[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 6 (Wednesday, January 20, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10-S12]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              THE ECONOMY

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, there has been a lot happening in this 
country with respect to politics and the economy over these past 
months, and I know there is great angst and concern across this 
country. There are questions: When will America get the bounce back in 
its step? These are troublesome times, for sure, for a lot of reasons, 
but I am convinced we will find ways to put America back on track. I am 
convinced of that.
  You know, you go back a couple hundred years in American history, and 
this country has been through some very tough times but always--
always--rebounds. There has always been a sense of optimism that the 
future will be better than the past, that kids will have it better than 
their parents. I am convinced of that.
  I think the American people have plenty to be steamed about, and they 
need to find ways to let off that steam. They have a right to be 
steamed, and let me describe a bit of it.
  One year ago, this President took office and he inherited an economic 
wreck. That is just a fact. The question at that moment was, will this 
economy completely collapse? That wreck was caused by a lot of things, 
but deciding to go to war and not paying for a penny of it year after 
year--everybody knows better than that. You can't do that. Hiring 
regulators who were boasting that they weren't willing to regulate, 
saying to the big shots on Wall Street, the speculators, the big 
investment bankers, and others: Do whatever you want. We won't watch. 
The sky is the limit. We don't care. Now we see the carnage that 
results from that: derivatives--instruments that derive value from 
something else--CDOs, mortgage-backed securities, synthetic 
derivatives. Do you know what a synthetic derivative is? That is 
something that doesn't have any value of any kind. It is just a wager. 
You might as well put a craps table in the middle of an investment bank 
lobby and say to them: You don't have to go to Las Vegas, you can 
gamble here. And by the way, you can gamble with other people's money, 
not your own. But even investment banks and FDIC-insured banks have 
been gambling on their own proprietary accounts on derivatives. We 
ought to know better than that. So what happens is the regulators give 
a green light to that kind of rancid behavior, and it steers this 
country into an unbelievable bubble of speculation. Then the center 
pole of the tent collapses, the economy nearly collapses,

[[Page S11]]

and a whole lot of the American people are paying for it. The fact is, 
these folks fleeced America. It is the great bank robbery in American 
history.
  When I talk about big investment banks and some others, the community 
banks out there weren't involved in this. Go to most of your hometown 
banks and take a look at how they are doing. They are doing just fine 
because they weren't involved in these sorts of shenanigans. It was the 
biggest financial firms in this country that steered this country into 
the ditch, and it started, yes, with mortgage brokers and mortgage 
banks and investment banks and hedge funds and derivatives traders. All 
of them steered this country into the ditch. By the way, now they are 
driving the getaway car, going to the bank to deposit their big 
bonuses. They got big bonuses even while their firms lost a lot of 
money. Now, all of a sudden, many of the firms that would have 
collapsed were it not for the help of the American people are now 
earning record profits and set to pay the biggest bonuses in history in 
the next few weeks. That is unbelievable, and in my judgment, it 
shouldn't be allowed.
  In my judgment, we have to do something about this, and one of the 
pieces of the agenda in front of us is to reform this system of finance 
and try to wring out the unbelievable orgy of speculation in this 
system that puts the American economy and the American people at risk. 
So one of the pieces of this agenda at this point is so-called 
financial reform legislation.
  As I said, I am convinced that while this ship of state has a lot of 
leaks, we can fix it and set it right and set it back on course, but it 
is not going to be done by revisionist history of the past by some, by 
those who put their hands over their eyes and plug their ears and 
decide, you know, we are not interested in learning the lessons of the 
past.

