[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 9]
[House]
[Page 12809]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            CORPORATE GREED

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the order of the House of 
January 23, 2002, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized 
during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, it has been almost a week since 
President Bush went to Wall Street to present his plan to curb 
executive greed and corporate misgovernance. The response, 
unfortunately, has been pretty underwhelming. The markets dropped by 
several hundred points day after day after day. The press and the 
American people have openly questioned the President's commitment to 
real change.
  Even Wall Street workers who attended the speech, mostly Bush 
supporters, wondered aloud about how much of the speech was just 
politics and how much was about real change.
  Why was this speech so poorly received? One, because so many 
officials in the Bush administration are themselves former corporate 
CEOs, lawyers, and accountants who lack the moral authority or the will 
to change corporate practices, or even to enforce current law.
  Second, because in the middle of the current crisis, the President 
and the Vice President, both former oil company CEOs, have been forced 
to answer questions about their own ethics and business practices in 
the private sector.
  Third, because, despite his rhetorical calls for corporate America to 
clean up its act, President Bush continues to oppose real reform on 
Capitol Hill. He has refused to support meaningful pension and 
accounting reform; he opposes legislation to halt offshore tax 
avoidance by huge corporations; and, to make matters worse, even though 
America's capital markets lost $2.4 trillion last year, more than the 
gross domestic product of Germany, the President continues to favor 
turning Social Security over to Wall Street in a privatization scheme. 
This is the same Wall Street that advised American investors to buy 
Enron and WorldCom and Adelphia and others while their analysts 
privately ridiculed those companies.
  In addition, the President has supported a whole slew of bills that 
have been written by and for big industry. He supports energy 
legislation written by the oil companies, he supports environmental 
legislation written by the chemical companies, he supports 
privatization of Social Security written by Wall Street bankers.
  Most recently, the President endorsed a prescription drug benefit to 
be administered by the health insurance industry, the same people who 
brought us HMOs. This plan would provide seniors with totally 
inadequate coverage, making no provision for dealing with the 
outrageous prices Americans are paying for their prescription drugs. It 
would undercut seniors' purchasing power and enable the drug industry 
to sustain its outrageous drug prices.
  Apparently, the President has been convinced by the brand-name big 
drug companies that prices are not a problem. Democrats are more 
concerned about the burden on seniors and their families who are being 
gouged by the predatory pricing of the prescription drug industry. The 
Democratic plan provides a direct prescription drug benefit inside 
Medicare and combats high prescription drug prices. The Republican 
plan, written by the drug companies, calls for a privatized system that 
coddles industry and leaves gaps in coverage for seniors.
  The Republicans claim they are offering the best drug benefit 
possible under current budgetary constraints; but a year ago, when the 
Bush tax cut plan, the tax breaks, which went overwhelmingly to the 
richest 1 percent of people in this society, when that was being 
debated, we were assured by the President and Republican leadership of 
huge budget surpluses. We were told these surpluses would be enough to 
address long-term solvency of Medicare and Social Security and still 
have the money for education and the money for a prescription drug 
benefit. Since then, these projected surpluses promised by President 
Bush and others have evaporated, mostly because of the overly-generous-
to-the-most-privileged-in-this-society tax cut.
  Maybe the President and his administration, full of corporate 
executives, were using the same accounting practices as America's big 
companies. Maybe, Mr. Speaker, this is what President Bush and Vice 
President Cheney meant when they said that, under their leadership, the 
country would be run like a corporation.

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