[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 148 (Wednesday, September 17, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8934-S8938]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              THE ECONOMY

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, since I took office last year, I have held 
more than 115 roundtables in nearly all of Ohio's 88 counties--from 
Ashtabula to Cincinnati, from Bryan the Gallipolis--as I bring together 
15 or 20 people from a community and listen to them talk about their 
hopes and their dreams and what we can do together to make Ohio a 
better place and to move this country

[[Page S8935]]

forward. But more than anything else, as I listen to people in 
communities such as Bucyrus and Mansfield and Wauseon, I hear about 
widespread economic anxiety and a betrayed middle class.
  Ohioans have understood that for years, especially in the first 6 
years of the Bush administration, this government allowed the drug 
companies to write the Medicare laws, allowed the oil industry to 
dictate energy policy, had allowed Wall Street to push through job-
killing trade agreements through the House and the Senate.
  They feel the middle class was betrayed by our Government. I hear 
from Ohioans worried about record high gas prices, worried about food 
prices, worried about good-paying jobs continuing to move overseas, 
worried about health insurance that costs more and covers less.
  Some of these worries can be blamed in part on our current recession, 
but that misses the larger point. For the last 7 years, the labor force 
workers have worked harder and harder, leading to huge gains in 
productivity. The productivity of workers in our economy has gone up 
like this. Yet CEOs' salaries and bonuses went through the roof while 
middle class Americans' wages stagnated and more families slipped below 
the poverty line. Again, productivity has gone up like this, meaning 
workers are creating more wealth for their employers, but wages have 
been stagnant for 80 or 90 percent of the workforce.
  In other words, as workers have produced more, as workers have been 
more productive, as workers have made more money for their bosses, if 
you will, they simply have not shared in the wealth they created. They 
are not getting raises. They are paying more for health insurance, they 
are seeing their pensions begin to disintegrate, as they are making 
more and more money for their employer.
  At the same time, while China manipulated its currency and ignored 
labor and environmental standards, corporations took the bait and 
abandoned American communities. While hedge fund managers irresponsibly 
leveraged real estate holdings, millions of Americans lost their homes 
to foreclosures. In other words, while Wall Street enjoyed an inflated 
stock market and a so-called economic expansion, most Americans 
actually became worse off.
  In the last few weeks, we know things have gotten worse. The 
Government has been forced to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lehman 
Brothers, an institution on Wall Street for 150 years, filed for 
bankruptcy on Monday. It is also reported that for the 8th straight 
month, our Nation has lost jobs. The national unemployment rate is now 
6.1 percent--a 5-year high. We know what happened to AIG today.
  Mr. President, 9.4 million Americans are officially unemployed, 2.2 
million more than a year ago--tens of thousands in my State of Ohio. In 
fact, you have to go back more than 15 years, to December 1992, to find 
a time when more Americans were forced to rely on the Government for 
their income.
  In my State of Ohio, middle class workers are facing even more bad 
news. DHL, the cargo express carrier, has announced that more than 
8,000 workers at Wilmington Air Park, the largest privately owned 
airport in the United States, will lose their jobs. Norwalk Furniture 
halted operations earlier this month, sending 500 employees home. 
General Motors is closing its plant in Moraine, a decision that will 
cost 1,200 Ohioans their livelihoods.
