Kongressman Brad Sherman: Martial Law if We Voted No
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaG9d_4zij8
Ausführlicher: Congressman Brad Sherman: Martial Law if We Voted No [1]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6KRXnYgu5I
Teil2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55lOhYw8Lxk
Teil 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHFUa4SpPBU
mehr Infos: http://bradsherman.house.gov/
Text:
Mr. SHERMAN. I thank the Chair. I have got 30 minutes, and I will share some with the gentlewoman from Ohio in just a second to describe the flaws with this bill. Believe it or not, 30 minutes is not long enough. But first I want to mention about the calls that are coming into our office.
The calls used to be from people around the country. Now Wall Street firms have their employees unplugging those headsets to call investors and instead calling Members of Congress. So now the calls coming in to at least my office have shifted from 20-1 against this bailout package for Wall Street, down to about 3-1 or 4-1 against this bailout.
I ask my colleagues not to be confused. Edit out some of those calls that are coming to you from folks who are being paid to make the call, and you will realize the country remains absolutely overwhelmingly opposed to this Wall Street bailout bill.
I thank again the gentleman from Ohio, and I will make a few more points.
We had a meeting of the Skeptics Caucus, which is now a bipartisan Skeptics Caucus, where we heard from Bill Isaac. Mr. Isaac was Chair of the FDIC, having first been appointed to that board by President Carter and then appointed by Reagan. You don’t find very many people who have support on both sides of the aisle like that.
Bill Isaac led the FDIC in solving the 1981 crisis, which was probably worse than the crisis that we have now. He used the emergency powers of the FDIC. He was able to solve that credit crisis without significant cost to the taxpayer.
We ought to hear from Bill Isaac. And I look forward to us defeating this bill tomorrow so we can have hearings and all my colleagues, not just those who came to the Skeptics Caucus, can hear from Mr. Isaac and so many others, because the starting point is this testimony that we didn’t hear before any hearing, because there have been no hearings on this bill, but rather a letter sent to Members of Congress by hundreds of eminent economists, including three Nobel Laureates. And they said, we ask
Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action.So, Nobel Laureates, economists eminent in their field, say the sky will not fall if we take some time. The only way to pass this bill is to keep up the panic. The panic has to be calmed down. We have got a few days. We have got a week. We have got 10 days, and that is more than enough time to write a much better bill.
But let me summarize some of the other things that Bill Isaac told our Skeptics Caucus. A vote “no” on tomorrow’s bill is not a vote to do nothing. It is a vote to defeat that bill and to start writing a much better bill.
Under the bill that comes before us tomorrow, in Mr. Isaac’s belief, half of all the money is going to be used to bail out foreign investors who made dumb business decisions. Now, I am not real sure that I want to use taxpayers’ money to bail out American investors who made bad business decisions. But why are we bailing out the Bank of China? Why are we bailing out the Saudi royal family? We are doing so because they demand it. They communicate those demands at the highest level to our administration.
After I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio, I will describe how the bill clearly provides that we can send as much money as Treasury wants not to bail out American investors, but to bail out foreign investors. And when I say foreign investors, I don’t just mean companies here in the United States that happen to have foreign owners.
I have sought at the Rules Committee to simply put an amendment in this bill to say that we are not going to buy any toxic asset that wasn’t demonstrably owned by an American on September 20. That amendment will not be allowed. It was not allowed last time; it won’t be allowed this time.
Why? Because they think they can hide from this Congress and from the [Page: H10691]
American people the fact that hundreds of billions of dollars are going to overseas investors. And there are transparency provisions in the bill on a lot of things, but the one thing that will never be revealed, when Goldman Sachs sells a bond on December 1 to Treasury, what will not be revealed is whether Goldman Sachs bought it from the Bank of China two or three days earlier with
intention to sell to Treasury. We are going to be buying bonds that are currently in vaults in Beijing and London.What Mr. Isaac also pointed out is that this bill is not going to solve the problem. People think that if you act in a panic and you throw $700 billion at something, you are going to solve it. Hardly. In his estimation, the credit markets will not be appreciably working any better than they are today. They may loosen things up for a week or two, but you are looking at a December that is no better than it would be if we did not pass this bill.
The FDIC could solve this problem under their existing powers. If they are a little shy to use those powers to the hilt, we can and should pass a bill that outlines that, yes, indeed, we do want them to use their powers. What should they do? They should provide for a temporary time a total guarantee on all of the general credit debt of banks, so the regulated commercial banks would be places where people know their money is safe.
They are subject to regulation, and the main part of this crisis is that the banks are unwilling to lend to each other as they traditionally do because no one bank is sure that the other bank is safe. We have got to say the commercial banks of America are safe and tell investors around the world that is where they can put their money with total safety.
