[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 15]
[Senate]
[Pages 20717-20719]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            ECONOMIC POLICY

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to address the 
Senate today. I second the words of my colleague from Texas of the 
concerns of this economy and question how we got here. It is pretty 
clear to me, with 8 years of Bush economics, with deregulation of Wall 
Street, more tax cuts for the rich, and a trade policy that Wall Street 
has pushed through the House and Senate, these job-killing trade 
agreements that have caused literally millions of manufacturing jobs to 
flee our country, combined with a tax policy that gives incentives for 
companies to go overseas, rather than passing Senator Obama's, Senator 
Durbin's, and my Patriot Corporation Act, which gives incentives for 
those companies that are staying right here in the United States, 
whether it is in Omaha or Cleveland, whether it is in Houston or 
Columbus, those companies that play by the rules, rewarding them with 
tax policy and others that those companies deserve.
  Let me, for a moment, Mr. President, take the Senate around on a tour 
of my State. There are so many good things happening in Ohio. I was 
with Governor Strickland for a couple days on Friday and Saturday going 
through eastern and southern Ohio. We were talking with people we met 
and talking to each other about all that is happening in our State, all 
the good that is happening, particularly in the area of biomedical 
research and development and job creation and especially in alternative 
energy.
  Ohio is on the precipice--as many of us have pushed for in my State 
for many years--Ohio is on the precipice of being the Silicon Valley of 
alternative energy. It started in Toledo, which has the largest solar 
energy manufacturer in the country. The research going on at the 
University of Toledo on wind turbines is the furthest reaching, 
furthest advanced research in the country.
  Go around the State to Akron and you can see what the University of 
Akron is doing with polymers and the kind of spinoff of jobs replacing 
lost jobs in the auto industry.
  Go to Dayton where we have the National Composite Center that is 
making major contributions with lighter, stronger, more durable 
materials that can help with more efficient, better mileage 
automobiles, not to mention what they are doing on alternative energy 
with wind turbine blades.
  Go to Cleveland and look at what the Case Western Reserve University, 
in conjunction with the Cleveland Foundation, is doing with plans to be 
the first place in the world where there will be a wind turbine farm in 
fresh water off the coast of Cleveland in green Lake Erie, supplying 
much of the electricity needs of northern Ohio.
  Go to Columbus and look at the Center for Automotive Research and the

