Floor Statements

I thank my friend from Illinois for asking that question because, coincidentally, we have just introduced and brought to the desk legislation for a single-payer national health care program. I suggest to my friend from Illinois and my Republican friends that it is a very different bill than the legislation we are now looking at. In no way, shape, or form is the legislation being debated now a single-payer national health care program. As my friend from Illinois understands-- and I ask his views on this--I have heard some of our Republican friends talk about how strong this current health care system is that we have right now. I ask my friend from Illinois, do you think we can do better than being the only major country in the industrialized world that does not guarantee health care to all of its people? Can we do better than that?

I ask my friend from Illinois, has he talked to physicians who have, on that issue, told him that they have lost patients who walked into their office and they say: Why didn't you come in here 6 months ago or a year ago? And that patient says: I didn't have any money, and I thought maybe the pain in my stomach or my chest would get better.

I have had that conversation with physicians in Vermont. I wonder if the Senator has talked to physicians who have said the same thing.

We have heard discussions of death panels. I think the Senator might agree with me that when we talk about death panels, we are talking in reality about 45,000 people who die every single year because they don't get to a doctor on time. That seems to me to be what a death panel is.

In the midst of all this, with 46 million uninsured, with 45,000 people dying every year because they don't get to a doctor when they should, when premiums have doubled in the last 9 years, when we have almost 1 million Americans going bankrupt because of medically related bills, I ask my friend from Illinois, isn't it time for a change? Isn't it time this country now moves forward and provides health care for all of our people in a comprehensive and cost-effective way?

I ask my friend from Illinois if we are not only dealing with the personal health care issue of 46 million uninsured and people dying, but are we not dealing with a major economic issue? How are businesses going to compete with the rest of the world when every single year they are seeing huge increases in their health insurance premiums, and rather than investing in the business that they are supposed to be in, they are having to spend enormous sums of money as health care costs soar? I know small businesses in Vermont tell me that in some cases not only can they not provide health insurance to their workers, they cannot even provide it for themselves. I have to believe there is a similar situation in Illinois.

While we are talking about the economics of health care, I wonder if my friend from Illinois has had the same experience I have had in Vermont where people tell me they are staying on the job, not because they want to stay on their job but because the job is providing decent health insurance. They can't go where they want to go because the new job may not provide insurance or they are afraid about the interval when they may not have any health insurance at all. I wonder if my friend from Illinois happened to see the piece in the paper, unbelievable, where a middle-aged fellow joined the U.S. military because his wife was suffering from cancer, and he couldn't find a way to get health care for her so he joined the military. Does the Senator think this is what should be going on in the greatest country in the world?

I ask my friend from Illinois, does he think some of our Republican friends feel so threatened and so upset by giving the American people the option to choose a public Medicare-type plan as opposed to a private insurance plan? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, some of our friends are more interested in representing the interests of the big private insurance companies rather than the needs of the American people?

I would say to my friend from Illinois that that is an interesting proposal and, in fact, I was almost thinking of offering an amendment at one point. We have a lot of people in this country who stand up and say: Get the government out of health care. Well, I think some of my Republican friends have kind of echoed that message. I do think that the Senator from Illinois is right. We may bring forth an amendment to allow our Republican friends to say: Let's abolish the Veterans' Administration. Because, as you know, that is a government- run program which most veterans in my State and I think around the country are very proud of. They think it is a good program. From what the statistics tell us, it is a very cost-effective way to provide quality health care to all of our veterans. Maybe we should bring forward an amendment to those who say get the government out of health care. If you want to abolish the Veterans' Administration, go for it. And what about TRICARE. Maybe you want to abolish TRICARE. Go for it. Maybe you want to abolish SCHIP which is providing high quality health insurance for millions of kids. Maybe we might work together and bring forth an amendment.

Let our Republican friends who say get the government out of health care, let them abolish the Veterans' Administration, Medicare, SCHIP, Medicaid, let them do that. We will see how many votes they might get.

I suggest to my friend from Illinois that we could take it a step further. I go to the Capitol physician's office. That is where I go. We pay extra money for it. I have Blue Cross/Blue Shield, but I go there. Do you know who runs the Capitol physician's office, which I suspect the vast majority of the Members of Congress go to and get very fine primary health care?

Well, it is that terrible government agency, the U.S. Navy. So maybe some of our friends who are busy denouncing government health care might want to say they do not want to take advantage of that very fine, high quality health care, and that speaks for the whole military as well. While we are at it, maybe you should abolish health care for the U.S. military, which is all government run and, by the way, generally regarded as pretty good quality health care.

I would ask my friend his views on that.

It might be an interesting amendment, I would say to my friend. There is another area where it is a semigovernment nonprofit, which I know the Senator from Illinois feels very strongly about, and that is the Federally Qualified Community Health Centers begun by Senator Kennedy over 40 years ago, where we now have over 1,200 community health centers all over this country. In fact, I know this is widely supported in a bipartisan or tripartisan way, because the Federally Qualified Community Health Centers provide quality health care and dental care and low-cost prescription drugs and mental health counseling.

I might say to my friend from Illinois, one of the provisions in that 2,000-page bill he is holding up is legislation he and I and others have worked hard on, which is to substantially expand the Community Health Center Program into every underserved area in America. We talk about 46 million people being uninsured in this country. We have 60 million people who do not have access to a doctor on a regular basis.

If we expand the Community Health Center Program, if we expand to a significant degree the National Health Service Corps so we can help young people become primary health care physicians by paying off their very substantial medical debts, would my friend agree with me that this would be a major step forward in improving primary health care in America?

My friend from Illinois makes the point. And I have visited virtually all of them in the State of Vermont. We have gone from 2 to 8, with 40 satellites. We have over 100,000 people in the State of Vermont who now use these Federally Qualified Health Centers.

I know my friend from Illinois is also aware that when you talk about health care, you have to talk about dental care.

Because what is true in Vermont is true in Illinois. You have a whole lot of people who do not have access to a dentist, which these Federally Qualified Health Centers now provide, and mental health counseling, and low-cost prescription drugs.

So I thank my friend from Illinois. I am sure the Senator and I are going to work together to make sure we, in fact, are successful in keeping people out of the emergency room, keeping them out of the hospital, by enabling them to get the medical care they need when they need it. I look forward to working with my friend on that.

Right.

Would my friend from Illinois agree, it does not make a whole lot of sense for people who do not have health insurance today to go into an emergency room and run up a huge cost or to get terribly ill because they do not go to a doctor when they should and end up in the hospital? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense, both for the personal health of the individual and saving money for the system, to provide health care to people when they need it?

Right.

Exactly.

At this point, let me thank my friend from Illinois for allowing me to engage in this colloquy with him. I am going to yield back the floor to him and thank him for his very good work.

Mr. President, I do disagree with my friend from Oklahoma very much, but that disagreement will have to wait for another day because today I want to deal with another crisis, and that is the situation regarding health care.

I come to the floor to urge my fellow Senators to go forward in passing the strongest possible piece of health care reform legislation--legislation which is comprehensive, covering all basic health care needs; legislation that is universal, covering every man, woman, and child in our country; and legislation, importantly, that is cost effective both for individuals and for our Nation.

I think all of us understand the United States today is in the midst of a major health care crisis. Mr. President, 46 million Americans have no health insurance and, importantly, even more are underinsured with large copayments and deductibles. We have heard some of our rightwing friends talk about death panels. Let me tell you about the reality of a real death panel, not a phony death panel, and that is, this year in the United States, according to Harvard University, some 45,000 Americans will die because they lack health insurance and they do not get to a doctor when they should.

Mr. President, 45,000 will die this year. And if we do not take action, 45,000 or more will die next year. This is the United States of America. To see tens of thousands of our fellow country people dying because they do not have access to a doctor is an abomination, it is not acceptable, and that needs to change.

Among many other reforms we need to bring about as we go forward with health care reform is a revolution in terms of primary health care. Today, 60 million Americans, including many with health insurance, do not have access to a doctor. The result of that is, when they get sick, they go to the emergency room, at great cost, or they delay getting health care, and they end up in the hospital being treated for a far more serious illness than they would have had if they were treated initially. Clearly, this is an absurdity. It costs us lives. It costs us money. We have to change that.