  Do you know what. The worst part is this: The administration is proud 
of this record. They are proud of the free trade agreements that have 
protected corporate interests, that have eliminated good-paying 
manufacturing jobs, that have brought unsafe food, drugs, and toys into 
American homes. They are proud of these free trade agreements, and they 
want more of them.
  They are proud of the tax cuts that went overwhelmingly to the 
wealthy and ignored the plight of the middle class. We know what that 
has meant. It has meant budget deficits as far as the eye can see. It 
has meant more money for the wealthiest people in this society, paid 
for by the middle class, and paid for by our children and our 
grandchildren of the future. Yet they are proud of these tax cuts that 
go overwhelmingly to the rich. The administration is proud of the 
financial deregulation that allowed greed on Wall Street to run amok.
  These days, Republicans respond to critics by saying: Things aren't 
so bad. John McCain, our colleague from Arizona, said: The foundations 
of the economy are strong. Former Senator Phil Gramm, the mentor of 
Senator McCain, the chief economic adviser to Senator McCain, said: The 
recession is in our heads. It is a mental recession, he said.
  I guess if you think things are going well, you advocate for more of 
the same, which is why Republicans continue to push for more tax cuts 
for corporations that outsource jobs overseas, pushing more energy 
policies that enrich oil companies and reinforce our dependence on 
foreign oil, pushing for more subsidies for private HMOs participating 
in Medicare, pushing more antiunion policies that undercut workers' 
power to bargain collectively and join the middle class, pushing for 
more hypocrisy that says we can afford to spend $10 billion a month in 
Iraq; we just cannot find the money to help uninsured children in 
Columbus or Zanesville or Dayton or Chillicothe or Springfield or 
Xenia.
  In fact, since we had our last vote, about an hour ago, we have spent 
some $19 million on the war in Iraq. In the last hour, we have spent 
about $19 million on the war in Iraq. Think what that could do for 
health care, for education, for rebuilding our infrastructure in Lima 
and in Portsmouth and in Chillicothe. Perhaps most troubling of all, 
Republicans are still, unbelievably enough, pushing for the 
privatization of Social Security. Can my colleagues imagine--Senator 
Sanders and I were talking about this a moment ago--if 3 years ago, 
when George Bush, Dick Cheney, and John McCain were fighting to 
privatize Social Security, and people in this institution, including 
Leader Reid and Senator Sanders, when he was in the House of 
Representatives, and many of us fought against that privatization of 
Social Security--can my colleagues imagine if that had passed in early 
2005? If the President and Senator McCain had had their way on the 
privatization of Social Security, can my colleagues imagine what this 
week would look like? Can my colleagues imagine, if 50 million retired 
Americans had had their entire life savings locked up in the stock 
market--can my colleagues imagine 50 million Americans opening their 
Social Security records, their mailing they get from Social Security 
and looking at what happened to their private accounts; money they had 
put in the stock market because George Bush and John McCain insisted on 
this risky scheme to privatize Social Security? Can my colleagues 
imagine what that would do to seniors in our society? Can my colleagues 
imagine what that would do to their future--if you are 65 and already 
on Social Security, if you are 50 and your mother is on Social 
Security, if you are about to join the ranks of Social Security? Can my 
colleagues imagine what one would think with food prices going up, with 
gas prices going up and all of a sudden, because you have these John 
McCain-George Bush privatized Social Security accounts, can my 
colleagues imagine what would be happening to their lives this week and 
the weeks ahead?