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work they are doing for Ohio State. Look at the great university 
facilities at Cincinnati Children's Hospital and the University of 
Cincinnati and what they are doing on biomedical research and 
alternative energy too.
  You can see in my State of Ohio, as many jobs as we have lost, this 
State is coming back.
  Now, we can't do what we need to do--and the Governor was emphatic 
about that, as I am in the Chamber of the Senate--we can't do what we 
need to do unless we get a little more help from the Federal 
Government, not so much giving us things but just not standing in our 
way.
  Instead, we have seen, for the last several years in our State and in 
our country, a betrayal of the middle class. The drug companies wrote 
the Medicare law, the insurance industry has written health care 
legislation in this Congress, the oil companies have dictated energy 
policy, and Wall Street has pushed through these job-killing trade 
agreements. On issue after issue after issue, the Republican majority 
in the House and in the Senate, for most of the last 8 years, and the 
Bush administration have betrayed the middle class and the values that 
we as a nation and that we as a State find so important.
  All you have to do is look at what happened yesterday in the Banking 
Committee when Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke testified. I 
have a lot of respect for Chairman Bernanke. I think he has moved as 
quickly as a Fed Chairman can in dealing with the housing crisis in 
most cases, certainly compared to his predecessor, who helped to set 
the table for a lot of these problems. I have a lot of respect for him. 
He and Secretary Paulson testified before our committee. They had some 
interesting ideas, as the Senator from Texas, Mr. Cornyn, mentioned a 
moment ago. I don't buy their solution: Give me $700 billion and a 
blank check and I will try and figure out how to do it; buying these 
troubled assets, without any rules to it. It is dead on arrival in my 
belief.
  But what my colleagues don't bring out, when we have this terrible 
problem on Wall Street, is how we got there. It is this betrayal of the 
middle class that has been brought to us by the Bush administration--
the deregulation of Wall Street. Wall Street people are always going to 
be aggressive. They are all going to look for money-making 
opportunities. They are all going to play on the edge sometimes and 
take risks. But until the Bush years, there have been rules in place 
that keep Wall Street from going over the line, that keep Wall Street 
in check, that still capture the energy and dynamism of capitalism but 
don't allow them to go overboard and do what they did. That is what has 
brought us to this today, coupled with the tax cuts and the incredible 
profits of Wall Street firms, the incredible bonuses, eight-figure 
bonuses. When I say eight figure, that means $10 million and up; 
bonuses that too many of these Wall Street executives had while they 
were inflicting damage in Maple Heights, in Garfield Heights, in 
Norwood, and in places all over my State that are suffering from the 
home foreclosure crisis.
  So we got to this place where Wall Street overreached, where their 
greed overcame all other sentiments, and we got to this place because 
of the Bush deregulation of Wall Street, because of the tax cuts, 
because of this trade policy that has betrayed the middle class. As far 
as I am concerned, three strikes and you are out. This deregulation, 
the tax cuts, and trade policy clearly have put us in a place where my 
State has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs since George Bush took the 
oath of office. I see the pain around my State, even though we are 
fighting back. Even in that initial trip around the State that I took 
my colleagues on, people in my State are hurting. In the last year and 
a half, since I was sworn into the Senate in January of 2007, I have 
held almost 120 roundtables in my State--from Ashtabula to Middletown, 
from Gallipolis to Toledo--and in these roundtables I will invite 15 or 
20 people from the community or 15 or 20 veterans or 15 or 20 farmers, 
a cross-section of the community, and talk to them about their hopes 
and their dreams. Increasingly, I see fear. Increasingly, I see anxiety 
about the future because they know their Government simply hasn't been 
on their side.
  So I think about this deregulation, the Bush-Cheney-McCain 
deregulation. We know that our colleague, Senator McCain--who has not 
been here very much in the last year and a half because of the 
Presidential campaign--has consistently pushed for deregulation. He 
has, in the last few months, become a raging populist. He almost sounds 
like some of the great populists who sat in this Senate over the last 
100 years. He almost sounds like Paul Wellstone. He almost sounds like 
Senator LaGuardia from New York, people who fought for the common man. 
But this is sort of a new John McCain than before when he was for the 
tax cuts, when he was for deregulation. More importantly, Senator 
McCain has been one of the prominent cheerleaders for deregulation 
which got us into this position on Wall Street. Now he is saying the 
President should fire Chairman Cox. He is saying we should go after 
these Wall Street executives, things he never dreamed of saying until 
he decided it was good for his Presidential campaign.
  In the past, Senator McCain has said he doesn't know much about 
economics, and what he does know he learned from one of our colleagues, 
Phil Gramm. Phil Gramm was the architect--John McCain's mentor in the 
Senate, particularly on economic issues--Phil Gramm was the prime 
architect of this deregulation scheme that has so pushed us behind the 
eight ball and that is so troubling, frankly, to the direction we are 
now going. I think if we hadn't had this deregulation of Wall Street, 
we wouldn't be in the position we are. I don't know that Senator Gramm 
gets it, still. Phil Gramm has said we are not in a recession; that 
Americans are in a mental recession. When people complained about that 
statement saying: Look around; all you have to do is look around, Phil 
Gramm said the American people ought to quit whining. It is easy for 
him to say. He is a major bank executive. He is a lobbyist--he is a 
major bank executive and he has made so much money. He is the Senator 
who supported Enron and all its problems. We know that following his 
economic advice is not the way the country should go.
  I come to the floor today for one more purpose, and that is to sound 
the alarm on what this privatization, deregulation scheme is all about. 
Imagine if we had followed what Senator McCain had said in 2005. In 
2005, President Bush was sworn in for his second term on January 20. 
Two weeks before that, the House and Senate began their sessions. We 
were sworn in. I was sworn in as a Member of the House of 
Representatives in those days. Soon after our swearing in and soon 
after the President's swearing in, the President unveiled his major 
domestic policy initiative, which was to privatize Social Security, to 
set up these private accounts. Democrats opposed them in a unified way 
in the Congress. In the House and Senate, almost every single 
Democrat--maybe every single Democrat--opposed them. People in the 
country said no. Democrats said no. All over the country, citizens, 
Independents said no, Republicans said no, this was a bad idea.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 3 additional minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BROWN. I thank my colleague from Florida.
  Imagine what would have happened if we had gone along and if the 
country hadn't said no to this Bush-Cheney-McCain privatization scheme: 
Americans now would find that these private accounts weren't quite what 
they were billed to be. They were, in fact, as risky as many of us 
said. Because of the promises of: Let's put our private accounts--let's 
put our hard-earned Social Security dollars in New York; let's have 
Wall Street manage our private Social Security accounts--we all know 
what would have happened with the vicissitudes and the volatility of 
the stock market.