I am very happy to say that in that regard I have introduced legislation that has 25 cosponsors in the Senate and which has been incorporated into the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions bill, which would quadruple--quadruple--the number of federally qualified community health centers in our country over a 6-year period, which would mean there would be a community health center providing excellent quality health care, dental care, mental health counseling, low-cost prescription drugs in every underserved area in the country. We go from about 1,300 centers to 5,200 centers.

Also in this bill, we would increase by 10 times the amount of money for the National Health Service Corps so we can provide debt forgiveness for those people in medical school who want to practice primary health care, which in Vermont and around this country is a desperate, desperate need. We absolutely need to increase the number of primary health care physicians we have.

When we talk about health care reform, we also have to include dental care. Dental care is often sometimes pushed aside. But I can tell you, in many regions of this country, people are finding it virtually impossible to gain access to a dentist and, oftentimes, they simply cannot afford the dental care they need. So when we talk about health care, we have to include dental care in that.

Furthermore, when we are talking about health care reform, it is absolutely imperative we begin to address the fact that in the United States of America we spend far more on prescription drugs than do people of any other country. This is not just a financial issue for the individual; this is a health care issue. I have talked to physicians who tell me--and I think this is common not just in Vermont but all over the country--that some 25 to 35 percent of their patients do not fill the prescription the doctor writes because they cannot afford to do that. So what sense is it when somebody goes to the doctor that the doctor writes out a prescription but that individual cannot afford to fill that prescription? We need to deal with the high cost of prescription drugs, and we can do that in several ways.

No. 1, when I was in the House, I was the first Member of Congress to take American citizens over the Canadian border to purchase prescription drugs there that cost a fraction of what they cost in the United States. So we need to pass what is called reimportation--the right of Americans and the right of people who manage prescription drugs, who are in that business, to be able to purchase safe, FDA- approved medicine from abroad at a fraction of the price the drug companies are selling those products to them in this country. That will lower the cost of prescription drugs for all Americans.

Second of all, we, obviously, have to negotiate prescription drug prices under Medicare Part D. When we do that--and we lower the cost that Medicare is paying--we can end the doughnut hole which is now causing so many problems for senior citizens today who go above the first part, where Medicare is paying about $2,500, and then they have to pay 100 percent of the cost, which is hurting a whole lot of seniors.

Thirdly, we must deal with the biologics issue. My colleague Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio has been strong on this issue, so that we stop drug companies from having exclusivity for 12 years, preventing generic companies from getting into the market and lowering the cost of biologics. That is a very important issue.

Any serious health care reform legislation must include strong cost containment. Insurers have increased premiums 87 percent over the past 6 years, while premiums have doubled over the last 9 years--increasing four times faster than wages. If present trends continue, health insurance premiums will double over the next 8 years, which will be a disaster for millions of Americans and, in fact, for our entire economy.

Today, the United States spends far more per capita for health care than any other country on Earth. That is a very important point for us to understand. We are now spending over $7,000 per person, and yet despite spending almost twice as much as any other industrialized country, our outcome in terms of infant mortality, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of immunization and preventable deaths, is often

behind other countries. So we are spending huge amounts of money; we are not getting value for what we are spending.

The cost of health care in this country is now 16 percent of our GDP, and it continues to soar at a rate that is basically unsustainable. So this is not, again, just an issue for individuals. This is an issue for our economy and our Nation.

If you look at a company such as General Motors--General Motors which went bankrupt--they were spending more money on health care per automobile than they were on steel. Small business owners in Vermont and across this country are finding it harder and harder not only to provide decent health care coverage for their workers, but in many instances they cannot even provide health care to themselves. What ends up happening is, instead of investing their profits into expanding their businesses and creating more jobs, all of that money is going into the soaring health care costs.

But when we talk about the personal impact of our disastrous health care system on individuals, there is no better example than looking at bankruptcy. In this country today, we have approximately 1 million Americans who are going bankrupt because of medically related costs. It is not hard to understand why: You lose your job in the midst of a severe recession. Somebody in your family becomes very ill. Well, how do you come up with the money if you do not have any health insurance, or even if you do have an inadequate health insurance program? The answer is, you go bankrupt. So, incredible as it may sound, close to a million people in this country this year are going bankrupt because of medically related illnesses.

I have talked a little bit about some of the problems that are out there--and there are many more. What is the answer? I do not think anyone has a perfect answer. But I do think the United States should be looking at other countries around the world. Why do we end up spending so much and get relatively poor value for what we are spending? When we do that, when we look at countries throughout Europe, Scandinavia, Canada, and so forth, I think it leads one to the conclusion that if we are serious about providing quality, affordable care to all Americans, in a cost-effective way, then we must move toward what many of us call a Medicare-for-all single-payer program.

I understand, as I think many people do, that because of the power of the insurance companies and the drug companies and the medical equipment suppliers, because of their campaign contributions, because of their lobbying, the truth is, a single-payer program has never been on the table from day one since this whole discussion began. I think that is very unfortunate. It is doubly unfortunate because we have many thousands of physicians in this country, including the 16,000 members of Physicians for a National Health Program, and other health care providers, the largest nurses union in this country, in support of a single-payer system. Millions of Americans want us to move that way. But because of big money interests, that discussion does not even begin to get to the floor.

Well, I intend during the course of the debate to offer an amendment on a national single-payer system. We will see how many votes we get. But what I am also trying to do is give States flexibility so that, if they so choose, they can move forward with a single-payer approach. My guess is that if one State does it--whether it is Vermont, California, Pennsylvania--whichever that State may be, if it works well, if everybody in that State has good quality health care, in a cost- effective way, it will spread all over the country. I intend to do my best to see that language is in the bill, which will allow States to do just that.

A single-payer national health insurance program is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health financing, but delivery of care remains largely private. This is not a government health care program. It is not what they do in the United Kingdom. It is public insurance privately delivered.

The reason we spend more--and this is an issue that has gotten amazingly little discussion--why do we end up spending almost twice as much as any other country? Well, I think that is a good question to ask. I do not hear a whole lot of answers. The reason is we have a patchwork system of for-profit payers. We have private insurance. What is the function of a private insurance company?

Everybody in America understands the function of a private insurance company is not to provide health care, it is to make money. What we end up with are 1,300 private insurance companies, with thousands of separate systems, each geared to a different group, each geared to make as much money as it possibly can. The result is we as a nation are spending about 30 cents of every $1 not on doctors and medicine and nurses; we are spending it on administration and bureaucracy, huge profits, advertising, billing, sales, marketing--you name it; we spend it--rather than spending it actually on trying to keep people healthy or make them well.

Single-payer financing is the most significant way I know to end the waste and bureaucracy of the current system. What the studies suggest is if we move toward a single-payer system, we would save over $350 billion every single year, getting rid of all of that bureaucracy, that waste--the paper shuffling that has nothing to do with making people well.

Under a single-payer system, all Americans would be covered for all medically necessary services, including doctor, hospital, long-term care, mental health, dental, vision, prescription drug, and medical supply costs. In other words, unlike anything else I have been hearing, it would be comprehensive: all of your basic health care needs. Patients, of course, would remain free to choose the doctor and hospital they would want, and doctors would retain autonomy over patient care, which often is not happening today as they have to argue with insurance companies as to what kind of therapies they can prescribe. Physicians would be paid fee-for-service according to a negotiated formulary or receive salary from a hospital or nonprofit HMO group practice. Hospitals would receive a global budget for operating expenses. Health facilities and expensive equipment purchases would be managed by regional health planning boards. A single-payer system would be financed by eliminating private insurers and recapturing their administrative waste. Modest new taxes would replace premiums and out- of-pocket payments currently paid by individuals and businesses. Costs will be controlled through negotiated fees, global budgeting, and bulk purchasing.

Well, that is where, in my view, we should be going. That is not where we will go. As I said earlier, that approach is anathema to the insurance companies, the drug companies, the medical equipment suppliers, all of the big money interests, and they have, unfortunately, enormous power over what goes on in Congress, so we are not going to go there.

Let me say a few words about where we are going. Obviously, we are in the middle of that right now. Last week the House came forward with their bill. Majority Leader Reid is now trying to meld the two bills in the Senate from the HELP Committee and from the Finance Committee, and we expect that new legislation will be out very shortly. I have not seen it; I don't know if anybody has. Let me express a few words of concern about what I have seen in the discussion and the legislation that has been passed in the House.