Now, this leaves out some Wall Street entities that are desperate for that $700 billion. They can just taste it. But it allows us to solve this problem without appreciable cost to U.S. taxpayers. And the FDIC collects an insurance premium from the banks so it would be the financial system, not the American taxpayer, paying the cost of taking care of this risk.
Now, I would hope that every Member of Congress has received my blue paper. I have sent it out today via e-mail, I have handed it out on the floor, but I know there are a few that haven’t received it. Please contact my office and read these seven pages. Learn how this bill will send half the money to foreign investors. Learn how this bill bails out firms that will continue to pay $1 million a month salaries, and could raise those executives to $1.5 million a month, should they choose to do so.
Please, read the paper. Read about the key provisions of the bill. Then you will be armed with the information necessary to deal with the fearmongers that tell you, well, you had to pass that bill. You had to dump $700 billion from a helicopter onto Wall Street, because somehow that was going to take a terrible economy and turn it into a great economy.
Such an action will indeed, will indeed, make things better for a few Wall Street executives, and they are very determined, and their employees on company time are calling our office.
With that, I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio.
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/congress/?q=node/77531&id=8902074
Mr. SHERMAN. Thank you. I thank the gentlelady from Ohio.
The only way they can pass this bill is by creating and by sustaining a panic atmosphere. That atmosphere is not justified. Many of us were told in private conversations, if we voted against this bill, that, on Monday, the sky would fall and that the market would drop 2,000 or 3,000 points the first day and another 2,000 the second day. A few Members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted “no.” That’s what I call fear mongering–unjustified, proven wrong.
We’ve got a week; we’ve got 2 weeks to write a good bill. The only way to pass a bad bill: Keep the panic pressure on.
Now, what has the Senate done to this bill? First, they’ve added pork to it in the hope that that would buy off some votes. Second, they’ve created a double hostage situation. Now, we already know that the first bill was a hostage situation. When Paulson announced this crisis, he basically sent a ransom note, and that ransom note read, “We’ve got your 401(k), and you’ll never see it alive again unless you send us $700 billion in unmarked bills.” So we had one hostage situation.
There’s the AMT patch, a necessary tax provision that Congress passes every year. Without this patch, the AMT tax, which is designed to fall only on the wealthy, will hit another 20 million American households. Everyone knows we have to pass this. We sent it to the Senate for them to pass. Instead of passing it, they created a hostage situation. They refused to pass it. They put it on this bill. So now we’re being told, if you don’t send $700 billion to Wall Street, we’re going
to tax 20 million American families in a way no one in Congress wants to do. That’s totally phony. If we vote down this bill, the Senate will pass the AMT patch bill that we sent them just like they do every year.
There has been some attempt to tell the American people that this bill isn’t going to cost anything permanently because, in 2013, we’re going to get the money back from the financial services industry. Nothing could be further from the truth. All the bill says is that the President has to send us a proposal to tax the financial services industry. Now, keep in mind, if the President has any good ideas in 2013, he’ll send them to us or she’ll send them to us. If the President is only sending us
revenue ideas because they have to send them and they don’t want to send that proposal, well then, they’re going to send it with a note, saying, “I’m required to give you this proposal, but I think it’s a bad idea.” What do you think we’re going to do with a Presidential proposal that is disparaged by the President?Furthermore, it would be absolutely impossible and contrary to the intent of the bill, contrary to the logic of the bill and contrary to the statutory provisions of the bill to construct a tax that hit only those companies that got bailed out. Instead, the tax is going to hit the entire financial services industry, and a proposal like that is highly unlikely to pass the House. If it passed the House and if it got over to the Senate, 41 Senators could block it, and Wall Street could have enough
money to hire 4,100 lobbyists.Now, why is it that we can’t tax the individual companies that are bailed out on some sort of proportional basis?
Well, first, many of those firms aren’t going to exist in 2013. Second, we’re not even keeping track of how much money we lost on the assets we’re buying from Goldman Sachs versus how much money we’re losing on the assets we’re buying from Citibank. We’ll know how much we bought from each of them, but we might buy really toxic assets from one and only mildly troublesome assets from the other. We’ll mix them together. Then we’ll sell them off and we’ll suffer a loss, and we won’t know how to attribute
that loss. How much are we going to tax Goldman Sachs? How much are we going to tax Citibank? We’ll never know how to tax those we’ll have bailed out.Some of these companies we’re bailing out are just going to be shell companies, so you know they’re going to disappear before 2013, and you know that a tax bill is going to hit similarly sized banks with the same rate of tax: the banks that got a big bailout, the banks that got a small bailout, the banks that didn’t get a bailout, the banks that sold us kind of bad assets, the banks that sold us assets that turned out to be worthless.