  Despite 7 years of this tired thinking and of the wrong-headed 
economic policies that betray our middle class, American workers are 
standing strong and continuing to fight for a better future.
  At my roundtables--as I mentioned, I have done some 1,500 roundtables 
in most of Ohio's 88 counties, in Cambridge and in Steubenville and in 
Defiance and in Miami County, all over--I still hear the hope and 
determination that defines this great Nation. I hear from community 
leaders. I hear from entrepreneurs with exciting plans for the future. 
What is happening with the incubator in Youngstown? What is happening 
with small business in Delaware? I hear about what people in Mansfield, 
my hometown, are doing to fight back. I hear from small business owners 
who are continuing to do the right thing. I hear from their loyal 
workers who take pride in their work and are valued by their employers. 
They tell us we need a government that similarly values loyalty and 
work ethic.

[[Page S8936]]

  For too long, those in power have simply turned their back on 
American workers. They have ignored their needs and their dreams--the 
dreams of the middle class. They have instead catered to the wealthiest 
Americans. We know that a strong middle class builds a prosperous 
society and is the engine that makes this country go. But it doesn't 
have to be the way we have seen in the last few years where this 
Government in Washington--that allowed the drug companies to write the 
Medicare law; that allowed the oil industry to write energy policy; 
that allows Wall Street to push through job-killing trade agreements--
all of this betrayal of the middle class from George Bush to Dick 
Cheney to John McCain, to far too many of my colleagues in this body 
and down the hall in the House of Representatives--people have had 
enough of this betrayal of the middle class. It doesn't have to be that 
way. The sooner we change direction, the sooner our economic woes will 
be behind us.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont is recognized.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to address the 
Senate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, let me begin by concurring with Senator 
Brown. He raised a very important issue, and that is: In the midst of a 
major economic crisis, when people today--especially senior citizens on 
fixed incomes--are wondering about how they are going to heat their 
homes, how they are going to purchase the food they need--I wonder 
about 3 years ago, had we listened to President Bush, if we had 
listened to John McCain, if we had listened to the Republican 
leadership and we had privatized Social Security--can one begin to 
imagine the anxiety that would be existing all over this country in 
terms of senior citizens wondering what kind of retirement they would 
have, what kind of funding would be there for their remaining years? So 
thank goodness we did not follow the advice of President Bush and John 
McCain and the Republican leadership; thank goodness we kept Social 
Security strong.
  Yesterday I came to the floor to discuss the interconnection of the 
two great crises that are currently facing our country. The first, of 
course, is the financial crisis--the collapse of major Wall Street 
firms--and secondly is the very serious problem of high and volatile 
energy prices, whether it is $3.70 for a gallon of gas to put in your 
car, or whether it is very high oil prices this coming winter to heat 
your home. Both of these problems clearly are having a major impact on 
middle-income families from one end of this country to the other.
  In terms of the financial crisis, the American people are finding it 
harder and harder to get a mortgage or a home equity line of credit. 
They are seeing the equity in their homes going down, and they are 
seeing the values of their savings, including their 401(k) savings, 
plummeting. What anxiety is existing all over this country. People have 
put money into their 401(k), the stock market is going down rapidly, 
and people are wondering what is going to take place for their economic 
future.
  In terms of the energy crisis, the American people have been forced 
to pay tens of billions of dollars more in inflated energy prices 
because of the outrageous price levels caused by speculation occurring 
in unregulated energy markets. We have heard testimony from energy 
economists who are telling us that between 25 percent to 50 percent of 
the cost of a barrel of oil today has nothing to do with supply and 
demand, it has nothing to do with marketplace fundamentals; it has to 
do with speculation on the part of financial institutions that are 
driving oil prices higher, and now, by the way, with that money coming 
out of oil futures, driving prices down, creating a lot of volatility.
  I laid out yesterday the connection between those two crises. Both of 
these crises are tied to the same extreme economic ideology--an 
ideology which says the Government should play no role--or a minimum 
role--in protecting consumers; that we should put all of our trust in 
the honesty and the integrity of the heads of large multinational 
corporations.
  I should mention that both of these crises are also tied to the work 
of one former Member of the U.S. Senate, and that is the former 
chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Phil Gramm of Texas. To a 
significant degree, a lot of what we are experiencing today is related 
to the disastrous changes to Federal law that deregulated both the 
energy industry and the financial industry, and that effort was led by 
former Senator Gramm.
  To recap, as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee in 1999, then-
Senator Phil Gramm, spearheaded legislation that bears his name, and 
that is the so-called Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill that broke down critical 
regulatory safeguards that the Government put in place after the Great 
Depression to prevent exactly what we are experiencing today. Having 
laid the groundwork for our crisis in the financial sector, the very 
next year, amazingly enough, Senator Gramm is credited with slipping 
legislation into a largely unrelated bill that deregulated the 
electronic energy market. Shockingly, when he slipped this measure into 
the law, a measure we now know as the Enron loophole, Senator Gramm's 
wife, Wendy Gramm, had recently been on the board of directors of--you 
guessed it--the Enron Corporation.
  This deregulation of the energy markets has allowed speculators to 
drive up the price of a barrel of oil to as high as $147 and, as I 
mentioned earlier, there are many economists who believe the volatility 
and the high price of oil today is not supply and demand primarily, but 
it is because of speculation on the part of financial institutions and 
hedge funds.
  Now, as bad as things were yesterday, last night they got even worse. 
Last night, the Bush administration nationalized the world's largest 
insurance company: AIG. The Bush administration claimed it had to put 
$85 billion of taxpayer money at risk because AIG's collapse would have 
brought down perhaps our entire economy--the entire economy of this 
country--and had a major impact on the entire world's economy. Let me 
ask the same question about AIG today that I asked yesterday about the 
energy and financial crises this country is facing, and that is: Is 
this bad luck? Why is this happening? We need to understand that, 
because the risks are enormous and the amount of money we are dealing 
with--trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars--is literally 
beyond comprehension. I think very few people can understand the scope 
and the magnitude of what we are dealing with.