First of all, the average American is saying--I get this in Vermont every day, and I am sure the Presiding Officer gets it in Maryland every day--all right, hey, good, health care reform. That is great. What is it going to cost me? What do I get? How much am I going to have to pay, and what do I get for what I pay? That is the question on the minds of millions of Americans.

The answer is, at this point--and, again, we have not seen Senator Reid's bill which will be out almost momentarily, but let me just tell my colleagues about what was in the Senate Finance Committee bill so everybody has a sense of what we are talking about.

Under the Finance Committee bill--and that is going to change; whether it goes up or down, I don't know, but it will change--a family of four in Vermont earning $44,000 a year, which is not an unusual sum in my State, would pay about $3,087 in annual premiums, while the Federal Government

would pick up the rest of the total of $14,700 in premiums. In a year with high medical expenses--in other words, somebody gets ill, somebody has an accident and ends up in the hospital for 3 weeks--that family would pay up to $5,800 out of pocket. So you have premiums of $3,087, out-of-pocket costs of $5,800. That is a total potential payment in premiums and out-of-pocket expenses of $8,887 for health care under the Finance Committee's bill. This would be about 31 percent of the net income, aftertax income, of a family in Vermont, and I don't know that Vermont is any different than Maryland or any other State earning $44,000--31 percent.

Somebody could tell us that is health care reform, but I really don't see it. Asking people in this country who, admittedly, have had a tough year with illness to pay 31 percent, and then say, hey, we passed health care reform, that, frankly, is not good enough for me, and I am going to do everything I can to make sure the final product out of the Senate is a lot better than that for ordinary middle-class families.

The second issue that concerns me as we proceed down the line in terms of this health care debate is the issue of public option. I think there is a lot of confusion about what a public option is, but let me say this: My belief is the vast majority of the American people want to have a choice as to whether they stay in a private insurance company or whether they go into a Medicare-type public option which is funded by premiums. It is not Medicare; it is funded by premiums. But there are large numbers of Americans, for right reasons--I agree with them--who do not trust private insurance companies because they understand that a private insurance company wants to make as much money as possible off of their premiums. They would like the choice of looking at and maybe going into a public option. My view is we should make that choice available to as many people as possible.

I have the sad thought that many folks out there are hearing us talking about a public option saying: Hey, that is great. I am going to have a choice. I don't like my employer-based health care. Now I am going to have a public option. That is great.

Let me break the bad news to you if that is what you believe. That is not the case as it now stands. Relatively few people--people who are currently uninsured; small, very small, businesses; people who today get their insurance companies privately for themselves or their families; the self-employed, those are the people for whom a public option is currently available based on what has been passed. I think that is wrong. I think we need to expand it. Frankly, I think virtually every American should have that choice.

There is the great debate: Should Members of Congress have the public option as our rightwing friends talk about? Yes, we should. And if the public option is better than Blue Cross Blue Shield or private insurance companies, many of us would take it. But as does everybody else, we deserve the option. That is what it is, an option. If you like private insurance, it is working well for you, stay with it. If you like the public option because it is better for you, you go with it. Let's give as many Americans the choice, not 2 or 3 percent but the vast majority of the people in our country who are now in private insurance.

That takes us to another issue because, in the midst of a bill which is very complicated--and I am not a great fan of complicated. I think when you have a bill that is 1,900 pages, that just begs for the big money interests and the special interests to get their little things in it, and I worry about that a whole lot. This is much too complicated, but there it is. I think the House bill is 1,900 pages. But when we talk about opening the public option for more Americans, it means to say you have to open the exchange, the gateway for more Americans. The gateway means if you choose either your private insurance company or a public option, you are going to get subsidized by the Federal Government. Right now, as this bill stands, there are many people stuck in bad private insurance plans.

Maybe you work for Wal-Mart, maybe you work for Dunkin' Donuts, maybe you work for McDonald's, and they are offering you some kind of insurance program which either costs a fortune or doesn't cover very much. Well, under the current legislation, up to now at least, you are stuck with that. That is what you have. That is not health care reform, to be stuck in a bad Wal-Mart plan. We have to do better than that. So we want to expand that gateway for more people.

The other question is--I don't know what Majority Leader Reid's bill is going to end up costing, but the estimates are that we are looking at about, over a 10-year period, $800 billion to $1 trillion. Well, the simple question is, Where is the money coming from? Where is the money coming from?

There are some people who have said: Well, maybe we want to tax good, strong insurance programs out there. That is the way to go. Well, not for this Senator, it is not, and I will do everything I can to oppose any movement in that direction. Workers have fought, in many cases, long and hard--given up wage increases--in order to get decent health insurance programs for their families, and now we are going to tax them? Not me. I am not going to do that. This country has the most unequal distribution of income and wealth. The rich are getting much richer while the middle class is shrinking.

I think it is fair as we move forward in health care reform to ask the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes.

There is another issue which is kind of a local issue, I admit, and that is on the impact on early-acting States in terms of Medicaid reimbursements. It was just in the newspapers today--and I am very proud of this--that for whatever it is worth, according to some group, the State of Vermont is now the healthiest State in the country. What that tells me and what I know for a fact is that Vermont, which is not a wealthy State, has said we are going to take care of our kids. We are going to make sure that as many kids as possible are involved in what we call our SCHIP program. It is called Dr. Dinosaur. It is a very good, popular program. We are going to have other public health insurance programs. We are going to do the best we can.

I am proud that today Vermont was acknowledged to be perhaps the healthiest State in the country. I am not going to sit by idly while Vermont and Massachusetts--another State that has taken major steps forward--are penalized because we have made reimbursement rates. Because we have done the right thing is not a reason to penalize us. I am all for helping out States that have not done the right thing, but we should not and will not penalize States that have done the right thing.

So let me conclude by saying this: This country faces a major crisis in health care. Because of the power of big money, we are not going to do the right thing and pass a Medicare-for-all, single-payer approach, which is the only way to provide quality, affordable, cost-effective health care for all Americans. What we are now looking at is a 1,900- page bill which is enormously complicated which clearly has been heavily influenced by the drug companies, by the insurance companies, and by every other special interest that is making billions off of health care.

I think it is very important as we proceed down this path to take a very hard look at the end of the day as to what this bill will mean for middle-class families, for working-class families, and for the financial stability of our country as a whole. I am going to do everything I can to make sure this bill is something worth voting for-- worth voting for.

So with that, I thank the Chair for the indulgence, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

I ask to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, I think, as most Americans understand, as a result of the greed, the recklessness, the illegal behavior of a relatively small number of financial institutions, the United States of America is currently in the midst of the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Millions of other Americans are working longer hours for lower wages. People have lost their homes, people have lost their savings, people have lost, in many respects, their hope.

On Friday we learned that the official unemployment rate is now 10.2 percent, the highest in over 26 years. But the official unemployment rate tells only half the story. If you add the number of people who are underemployed, if you add the number of people who have given up looking for work, what you find is we have 27 million people in that category of unemployed or underemployed, which is 17.5 percent of the American workforce. That is an astronomical number. Obviously there are areas of our country, in the Midwest and California, where the number is substantially higher than that.

Over a year has come and gone since Congress passed the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. In addition, of course, the Federal Reserve has committed trillions of dollars in zero interest loans and other assistance to large financial institutions. Added together, this amounts to the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world.

President Bush, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told us we needed to bail out Wall Street because we could not allow huge financial institutions and insurance giants to fail. They said if any of these large institutions failed, it would lead to systemic damage to the financial system and, in fact, the entire economy.

One might think, if these institutions then were too big to fail, it doesn't take a Ph.D. in economics to figure out maybe one of the important solutions would be to make them smaller. Too big to fail? Well, let's reduce their size.

Yet in the last several years these financial institutions in many respects did not get smaller but, amazingly enough, they got larger. Too big to fail. What do we do? Make them larger. If that makes sense to somebody, it doesn't actually make sense to me, nor do I think to a majority of Americans.

Last year the Bank of America, the largest commercial bank in this country, which received a $45 billion taxpayer bailout, purchased Countrywide, the largest mortgage lender in this country, and Merrill Lynch, the largest brokerage firm in the country. So you had a huge bank--too big to fail. They became larger through the consolidations of Countrywide and Merrill Lynch by the Bank of America.

Last year JPMorgan Chase, which received a $25 billion bailout from the Treasury Department and a $29 billion bridge loan from the Federal Reserve, acquired Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, the largest savings and loan in the country. Too big to fail? Well, what happens if you are JPMorgan Chase? You become bigger.

