[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 76 (Tuesday, May 20, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3162-S3164]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            THE MIDDLE CLASS

  Ms. STABENOW. Madam President, I am here to talk about the future of 
our country and the future of our middle class, which I know the 
Presiding Officer cares deeply about as well.
  A few years ago in Michigan something quite extraordinary happened. 
In 1914 a man named Henry Ford did

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something that all his business friends said was crazy. He doubled the 
wages of his workers to $5 a day. The headlines at that time showed 
that those on Wall Street literally thought he was going to ruin the 
economy, and everyone said he was going to go under. It was the 
craziest thing they had ever seen.
  Exactly the opposite happened. In fact, there were stories a month 
after he did this--by the way, tens of thousands of people showed up 
for these jobs. Around the plant there were newspaper interviews about 
how all the small businesses had seen their profits double and how they 
were hiring new people for the hotdog stand or the clothing 
entrepreneur who was selling shoes and suits, and so on. Small 
businesses said that it had been wonderful for them.
  We all know what happened to Henry Ford. He went on to become one of 
the wealthiest men of his generation by doing the right thing and 
understanding that we all do better if everybody has a fair shot to 
make it and that he would do better as a business person if everybody 
had a shot. In fact, we are very proud, and we believe we started the 
middle class in Detroit, MI.
  We celebrate success in this country. We also understand that we are 
all in this together--our family, our community, and our country. We 
can do great things by ourselves, but ultimately what makes us great as 
Americans is that we are connected and in it together. That is the idea 
on which America was built. Everybody contributes their fair share, and 
we give everybody a fair shot to work hard and get ahead in life.
  Just like Henry Ford, we understand that the economy is not working--
our country is not as strong as it could be--unless it is working for 
everyone and not just the wealthy few.
  In fact, Henry Ford showed that you can become very wealthy yourself 
by doing the right thing. We now have choices to make. Unfortunately, 
today a small number of incredibly rich people are doing the opposite 
of what Henry Ford did. They are literally trying to buy a government 
that works only for them at the expense of every other American.
  The Supreme Court's outrageous Citizens United decision and other 
decisions that have followed have paved the way for multimillionaires 
to spend secret money on fake front groups and hundreds of millions of 
dollars on television and radio ads to twist the facts or just make 
things up so they can impose their own extreme views on our country.
  I want to speak about the two people who are at the forefront of this 
effort and what their views mean for the people I represent in 
Michigan, the people in Wisconsin, and the future of middle class 
families all across America. The Koch brothers, two petrochemical 
magnates, are reportedly now worth over $100 billion. Last month, their 
fortune grew by $1.3 billion in just 1 day. How many average Americans 
would work a lifetime--added up together across the country--to try to 
reach the $1.3 billion they made in a day? They have built what the 
Washington Post called ``a far-reaching operation of unrivaled 
complexity, built around a maze of groups that cloak its donors'' in 
secrecy. This ``maze of groups'' raised $400 million in 2012.
  Just last week we found out one of the groups, Americans for 
Prosperity, plans to spend $125 million in secret, undisclosed money in 
this year's election alone--$125 million on people who support their 
views of America.
  One expert on taxes and political groups, a professor at Notre Dame 
Law School, said he had never seen anything like the network of Koch 
groups before. He said:

       It is designed to make it opaque as to where the money is 
     coming from and where the money is going . . . It would only 
     be worth it if you were spending the kind of dollars the Koch 
     brothers are, because this was not cheap.