  Well, it turns out the AIG situation is closely tied to the same 
rightwing economic ideology that has been pushing us toward economic 
disaster, and the responsibility for AIG's near collapse lies, again, 
with that same philosophy which has been led by former Senator Phil 
Gramm.
  As a very recent online article from Time magazine explains, AIG's 
traditional insurance business seems to be doing well in what they have 
been doing for many years. They are, in fact, making money. But what 
AIG got involved in was more than the traditional insurance business. 
They got involved in risky derivative schemes that about three people 
in the world understand called credit default swaps, or CDS's that 
allow big companies to guarantee each other's risky lending practices. 
This is extremely complicated stuff--a long way away from where we were 
10 or 15 years ago.
  Now in order to give the American people a full understanding of the 
risks posed by these unregulated credit default swaps--unregulated 
credit default swaps--I wish to read a short September 15 article by 
Professor Peter Cohen, a graduate of the Wharton School, that deals 
with the full scope of the problem we face and the role that Senator 
Gramm had in its creation. I apologize to anybody who is listening. 
What is following is technical, it is a bit boring, but when we are 
dealing with trillions of dollars, I think it is important that we try 
to understand this. This is what Professor Cohen writes:

       Lurking in the background of this weekend's collapse of two 
     of Wall Street's biggest names is a $62 trillion segment of 
     the $450 trillion market for derivatives that grew huge 
     thanks to John McCain's chief economic advisor, Phil 
     ``Americans are Whiners'' Gramm.


[[Page S8937]]


  Let me just go through these numbers again, because these numbers are 
so huge. When the Presiding Officer and I represent our State, we fight 
for a few million dollars here and a few million dollars there, and 
that makes a lot of difference to the people of Colorado or the people 
of Vermont. What we are dealing with is so incomprehensible: It is a 
$62 trillion segment of the $450 trillion market for derivatives. Who 
can even understand what that means? A $450 trillion market, what does 
that mean?
  Now, all of this occurred, all of this deregulated activity, of which 
the Government plays no role, took place because in December of 2000, 
Senator Gramm snuck in--snuck in--a 262-page amendment. That is what 
goes on around here. We can sneak in 262-page amendments to a 
government reauthorization bill that created what is now the $62 
trillion market for credit default swaps, or CDS's.
  Continuing to quote:

       I realize it is painful to read about yet another Wall 
     Street acronym, but this is important because it will help us 
     understand why the global financial markets are collapsing. 
     CDSs are like insurance policies for bondholders. In exchange 
     for a premium, the bondholders get insurance in case the 
     bondholder can't pay. . . . In the case of the 1.4 trillion 
dollars' worth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds, the Government's 
nationalization last Sunday triggered the CDSs on those bonds. The 
people who received the CDS premiums are now obligated to deliver those 
bonds to the ones who paid the premiums.

  Professor Cohen continues:

       Gramm's 262-page amendment, dubbed ``The Commodity Futures 
     Modernization Act''--

  We have heard that term--

       ``The Commodity Futures Modernization Act,'' according to 
     the Texas Observer, freed financial institutions from 
     oversight of their CDS transactions.

  That is the important thing, they became deregulated. The Government 
no longer was able to see what was going on.

       ``Prior to its passage, they say, banks underwrote 
     mortgages and were responsible for the risks involved.''

  You went to a bank, you got a mortgage, the bank took responsibility, 
they lost money, they made money, that was the transaction.

       ``Now, through the use of CDSs--which in theory insure the 
     banks against bad debts--those risks are passed along to 
     insurance companies and other investors,'' wrote the Texas 
     Observer.

  Still, in Professor Cohen's article:

       How does this relate to Lehman's bankruptcy? ``CDSs were a 
     key factor in encouraging lenders to feel they could make 
     loans without knowing the risks or whether the loan would be 
     paid back.''

  When you and I were younger, Mr. President, banks knew the people to 
whom they made loans. They didn't give a loan to somebody they knew 
would not be able to pay it back. But that is no longer the case.

       ``The Commodity Futures Modernization Act freed them of 
     Federal oversight . . . '' And it was due to these CDSs that 
     Wall Street held an emergency session yesterday to try to 
     minimize the damage of Lehman's CDSs and other derivatives. 
     Unfortunately, the session did not produce much, thanks to 
     the built-in lack of knowledge of the risks in these 
     transactions that Gramm's legislation ensured. You are going 
     to be reading more and more about CDSs over the months ahead.