Last year the Treasury Department provided an $18 billion tax break to Wells Fargo to purchase Wachovia, allowing that bank to control 11 percent of all bank deposits in this country. Too big to fail? If you are Wells Fargo, make it bigger.

Today these huge financial institutions have become so big that the issue now is not just too big to fail and taxpayer liability, the issue becomes concentration of ownership. According to the Washington Post, the four largest banks in the United States--that is the Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup--now issue one out of every two mortgages. Half of the mortgages in America are issued by four large financial institutions. Two out of every three credit cards in this country are issued by the four largest financial institutions of the country. These same institutions hold $4 out of every $10 in bank deposits in the entire country.

What we are looking at here is not just taxpayer liability for when huge financial institutions collapse and the taxpayers have to bail them out; now what we are also looking at is concentration of ownership where a handful--four major financial institutions--controls half of the mortgages, 2 out of 3 credit cards, and 40 percent of bank deposits in the entire country. That is wrong from a competitive point of view, from a point of view that the consumer has to have some choices and has to see some competition in order to get a break.

The face value of over-the-counter derivatives at commercial banks has grown to $290 trillion--that is an astronomical sum of money--95 percent of which is held in 5 financial institutions in the entire country. Five financial institutions control 95 percent of over-the- counter derivatives. Derivatives are nothing more than side bets by Wall Street gamblers that oil prices will go up or down or that the subprime mortgage market will continue to get worse or betting on the weather or whatever else can make them a quick buck. Risky derivative schemes led to the $182 billion bailout of AIG, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the downfall of Bear Stearns, and precipitated the largest bailout in the history of the world and the severe recession that millions and millions of people are experiencing today through their loss of jobs.

If any of these financial institutions were to get into major trouble again, taxpayers one more time would be on the hook for another substantial bailout. In fact, the next time it might even be bigger than we saw last year. Now is the time to say clearly we cannot allow that to happen. Not only are too-big-to-fail financial institutions bad for taxpayers, the enormous concentration of ownership in the financial sector has led to higher bank fees. Every Member of the Senate has heard from constituents who pay their credit card bills on time every single month, they then bailed out Wall Street, and what they get in return is interest rates which have gone from 10 percent or 15 percent to 25 percent or 30 percent. That is what you get when four large financial institutions control two-thirds of the credit cards in this country.

According to Businessweek, ``Bank of America sent letters notifying some responsible card holders that it would more than double their rates to as high as 28 percent.''

That is what we are seeing all over this country. Credit card interest rates went up by an average of 20 percent in the first 6 months of this year, even as banks' cost of lending declined. We all know this. Here are these guys on Wall Street. We bailed them out. They become bigger. And they say: Thank you, America. Now we are going to raise the interest rates on your credit cards to usurious rates-- outrageous, unacceptable. Twenty-five percent or thirty percent interest rates on hard-working people who pay their bills on time is something that should be eliminated and, in fact, on another issue we have legislation to do that.

It seems to me if you add all of that together, the fact that the largest banks that were ``too big to fail'' have grown larger, that we have a very dangerous concentration of ownership within the financial institution industry, the time is now to do exactly what good Republicans, good Republicans such as Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, did 100 years ago; that is, to start breaking up those institutions.

That is what we have got to do. We have got to start breaking up these institutions. Last week I introduced S. 2746, the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act that would do that. I think the title of that legislation I have introduced says it all: If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. Let's break it up.

This legislation is all of two pages long. It is not 2,000 pages like the

health care bill. It is two pages. That is all. It is very simple. This legislation would require the Secretary of Treasury to identify within 90 days every single financial institution and insurance company in this country that is too big to fail. That should not be too hard to do. Which are the institutions that are too big to fail? Tell us who they are. Then within the rest of the year, within 1 year, start the process of breaking them up.

One of the further reasons we have got to break up these institutions is not just that they continue to be a liability for taxpayers, not only that the concentration of ownership leads to higher and higher interest rates, leads to the fact that Wall Street remains an entity unto itself, largely a gambling casino which makes huge amounts of money for the people on Wall Street but ignores the credit needs of small and large businesses in the productive economy, but there is another reason. The other reason is I know some of my friends here say: Well, you know, we have got to regulate Wall Street. That is what we have to do, not break them up, regulate them. But it is not the Congress that is going to regulate Wall Street, it is Wall Street that is going to regulate the U.S. Congress.

I think anybody who knows anything about politics knows that is true. We know that over a 10-year period, Wall Street has spent $5 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions. Despite their greed and the fiascos which they caused, what they are doing now is spending millions more trying to make sure that Congress allows them to go back to where they were.

I don't think it is a question of us regulating them, it is them regulating us with so much wealth and so much power. That is what they are capable of doing. What we are beginning to see, not only in the United States but all over the world, are people saying: Enough is enough.

I find it interesting that John S. Reed, who helped engineer the merger that created Citigroup, Inc., apologized for his role in building a company that has taken $45 billion in direct U.S. aid, and said ``banks that big should be divided into separate parts.''

That is what John S. Reed said, the former CEO of CitiGroup. He was one of the people who engineered the deregulation effort. He has apologized to the American people, and I respect that very much; one of the few who has had the guts to come before the United States and say: I made a mistake. I am sorry. I respect him for doing that.

Furthermore, we have Alan Greenspan, who probably more than any other person in this country led the effort to deregulate, to do away with Glass-Steagall, this philosophy that said: If we deregulate, if we allow these titans on Wall Street to do anything they want, they are going to create wealth for the whole economy.

But even Alan Greenspan, whose disastrous leadership helped lead us to where we are right now, even he, I think, has recognized the error of his ways. According to Bloomberg News on October 15, 2009, former Chairman Greenspan said:

If they're too big to fail, they're too big. In 1911 we

broke up Standard Oil--so what happened? The individual parts

became more valuable than the whole.

That is Alan Greenspan understanding the errors he made.

I should note, I am grateful Mr. Greenspan's views on the subject have drastically changed. Because when I was in the House, on the Financial Institutions Committee, he would come before that committee. He and I used to have a little bit of a debate on the issue of deregulation. I remember, back in 2000, I asked Mr. Greenspan the following question. I asked him:

Aren't you concerned with such a growing concentration of

wealth that if one of these huge institutions fails that it

will have a horrendous impact on the national and global

economy?

Here is what Mr. Greenspan said in the year 2000:

No, I'm not. I believe that the general growth in large

institutions have occurred in the context of an underlying

structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are

dramatically--I should say fully--hedged.

Well, unfortunately, Mr. Greenspan appeared to be wrong, was wrong, and we have spent $700 billion bailing out Wall Street and trillions more on low-interest loans. But it is not just Alan Greenspan who has changed his views. According to the Washington Post, we know this to be the case:

The British government announced Tuesday it will break up

parts of major financial institutions bailed out by taxpayers

. . . The British government--spurred on by European

regulators--is forcing the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds

Banking Group and Northern Rock to sell off parts of their

operations. The Europeans are calling for more and smaller

banks to increase competition and eliminate the threat posed

by banks so large that they must be rescued by taxpayers, no

matter how they conducted their business, in order to avoid

damaging the global financial system.

In other words, what the United Kingdom is beginning to say is, we have got to start breaking up these institutions. If they are too big to fail, they are too big to exist.

But it is not just Alan Greenspan, it is not just John Reed, former CEO of CitiGroup, it is Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman and the head of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. This is what he said:

Keep [banks] small, so that any failure won't have

systematic importance. People say I'm old fashioned and banks

can no longer be separated from nonbank activity. That

argument brought us to where we are today.

Robert Reich, President Clinton's former Labor Secretary, has said that:

No important public interest is served by allowing giant

banks to grow too big to fail . . . Wall Street giants should

be split up--and soon.

That is Robert Reich.

Sheila Bair, the head of the FDIC, has said that:

We need to reduce our reliance on large financial

institutions and put an end to the idea that certain banks

are too big to fail.

Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, has said:

Banks that are too big to fail must now be considered too

big to exist.

I am under no illusions that taking on Wall Street will be an easy task. Generally speaking, Congress is never successful or very rarely successful taking on big money interests. They are too powerful, they have too much sway over this institution.

As I mentioned earlier--this is quite incredible--the banking and insurance industry has spent over $5 billion on campaign contributions and lobbying activities over the past decade in support of deregulation, and they are spending even more today to try to prevent Congress from seriously regulating their industry.

