[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 1304-1306]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            THE WAY FORWARD

  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I wish to begin by congratulating Senator 
Mikulski on her continued efforts in fighting for pay equality for 
women workers. This is a struggle that has gone on for decades. We are 
making some progress, but we have a long way to go and it is imperative 
that we pass the Ledbetter legislation.
  Yesterday, as everybody in the world knows, Barack Obama was sworn in 
as the President of the United States. I can tell my colleagues that in 
my State of Vermont, and I expect all over this country and, in fact, 
in virtually every country in the world, there was great anticipation 
and great joy, not only because we have made history in our country by 
electing the first African American ever elected President, but also 
because the people of this country demand that we begin moving America 
in a very different direction than where we have been going for the 
last 8 years. Unfortunately, as President Obama assumes office, the 
Congress, the American people, and he are looking out at a set of the 
most serious problems that our country has faced since the Great 
Depression. Let me take a very few minutes to give a broad outline of 
some of those problems and some of the efforts I personally will be 
making in order to address these crises.
  As a result of the outrageous greed and recklessness and dishonesty 
on the part of a few hundred or a few thousand speculators on Wall 
Street, our entire financial system is in danger of collapsing. That 
impacts not only the United States but, in fact, the financial markets 
all over the world. At this point, the American taxpayer--primarily the 
middle class--has already put into the TARP bailout some $700 billion, 
but in addition to that, the Fed has lent out trillions of dollars with 
virtually no transparency and certainly no accountability. This is a 
crisis we have to deal with in a number of ways. I will tell my 
colleagues as somebody who voted against the original bailout and who 
voted against the second bailout, we have to develop a mechanism that 
does more than pump hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to 
bail out Wall Street. This is a difficult issue, it is a complicated 
issue, but it is an issue that we have to address.
  Furthermore, in my view, we need an investigation to get at the root 
of the problem. I reject the idea, as some suggest, that this was a 
problem caused by everybody; all of us are guilty in causing this 
financial crisis. That is wrong. The fact is there are a relatively 
small number of people--by and large people who in the last 5 to 10 
years have made hundreds of millions of dollars; in fact, in some cases 
have accrued billions of dollars of wealth for themselves, who have 
operated in utter recklessness and, in my suspicion, in illegal 
mannerisms in order to make these incredible profits and to bring our 
financial system to the edge of collapse. We need to know who these 
people are, how they did it, hold them accountable, and create 
legislation which makes sure that we never, ever again are placed in 
the position we are in today.
  The truth of the matter is that while the financial crisis of the 
last few months has exacerbated the economic problems that we are 
facing as a Nation today, for many years, despite the assertions of the 
Bush administration, the middle class has been in a significant state 
of decline, poverty has been increasing, and millions of people have

[[Page 1305]]

