[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 39 (Thursday, March 5, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H3032]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            INHUMANE ECONOMY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Mr. Speaker, we live amid an inhumane economy. We need 
to look no further for proof than the unemployment figures released 
today from my home State of Michigan, an unemployment number that has 
climbed to 11.6 percent and has seen tens of thousands of my friends 
and neighbors lose their jobs.
  As people know, Michigan is an automotive and manufacturing State. We 
get sicker quicker, and we heal more slowly in difficult times. But I 
encourage them to make no mistake, what happens in Michigan will happen 
in the rest of America. And we cannot let that continue.
  One of the things that has caused the current crisis we are in is a 
theory. Many of us have heard it. Namely, it is the theory that some 
institutions are too big to fail. And yet, after the loss of millions 
of jobs and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of taxpayer 
dollars, we find out that these institutions were, in fact, not too big 
to fail; they were too big to succeed.
  Over the decades, this problem has arisen, and yet, if we look back 
over those same decades, there were voices of reason warning us that we 
should seek a more humane economy. And I quote one of those 
individuals:
  ``Even as the drive toward bigness (and) concentration . . . has 
reached heights never before dreamt of in the past, we have come 
suddenly to realize how heavy a price we have paid: in overcrowding and 
pollution of the atmosphere, and impersonality; in growth of 
organizations, particularly government, so large and powerful that 
individual effort and importance seem lost; and in loss of the values 
of nature and community and local diversity that found their nurture in 
the smaller towns and rural areas of America. And we can see . . . that 
the price has been too high. Bigness, loss of community, organizations 
and society grown far past the human scale--these are the besetting 
sins which threaten to paralyze our very capacity to act, or our 
ability to preserve the traditions and values of our past in a time of 
swirling, constant change.

                              {time}  1945

  ``Therefore, the time has come when we must actively fight bigness 
and overconcentration, and seek instead to bring the engines of 
government, of technology, of the economy, fully under the control of 
our citizens, to recapture and reinforce the values of a more human 
time and place.
  ``It is not more bigness that should be our goal. We must attempt, 
rather, to bring people back to the warmth of community, to the worth 
of individual effort and responsibility, and of individuals working 
together as a community to better their lives and their children's 
future. It is the lesson that government can follow the leadership of 
private citizens; that men who are citizens in the full sense of the 
word need not belong to the government in order to benefit their 
community. And it is the lesson that if this country is to move ahead, 
it will not be by making everything bigger, not by piling all our 
people further on top of one another in huge cities, not by reducing 
the citizen to the role of passive consumer and recipient of the 
official vision, the official product.'' These were the words spoken on 
September 17, 1966 of the junior Senator from New York, Robert Francis 
Kennedy.
  Today, as we seek a better world and a more humane economy, we should 
remember his words. For after trillions of dollars in potential 
government expenditures, the amassing and concentration of power in 
Washington, we can see that we are no better off, as the unemployment 
figures in Michigan portend. What we really have to do is realize that 
as the dot-com bubble was replaced by the housing bubble, we must not 
attempt to replace the housing bubble with a government bubble. For 
when that bubble bursts, what will be left?
  What we need to do is seek a way to free the entrepreneurial spirit 
of the American people, to allow them, with their own hands and genius, 
to rebuild their lives, to rebuild and restore order, opportunity, and 
prosperity to our chaotic economy, and to preserve the cherished 
America we all call home. We will.

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