  Professor Cohen continues:

       It will become as familiar as the phrase subprime 
     mortgage--

  Which, unfortunately, many of us now are familiar with--

     was in the year 2007. Unfortunately--

  Get this, this is quite amazing--

     there were ``only'' $1.3 trillion worth of subprime mortgages 
     and the CDS market is 48 times bigger than that.

  Forty-eight times bigger than the subprime market--

     and more than four times bigger than the U.S. GDP. And since 
     nobody has ever had to deal with this volume of CDS 
     unwindings, it is impossible to calculate how much they will 
     cost.

  In other words, what has happened as a result of Senator Gramm's 
legislation is, unbelievable amounts of money have been traded, 
accumulated without anybody really knowing what is going on. Now we are 
left trying to pick up the remains of those problems.
  Professor Cohen's article is compelling because it tells us how huge 
this crisis is and why we have every reason to fear that AIG may well 
be just the first of many companies involved in risky investments that 
the American people will have to bail out.
  The time for hand wringing is over. This Congress needs to put an end 
to the radical deregulation that was pushed by Senator Phil Gramm and 
many other Republicans, and there were Democrats who went along with 
that as well. We need to put the safety walls back up in the financial 
services sector. We need to regulate the electronic energy markets. We 
need to end the use of unregulated credit default swaps. In other 
words, what we need to do once again is have the U.S. Government play 
an important role in protecting the people of this country against the 
greed of large corporate interests.
  Unfortunately, the response from the administration and Wall Street 
is not to do that but to push for further consolidation in the 
financial services sector. Here is just an amazing thing. The argument 
we are hearing over and over again is that AIG was too big to fail, and 
what we are now creating are institutions that are even larger than 
AIG. And 10 years from now, when these institutions are threatened with 
collapse, there will be people coming up saying: Oh my goodness, we 
can't allow those to fail; we have to bail those out as well.
  This country can no longer afford companies that are too big to fail. 
If a company is so large that its failure would cause systemic harm to 
our economy, if it is too big to fail, then it is too big to exist. If 
it is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. We need, as a Congress, 
to assess which companies fall in this category. Bank of America is 
certainly one of them. Those companies need to be broken apart. We 
cannot have companies so huge that if they go under they take the world 
economy with them.
  Then once we break them up, if a company wants to act in a risky 
manner, if they want to take risks in order to make some quick bucks, 
that is OK. If they want to take the risk and they want to lose money, 
that is OK. The American people should not have to, and would not be 
under those circumstances, be left to pick up the pieces.
  Finally, in terms of dealing with this unfolding disaster, we need to 
make sure working Americans, the middle class, do not foot the bill. If 
the economic calamity requires a Federal bailout, it should be paid for 
by those people who actually benefited from the reckless behavior of 
people empowered by the extreme economic views of Senator Gramm, 
President Bush, Senator McCain, and many others.
  In other words, the point I am making is that in the last 10 years, 
many of these people have made billions and billions of dollars. It is 
unfair to simply ask the middle-class working families who are trying 
to figure out how they are going to pay their fuel bills, how they are 
going to send their kids to college, to bail out these large 
institutions from which many people made huge amounts of profits.
  We don't talk about this too often, but today the wealthiest one-
tenth of 1 percent earns more income than the bottom 50 percent. The 
top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. And the 
wealthiest 400 Americans in this country have not only seen their 
incomes double, their net worth has increased by $640 billion since 
George W. Bush has been in office.
  Can you believe that? Four hundred families, four hundred people, 
less than the Congress, have seen a $640 billion increase in their 
wealth since President Bush has been in office. And, amazingly, these 
400 families are now worth over $1.5 trillion--400 families. On 
average, they earn over $214 million a year.
  As a result of President Bush's policies, amazingly enough, their tax 
rates have been cut almost in half to only 18 percent on average. 
Amazingly, the wealthiest 400 Americans pay a lower tax rate than most 
police officers, teachers, firefighters, and nurses. So if you are one 
of the very wealthiest people in this country, if you are earning $214 
million a year on average, you pay a lower tax rate than somebody who 
is a police officer, a teacher, a firefighter, or a nurse.
  That may make sense to somebody; it does not make sense to me. What 
does it say about us as a nation when

