[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12282-12283]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              PRESIDENT'S PLAN ON CURBING CORPORATE GREED

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Shuster). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, earlier today President Bush gave a 
major speech on the administration's plan to curb executive greed and 
corporate misgovernance in our country. This plan could be a tough 
sell, considering the President's own record as a businessman and his 
record of regulating industry.
  Shortly after taking office, President Bush made clear how he felt 
about any kind of government regulation. His first budget proposal 
contained the elimination of 57 staff positions at the Securities and 
Exchange Commission, the agency charged with reviewing his corporate 
financial problems of the 1980s and reviewing all corporate financial 
reports today. His Treasury Secretary moved immediately to shut down 
intergovernmental efforts undertaken by the previous administration to 
monitor offshore tax havens at the heart of the financial maneuvering 
that led to Enron's collapse.
  This President let chemical companies write legislation that dealt 
with arsenic in the drinking water, let insurance companies write 
legislation about the privatization of Medicare, let the drug companies 
write legislation that had to do with prescription drug coverage, let 
Wall Street write legislation to privatize Social Security, and let the 
banks write legislation relating to bankruptcy. This laissez-faire 
antigovernment attitude of the Bush administration also created a 
permissive environment clearly making companies like Enron, WorldCom, 
Adelphia, and others believe they could mislead investors with impunity 
as long as President Bush was in office.

[[Page 12283]]

  Even after the Enron scandal was revealed last year, the President 
proposed a zero-growth budget for the SEC. He supported publicly and 
aggressively weak pension and accounting reform bills in the House, 
even though thousands of employees in this country, turning into tens 
of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees, are losing their 
retirements to fraud and mismanagement by the President's friends at 
Enron and other corporations.
  He refused to support legislation that would close the loopholes that 
allow American companies to go offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. He has 
declined to support reauthorization for the Superfund tax, requiring 
corporate polluters to pay for cleanup of the messes they make. 
Instead, he has chosen to have taxpayers pay to clean that up. To make 
matters worse, the President's advocated turning Medicare and Social 
Security over to the private sector.
  As evidence of this bias in his political contributions from the 
insurance industry, the President recently endorsed a Medicare 
prescription drug plan that would be administered by the health 
insurance industry. This plan undercuts seniors' purchasing power and 
enables the drug industry to sustain its outrageous drug prices by 
permitting the continued abuse and manipulation of drug patent laws.
  Why? It just might have had something to do with our committee 2 
weeks ago considering the prescription drug bill. The committee chair 
decided to quit at 5 p.m. so all the Republican members in the 
committee could troop off to a fund-raiser, a Republican fund-raiser 
headlined by George Bush, where the chairman of the fund-raiser was the 
CEO of a prescription drug company in England. That chairman and that 
company contributed $250,000 to House and Senate Republicans and to 
President Bush. Other prescription drug companies contributed $50,000, 
$100,000, and $250,000, while Congress was considering a prescription 
drug bill.
  No surprise that the next day, when our friends returned to our 
hearing, that on issue after issue after issue the Republicans voted 
down the line for drug company interests against seniors' interests.
  The President and his administration have a long way to go to 
convince the American people they are serious about cleaning up 
corporate abuses in large American business or even enforcing current 
law.
  So as the country considers the President's plan for reversing the 
current trend of corporate greed and misdeeds, I hope my colleagues 
will understand that I view his conversion from a proponent of laissez-
faire economics in letting corporations run roughshod over government 
regulations and roughshod over the public, his conversion from that to 
chief regulator and enforcer of these laws with a healthy degree of 
skepticism.
  A famous civil rights leader years ago said, ``Don't tell me what you 
believe. Tell me what you do, and I will tell you what you believe.''

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