In 2007 alone--and if people want to know why the rich get richer and everybody else gets poorer, they should understand--the financial sector employed nearly 3,000 separate lobbyists to influence Federal policymaking. Remember, we only have 100 people in the Senate, 435 in the House. They have 3,000 separate lobbyists. So if anyone thinks it is going to be easy to reform the financial services sector, it clearly will not.

But if we are going to turn this economy about, if we are going to try to prevent another disaster by which taxpayers have to bail out some of the wealthiest and most powerful people, if we are going to create a situation where financial institutions provide capital to the productive economy so that we can create decent paying jobs, producing real products and real services, we are going to have to finally stand up to these very powerful institutions.

I think the issue is clear. I think all over this country people, whether they are progressive, whether they are conservative, understand that if an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. Let's break them up.

I yield the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Nelson of Nebraska.) The Senator from New Jersey is recognized.

Amendment No. 2741 to Amendment No. 2730

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, as a result of the greed, the recklessness, and the illegal behavior of a handful of executives on Wall Street, we are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Millions of Americans from one end of this country to the other have lost their jobs, they have lost their homes, they have lost their savings, they have lost their ability to send their kids to college, and they have lost their hope. In fact, just this morning, we have learned that the official unemployment rate is now a staggering 10.2 percent--the highest in over 26 years.

Since the recession began in December of 2007, 8.2 million Americans have lost their jobs and the unemployment rate has more than doubled. In total, today 15.7 million Americans are officially unemployed; another 9.3 million are working part time--they want to work 40 hours a week, but they are only working part time; and 2.2 million workers have given up looking for work altogether. When you add those three factors together--official unemployment, people who have given up looking for work, and people working part time who want to work full time--what you are left with is an incredible 17.5 percent of the American workforce unemployed or underemployed--27 million Americans. And when we go out and we find that people are angry or hurt or depressed, that is one of the reasons.

Over a year has gone by since Congress--against my vote--passed the $700 billion bailout for Wall Street. The Federal Reserve has committed trillions of additional dollars in virtually zero-interest loans and other assistance to large financial institutions. Add it all together, and you are looking at the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world.

Then-President Bush, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told us at that time that we needed to bail out Wall Street because we could not allow these huge financial institutions and insurance companies to fail because if they failed, their failure would be systemic and would impact every aspect of our economy and would take down large segments not only of financial services but the entire economy as well. We all remember: This is not a bailout of Wall Street, this is a bailout to help Main Street.

One might think, if these institutions were ``too big to fail,'' one kind of obvious solution--and you don't need a Ph.D. in economics to figure this out--is that you might want to make them smaller. If they are too big to fail, maybe you would want to reduce their size. Yet, under the leadership of the Bush administration and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, these financial institutions did not get smaller, they got bigger.

Last year, Bank of America, the largest commercial bank in this country, which received a $45 billion taxpayer bailout, purchased Countrywide, the largest mortgage lender in this country, and Merrill Lynch, the largest brokerage firm in this country. You don't become smaller when you incorporate other large institutions into your existence.

Last year, JPMorgan Chase, which received a $25 billion bailout from the Treasury Department and a $29 billion bridge loan from the Fed, acquired Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, the largest savings and loan in the country.

Last year, the Treasury Department provided an $18 billion tax break to Wells Fargo to purchase Wachovia, allowing that bank to control 11 percent of all bank deposits in this country.

Today, these huge financial institutions have become so big that, according to the Washington Post, the four largest banks in America-- and I want people to hear this--Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages. Got that? The largest four financial institutions issue half of the mortgages in America. They issue two out of three credit cards and hold $4 out of every $10 in bank deposits in the entire country.

The face value of over-the-counter derivatives at commercial banks has grown to $290 trillion, 95 percent of which are held at just five financial institutions in the entire country--JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Derivatives are nothing more than side bets by Wall Street gamblers that oil prices will go up or down or that the subprime mortgage market will continue to get worse or on the weather or whatever can make them a quick buck. Risky derivative schemes led to the $182 billion bailout of AIG, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the downfall of Bear Stearns, and precipitated the largest bailout in the history of the world.

If any of these financial institutions were to get into major trouble again--and, frankly, there is no reason to believe that will not happen because they are spending millions of dollars trying to influence Congress to prevent any action to stop them from going back to the way they were before the collapse--we would be in line for a bailout that would be even larger than the bailout that took place over a year ago. Obviously, we cannot allow that to happen.

Not only are too-big-to-fail financial institutions bad for taxpayers, the enormous concentration of ownership in the financial sector has led to higher bank fees, usurious interest rates on credit cards, and fewer choices for consumers.

Mr. President, I am sure you have gotten the same calls I have gotten from people who say: You know, I pay my credit card bills on time every single month, and suddenly they raise my interest rates to 29 percent, to 30 percent. And one of the reasons these guys can get away with doing that is there is not a heck of a lot of competition out there. One out of four American families, as a result of this greed, this usury, is now paying an interest rate of at least 20 percent on their credit cards. That is another issue that, obviously, we have to deal with.

According to BusinessWeek:

Bank of America sent letters notifying some responsible

cardholders that it would more than double their rates to as

high as 28 percent.

These are people who pay their bills on time.

According to a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, credit card interest rates went up by an average of 20 percent in the first 6 months of this year, even as banks' cost of lending declined. In other words, as banks get bigger, consumers are having to pay twice--once to bail out these institutions when they screw up altogether and a second time to pay higher fees and interest rates.

The time has come for us to do exactly what Teddy Roosevelt, a good Republican, did in the early 1900s; the time is now to do what I think most Americans understand we have to do; that is, break up these huge financial institutions.

Yesterday, I introduced S. 2746, the Too Big To Fail, Too Big To Exist Act, which would do just that, and that is the bottom line. The bottom line here is that if a financial institution is too big to fail, that financial institution is too big to exist, and we have to start breaking them up.

This legislation is all of two pages. So when people ask you if you have read it, unlike the 1,900-page health care legislation, you can say with all confidence that you have read it, because it is all of two pages. What it says is, first, that the Secretary of the Treasury has to identify every single financial institution and insurance company in this country that is too big to fail within 90 days. In other words, what are the institutions that if they fail would cause widespread economic harm to the country? The Secretary of the Treasury does that within 90 days. After 1 year, the Secretary of the Treasury would be required to break up these institutions so that their failure would not lead to the collapse of the U.S. or global economy.

There is growing support in our country and around the world for breaking up too-big-to-fail financial institutions. Let me give you a few important examples of that growing sentiment all over the world.

It was reported in the Washington Post and major media all over the world that the British Government, in fact, is moving in that direction. Let me quote from the Washington Post:

The British Government will break up parts of major

financial institutions bailed out by taxpayers. Spurred on by

European regulators, the British Government is forcing the

Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and Northern

Rock to sell off parts of their operations. The Europeans are

calling for more and smaller banks to increase competition

and eliminate the threat posed by banks so large that they

must be rescued by taxpayers, no matter how they conducted

their business, in order to avoid damaging the global

financial system.

That is about it. Ain't more complicated than that. Let's break them up before they again lead this world to a major financial crisis. Let's break them up before they require hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout. And in my view, it is a positive thing that the Government of the UK is moving in that direction.

But it is not just the Government of UK. On October 15, 2009, Bloomberg News reported that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan--perhaps more than any other individual, the person most responsible for the deregulatory efforts which led us to where we are today--said this. This is what Greenspan said on October 15, 2009:

If they're too big to fail, they're too big. In 1911, we

broke up Standard Oil--so what happened? The individual parts

became more valuable than the whole.

Former Fed Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the head of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said:

Keep banks small so that any failure won't have systematic

importance . . . People say I'm old-fashioned and banks can

no longer be separated from nonbank activity. That argument

brought us to where we are today.

That is former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

Robert Reich, President Clinton's former Labor Secretary, said:

No important public interest is served by allowing giant

banks to grow too big to fail . . . Wall Street giants should

be split-up--and soon.

Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, has said:

We need to reduce our reliance on large financial

institutions and put an end to the idea that certain banks

are too big to fail.

On and on, people all over our country, conservatives, progressives, are making that point.