  This President inherited a wreck. He may not have done every single 
thing right in the last year, but I will tell you this: He took action 
to try to put a foundation under this economy to prevent its collapse, 
and I think he deserves some credit for that. Had he done nothing after 
walking in the White House door, the Federal budget deficit was going 
to be $1.3 trillion. That is what this President was left with from the 
previous administrations.
  So, as I said, we have a lot of work to do, and it is going to 
require the cooperation of people in this Chamber. There has not been 
much cooperation recently. This Chamber has been pretty divided. You 
know, I have I guess dozens of times quoted Mark Twain when he was 
asked once by someone if he would engage in a debate. And he 
immediately said: Yes, if I can take the negative side. And they said: 
Well, we have not even told you the subject. He said: That doesn't 
matter. The subject doesn't matter. The negative side will take no 
preparation for me. And so it is here in this Chamber--the negative 
side saying no to every single initiative, even those initiatives that 
I believe saved this economy from collapse. But we need to do better 
than that. We need to work together and find ways, in a bipartisan 
manner, to cooperate for this country's benefit.
  So what are the issues? Well, I just mentioned financial reform. We 
have to fix this system of ours. The fact is, the same firms that 
steered this country into the ditch, the same people, the same 
interests are doing exactly what they did before: trading on their own 
proprietary accounts and taking on massive amounts of risk. We have to 
decide whether we should separate investment banking from FDIC-insured 
banking. We have to decide if you are too big to fail, you are just 
flatout too big. We have to decide those things in a financial reform 
bill that comes to the floor of the Senate.
  The American people are concerned about a lot of things--first and 
foremost, jobs. There is no social program in this country that is as 
important as a job that pays well, in my judgment. A good job that pays 
well makes everything else possible for families. So we need to focus 
like a laser on trying to create jobs once again in this country and 
put people back on payrolls. If we want to do something for the 
economic health of both families and America, it is good jobs that pay 
well, with some security and some benefits. There is no better tonic 
than that.
  It is also the case that we need to focus like a laser on this issue 
of deficits and debt because the fact is, we were left with an economy 
that is not sustainable with respect to the current deficits. It just 
isn't. You can't fight wars without paying for them. You just can't do 
that. You can't enact programs without paying for them. And when you 
fall into a very deep recession and your revenues dry up and you have 
$400 billion a year less in revenue--because of unemployment and many 
other stabilizing programs that try to help people who have been laid 
off and who are in trouble, you have $400 billion more in outlays--and 
you run into giant Federal budget deficits, we have to fix that. We 
have to do that because this course is not sustainable.
  There is one other issue I want to talk about for a moment. I hope 
that early on in this year, we will do something else that is important 
to the economic strength of America, and that is to pass an energy bill 
that moves in the direction of giving us the freedom from foreign oil. 
Let me describe why this is important in the context of trying to also 
fix what is wrong in this economy. We are a nation that uses a 
substantial amount of oil. We stick little straws in this planet every 
day and suck out oil. We suck out about 85 million barrels of oil a day 
from this planet called Earth. Of the 85 million or 84 million barrels 
of oil a day, one-fourth of it is used in this little place on the 
planet called the United States of America. We need one-fourth of all 
the oil that is produced every day just to keep America going, and a 
substantial amount of that oil is produced in areas of the world that 
don't like us very much, areas of the world that are very troubled. So 
we have great vulnerability with respect to our nation's energy 
security.
  The fact is, energy powers this country's economy. We don't think 
about it. We get up every single day and we flick on a switch, we plug 
something into a wall socket, we turn a key in an ignition. In dozens 
of ways, beginning when we first step out of bed and turn on the light, 
we use energy, and we use a lot of it. So the question is, What can 
give this country some energy security? Being 70 percent dependent on 
foreign oil? Certainly not. By the way, in addition to getting nearly 
70 percent of our oil from other countries, nearly 70 percent of the 
oil is used in our transportation fleet.
  So what do we do about all that? The fact is, we passed the Energy 
bill out of the Energy Committee, about 6, 7 months ago here in the 
Senate, and that Energy bill, in my judgment, has a lot to commend it. 
I believe that early on in this Congress, the President and the Senate 
ought to decide we are going to take up this bill. It is bipartisan. We 
should pass this legislation and give America another step in the 
direction of being less dependent on foreign oil.
  It is also about jobs. You create a lot of jobs by new production and 
conservation systems and so on.
  Let me describe what is in this legislation. The legislation deals 
with increasing production of energy here at home. It also increases 
conservation and efficiency and maximizing the production of renewable 
energy. It also creates the first ever national renewable electricity 
standard, which means that a certain percentage of our electricity to 
come from renewable energy. All that is in this legislation and it has 
already been passed by the Senate Energy Committee on a bipartisan 
vote. Let me start for a moment with some good news.
  Mr. President, could I be notified at the end of 15 minutes, please, 
of my presentation.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. DORGAN. Let me start with some good news because we almost never 
hear good news these days in America. All the news in America is about 
what went wrong, the old saying about bad news is that it travels 
halfway around the world before good news gets its shoes on. Almost 
nobody has any interest in saying let's broadcast good news all day.
  The good news last year, with respect to oil, was that for the first 
year in a long time, America actually increased its production of oil. 
We have been on this declining path. No more. Last year

[[Page S12]]

