[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 134 (Tuesday, September 22, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9650-S9651]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            ANGRY AMERICANS

  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, my impression is that the American people 
are angry. In my view, they have every right in the world to be angry 
because what we are seeing in our country today is the kind of economic 
suffering and pain that we have not seen in this country since the 
Great Depression.
  Recently, last week, Ben Bernanke, who is the Chairman of the Federal 
Reserve, said he thought it ``very likely that the recession had 
ended.''
  I would suggest to Mr. Bernanke that before he makes statements like 
that, he might want to talk to the tens and tens of millions of people 
in this country who are suffering economically and who, in many 
respects, are not going to see a better day soon unless we as a 
Congress get our act together.
  When you ask why the American people are angry, let me suggest to you 
why that is so. We went through 8 years which, in my view, were led by 
the worst administration in the modern history of the country. This is 
what happened during those 8 years before the financial crisis of last 
year. During the Bush-Cheney administration over 8 million Americans 
slipped out of the middle class and into poverty; median household 
income declined by over $2,100; over 6.5 million Americans lost their 
health insurance; 5.4 million manufacturing jobs disappeared; and 4 
million American workers lost their pensions. That is between 2000 and 
2008.

  Colleagues may have seen the other day in USA Today on their front 
pages unbelievable statistics which were geared toward age groups of 
young American workers seeing, during that 8-year period, huge declines 
in their median family income. That was before the financial crisis.
  As we all know, about a year ago, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson 
came before the Congress and essentially said: I know that for 7 years 
we were telling you how robust and great the American economy was, but 
it seems we may have made a little bit of a mistake. If you don't give 
us $700 billion in the next few days, it appears that the entire 
world's financial system might collapse. It seems we may have made a 
mistake.
  Thank God the financial system of the country and the world did not 
collapse. But on Wall Street, because of the greed, the 
irresponsibility, and the illegal actions of a handful of CEOs at the 
head of huge financial institutions, we have seen the most significant 
economic decline in this country since the 1930s. Since the beginning 
of the recession in December of 2007, 7.4 million Americans have lost 
their jobs. The official unemployment rate is 9.7 percent. Let me give 
a statistic which I think is enormously powerful and extremely 
frightening. If we count people who are officially declared as 
unemployed and if we add to that number those people who have given up 
looking for work, who are no longer counted as unemployed, and if we 
add to that number those people who want to work in full-time jobs but 
are now working part-time jobs, what we are looking at is 26 million 
Americans who are unemployed or underemployed. That is 17 percent of 
working-age Americans. As bad as the official statistic of 9.7 percent 
is, the reality is a lot worse than that. When we wonder why people are 
angry, I think when 26 million Americans are unemployed or 
underemployed, when millions more have lost their homes, when they have 
lost their pensions, when they have lost their health insurance, those 
people have a right to be angry.
  In my view, we have been far too easy in terms of our response to 
what the people on Wall Street have done. It is beyond my comprehension 
that we did not begin an investigation weeks or at least months after 
the financial meltdown and ask what the cause of that meltdown was, who 
was responsible, hold them accountable, and if they broke the law, they 
deserved to find out what the American penal system is all about.
  What we have to do right now--and I know there is an investigation 
beginning--is a thorough investigation--it is already very late in the 
process, and we should have done it earlier--to start holding those 
people who have caused so much suffering accountable, to understand 
that they just can't get away with it. What amazes me is that we have a 
handful of people whose greed and recklessness have caused this crisis. 
And have you heard one of them come before the American people to say: 
I am sorry. My greed, my recklessness, my illegal behavior has caused 
so much suffering in this country and around the world. I want to 
apologize.
  On the contrary, what I have heard is lobbyists all over this place 
and the financial institutions spending millions and millions of 
dollars trying to make sure we do nothing and that they are able to 
continue doing what they did, the same old ballgame which caused the 
crisis in the first place.
  The first thing I think we need to do is a real investigation of this 
financial crisis. If there are CEOs, who made hundreds of millions of 
dollars, responsible for this disaster, this financial crisis, they 
have to be accountable. If they broke the law, they have to go to jail.
  Second, in terms of real financial reform, I am more than aware that 
Congress passed legislation trying to bring more transparency and 
integrity to the credit card industry. All of us have received 
prospectuses from credit card companies telling us if we sign on the 
bottom line, we will have zero-interest-rate credit. They have sent out 
billions of these prospectuses every single year. Meanwhile, in tiny 
print on page 4, it appears they could raise their rates to any level 
they want for any reason. We have begun to deal with that, but we have 
not gone far enough.
  When major financial institutions are charging the American people 29 
percent interest rates on their credit cards, 30 percent interest rates 
in terms of payday lending, 40, 50 percent interest rates, we have to 
call it what it is. That is loan sharking. In the old days, a loan 
shark was somebody who lent you money and if you didn't pay it back on 
time, they broke your kneecaps. Now we have these guys on Wall Street 
who are doing exactly the same thing, and we call that providing 
credit. But it is not. It is loan sharking. It is usury. We need to 
bring back usury legislation, which we used to have but was done away 
with by a Supreme Court decision which allowed companies to go to 
States that don't have usury laws to be protected in terms of being 
able to charge high interest rates all over the country.
  I have introduced legislation which imposes a maximum of 15 percent 
interest on credit cards. The reason I have done that is, in fact, 
credit unions for many decades now have been operating under that law. 
It is not the credit unions that are coming here for massive bailouts. 
It is our friends on Wall Street. I think if it has worked for the 
credit unions, it can work for private banks as well. We have passed 
credit card legislation which was a step forward, but I think we have 
to take another big step. We have to say that there has to be a 
maximum, a cap on interest rates. I believe an appropriate one is 15 
percent.
  Another issue we have to deal with is the phenomenon of too big to 
fail. The reason we provided hundreds of billions of dollars in a 
bailout to Wall Street is that the experts believed--the Secretary of 
the Treasury and the head of the Fed--that if we allowed these huge 
financial institutions to fail, they would bring down the entire 
system. That was a year ago. Maybe you know more than I do, but I am 
not aware that we have taken any steps to begin breaking up these large 
financial institutions. If they were too big to fail a year ago, they 
are too big to fail right now.
  What we have seen--and there have been a number of articles on this--
is that these huge financial institutions have become even larger. What 
sense is that? We have to begin to learn what Teddy Roosevelt did 100 
years ago. We have to start breaking up these guys. Because if we 
don't, we will be back here again, except next time the bailout will be 
even larger, because the financial crisis will be that much more 
severe.
  Furthermore, it goes without saying that for years Alan Greenspan and 
Bob Rubin and all of those people who told us that the secret to 
financial success in America was to deregulate Wall Street, that what 
we really had to do