  These are front groups that pose as senior citizen groups, 
environmental groups, and veterans groups. I could go on and on about 
all of the fake groups through which they are funneling money.
  The Koch brothers may be able to hide their money and hide behind 
shadowy groups, but they can't hide their radical views from the 
American people. Let me be clear. It is not only me who is saying they 
are being radical. Charles Koch described his own views as ``radical.''
  Senator Sanders recently spoke on the Senate floor about some of the 
Koch brothers' extreme anti-middle-class views. I want to thank him for 
shedding light on some ideas that I know the vast majority of Americans 
disagree with and many of us find frightening, frankly, for the future 
of our country.
  We don't have to guess what these views are since David Koch ran for 
Vice President on the Libertarian ticket in 1980 and loudly trumpeted 
them for all to see. What did David Koch promise to do when he ran for 
the second-highest office in the country? He promised to end the 
``fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social 
Security system,'' which has lifted a generation of seniors out of 
poverty and given them dignity as they have moved on over the years.
  He promised to abolish Medicare and Medicaid. By the way, the 
majority of Medicaid funds is used on low-income seniors in nursing 
homes. He promised to get rid of the post office. He didn't suggest 
that it be cut it back to 5 days a week, he wanted to get rid of it. I 
suppose you can deliver the mail yourself or go hire somebody from 
someplace to somehow deal with the mail. What about trying to get your 
Social Security check? I guess it doesn't matter. Since he thinks you 
should not get Social Security or Medicare, it doesn't matter if you 
get that check as a senior.
  He proposed to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency--the 
agency that makes sure we have clean air to breathe and safe water we 
can drink. For those of us in the Great Lakes region, we have the 
blessing of being able to fish and boat and have the beauty of the 
Great Lakes.
  He promised to end all programs for children and seniors, low-income 
veterans, and repeal all taxation--no funding for the police 
department, fire department, roads, military, and veterans.
  We just heard Senator Cornyn--and I agree with him--talk about our 
veterans and the great concern we have with what is happening to our 
veterans. The people supporting our colleagues on the other side of the 
aisle, the top two donors, said there should be no taxation and that we 
should get rid of the minimum wage. Remember how Henry Ford became one 
of the wealthiest men of his generation. He helped build the middle 
class by doubling their wages. By the way, if we were using Henry 
Ford's formula, the minimum wage would be close to $15 right now.
  The Koch brothers don't want a minimum wage, Social Security or 
Medicare. They don't want help for anyone. They expect people to go out 
and earn $1.3 billion in a day and purchase whatever they need. 
Seniors, children, people with disabilities, including our veterans, 
would be left with no support, and, of course, no taxes for the Koch 
brothers and their big-shot friends.
  This is truly a radical agenda. Here is the truly shocking part. The 
Koch brothers' agenda, which, again, Charles Koch himself proudly calls 
a ``radical'' agenda, is exactly the agenda we are seeing emerge from 
the Republican House of Representatives right now. Too many Members in 
our Senate Republican caucus want to privatize Social Security and 
gamble seniors' money away in the stock market. They want to eliminate 
Medicare as we know it. They passed the Ryan budget, which does that. 
They want to privatize the post office.
  They passed a budget that guts efforts to help Americans in need or 
invest in the future of education and innovation. This is not what was 
said in 1980. This is what has passed and is being promoted right now, 
which is why they are putting so much money into the elections. Their 
agenda is being promoted right now, which they themselves call radical.
  They refuse to join us in giving Americans a raise so that people who 
work 40 hours a week in a full-time job and make minimum wage--by the 
way, a majority of them are women who are raising children--are at 
least above poverty level and have a fair shot to get ahead.
  We also don't have to guess how this radical, ``I've got mine and 
you're on your own'' Koch brothers agenda works in practice. We have 
seen how this plays out in Michigan.