Such a controversial tax bill submitted under duress by a President is not going to pass this House, let alone pass the Senate, which can stop it with 41 votes. Wall Street gets their money now, and we get it back: never.
Now, as I said, hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be used to bail out foreign investors. That is why my amendment, which easily fixes that problem, has been rejected, because the White House demands that we bail out these foreign investors. That’s what they want to do. That’s what they promised the Saudi royal family. That’s what they promised the Bank of China. Those promises will be honored with the tax money squeezed out of the American people.
They talk about executive compensation being controlled in this bill. They do put some controls on some bonuses being given to some departing executives–great–but they allow $1-million-a-month salaries. If some executive says, “well, you know, you wanted to pay me a good bonus on top of my $1-million-a-month salary and now the bonus formula is being changed a little bit,” the company can say, “You know, [Page: H10693]
you’re right. We wanted to give you more
money. We’ll raise your $1-million-a-month salary to $2 million a month.”Now, if that qualifies as limits on the executive compensation of companies that need and get a bailout under this bill, please explain to me how that is. Look, Bill Gates is running a great company. He doesn’t need a bailout. I hope he gets paid a whole lot. But if your company has been run into the ground, if you need a bailout, if you’re part of the reason for this panic situation, why do you need to pay over $1 million a year to any executive? That ought to be the limit. Frankly, it strikes
me as a generous limit.We’re told that there’s going to be oversight under this bill. There is a good, Democratic-dominated board that is created. It is a critique board, not a control board. It is a board that will issue press releases and reports, but it will not halt and it will not reverse and it will not delay any decision that will be made by the Secretary of the Treasury, which brings up another thing:
Why are we having Paulson run this thing? I thought he already had a job. The Secretary of the Treasury ought to be a full-time job if we’re in a period of an unparalleled, sky-is-falling economic crisis. Furthermore, he is temporary. He is leaving Washington in January. Why doesn’t this bill provide for an administrator selected in a bipartisan way and with bipartisan support who is willing to stick around for 2 or 3 years? Because this is a Paulson-Bush power grab. Paulson doesn’t want somebody
else to do it. He wants to be up on Wall Street, handing out the money to the companies he likes and ignoring the phone calls from the firms he doesn’t like.I want to point out that, if another Member comes to the floor in the next couple of minutes, he can claim the next hour. Otherwise, for better or for worse, this speech and all of the pontificating on this floor will be over soon. So I hope Members will come to the floor. We’ve got a lot to discuss.
The board is just a critique board. Paulson’s power is undiminished, and we’re having a part-time, temporary employee run this because that’s what Paulson really wants. Homeowners are not going to get any relief under this bill. All $700 billion can easily be spent.
I see the gentlelady from Ohio (Ms. Sutton), and I hope that she claims the next hour of time. I thank her for coming here and for being here so quickly. I will use the remaining 3 minutes of my time, and I will look forward to being part of her Special Order, right up until the Vice Presidential debate starts.
[Time: 20:15]
We are told in 2009 we are going to pass really good legislation to make sure that this never happens again–corporate governance reform, regulatory reform, we are going to get it done. What is really going to happen? We may write a really good bill in the House, something Wall Street really hates. Then it goes over to the Senate where 41 Senators out of 100 is all it takes to block it. I don’t think they will defeat reform legislation in the Senate. They will delay it and then they will dilute
it. And by the time it passes, it will be so diluted, Wall Street will drink it down with a smile on its face knowing that no effective reform is really being imposed upon them.So we are not going to see meaningful regulatory reform; although we will pass something and Wall Street will tell you it is a big deal. We will see million-dollar-a-month salaries, or one-and-a-half million or $2 million a month salaries paid to the executives of these firms while they are getting a bailout with our taxpayer money.
We are going to see a very large percentage of this money going to buy securities, bad paper, and toxic assets currently in safes in Shanghai, Beijing, London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
We will see all of the power in the hands of the Bush administration and in the hands of a part-time temporary administrator, namely the Secretary of the Treasury.
Under this bill, if it passes, we don’t really know what is going to happen to the economy. No one knows. The only thing that is certain, two things: Wall Street executives are going to get huge amounts of money and our children and grandchildren are going to get stuck with hundreds of billions of dollars of additional Federal debt. And we as a country, having just done a bad $700 billion program, will not be able to do anything to help homeowners because we won’t have the money. We won’t be
able to bail out local governments because we won’t have the money. We won’t be able to deal effectively with the real banking-lending crisis because we will have shot our entire wad on a bill that is guaranteed only to do one thing, and that is to help the truly wealthy on Wall Street.My time has expired, and I look forward to the Speaker giving unanimous consent to the gentlelady from Ohio controlling the next hour.
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