we increased the production of oil. Part of that comes from a formation 
in my part of the country called the Bakken shale. It is unbelievably 
complicated what we have done, but our country has learned to go 
explore and get oil from formations that 5, 8, 10 years ago you could 
not get oil from. There is up to 4.3 billion gallons of oil in the 
Bakken shale formation, 4.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil, that 
can now be unlocked using today's technology. They drill down 2 miles 
with a drilling rig, do a big curve, and go out 2 miles. With one rig 
they go down 2 miles, then go out 2 miles and then they hydrofracture 
it and the oil drops. They are getting up to 2,000 barrel-a-day wells. 
That is just one part of the substantial additional production 
available in this country, and it is producing now in a very 
significant way in Montana and North Dakota in the Bakken shale.
  Also, in the Energy bill that was passed by the Senate Energy 
Committee, I introduced an amendment that was agreed upon on a 
bipartisan vote that opens the eastern Gulf of Mexico. We believe that 
there is at least 3.8 billion gallons of recoverable oil and at least 
21 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the eastern Gulf of Mexico 
including the Destin Dome. There is a lot to be achieved by additional 
production and we should do that. There is no question we should do 
that. The legislation that has been passed on a bipartisan vote, with 
my amendment to open the additional production, would allow that to 
happen.
  That is one piece of the Senate Energy Committee's legislation. But 
there is much more. We understand our most abundant resource is coal, 
but we need to have a lower carbon future as we continue to use fossil 
fuels for energy. So the research and the science that is exciting, to 
be able to continue to use coal and capture and sequester or capture 
and provide beneficial use of CO2, is something we are 
working on very hard. We advance it in this legislation.
  If you are going to maximize production of energy where the wind 
blows and the Sun shines, through solar energy and wind energy, you 
need to develop an interstate highway of transmission. We don't have 
that. We have an interstate highway system to drive on, but we don't 
have an interstate highway system to move electricity on and to produce 
energy where the wind blows and the Sun shines and then move it to the 
load centers. That does not exist at the moment.
  In the last 10 years, we have built about 11,000 miles of natural gas 
pipeline to move natural gas around the country. During the same 
period, we only built 668 miles of high-voltage transmission lines 
between the States. We have to fix that. If you are going to maximize 
the production of energy where the wind is blowing and the Sun is 
shining, and we should, then you need to have an interstate highway of 
transmission to move that energy to the load centers. This transmission 
section is in the Senate Energy Committee's bill.
  We have included a national renewable electricity standard, for the 
first time in history, in this legislation. That will drive the 
production of renewable energy because 15 percent of the energy that is 
sold must come from renewable energy sources. I think the votes exist 
on the floor of the Senate to get to a 20-percent RES. All of that, I 
think, is very important.
  The other thing we do is we move toward an electric drive vehicle 
system with investments in battery technology and all of the related 
issues that would involve electric drive vehicles. That is going to be 
part of our future.
  Beyond the electric drive future, I think, is hydrogen and fuel cell 
technology. There is so much to be excited about. We do need to get the 
legislation that has already passed the Senate Energy Committee to the 
floor of the Senate. Let me describe it briefly by saying this. There 
are some who say the issue is climate change, and we have to bring a 
climate change bill to the floor of the Senate.
  Here is my view. To address climate change and have a lower carbon 
future means that you have to put in place policies that actually 
reduce carbon. How do you do that? By doing the very things I have 
described in this legislation that is now out of the Senate Energy 
Committee and ready to come to the floor. It is addressed to the 
specific policies that will reduce carbon, that will actually allow us 
to make progress in addressing climate change issues.
  I know there is a lot of discussion, and also a lot of controversy 
surrounding the issue of cap and trade. My own view on cap and trade is 
that I don't have the foggiest interest in providing a $1 trillion 
carbon trading market for traders and speculators on Wall Street to 
decide on Monday and Tuesday what our energy is going to cost on 
Thursday and Friday. I am not interested in doing that, given the 
history of what has happened on Wall Street and the economic wreck they 
caused in recent years.
  Having said that, we still need a lower carbon future. I agree with 
that. The way to do that is to pass smart energy policy. We have a 
bipartisan bill that addresses all these issues: additional production, 
additional conservation, more efficiency, maximizing renewables, the 
first ever renewable electricity standard. All these issues will 
strengthen our country, and I hope very much one of the priorities in 
the coming months will be to pass the energy legislation that was 
passed by the Senate Energy Committee and advance our country's 
interest.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator has used 15 minutes.
  Mr. DORGAN. I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Illinois is 
recognized.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, before I address some of the issues before 
us, let me say a word about my friend and colleague from North Dakota 
who, during this recess, announced he is going to retire at the end of 
this year. Senator Dorgan and I have served together both in the House 
and the Senate. He has been such a powerful force and powerful voice in 
the Senate Democratic caucus on so many important issues that we share 
values on. I am not going to bid him farewell because I know this year 
will be a busy year for him, representing his State and being engaged. 
His talk, just this moment on the floor, about issues of concern are 
clear evidence he is going to be fighting for his causes and his people 
in this upcoming year. But I do have to express my regret that my 
colleague is leaving us and thank him for his many years of fine 
service to the people of his State, in the House and the Senate, and I 
look forward to making this a great sendoff year and again thank him 
for his contribution.
  Mr. DORGAN. If the Senator will yield, I have always refrained from 
using the word ``retire'' because I can't sit around very much. So I 
don't intend to quit working. But I am not seeking reelection, the 
Senator is correct about that. This is a great institution, and it is a 
great privilege to serve here. I look forward to a lot of work this 
year with my colleague from Illinois and I hope, together, we will 
frame the policies that will help put America back on track to a better 
future.

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