[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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