[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 62 (Monday, April 27, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H4755-H4756]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                GIVE AMERICA BACK TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, tonight as General Motors, Chrysler, and the 
United Auto Workers struggle with the imposed government deadlines that 
will determine their survival, I wish to share with you Harold 
Meyerson's article ``Break Up the Banks'' from The Washington Post last 
Friday.
  You see, what has been holding up the deal to save the American auto 
industry, save America's jobs, and breathe life into communities where 
wealth is actually created and not just traded away is something not 
much talked about, and that is the megabanks, centered, yes, on Wall 
Street, again.
  Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase that were huge Treasury bailout 
recipients, billions and billions and billions of dollars, who turned a 
profit this year, by the way, are the leading culprits for the rest of 
the banks in slowing down or impeding the Obama administration's 
efforts to restructure Chrysler. Currently, Chrysler's bonds found on 
the books of Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase are trading at 15 cents on 
the dollar. Despite increasingly better offers than that, Citigroup and 
J.P. Morgan Chase insist that they and their fellow banks are entitled 
to more, more of your money. More of our money. That is greed in its 
purest form. More, more, and more for them and their cronies, and less 
and less and less for everyone else. They have bilked America on the 
front end and then on the back end.
  First, the front end by restricting the availability of credit to 
consumers looking to purchase cars and car dealers looking to finance 
their showrooms. Just squeeze them down out of existence by shutting 
off their credit. And now at the back end by denying the restructuring 
of GM and Chrysler's debt. Yes, they keep America's cash but then deny 
us the ability to access it in the marketplace to buy cars and 
furnishing dealers' showroom floors. Very clever. It's a tourniquet at 
both ends.
  Wall Street's idea is to bleed Chrysler retirees, Fiat, and the 
American taxpayers dry. They care for their own interest at the expense 
of the national interest.
  The American automobile industry is just one victim of Wall Street's 
meltdown. The industry is the lifeblood of so many communities, and 
they were just on the cusp of a new green engine era, and they have 
been forced to their knees.
  Of course, the banksters bail out their friends, firms like AIG. 
Beyond mere life support, they were handed over $70 billion. That's 
putting all the auto bailout together and multiplying it times five. 
Not only does AIG have special access to policymakers and your tax 
dollars; they didn't have to take any haircuts.
  Compare that to what is being asked of autoworkers: first, give up 
your job, move out of your community, cut your wages and your health 
benefits too, and, oh, by the way, we want to go after your retirement 
benefits, even the widows and retirees out of those firms.
  Meanwhile, AIG pensioners, well, they're alive and well. Their health 
care benefits are not threatened. Their counterparties are kept whole. 
While hardworking blue collar America is squeezed dry, they're just as 
happy as clams.
  Right now it's Wall Street versus the American people. Surely those 
that work hard and make things with their hands and end up with all the 
injuries to prove it, with bodily wear and tear, don't they deserve 
some regard? Don't they have some rights for three decades in an auto 
plant? Well, Citigroup, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, HSBC, Wells 
Fargo, and the rest of the high fliers up there on Wall Street, they 
want to deny these folks the right to their hard-earned benefits and 
wages.
  American workers built and continue to build America, while Wall 
Street destroys not just capital; they destroy industries. They destroy 
communities. They destroy people's lives. Now, we can see who has that 
power. But that isn't what America was supposed to be

[[Page H4756]]

all about. When you work hard and you build something real for the 
Nation's might, you expect a fair deal. And that was supposed to be the 
American Dream, for the many, not just the privileged few. Today a real 
industry, auto production, gets stomped on, chewed up, spit out because 
Wall Street robbed the kitty. They stole our hard-earned money and 
continue to beg, borrow, and steal from American citizens. Sales in 
business after business, including the auto industry, have gone down 
because the bailout recipients didn't make loans. Credit is frozen. 
People can't buy cars. The Big Three is suffering. So what does Wall 
Street do? It gets its friends, its shills, on the op-ed pages and 
other media to shift the blame.
  So who gets the blame for the strangled auto industry? Is it Detroit 
that's the problem? No, my friends. It's Wall Street that's the 
problem. And it's time that we put America back on its feet again. And 
as Mr. Meyerson suggests in his very last sentence, pass the anti-trust 
laws we need in order to scale down these banks and give America back 
to the American people.

