[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 77 (Tuesday, May 19, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H5770]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




     WALL STREET ROUND 2: HEARTLAND INDUSTRIALISTS VS. WALL STREET 
                               FINANCIERS

  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, who thrust Chrysler into bankruptcy? A few 
Wall Street investors who wanted more return on their investment as 
opposed to taking the government's deal.
  Who can't get loans to pay their employees or retool their businesses 
in this new economy? Heartland industrialists.
  Throughout our country, and especially in regions where manufacturing 
built the middle class, the credit crisis has subjugated production to 
Wall Street financiers. The warning signs were present when the Big 
Three automakers were changed from production companies to cash cows 
and transformed into financing companies back in the 1990s.
  In Toledo, Ohio, automobile production started 100 years ago when 
John North Willys bought the Pope Motor Company factory and started 
turning out automobiles in our region.
  When General George Marshall ordered production of a rough-and-ready 
vehicle for American troops to win World War II, Willys won the 
competition, and we made hundreds of thousands of Jeeps in Toledo, and 
we continue to do that today. Toledo workers make the best-known brand 
in the world.
  Control of Chrysler, however, went to Daimler, and then to an 
uncaring hedge fund known as Cerberus.
  Who is Cerberus? No one knows. Worse yet, Cerberus even has a seat on 
the trust created to handle the United Auto Workers' 55 percent 
investment in Chrysler. But the UAW doesn't even have a seat, and it's 
their money.
  Wall Street, again, will call the shots, not the people whose money 
they hold.
  By the late 1990s, the auto companies were profitable on paper, but 
only through their financing arms, because their Wall Street handlers 
had rigged the Tax Code, through this place, to benefit car leasing, 
fleet leasing, and financial activities. And you can trace the recent 
demise of GM and Chrysler, discounting the equally devastating trade 
and tax policies that bore down on them, to the year that they became 
financing companies, not production companies.
  Wall Street started to accumulate and milk the wealth of these firms. 
When GMAC became a mortgage lender and sucked into Wall Street's 
subprime lending in the late 1990s, then acquired by Cerberus, their 
fate was sealed. Chrysler Financing is now subsumed under Cerberus, 
too, as has been GMAC for quite a while.
  It is true that the public wanted more energy-efficient vehicles, and 
the Big Three failed to produce them. However, this goes back to 
management who were in cahoots with Wall Street and the role of Big 
Oil.
  You can look at all of the green patents that these firms filed, 
evidence of the industrial people, men and women inside these companies 
trying to beat back the Wall Street house.
  Why, in Europe, are the majority of cars diesel, but not here?
  Why, in Brazil, are flex-fuel vehicles made by GM the norm but not 
here?
  I will tell you why. Because lots of people made money off the ``gas 
hog'' cars of America. Global oil companies certainly did. And as oil 
companies merged and went global, many Arab sheiks got filthy rich by 
recirculating their petro dollars through, guess where, our own Wall 
Street houses. Their wealth grew so huge they constitute one-seventh of 
reinvested global capital that today props up our economy.
  This goes way back to the time of Richard Nixon and Secretary of 
State Henry Kissinger, whose secret U.S.-Saudi agreements were signed 
through the Treasury to denominate Middle East oil sales in dollars, 
thus assuring petro dollar reinvestment in this country's financial 
system and saddling the American people with gas hogs for years to 
come, because gas hogs meant more oil sales. The more oil sold, the 
more Wall Street got petro dollars to recirculate.
  Gradually, we became more and more embroiled in the Middle East, 
where our troops stand today, over 150,000 of them. And more energy-
efficient cars would mean less deployment of U.S. troops to places they 
shouldn't be in the first place. But Wall Street doesn't like that 
game. They'd lose too much money and their greed would not be fed.
  Beyond diminishing our Nation's innovation, this dependence also wed 
our country to a diminishing resource found in these unstable, 
undemocratic nations. For too long, it is has compromised the integrity 
of the industrial might of regions like I represent in a critical 
sector of our economy, as well as our defense base.
  What great industrial Nation does not have a thriving automotive and 
vehicular sector?
  Wall Street continues to sell out our heartland. Let me repeat that. 
Wall Street continues to sell out our heartland, sell out our 
companies, sell out our workers. I hope the American people begin 
paying attention to whom really has the reins of power in this country, 
and it's time the American people reassumed that power to themselves.

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