[[Page S8938]]

the middle class pays a greater percentage of their income in taxes 
than the wealthiest 400 Americans?
  It is this very small segment of our population that has made out 
like bandits--frankly, some of them are bandits--during the Bush 
administration. We have to recognize that when we talk about who is 
going to pay for the bailouts.
  In my view, we need an emergency surtax on those at the very top in 
order to pay for any losses the Federal Government suffers as a result 
of efforts to shore up the economy. It should not be hard-working 
people who are trying to figure out how they are going to keep their 
families economically above water, people who are working longer hours 
for lower wages, people who have lost their health care, people who 
cannot afford to pay their fuel bills this winter. Those are not the 
     people who should be asked to pay for this bailout. If 
     there is a bailout that has to be paid for, it should be 
     the people, the segment of society that has benefited from 
     Bush's economic and tax policies over the last 8 years.
  Before I complete my remarks, I would like to step back for a minute 
and examine this current crisis in the context of whom our Government 
represents.
  What does it say about an administration that is prepared to put $85 
billion at risk to bail out AIG but fights tooth and nail against 
dealing with the economic crises facing working families in this 
country? Mr. President, $85 billion at risk for AIG, some $30 billion 
for Bear Stearns, perhaps trillions for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. For 
those folks there seems to be an endless supply of money. Don't the 
American people deserve a Government that views their economic needs as 
being as important as the health of large corporations and Wall Street 
executives?
  Since President Bush has been in office, nearly 6 million Americans 
have slipped out of the middle class and into poverty. What was the 
administration's response? Was there a bailout for those people who 
lost good-paying jobs and are now working for significantly lower 
wages? Did President Bush come and say we have to protect those kids in 
a society which has the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major 
country? Are we going to bail out those families? I didn't hear that 
from the White House.
  Over 7 million Americans have lost their health insurance. More than 
4 million Americans have lost their pensions. Over 3 million 
manufacturing jobs have been lost. Total consumer debt has more than 
doubled since President Bush has been in office. Median income for 
working-age Americans has gone down by over $2,000 after inflation. 
Where has the Bush administration been in bailing out those families? 
Where has the Bush administration been in saying we are going to 
provide health care to all Americans? I didn't hear them come forward.
  But when it is AIG, when it is Bear Stearns, my goodness, how quickly 
they respond. If you are a CEO of a large insurance company, they are 
there for you. But if you are a working mother whose kid does not have 
any health insurance: I am sorry, we can't afford to take care of you.
  I can go on and on about the priorities established by this 
administration. The American people should know this President wanted 
to cut emergency food assistance for nearly a half million seniors, 
mothers, and children. He wanted to cut job training for 161,000 people 
and cut childcare assistance for 200,000 children. There is not enough 
money to take care of those people. I guess they don't make a whole lot 
of campaign contributions.
  The President wanted to raise fees on veterans getting health care, 
which we, of course, stopped. He fought giving 3 million children 
access to health care. He wanted to cut $1 billion from rural housing 
when we have a major housing crisis in rural America.
  No money for children who don't have any health insurance, no money 
for people living in dilapidated housing, no money available for 
veterans health care. We can't do that. But if you are AIG, if you are 
a large corporation, this Government is there for you.
  These people, working families, seniors, veterans, the unemployed--
their problems do not warrant, apparently, an urgent response from the 
President. But big insurance companies, big investment houses, 
companies that get engaged in risky subprime lending and credit swaps, 
my, my, how quickly we respond to them.
  The American people deserve better. We need to reject the failed 
economic policies and priorities of George W. Bush and John McCain. 
Americans need a Government that is not going to let the rich and large 
corporations loop our economy. Americans need a Government that will 
put regulatory firewalls back up in the financial sector and end the 
use of unregulated credit swaps. Americans need a Government that is 
going to prevent speculators from robbing them at the gas 
pump. Americans need a government that breaks up companies that are too 
big to fail. Americans need a government that is going to view their 
problems as seriously as they view the problems of corporate America. 
Our job is to give the American people that kind of government.

  Mr. President, I yield the floor.

                          ____________________