               [From the Washington Post, Apr. 24, 2009]

                           Break Up the Banks

                          (By Harold Meyerson)


                          This week in banking

       Our leading financial institutions announced that they had 
     actually made a profit in the year's first quarter through 
     the creative manipulation of rules and regulations, lobbied 
     Congress to preserve their ability to raise credit card 
     interest rates just for the heck of it and opposed the 
     administration's plan for restructuring Chrysler, which would 
     save some jobs and honor pension obligations, in the hope 
     that they can redeem the company's bonds at a higher level 
     than they're trading at just now. And, to round out the 
     picture, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that 
     lending at the 19 largest TARP recipients was 23 percent 
     lower in February--by which time these banks had received 
     hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds intended to 
     enable them to lend more--than it had been in October, before 
     the floodgates of tax dollars had been fully opened.
       This is what our major banks are up to at a time when it is 
     our largess that is keeping them afloat.
       The week began with a burst of creative accounting. 
     Citigroup, into which we've sunk more dough than any other 
     company, with the possible exception of AIG, claimed a profit 
     for the first quarter of this year because its bonded debt 
     has lost value, which under the rules of accountancy enabled 
     it to register a one-time gain equal to that lost value, 
     because Citi could, in theory, buy back its own bonds for 
     less. J.P. Morgan Chase, whose fire-sale purchase of Bear 
     Stearns we taxpayers backed, declared a similar profit 
     because of a similar decline in the value of its bonds.
       As events would have it, the very same Citigroup and J.P. 
     Morgan Chase are the lead negotiators for the banks that are 
     objecting to the Obama administration's efforts to 
     restructure Chrysler. Chrysler's bonds, which these banks 
     hold, are trading at 15 cents on the dollar, the amount the 
     government offered to pay the banks in its initial proposal 
     to restore the company to viability. Yesterday, the 
     government upped that amount to 22 cents, plus a 5 percent 
     equity share in the company. Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, 
     however, insist that they and their fellow banks are entitled 
     to more, though that ``more'' could only come at the expense 
     of Fiat (the auto company that is providing the new car lines 
     and technology without which Chrysler will fold) or the 
     company's retirees (to whose health-care fund Chrysler is 
     legally obligated) who built the company, or the taxpayers 
     who are keeping Chrysler alive.
       Instead of playing Scrooge (and a publicly subsidized 
     Scrooge, at that), what the banks should do is lend Chrysler 
     their accountants. Maybe they'd show that the company turned 
     a profit last year.
       The banks' lobbyists, meanwhile, have been hard at work, 
     too. Bills to limit credit card fees and penalties--my 
     favorite fee is the one banks charge some customers for 
     making (not missing, making) a payment--are moving through 
     both houses of Congress, but the Senate version has yet to 
     receive any support from Republicans. A bill that would 
     enable bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms has also 
     hit a wall in the Senate, with Republican leaders claiming 
     the backing of all 41 of their members to filibuster the bill 
     when it comes to the floor.
       President Obama told representatives of the major banks 
     yesterday that he backs the limits on credit card charges. 
     The question here is whether the administration and 
     congressional Democrats will use this issue to go after the 
     Republicans, whose decision to align themselves with the 
     banks, particularly on the issue of credit card fees, is 
     incomprehensibly dumb even by their standards. Socially 
     liberal bankers may be a financial mainstay of the new-model 
     Democratic Party, but if the Democratic Senate and House 
     campaign committees don't run against the Republicans for 
     backing the moral sewer and economic disaster that is our 
     modern banking industry, they will be derelict in their 
     political duties.
       And that should just be the beginning. The Democrat in the 
     White House and the Democrats on the Hill are committed to 
     legislation that regulates our dysfunctional wards in the 
     banking industry, but regulations by themselves won't solve 
     the problem of the banks being too big to fail--and so big 
     that they dominate campaign finance and, with it, much of the 
     business of lawmaking. We need to amend our antitrust laws so 
     we can scale down banks to the point that they no longer 
     imperil our economic and political systems. As things stand 
     now, it's we who are serving their needs, not they who are 
     serving ours. It's time to turn that around.

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