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  In Gaylord, MI--beautiful northern Michigan--hundreds of workers used 
to work at a plant making particleboard--that is, until the Koch 
brothers bought their company, closed the plant, and left town. Instead 
of good-paying jobs that paid workers $15 to $20 an hour so they could 
with their family enjoy the great outdoors in Michigan and send their 
kids to college--jobs that gave workers a fair shot to get ahead--the 
Koch brothers left behind rubble and scrap metal. But that is not all 
the Koch brothers left behind.
  Imagine you are outside with your family--or even inside your 
apartment or home--and suddenly you see a giant cloud of toxic black 
dust blowing towards you. It is piling up, and later you discover that 
this black dust includes a toxic metal that is believed to cause 
cancer. Imagine you own a restaurant and are forced to sweep up the 
same toxic dust from your patio, and you have to worry about what it is 
doing to your pregnant wife and unborn child. This is not something out 
of a Charles Dickens' novel or a story about the pollution in China 
today. This actually happened to the people in Detroit. Why? Because a 
company owned by the Koch brothers decided to illegally store piles of 
petcoke--a byproduct of refined, dirty tar sands oil--alongside the 
Detroit River. These piles were up to four stories high and piled up 
next to where people lived.
  Just the other day I read a story about the exact same thing 
happening to people in Chicago. Another company owned by the Koch 
brothers is storing giant piles of petcoke in a residential area, which 
is something I know Senator Durbin is very concerned about. It doesn't 
stop there.

  Last Wednesday, Senator Levin, Congressman Fred Upton from Kalamazoo, 
and I wrote to the Environmental Protection Agency about a toxic waste 
site in Kalamazoo, MI. We want to make sure it finally gets cleaned up. 
Guess who owns that toxic waste site and hasn't cleaned it up for years 
and years. That is right, the Koch brothers.
  We have come together in this country and decided that it is not fair 
for the rest of us to have to breathe dirty air and drink dirty water 
so a multibillionaire can have an even bigger profit. The Koch 
brothers, however, whose companies have been fined numerous times, 
apparently think it is just fine to pollute our air and our water and 
then say to every American: You are on your own; you clean it up.
  The New York Times reported this weekend that David Koch even ran ads 
calling for the complete deregulation of the energy industry. Can we 
believe it. A billionaire oilman who thinks there should be no rules 
for Big Oil at the expense of the public.
  So whether it is clean air and clean water rules, whether it is 
Medicare, whether it is Social Security, funding for seniors in nursing 
homes through Medicaid, other vital services that keep the promise of 
the American dream within reach for every American, the Koch brothers 
want to get rid of those things in order to help themselves and their 
powerful friends. They want to rig the game in their favor. They are 
trying very hard to do that, with hundreds of millions of dollars of 
secret money and phony groups. They are willing to use their billions 
to create a government that works for them--just them and their 
friends. Heads they win; tails the rest of America loses.
  That is not what this country is about. We need to stop this assault 
on our democracy and our middle class by passing a constitutional 
amendment to get this secret money out of our elections. That is why I 
am so proud to join in supporting and cosponsoring an amendment 
sponsored by Senator Tom Udall that so many of our caucus are 
supporting because we need to make it clear that this is not acceptable 
in a democracy. In the meantime, though, we need to make sure the 
American people understand the real agenda behind the front groups and 
the secret money. That is why I am here today. That is why our majority 
leader and others speak out. It is because it matters. It is the money 
promoting the agenda, the money promoting actions such as closing 
plants and petcoke going into the rivers in our neighborhoods.
  It is an agenda that is not the agenda of the American people. In 
America, everyone deserves a fair shot to work hard and get ahead--
everybody. It is not about rigging the game for a few. People shouldn't 
be able to buy all the rules of the game by putting secret money and 
front groups out there and saying things that aren't true and getting 
people in there whom they know will just work for their own radical 
agenda. That is not what America is about. We have too many people 
barely holding on to the middle class, struggling to get into the 
middle class, and all they want is a fair shot to make it. That is what 
we are about. That is what we are fighting for every single day.
  I see my colleague on the floor who is offering a constitutional 
amendment that would address this issue of getting the light of day on 
the money in politics in our great country. I wish to again, in his 
presence, commend Senator Udall for doing that, and I urge my 
colleagues to come together. What is happening right now with the money 
is the worst of America, not the best of America. We can do better than 
that. People expect us to do better than that. I am going to continue 
with my colleagues in the Democratic caucus to fight to make sure that 
happens.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The deputy whip.

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