[[Page S9651]]

was to get the government off of the backs of all of these big Wall 
Street companies, we had to do away with Glass-Steagall legislation, we 
had to allow investment houses to merge with commercial banks, to merge 
with insurance companies--all of that was going to be wonderful in 
terms of creating wealth and prosperity for the American people.
  Our friends on Wall Street spent billions of dollars on lobbying to 
get that through. I was one of those in the House vigorously opposed to 
that approach. Needless to say, it is time to rethink that and, in a 
sensible way, to start the reregulation of Wall Street.
  The bottom line is, these people on Wall Street are by and large 
concerned about one thing, and that is making as much money as they 
possibly can for themselves. And they have done phenomenally well. Some 
years ago 25 percent of all profits in America went to Wall Street, 
which has relatively few people. Obviously, as I think everybody knows, 
you had hedge fund guys making a billion dollars a year, CEOs making 
hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They have done very well. They 
don't care that manufacturing is disintegrating in America, that 
millions of workers have lost their jobs. They don't care that small 
businesses can't get credit. They don't care about trying to build a 
productive economy where working people are producing real products 
that people can consume. That is not where these guys are at. They are 
at it for short-term gains. If anybody believes otherwise, they don't 
understand history.
  We have to set out a number of rules by which they have to play or 
else we are looking to bring back exactly what we just went through.
  Another issue we have to deal with, as we get to financial reform, is 
the Fed. I am a member of the Budget Committee. Last year, when Mr. 
Bernanke came before the committee, I asked him very simply if he could 
tell me which financial institutions were the recipients of some $2 
trillion in zero interest loans. During the financial crisis, Mr. 
Bernanke and the Fed provided $2 trillion to large financial 
institutions. I asked him a pretty simple question: Can you please tell 
me which financial institutions received that money? I don't think that 
is a terribly radical question, putting $2 trillion of taxpayer money 
at risk. And he said: No, I can't tell you.
  On that particular day, I introduced legislation that would make him 
tell us. It is beyond comprehension that we are putting at risk 
trillions of dollars going to institutions, and we don't know who they 
are, what kind of conflicts of interest exist. We don't know what the 
terms of payment are. It is beyond comprehension.
  On this issue, I must confess, I am working with somebody whose 
politics and ideology are very different than mine, my old friend Ron 
Paul, who is a very conservative Republican in the House. Ron and I 
worked on some issues when I was there. He and I are working together 
on two pieces of legislation on the Fed. But one of them is going to 
tell the Fed they can't give away trillions of dollars with the 
American people not knowing what it is. We need an order to the Fed. We 
need transparency in the Fed, and we need accountability in the Fed.
  There is another issue we want to deal with, and that is oil 
speculation. I come from a cold weather State. Many people heat with 
oil. Obviously, all over the country people are filling up their gas 
tanks to get to work. We have reason to believe that one of the causes 
of the volatility in oil prices has to do with speculation coming from 
Wall Street where our friends there are investing in oil futures. We 
have to begin to control that speculation so that people are not paying 
outrageous prices, heating their homes in winter or filling up their 
gas tanks.
  Lastly, the issue of Wall Street in one sense is not radically 
different from the issue of health care or many other important issues, 
the incredible power these special interests have. The banking and 
insurance industries have spent over $5 billion on campaign 
contributions and lobbying activities over the past decade in support 
of deregulation, and they are spending even more to try to prevent 
Congress from seriously regulating their industries. The American 
people want change. They want Congress to reform Wall Street. They want 
those people who caused this economic crisis to be held accountable. 
They want to make sure we prevent the country from ever going into a 
situation such as we were in last year. Whether we can do it remains to 
be seen, given the power of Wall Street and the incredible amounts of 
money they spend on campaign contributions and on lobbying.
  Which brings me to the issue of campaign finance reform and my strong 
view that we need public funding of elections.
  So, Mr. President, I just did want to say a word as to my perception 
of why the American people are angry, the fact that they have every 
reason in the world to be angry because in our great country what we 
are seeing, for the first time in our lifetimes, is the real likelihood 
that our kids will have a lower standard of living than our generation, 
and that is not something we should be happy about.
  We have to ask the question why. We have to ask what policies 
contributed to that decline of the middle class, that increase in 
poverty. We have to ask why we are the only country in the world that 
does not have a national health care program guaranteeing health care 
to all people, why we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any 
major country on Earth, why we have the greatest gap between the rich 
and everybody else of any major country on Earth.
  We have to ask those questions, and we need to stand up to powerful 
special interests in bringing about the kinds of reforms we need.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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