[[Page 20719]]

  My last point is Senator McCain has recently called himself 
fundamentally a deregulator and he is sort of the deregulator in chief 
in the Senate. But he has come up with something else. He wrote in this 
month's issue of Health Magazine that it would still be a good idea to 
deregulate the health insurance market: ``As we have done over the last 
decade in banking.''
  I don't get it. I don't know how any Member of this body, if he ever 
goes home or she ever goes home and talks to voters, how they could 
think that deregulation of banking, deregulation of health care, let's 
give more power to Wall Street and deregulate banking; let's give more 
power to the health insurance industry and deregulate health insurance, 
it would make any sense at all. I think that, perhaps, more than 
anything, shows the fork in the road we are at in this country.
  In this Senate and in the House and in the elections, we have a 
choice. Do we want to continue down this path of deregulation and 
betrayal of the middle class by a government that has turned this 
Government over to interest groups--the drug companies writing the 
Medicare law, the insurance companies writing the health care 
legislation, the oil companies writing energy policy, Wall Street 
pushing through these job-killing trade agreements--do we want to 
continue to go in that direction or do we want to go in a different 
direction that will put the middle class first. I think the choice is 
clear, and I think we will see that in the upcoming weeks.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I thank the Senator from 
Florida.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Florida is recognized.
  Mr. MARTINEZ. Mr. President, I have some remarks I wish to make about 
the pending matter of the financial crisis we are facing, but before I 
do I guess I have to make some comments about some of the things my 
distinguished colleague from Ohio had to say. It was a great speech for 
a Presidential race, but I don't think it touched on some of the very 
important issues our country is facing right here and now, the big 
decisions we have to make and that we have to do in a bipartisan way.
  We cannot rewrite history because it sounds good. We cannot rewrite 
history because it helps the Presidential campaign that one might want 
to see succeed in the next 40 days.
  The fact is we had a regulation bill before the Senate: S. 190. I was 
a cosponsor of it. Senator John McCain was a cosponsor of that bill. 
That bill could have regulated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It got 
nowhere. The silence on the other side of the aisle was deafening. This 
was in 2005. It wasn't that long ago. There was an opportunity then for 
all to come around the idea that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were at the 
heart of the problem we have faced in this financial crisis, and they 
should have a strong, world-class regulator. I wish to talk more about 
that in a moment. When we talk about a betrayal of the middle class, 
wouldn't it have been a good idea if we had rallied around John McCain, 
Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu, Mel Martinez, and others who were 
supporting the idea that we needed a strong regulator for Fannie Mae 
and Freddie Mac; that they were undercapitalized, and until they had a 
world-class regulator, it would be business as usual, and they would 
continue to pass their largesse around the Congress among their 
favorites. The fact is we did not get that bill passed in 2005, when it 
might have made a difference.
  It is also easy to talk about this administration and attempt to 
rewrite history. It is probably more politically expedient not to 
defend this administration, but I was a part of it. From 2001 to 2003 I 
served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. I came before the 
Congress and I testified before the House and the Senate Banking and 
Financial Services Committees, respectively. I had on my side the 
Secretary of the Treasury, John Snow, who was the Secretary at the 
time. What did we tell the Congress? We told Congress that we thought 
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac needed a strong regulator, that they were 
thinly capitalized, and that they posed a systemic risk to our economy. 
I don't know if Senator Brown, at the time a Member of the House, had 
an opportunity to hear or read our testimony, but if he had, he would 
have known that this administration was for a stronger regulatory 
scheme for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
  I would also say to the Senator from Ohio, when he talks about 
deregulatory schemes and tax cuts, the fact is the tax cuts we have had 
in place brought us out of a recession which we were in in 2001. We 
have short memories, I know. I know we have a 30-second sitcom memory, 
but we should remember that in 2001, when President Bush came into 
office, this country was in a recession. We came out of that recession 
as a result of a lesser tax burden on the American people that created 
jobs and that got this country moving again.
  One last thing I will say before I go to my remarks that I planned to 
make. When we talk about trade agreements that lose jobs, stalling a 
trade agreement with the country of Colombia, in addition to not 
serving our security interests, is costing jobs in Miami, in Port 
Everglades, in the Port of Tampa. These are good-paying jobs. These are 
the kinds of jobs that people today in Florida, with unemployment over 
6 percent, would stand in line to be able to have. These are good-
paying jobs at the ports--ports that would trade with Colombia. The No. 
4 trading port in America with Colombia is in Tampa. Jobs would be 
created in Tampa, FL, if we were to trade with Colombia and if we were 
to have a free-trade agreement with Colombia. Over $1 billion in 
increased trade, in increased jobs, in increased dollars flowing into 
Florida's economy would be created if we would pass that free-trade 
agreement, which is stalled because we are doing the bidding of the big 
labor unions that don't want to see it happen.

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