Let me conclude by saying this. As Members of the Senate, Members of Congress, we are besieged every day by enormously powerful and wealthy special interests. The health insurance industry is spending over $1 million a day on lobbying, huge amounts of campaign contributions. The drug companies, the military defense contractors, you name it, they are all outside the door, fighting to make sure that their special interests are getting more and more. But at the top of that list of powerful special interests certainly are the large financial interests. Over a 10-year period they spent over $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions in order to make sure that Congress deregulated their activities so they could merge, so they could engage in reckless financial speculation.

They won and the American people have lost, and the American people are paying that price today. The time is now for us to say enough is enough, for us to do what I think the vast majority of the American people want us to do and that is, if an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

Let's start breaking them up for two basic reasons. No. 1, I don't want to see a huge bailout having to take place again, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money going to these guys. No. 2, it is unhealthy for the economy when so few people have such a concentration of ownership in terms of credit cards, in terms of mortgages, in terms of other financial transactions. The small business community and middle business community desperately need credit and they are not getting credit. You have people on there who are controlling a whole lot of our financial system.

Now is the time to do what Teddy Roosevelt did well over 100 years ago, and that is to stand up to these guys. For the well-being of the economy and for the American people, let's break them up.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, let me begin by congratulating my friend, Senator Brown of Ohio, for his leadership in this struggle for fundamental reform of the American health care system. He understands, as I do, that there is something absurd about a situation in which we as a nation end up spending almost twice as much per person on health care as any other nation on Earth; yet we end up with tens of millions of people who are uninsured, people who are underinsured, and we have almost 1 million Americans this year who are facing bankruptcy because of medically related illnesses.

As Senator Brown just talked about, understanding that small businesses are the economic engine of this country, there is something absurd when we have small businesses desperately trying to provide health insurance for their employees but are finding it harder and harder to do so. So I want to congratulate Senator Brown for the work he is doing on health care.

As I think every American understands, we are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. I find it interesting that there are some people out there, some economists, including the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Bernanke, who have told us ``the recession is very likely over.'' I suggest to Mr. Bernanke, come to the State of Vermont, go to California, go to Nevada, go to Ohio, go to any State in the country and go out on the street and ask people whether they think this recession is over. They will say it may be over for the large banks that were bailed out by taxpayers but it is not over for working families. In fact, according to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, 82 percent of Americans disagree with Mr. Bernanke. The overwhelming majority of the American people do not believe the recession is over. Of course, they are right. The recession may be over for banks that are now starting to be profitable, for Goldman Sachs, which is paying out huge bonuses to its top executives, but trust me, on Main Street, on family farms all over this country, in factories all over this country, this recession most certainly is not over.

Since the beginning of this recession in December of 2007, 7.6 million Americans have lost their jobs. The official unemployment rate has doubled, going from 4.9 percent to 9.8 percent. But what is extremely important to understand when we look at the economy today is that the official unemployment statistics do not reflect the reality of what is going on in our economy. Official statistics do not include people who have given up looking for work. If you are in a community where 15 or 20 percent of the people are unemployed, you have given up looking for work, but you are not part of the official unemployment statistics. What happens if you want to work 40 hours a week but you can only find a job for 20 hours a week or 25 hours a week? You are also not in the statistics.

The reality is, if you add all those factors together, people who are officially unemployed, people who have given up looking for work, people who are working part time when they want to work full time, what you are looking at is 17 percent of working-age Americans today are in that category, which adds up to 27 million Americans--an astronomical number. That is an indication of a real catastrophe in our economy.

Mr. Bernanke, I am sorry to disagree with you, but in my view and in the view of the vast majority of the American people, this recession is not over. In fact, in terms of unemployment numbers, it may, in fact, even be getting worse.

On the issue we are dealing with right now, we have to address long- term unemployment. It is one thing to lose your job and get another job a few weeks later. It is another thing not to be able to find a job month after month, and there are millions of Americans in that category.

Today, 5.4 million Americans have been unemployed for over 6 months-- the highest on record. Long-term unemployment is a major crisis in this country. It is one we have to address. It is one we have to deal with in terms of extending unemployment benefits. The average length of unemployment is now 27 weeks. That is over 6 months. That is over half a year. That is the longest since the end of World War II.

There are fewer jobs in America today than there were in the year 2000, even though the workforce has grown by 12 million since then. This is a shrinking workforce. We now have the fewest manufacturing jobs than at any time since April of 1941, 8 months before the start of World War II. The importance of that is that manufacturing was the mechanism by which working families were able to carve out a middle- class existence. They had decent wages, decent benefits. They had a union. They may have had a pension program. But today we have the fewest manufacturing jobs since April of 1941.

Home foreclosures are the highest on record, turning the American dream of home ownership into an American nightmare for millions of people.

There is nothing we should be proud of in saying this: Today, in the industrialized world, the United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty. We have the highest infant mortality rate. We have the highest overall poverty rate. At the same time, we have the largest gap between the wealthy and everybody else. What we have seen for a number of years is a collapse in the middle class. It has certainly gone on a lot longer than since the financial collapse. But we have also seen an increase in wealth amongst the top 1 percent. That gap between the very rich and everybody else is growing wider and wider. From a moral perspective, not to mention an economic perspective, we have to address the reality that the top 1 percent today earns more income than the bottom 50 percent. The top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. We are becoming two very different countries: people on top with incredible wealth--CEOs on Wall Street making hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars in a hedge

fund--yet working people seeing their incomes decline, working longer hours for low wages. Actually, today a two-income family has less disposable income than a one-income family did 30 years ago. That is what is going on in America--poverty increasing, middle-class shrinking, the gap between the very richest and everybody else growing wider.

This is an important point to make. We know what happened on Wall Street a little over a year ago. We know what that collapse has done. We know that the outrageous behavior on Wall Street has precipitated us into this very severe recession. But we should not kid ourselves. If by some miracle tomorrow we manage to go back to where we were before the financial collapse on Wall Street, we would still be in very bad shape. It isn't a question of, weren't things great before the collapse on Wall Street and the development of this major recession--no, things were not great back then.

Let me just mention what happened during the Presidency of George Bush. Let me talk a little bit about what happened during that 8-year period.

When President Bush was in office from the year 2000 to 2008, 8.2 million more Americans slipped out of the middle class and into poverty. That is what happened during that period. I might mention, you may recall--it is really frightening to think about it--how during much of that period the Secretary of Treasury and the President were saying the economy is robust, the gross national product is expanding. But that was the reality for working families--people slipping out of the middle class and into poverty.

During that same period--we are dealing with health care right now. One of the reasons we need a national health care program guaranteeing health care to all people is during that same period, 7.8 million more Americans were uninsured; they lost their health insurance. We are now up to about 46 million people without any health insurance. That number is going up every single day. During the Bush era, close to 8 million Americans lost their health insurance.

During the years 2000 to 2008, 4.5 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. I talked a moment ago about the importance of manufacturing. I know it is not a sexy job, but it was a means by which millions of Americans went to work every day, they produced real products, they had real income. It was a vehicle--manufacturing was and is a vehicle by which working Americans could make it into the middle class.

During the Bush tenure, 3.2 million workers lost their pensions, with the result that about half of American workers in the private sector today have no pension whatsoever. There was a time--I know it is a radical idea to even think about--there was a time when millions of Americans who worked had a defined pension plan, a defined benefit pension plan. They actually knew they were going to have a pension. Boy, what a radical idea. That does not exist anymore.

During the Bush era, median household income declined by over $2,100, from $52,500 to $50,303. According to an article that appeared a couple of months ago in USA TODAY, from 2000 to 2008 middle-class men experienced an 11.2-percent drop in their incomes, a reduction of $7,700 adjusting for inflation. That is unbelievable. During that period, middle-class men saw an 11-percent drop in their income. Middle-class women in this age group saw a 4.8-percent decline in their incomes as well.

The important point to be made here is when you hear economists talking about the economy in abstract ways--we have 3 percent growth in this quarter; isn't that great? Yes, that is an important fact, but it is not the most important fact. The most important fact is what happens to ordinary people. This is what happens to ordinary people. People who were 45 to 54 years of age lost $7,700 in the Bush economy. That is true today, it was true then. Focus on what is happening to ordinary people.

With all of that, with the long-term trends in which the middle class has declined, with the fact that since the greed and illegal behavior of Wall Street has gotten us into the deep recession we are in right now, working families all over this country are desperately in need of help, and they are looking to their Federal Government to provide that help. That is why it is so important that we pass an extension in unemployment benefits. I find it hard to understand, why my Republican colleagues continue to delay this legislation being implemented.

