only we can make. Alabama, Arizona, 
Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, 
Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, 
Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North 
Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia. I have not counted 
them, but it is getting to be almost half the States have unemployment 
insurance laws that unfairly, unfairly hurt working families who have 
paid into the unemployment insurance fund. That is a crime, 
particularly when we consider what is happening to the market today.
  More than 2 million unemployed workers are likely to exhaust their 
unemployment benefits in the first 6 months of this very year. That is 
a pending crisis that needs immediate attention. Mr. Speaker, I am 
concerned at the effects that the market crash is having across the 
board on our economy, and I have tried to speak to that profound 
spreading infectious effect.
  I note that the market is marvelous in its capacity for self-
correction. The problem is it overcorrects or undercorrects very often. 
You see some correction from companies themselves. There are companies 
that are stepping forward, for example, to expense their own stock 
options, Coca-Cola, the Washington Post right here in the District of 
Columbia. But we have a problem that cannot be blinked. When you have a 
double-digit decline in stocks, traditionally, there is almost a 
formula that is been at work and the first 6 months, normally recovery 
there is a double-digit increase. We are not having that increase.
  All of this speaks to the need to pass a bill before we leave here. 
When you see an old-line company that no one has said has been engaged 
in any malfeasance, like GE, posts a 14 percent increase, and yet the 
stock shows only a minor increase itself, less than 4 percent, you know 
that there is no confidence in the market, that people do not know 
whether even a company with that reputation can be believed. We have 
got to put something behind such companies so that when people read 
those statements they say, I think those statements are probably right 
because the Congress has passed a bill that makes them sign on the 
dotted line and is going to send people to jail if they are not right, 
because the Congress has shored up all the loopholes.
  So I think now I can look at those statements and understand that 
that is probably more or less what is in my portfolio. I can begin 
gradually to reinvest in the markets. We can do that much. We cannot 
make people invest. We cannot tell people what to do. I do not know 
what to tell people to do, and I do not know any analysts that are 
telling people what to do except the same old thing that they tell us, 
do not run from the market; stay the course. That is having no effect 
on investors. They are running as fast as they can.

                              {time}  2330

  The President asked people to stay the course. That is his job, and 
he is doing his job by saying to people do not run, stay put, and they 
are running, anyway. So what is missing? What is missing is something 
to back that up. We and we alone can back that up. There is nobody in 
power to do it under the law. There is no other body that can do it. We 
cannot do it State by State. It can only be done by the Congress of the 
United States.
  No, I do not think this is a matter of bad apples alone. I do not 
spend much time on the President and whether he sold stock or bought 
stock in ways that, at least today, we say should not be done. I just 
do not spend a lot of time on that, on whether he borrowed money. I do 
not even spend a lot of time on the Vice President's problem with 
Halliburton. I do not think this is the problem.
  I think the problem is systemic. I do not think the problem is the 
President and what he did, which probably was not illegal, or 
Halliburton and the Vice President, and I certainly do not think he 
intended to do anything illegal. I just do not think that is the 
problem.
  I think the problem is that we have taken the covers off of corporate 
America and found that they were doing anything they wanted to do 
because nobody was acting like the cop. Somebody has to be the cop. It 
was not the auditors, it was not the board of directors, and it was not 
the Congress of the United States. We do not have to be a bad cop. We 
do not have to engage in police brutality, but somebody has got to 
stand up there and say what is wrong and what is right, and say if a 
person does not do what is right, then there is a sanction. If the 
auditors do

[[Page H5084]]

not do it, if the board of directors does not do it, then the law will 
make that person do it.
  That, Mr. Speaker, is all I think the public has a right to. It is 
what we have not given them yet. This is Monday. There is still time. 
We are rushing with homeland security. Important as that is, I do have 
no hesitation to say, it is not nearly as important to meet the 
deadline of Friday for the Sarbanes bill. That is what is important. If 
we get away from here on Friday, that market continues to do what it is 
doing today and there is nobody here to do anything about it, there is 
a price we ought all to pay if we get away from here and it continues 
to be out of control, then at least we can say we have done all we can 
do.
  Capitalism and marketing economies have their own mind. They work in 
mysterious ways, and they are not subject to the command of man or 
woman all of the time.
  So I say to my good friends and colleagues that I have come to the 
floor today because I did not believe it was appropriate to discuss 
this matter only as one of the individuals without understanding where 
this greed comes from, that the culture of greed comes because we have 
allowed it to grow. We cannot stand away from our own responsibility 
here. We have got to pass laws that say that we at least have shored up 
the system and instructed it to do right by putting in place laws that 
put a person at risk if they do not do right.
  When I go home, I go up the street. When my colleagues go home, they 
will be going far away. I ask my colleagues not to go one step away 
from this place without leaving our economy in order to the best of 
their ability. Pass the bill that is before us. Pass the Sarbanes bill. 
Let us not quibble about the details. If we make mistakes with the bill 
in one fashion or another, there will be time to correct them. There 
will be no time to correct what happens to the economy if we leave this 
place and the economy, with a mind of its own, goes its own way and its 
own way turns out to be a way not in keeping with what is best for the 
people we represent.
  I believe that the signs and the message from the market have been 
clear. I ask only that we reply in a way that is appropriate to the 
moment.

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