[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 16620-16621]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            RIGGED ECONOMICS

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, we are going through one of the most 
difficult and painful periods in American history, and millions of 
Americans are wondering what is happening to our country. Behind the 
curtain of spin, propaganda, and political attacks, here is what I 
believe is happening.
  The rules of the economic game in this country are increasingly being 
rigged to provide unfair advantage to the wealthy and well-connected 
and to take unfair advantage of regular folks and families. America has 
always promised a straight deal, and that straight deal, for many 
Americans, is getting harder and harder to find.
  Let me say I am relentlessly proud to be an American. I grew up in 
the foreign service of this country, surrounded by families who put 
public service and pride in this country ahead of their comfort, their 
convenience, even their safety and their family's safety. I am 
absolutely convinced of American exceptionalism. I have seen it, and I 
have lived it.
  That is why I am so upset to see our country in the shape it is in 
today. Our Founding Fathers changed the world when they set in place 
our finely balanced system of government, illuminated by the clear and 
guaranteed rights of the American people. We are squandering that 
inheritance. Our government is not working, our rights are being 
undermined, and it is the American people who are paying the price. 
They are paying the price because too often they are not getting a 
straight deal anymore.
  Let's look at some of the places where the deal is rigged, where 
special interest gets special deals, and where the regular American 
family doesn't get a straight deal. Big multistate banks are allowed to 
charge middle-class families 30 percent credit card interest rates that 
are likely illegal under the State laws where that family lives. 
Senators in this Chamber who are ardent States rights federalists in 
every other circumstance have no complaint when their State law is 
overruled and overborne by the big banks. Students with college loans--
who now carry $1 trillion of debt--and families with home mortgages are 
denied the privileges every corporate borrower gets to seek, bankruptcy 
protection against their debt when they are in over their heads.
  Our individual tax system allows the wealthiest and highest income 
Americans to pay lower tax rates than middle-class wage earners pay or 
even hide their income in offshore tax havens and pay no tax at all. 
The corporate tax system allows international corporations to route 
their profits through foreign countries and through tax shelters to pay 
little or no tax in this country.
  When you drill down to cases, GE, General Electric, on billions of 
dollars in profit, paid little or no Federal income tax. When you pull 
up to look system-wide, even though corporations are richer than ever, 
American people now contribute $5 for every $1 corporations contribute 
to sustaining our country's revenues. It used to be 1 to 1. For every 
$1 corporations contributed, the American people contributed $1. There 
was an even sharing of our Nation's revenue needs. But for 75 years now 
it has been steadily sliding, and now it is 5 to 1 against ordinary 
Americans and in favor of corporations.
  The wealthy elite who make their fortunes in the marketplace don't 
protect and honor the marketplace. They try to rig the game, even when 
it puts the marketplace itself at risk. When that requires everybody 
else to come to their rescue, they show no shame and little gratitude 
and go right back to work gaming the system. Those who have become CEOs 
extract from their company's ridiculous amounts of compensation. CEO 
pay is up in my lifetime from 40 times the average wage of the employee 
to 400 times the average wage. These CEOs even extract princely 
compensation when they fail.
  The big polluters have one party denying science entirely, denying 
the plain evidence of carbon pollution all around us and spinning the 
phony theory that the cost of controlling pollution is a burden on the 
economy when it is actually a huge net gain for our country. A party 
that used to proudly carry the banner of conservation and environmental 
protection is now reduced to serving corporate spin masters with phony 
fabrications, and it is the middle-class families who pay the price.
  The appointees of one party on the Supreme Court, by a bare 5-to-4 
majority, are willing to overturn precedent and flout the rules of 
judicial decisionmaking to decrease something novel and remarkable: 
that corporations are people and money is speech and, therefore, our 
precious constitutional rights to free speech, as American people, give 
corporations a right to spend as much money as they please, even 
anonymously, in American elections.
  International corporations with no loyalty to any flag or nation but 
with virtually unlimited money may now drown out the voices of regular 
people, regular families in our American democracy. CEOs get to use the 
corporate megaphone amplified by the corporate treasury to drown out 
their employees' voices. Just one big corporation with just 5 percent 
of one-quarter's profits could match the entire political spending of 
both Presidential campaigns in the last election.
  Our Constitution and Bill of Rights established the jury not once but 
three separate times as an important institution of freedom in our 
system of democracy. DeTocqueville--one of the great historians and 
commentators on the American system of government--called the American 
jury ``one of the forms of the sovereignty of the people.'' Big 
corporations go to court all the time and fight it out before a jury 
when they want to. Yet over and over again, a middle-class family, in 
contracts, cannot negotiate or control, in fine print they probably 
never even read, their credit card company, their cell phone company, 
the companies they do business with, quietly take away their right to 
go against them before an American jury. Over and over again those same 
Supreme Court Justices who decided a corporation was a person have let 
them down. They have to go, instead, to something called arbitration 
instead of a constitutional American jury.
  To give an idea of how arbitration works, for a long time the biggest 
arbitration company in the country was a racket rigged to rule against 
the consumer. It had to be shut down by legal actions by our State 
attorneys general. Add it all up, all those different areas that I 
mentioned, and there have been a lot of changes since my childhood.
  There are a lot of changes in how our country runs, and it is all in 
the same direction--special deals and special tax rates and special 
rules that help big corporations and people who are as wealthy as big 
corporations and leave out regular people who don't have masses of 
money, money, money; rules that allow corporations to intrude into our 
public discourse in this democracy and drown out people's voices 
through mighty corporate megaphones amplified by money, money, money; 
lies and nonsense cooked up in corporate spin factories being treated 
as fact obtaining acceptability by how often the lies are repeated 
thanks to money, money, money.
  Under all of that money, what is drowning is the sense we are all in 
this together as Americans. One of the things America actually stands 
for in this world is that we are fair with each other. We get a 
straight deal, and we give each other a straight deal. That is one of 
the ways we, as Americans, set an example in this world, an example of 
being fair. There are plenty of countries in the world whose internal 
political and economic systems amount to a racket, a racket rigged for 
the benefit