We have to do more than that. We have to extend unemployment--that goes without saying--but we have to do more than that. We have to ask ourselves why our economy is in the shape it is right now. That will precipitate a major debate and major discussion, something we as a nation have to have. We have to ask ourselves not just the causation of the recession we are in right now, the role Wall Street has played, but, long term, why since the early 1970s has the middle class continued to shrink? What are the causes of that? Why do we have the highest rate of poverty of any major nation on Earth? Why is it today that people are losing their homes and their pensions and their life savings and their ability to send their kids to college?

Clearly, short term it is imperative that we investigate thoroughly and that we hold accountable those crooks on Wall Street who have done so much damage to the American people. It is simply not acceptable that they be allowed to continue the behavior that drove this country into the severe recession. We need to understand how it happened, we need to hold accountable those people who caused this crisis, and where there is illegal behavior, those people should learn what the penal system of this country is about.

One of the things that really amazes me is that I have yet to see, nor have the American people yet seen, one of those folks on Wall Street whose greed and recklessness has caused this recession, has caused this intense suffering all over this country--have you seen one of those guys go before television, get on TV and say to the American people: I apologize. I am sorry for our greed. I am sorry for the fact that we cost millions of people their jobs and their health care and their savings and their pensions. We are sorry.

I have not seen that. In fact, what we are seeing is these guys on Wall Street spending millions of dollars every day, every week, every month on lobbying in order to make sure we do not bring about the reforms to prevent them from continuing to do what they did, which caused this recession. These guys live in a world of their own, a world of entitlement. They do not seem to understand their actions have widespread consequences in terms of destroying the economic well-being of millions of people. All they seem to think about is, I only made $100 million last year. I can't get by on that. I need my 18th home or 16th car and 18th country club membership. For them, enough is never enough--more and more greed and more and more selfishness. That is an issue we have to deal with.

It only took a couple of weeks for Congress to give Wall Street the largest bailout in history, some $700 billion. But the truth is, up until this point we have done very little to make sure this financial crisis does not occur again. These guys want to go right back to where they were. They want the freedom to speculate, the freedom to convert their financial institutions into large gambling casinos. The Federal Government has provided $182 billion to AIG, $50 billion to Citigroup, $50 billion to Bank of America, a $25 billion bailout to Wells Fargo, a $25 billion bailout to JPMorgan Chase, and on and on it goes. Yet we have asked them for nothing in return. Here are tens of billions of dollars. What are you going to do? What are you going to do for the American people who have bailed you out?

I know reforming the banking sector is not going to be easy. After all, the banking and insurance lobbyists have spent over $5 billion on campaign contributions and lobbying activity over the past decade in support of deregulation. They were all over this place telling us, telling the Congress: Just trust us. Deregulate us. Let us do what we want to do. We are going to create wealth for all the American people.

There were some of my colleagues who actually believed that. I happened not to be one of them, but some of them did, and we deregulated and we let them do whatever they wanted to do and we are where we are today.

In 2007 alone, if you can believe this--this is what goes on--the financial sector employed nearly 3,000 separate lobbyists to influence Federal policymakers. Got that. There are 100 Members of the Senate, 435 in the House--that equals 535 Members of Congress--and they had nearly 3,000 individual lobbyists to influence Federal policymaking. Over a 10-year period, they spent $5 billion.

And that, my friends, is why the rich get richer and almost everybody else gets poorer. We have to address the issue of Wall Street. Let me make some suggestions as to what we have to do.

We need, in fact, a thorough investigation as to how this happened and we need to hold those people accountable. I hope we can do that. I think the American people are asking questions, and they are right to demand answers. But what we also have to do is to deal with this issue of ``too big to fail.'' What I have said ever since this financial crisis began is: If a financial institution is too big to fail, that financial institution is too big to exist.

We need to do exactly what Teddy Roosevelt did back in the trust- busting days, and we need to start to break up these huge financial institutions. We cannot continue to be held hostage by them such that if they fail, they take down the entire system with them so we have to prop them up and bail them out.

I would mention, interestingly enough, that is exactly what they are doing right now in the United Kingdom. Let me quote from the Washington Post:

The British government announced Tuesday that it will break

up parts of major financial institutions bailed out by

taxpayers. The British government, spurred on by European

regulators, is set to force the Royal Bank of Scotland,

Lloyds Banking Group and Northern Rock to sell off parts of

their operations. The Europeans are calling for more and

smaller banks to increase competition and eliminate the

threat posed by banks so large that they must be rescued by

taxpayers no matter how they conducted their business, in

order to avoid damaging the global financial system.

And you know what. Our friends in the U.K. are doing exactly the right thing. That is what we should be doing. But that is not just my opinion. A growing number of experts, both on the left and on the right, are coming to the same conclusion.

On October 15, Alan Greenspan, probably the man more than any other individual responsible for the deregulatory efforts which led to this financial crisis, admitted last year that his views on deregulation were wrong. He was quoted in Bloomberg News as saying:

If they are too big to fail, they are too big. In 1911 we

broke up Standard Oil--so what happened? The individual parts

became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that's what we

need to do.

Alan Greenspan, the man whose deregulatory leadership helped create this disaster, now perhaps understands that that whole philosophy of deregulation, letting big banks do whatever they want, letting them merge with insurance companies, maybe was not quite right.

Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised the Obama administration, supports breaking up big banks so that they no longer pose systemic risks to the entire economy. During a recent article in the New York Times, Volcker says:

People say I'm old fashioned and banks can no longer be

separated from nonbank activity. That argument brought us to

where we are today.

Absolutely right. The New York Times said that under Volcker's plan:

JPMorgan Chase would have to give up the trading operations

acquired from Bear Stearns. Bank of America and Merrill Lynch

would go back to being separate companies. Goldman Sachs

could no longer be a bank holding company.

In my view, that is exactly what needs to happen. What insanity that when individuals lose their health insurance, tough luck; small businesses go bankrupt, tough luck; but if you are a large financial institution and you acted in a legal greedy way, we say: Hey, no problem. Taxpayers of this country are here to bail you out, because if we don't bail you out, you are going to bring down the entire economy. That is absurd. We have got to end that.

Robert Reich, President Clinton's former Labor Secretary, said:

No important public interest is served by allowing giant

banks to grow too big to fail. Wall Street giants should be

split up--and soon.

I agree with former Secretary Reich.

Let me touch on a few other issues we have to have the courage to deal with. I get calls all the time. I do a national radio show--get it on the radio show, get it from Vermont. People are saying, We bailed out these large financial institutions and what they then do is say ``thank you'' and they raised my interest rates on my credit card to 25 or 30 percent.

That is outrageous. That is usury. We need to pass national usury laws. The truth is, today one out of four credit card holders in this country is paying interest rates above 20 percent, as high as 41 percent, more than double what they paid in interest in 1990.

What we need to do is pass national usury legislation. I have introduced legislation that would mandate that the maximum interest rates that could be charged would be 15 percent. The reason I came up with that number is that is exactly what credit unions are doing today, 15 percent, except under unusual circumstances.

I am proud that on that bill we have as cosponsors Senators Durbin, Leahy, Levin, Harkin, and Whitehouse. That is what we have to do. It is immoral. It is wrong for these large companies to be charging 25 or 30 percent interest rates.

It goes without saying that as we take a look at Wall Street, we have to reregulate those institutions. We have to take a hard look at bringing back Glass-Steagall in one form or another.

Lastly, we also need more transparency at the Federal Reserve. Last year when Secretary Bernanke came before the Budget Committee, I asked him a very simple question. I said: Mr. Chairman, my understanding is that you have lent out over $2 trillion at zero interest to some of the largest financial institutions in America. Can you tell me who got the money? I mean, you are putting taxpayer money at risk. Who received this $2 trillion-plus dollars? And, amazingly enough, what Mr. Bernanke said is: No, I am not going to tell you. It is a big secret. I cannot tell you.

Well, on that day we introduced legislation that would mandate that he tell us, and also we would bring about a GAO audit of the Fed. The Fed, especially since the financial collapse, has assumed an enormous amount of power, and the American people have a right to have more transparency there.

