[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12611-12612]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




             PRESIDENT BUSH REFUSES TO SUPPORT REAL REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kirk). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, on Tuesday of this week, President 
Bush gave a major speech on his administration's plan to curb executive 
greed and corporate misgovernance in America.
  Why was the President's speech so poorly received? Why did the 
markets drop by several hundred points in the 2 days following the 
speech? Why did so many Wall Street workers who attended the speech 
ask, How much of this speech was politics, and how much of it is about 
real change?
  Because despite his calls for corporate America to clean its act, 
President Bush, at the behest of his corporate sponsors, his major 
contributors, his political base, his political friends, continues to 
oppose real reform on Capitol Hill. He has refused to support pension 
and accounting reform and takes millions of dollars from the securities 
and accounting professions. He will not support legislation to halt 
offshore tax avoidance, while receiving contributions from many major 
companies who have moved offshore to avoid paying those taxes. His 
budget severely underfunds the Securities and Exchange Commission.
  To make matters worse, the President has pushed to turn the public 
program of Medicare over to the health insurance industry and to HMOs, 
again while receiving millions of dollars from that health industry for 
his campaign and for Republican campaigns in the House and Senate.
  The President also advocates turning Social Security over to the same 
Wall Street banks that advised American investors to buy WorldCom, 
Enron, Adelphia, and Bristol-Myers, and all those others companies over 
the last few years, while their analysts have privately ridiculed these 
companies and investors.
  More recently, the President endorsed a prescription drug plan that 
would be administered by the health insurance industry and would make 
no provision for dealing with the skyrocketing prices American seniors 
pay for prescription drugs, simply because the President and Republican 
leaders in this Congress do not want to upset the prescription drug 
industry.
  Apparently, the President has been convinced by the brand-name drug 
industry that prices simply are not a problem. The plan would undercut 
seniors' purchasing power and enable the drug industry to sustain its 
outrageous drug prices by permitting the continued abuse and 
manipulation of drug patent laws. Three weeks ago in the Committee on 
Energy and Commerce as we were marking up the drug bill, the chairman 
notified us that we would be quitting at 5 p.m., even though we had 20 
more hours of work to do, because all of the Republican Members trooped 
off to a $30 million fundraiser headlined by President Bush and Vice 
President Cheney, and underwritten by the prescription drug industry.
  The Chair of this fundraiser was the CEO of Glaxo, a British drug 
company which donated $250,000 to that event. The next day when we 
returned to business and our committee continued its markup on the 
prescription drug bill, amendment after amendment after amendment that 
was pro consumer was defeated because the drug companies wanted those 
amendments defeated.
  The insurance industry has written legislation for the White House 
and the Republican leadership on Medicare privatization. The chemical 
industry has written legislation for the Republican leadership and the 
White House on environmental policy. The oil industry has written for 
Republican leadership and the White House legislation on energy. Wall 
Street has written for the White House and Republican leadership 
legislation on privatizing Social Security; and the prescription drug 
industry has written legislation dealing with pharmaceuticals for the 
White House and Republican leadership.
  Coincidentally, Mr. Speaker, the most recent example of the President 
taking industry's side comes from today's headlines and also concerns 
prescription drugs. To avoid more questions about corporate 
accountability, President Bush left town today to give a speech in 
Minnesota on prescription drugs, and of course to headline a Republican 
fundraiser, his 34th this year, while we fight the war on terrorism.
  The speech is timed to coincide with the release of an administration 
report, which conveniently concludes that the drug industry, America's 
most profitable industry year after year after year over the last 20 
years, and an industry which enjoys the lowest tax rate of any industry 
year after year, his report concludes that the drug industry will be 
harmed by additional regulatory burdens, by lower prices imposed in 
part by this Congress.
  Democrats are more concerned about the burden on seniors and their 
families who are being gouged by the predatory pricing of the 
pharmaceutical industry. That is why we support a direct prescription 
drug benefit with guaranteed coverage inside Medicare, not an insurance 
policy plan written by the drug industry.
  Mr. Speaker, when will the administration do work in the public 
interest rather than on corporate interests?

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