lost their health insurance and their pensions. What is happening today 
as a result of the financial crisis and the huge increase in 
unemployment is a situation where when people lose their jobs, they are 
losing their health insurance; when they are losing their income, they 
are losing their ability to maintain their homes and they are losing 
their homes; when they are losing their income, they are unable to take 
care of their parents, they are unable to send their kids to college, 
and the dreams many people have fought for their entire working lives 
are now disappearing. I can tell my colleagues that in the State of 
Vermont we have received many e-mails and communications from elderly 
people, elderly workers who have told me that they have spent their 
whole lives working so they would have a secure retirement, and now 
that retirement is disappearing with the decline of the stock market. 
We are in the midst of a grave crisis and we are going to need some 
bold thinking in order to get out of it.
  Not only are we seeing a huge increase in unemployment, people losing 
their health insurance, poverty increasing, the reality is we continue 
to have--and we do not talk about this enough--by far the highest rate 
of childhood poverty of any major Nation on Earth. During my years in 
the House and my time in the Senate, I have heard some of my colleagues 
talk about family values. Well, let me say very clearly that having the 
highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world is not a 
family value, it is a national disgrace. Every psychologist in the 
world will tell us that when kids grow up in poverty, when kids do not 
have early childhood education, when kids go to poor schools, there is 
a direct correlation between that reality and the fact that we have 
more people behind bars today, more people in jail than any country in 
the world, including China. How does that happen, that millions of 
Americans end up in jail more so than in an authoritarian country such 
as China? If one thinks it does not have a relationship to the high 
rate of childhood poverty in this country and the fact that we are not 
investing in our kids, I think you would be wrong.
  Last year, we continued the process of seeing a growing gap between 
the very rich and everybody else. I know this is not an issue that many 
people in the Congress choose to talk about, but it is an issue that 
must be talked about, not only from a sense of morality but from a 
sense of basic economic well-being. In my view, it is not acceptable 
that the top one-tenth of 1 percent earn more income than the bottom 50 
percent. It is not acceptable that the top 1 percent own more wealth 
than the bottom 90 percent. The whole issue of greed is something that 
we as a Congress and as a Nation have to be talking about. Do people 
need billions and billions and billions of dollars in personal wealth 
when we have children in this city and all over this country who are 
living out in the streets and who are denied basic, decent quality 
childcare? Is that the kind of Nation that we are about?
  Since 2000, since the year 2000, nearly 6 million Americans have 
slipped out of the middle class and into poverty, the median income for 
working age families has gone down by over $2,300, over 7 million 
Americans have lost their health insurance, more than 4 million decent 
paying manufacturing jobs have been lost, and over 4 million workers 
have lost their pensions. All of those figures will get worse because 
of the statistics we have seen in recent months because of the 
financial crisis. The dream of a college education is fading away for 
many working families in my State and all over this country as college 
costs go up while incomes go down. We are seeing a situation where 
hundreds of thousands of qualified students are unable to go to college 
because they simply don't have the money to do that, and many others 
are coming out deeply in debt and have to take jobs which they would 
rather not take in order to pay back their student loans. Meanwhile, in 
the last 8 years, despite the bailout of Wall Street, with ongoing tax 
breaks for the very wealthy, and with the war in Iraq, we now have a 
national debt of over $10.5 trillion.
  Another issue this Congress has to deal with is to address the 
reality that the United States of America remains the only major 
country on Earth that does not provide health care to all of its 
people. Yet we end up spending substantially more per capita on health 
care than any other Nation. But 47 million Americans have no health 
insurance. Almost 20,000 Americans die every single year because they 
don't have access to decent primary health care--they can't find a 
doctor when they need it--and we pay the highest prices in the world 
for prescription drugs.
  With a new President, with a new Congress, the American people are 
asking whether finally we will have the courage to stand up to the 
lobbyists who are outside of this building every single day, who are 
walking the corridors; can we stand up to the insurance companies, can 
we stand up to the drug companies so that we finally--finally--will 
provide quality health care, low-cost prescription drugs to every man, 
woman, and child as a right of citizenship? Will we have the courage to 
do that? I certainly hope we will.
  As we speak, we are currently involved in wars in Iraq and 
Afghanistan which have cost us not only the lives of thousands and 
thousands of wonderful young men and women, but they cost us over $10 
billion every single month. These wars are also stretching the Army and 
our National Guard to the breaking point. My hope is that in the next 
several months we will be developing policy to bring our troops home 
from Iraq as soon as we possibly can. I hope very much that we will 
have not only a debate right here in Congress but a national 
conversation about how we deal with the very difficult issues of 
Afghanistan.
  Despite the reality of global warming, our Nation still, despite 
decades of talk, has not yet broken our dependency on fossil fuel and 
foreign oil. In fact, every single year we are spending more than $500 
billion bringing in oil from abroad. We have only begun--just begun--to 
make the advances we need to make in terms of energy efficiency and 
sustainable energy. As a member of both the Environmental Committee and 
the Energy Committee, it is my view that we have the potential to 
create millions of good-paying jobs as we transform our energy system 
away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. We 
can do that. We must do that.
  As my colleagues well know, the major issue that this Congress is 
going to be dealing with in the next several weeks is an economic 
recovery program. I strongly support the basic outlines of that 
program. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of debate about the 
details within it and the hope that we can target that money in such a 
way as to create good-paying jobs as quickly as possible in the most 
cost-effective way imaginable. What I can tell my colleagues is that in 
my State--and I expect in the other 49 States in this country--our 
infrastructure is collapsing. We have roads in the State of Vermont 
which have huge problems. We have all kinds of bridges that are in need 
of repair in our small towns. We have water systems that are simply 
inadequate. We have wastewater plants that need to be rebuilt. All of 
these are very expensive propositions. So in the stimulus package, my 
hope is that we are going to put substantial sums of money into 
rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our water systems. I hope we begin 
to make the investment we need in public transportation--certainly 
rural public transportation in the State of Vermont--as one of many 
needs. If you are a worker in one part of the State and you want to go 
50 miles to your job, in almost every case there is no public 
transportation to get you there. If you are a senior citizen and wish 
to go to the hospital or the grocery store, it is very hard to get 
there if you do not have a car. I suspect that is true all over rural 
America. In addition, our rail system is far behind, where Europe, 
Japan, and even China are now advancing forward. So I hope for and will 
support a major increase in funding to create a substantial number of 
new jobs as we rebuild our infrastructure.

[[Page 1306]]

  In addition--I know President Obama has been very strong on this 
issue, and I agree with him--we need to invest heavily in energy 
efficiency. I can tell you that in the State of Vermont and, again, all 
over this country but especially in cold-weather States, you have older 
homes where energy is just going through the roof--literally going 
through the roof and the windows--because of poor insulation. We can 
create jobs making our homes, our offices, our schools more energy 
efficient.
  We need to be extremely aggressive, as I mentioned a moment ago, in 
terms of public transportation.
  Also, right now we are on the cusp of major breakthroughs in such 
renewable technologies as wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass. I 
suspect that in 20 years, people will see a very different energy 
system than we have right now. It will be a cleaner system. It will be 
a system not emitting greenhouse gases.
  There is a lot of work that stands in front of us. There was an 
election in November where the people said: We want change. That is 
what that election was all about. Unless we are bold, unless we are 
prepared to take on the big money interests that have dominated 
legislation for the last many years, there will be a great deal of 
disappointment all over this country.
  Now is the time. There is a lot of enthusiasm in the work President 
Obama has been doing since he has been elected. There is an enormous 
amount of hope and confidence in the air that we can move America in a 
new direction. I hope that with new national leadership, with strong 
grassroots participation, with a Congress prepared to stand up and take 
on the powerful special interests that have dominated us for so many 
years, we can fulfill the faith the American people have expressed in 
us in recent years and that, in fact, we can move America in a very 
different direction and become the country all of us know we can 
become.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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