[[Page 16621]]

of the rich and powerful where farmers and workers and ordinary 
families get screwed and the wealthy skim all the cream. Some of these 
countries are so bad we call them kleptocracies. The world is full of 
that.
  It has been the pride and joy of America that we are not like that. 
It has been our message to the world that it doesn't have to be like 
that. But now it is looking more and more like we actually are becoming 
just like that.
  What can we do about it? What can we do to make sure Americans are 
getting a straight deal in all of this? I propose these actions: No. 1, 
big banks should have to follow the State laws just like local banks do 
and just like you and I do. No more going to South Dakota and marketing 
from their credit cards 30 percent interest rates that violate the laws 
of the home State.
  No. 2, if big corporations can restructure all their debts in 
bankruptcy court, so should students and families be able to. No 
second-class citizenship for those who borrowed college loans and home 
mortgages.
  No. 3, amend the Constitution to make it clear that corporations are 
not people--never were, never could be. The Good Lord just did not make 
it that way. We need to make it crystal clear that corporations can't 
spend money in American elections anonymously or through phony shell 
organizations. If big oil wants to influence American elections, 
Americans should know it is big oil.
  No. 4: Straighten out our tax systems and, until we do, put in a 
minimum tax for ultra-high income earners that is at least at the rate 
that ordinary American taxpaying families pay. While we are at it, put 
in a minimum corporate tax rate that is at least half of what average 
corporations pay. No corporation that is making millions or billions of 
dollars should get away with paying nothing in income tax.
  No. 5: Shut down the offshore tax havens and charge companies a CEO 
pay surtax on CEO compensation that is more than 100 times their 
average worker's compensation.
  No. 6: Make polluters pay the actual costs of their pollution. Why 
should a polluting company be able to push onto all of the rest of us 
the costs of their pollution? Why should American families bear that 
polluting corporation's costs? Economics tells us that should be part 
of the company's cost of doing business.
  No. 7: No more corporate tax deductions for offshoring American jobs, 
and no more favoring of offshore corporate income derived from what 
used to be American jobs.
  No. 8: Take out of those take-it-or-leave-it consumer contracts the 
provisions that take away in the fine print the American right to go 
before an American jury, as the Constitution and Bill of Rights 
promises whenever a citizen has a grievance or has been harmed.
  None of these eight things I have mentioned asks anything of anyone 
that isn't fair, and most of them simply ask that ordinary Americans 
get the same deal, or at least no worse of a deal, than special 
Americans get and big corporations get. This all does no more than put 
people on the same level, or at least under the same rules, as the rich 
and powerful.
  When someone is getting a better deal than you because of who they 
are, you are not getting a straight deal. When someone is taking 
advantage of you because you are small and easy to take advantage of, 
you are not getting a straight deal. When the rules of the game are 
rigged to help the winners win and to make you a loser, you are not 
getting a straight deal. It is time we started giving the people of 
America a straight deal around here.
  I thank the Chair. I yield the floor and note the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. REID. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Hagan). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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