Let me conclude by saying that anybody who thinks this recession is over has obviously not talked to real people. Millions of people are hurting. Millions of people are frightened. They are looking to us for some help in terms of extending unemployment benefits, but they are also looking to us to understand the causation of this problem, and to work on economic ideas which will prevent a continued collapse of the middle class in this country.

We have got a lot of work on our hands, and I look forward to working with you.

I yield the floor.

Employment Disincentives

Mr. President, let me begin by suggesting that at a moment in American history when we probably have more serious problems than at any time since the Great Depression, I find it rather sad and distressing that time after time the response of our Republican colleagues is no, no, no; filibuster, filibuster, filibuster. In fact, what we are seeing now is that the filibuster is the norm. Most Americans think it takes a majority to pass something. Not around here. Our Republican friends, I think, have broken the alltime world's record for bringing forward filibusters--my understanding is 81 in this session alone.

So here you have a crisis in health care, a crisis in the economy, a crisis in global warming, a crisis in foreign policy, a crisis in terms of our national debt, and yet our Republican friends say: No, no, no; filibuster, filibuster, filibuster. So it is easy to understand why the American people are extremely frustrated with what is going on here.

The election in November was all about the American people saying very loudly and clearly: We did it their way for 8 years. We gave the tax breaks to the billionaires that these folks wanted. We went into a war we should never have gotten into. We drove up the national debt to a recordbreaking level. We ignored the crisis in global warming and forfeited enormous opportunities to create jobs addressing that. We did it their way.

Now let me tell you the results of having done it their way.

During the Presidency of George W. Bush, over 8 million Americans slipped out of the middle class and into poverty. Today, nearly 40 million Americans are living in poverty.

During the 8 years of the Bush administration, 7.8 million Americans lost their health insurance. Today, these guys still do not want to address the issue of soaring health care costs and 46 million Americans uninsured.

Under President Bush, 4\1/2\ million manufacturing jobs in this country were lost in the Midwest and other parts of this country. We are seeing desolation in areas where workers used to earn good wages, producing real products. In my own small State of Vermont, we have lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs over the last 6 or 7 years.

During the Bush era, 3.2 million American workers lost their pensions--pensions they were dependent upon in order to provide some security when they retired. Incredibly, during that period, median household income declined by over $2,100.

My colleagues may have seen an article in USA TODAY recently which mentioned that from 2000 to 2008, middle-class men experienced an 11.2- percent drop in their incomes. Do you believe that--11.2 percent? That is a reduction of $7,700, adjusting for inflation, during the Bush era. Middle-class women in this age group saw a 4.8-percent decline in their incomes as well.

We did it their way, and the middle class is on the verge of collapse, poverty is increasing, more and more people are losing their health insurance, and the national debt has exploded. And then, after hearing President Bush tell us how robust the economy was, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson saying how strong the economy was, they walked into Congress over a year ago and said: Seems we made a little bit of a mistake. The economy is not actually robust. If we don't get $700 billion within the next couple of weeks, the entire world's financial system will collapse. Sorry about that. We not only have many hundreds of supervisors and the Fed, we have the whole Federal bureaucracy looking at what is going on--we kind of missed it. We are sorry about that.

What ended up happening, as everybody in America knows, the economy plunged as a result of Wall Street greed and illegal behavior and recklessness; the conversion of Wall Street to a gambling casino, to all the deregulation that these guys fought for for years--both parties, by the way, not just Republicans--we ended up with the greatest economic decline since the Great Depression.

Let me tell you a little bit about where we are today when we talk about the need to extend unemployment benefits. We hear the official unemployment statistic of 9.8 percent. That is bad. But that only tells literally half of the story. If we add to the 9.8 percent who are unemployed all those in high unemployment areas who have given up looking for work or who are not part of the official statistic, and we add to that number people who want to work full time but are working part time, do you know what we end up with? We end up with 27.2 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed. This is over 17 percent of our population.

That is a disaster. That is an absolute disaster causing massive suffering for working families all over this country.

I rise today in the midst of that economic disaster in strong support of the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act. I am proud to be an original cosponsor of this legislation. I thank Majority Leader Reid and Senator Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee, for their leadership on this legislation. We are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the suffering, from California to Vermont, is enormous.

I am sure my colleagues get the same letters I get:

I lost my job, I am looking for a new job, there is no job available.

I lost my job, I got a new job, but it only pays half of what my old job did.

I lost my job and I lost my health insurance and maybe I am 1 of the 1 million people this year who are going to go bankrupt because of medically related illnesses.

I am a young person, I graduated high school, I want to get a job. I can't find a job.

I graduated college, I can't find a job.

That is what we are looking at. We have to address that problem.

As bad as the current situation is, what we also understand is that long-term unemployment is soaring. It is a bad thing if somebody loses their job. That is always bad. If they get a new job in a couple of weeks, that is one thing. But what is happening now is we are looking at 5.4 million Americans who have been unemployed for over 6 months. That is the highest on record. We have a crisis of long-term unemployment. The average length of unemployment is now 27 weeks, the longest since World War II. In the midst of serious unemployment numbers, the fact we are looking at long-term unemployment at record- breaking levels tells us it is absolutely imperative to extend and increase, expand unemployment benefits.

There are fewer jobs in America today than there were in the year 2000, even though the workforce has grown by over 12 million since that time. We now have the fewest manufacturing jobs at any time since April of 1941. Can you believe that? We have fewer manufacturing jobs, blue- collar jobs, the jobs that made the middle class, since April of 1941.

The American people need our help. That is why it is so important that we pass this legislation and why it is so important that we do this in a bipartisan way. I hope our Republican friends will finally stop saying no and say yes to American working families. This bill provides an additional 14 weeks of unemployment benefits to all 50 States. That is important to me. It is important to me because while I do understand there are States which have a lot higher unemployment rates than the State of Vermont, the truth is there is long-term unemployment in 50 States in America, and I believe we should be extending unemployment for all of our workers.

If we do not pass this legislation, by the end of this year nearly 2 million Americans will see their unemployment benefits expire, including some 2,000 people in the small State of Vermont. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and at a time when long-term unemployment is extremely high, we cannot turn our backs on jobless Americans by letting their unemployment insurance expire. That would be driving people into the abyss. We cannot do that. This bill will allow workers who have lost their jobs during the severe recession to get the help they deserve while they try to find new jobs to support their families.

The American people are looking to the Congress for help. These are tough times all over this country. We cannot turn our backs on hard- working Americans who are trying as best they can to keep their families above water. I hope we pass this legislation and we pass it as soon as possible.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes talking on an issue that I think is of concern to tens of millions of senior citizens. Before that, I ask unanimous consent for Senator Chambliss to follow me on the floor.

Mr. President, as you know, today the Social Security Administration announced there will be no COLA, or cost of living increase, next year for more than 50 million seniors. That is the first time in 35 years that situation has occurred, and it worries me very much.

About a month ago, I introduced legislation which the occupant of the chair is a cosponsor of, along with Senators Leahy, Dodd, Stabenow, Begich, and Casey.

I ask unanimous consent to add Senator Mikulski and Senator Tom Udall as cosponsors of S. 1685.

We are all saying that in the midst of this major economic downturn, the worst recession since the Great Depression, while we are keenly concerned about the 9.8 million Americans who are unemployed officially, the Americans who have given up looking for work, the millions of Americans who are working part time when they want to work full time--when you add that all together, that is something like 17 percent of our workforce, about 26 million Americans. We are concerned about that issue, and we have to do everything we can to make sure we get this economy going in a way that benefits not just Wall Street but ordinary Americans.

While we remain concerned about the need to start creating the millions of jobs the middle class in this country desperately need, we cannot turn our backs on the senior citizens of this country. What we are seeing today is that millions of seniors are facing extremely high prescription drug costs. They are facing very high health care costs. We have to address that issue.

The legislation I introduced--and it was introduced by Congressman DeFazio in the House--would provide a one-time $250 payment for more than 50 million seniors and disabled veterans. We would pay for that cost of about $14 billion by raising the Social Security tax on people who earn between $250,000 and $359,000, on a 1-year basis--about $14 billion.

What I am delighted about is that yesterday President Obama announced his support for the concept of a $250 one-time payment to our seniors on Social Security and to disabled veterans. He did not yet determine, in his judgment, the best way to fund that program. I think it is a real step forward that he is doing that. I am delighted that the majority leader, Senator Reid, has also been very strong on saying we have to make sure our seniors get some help this year, as has Speaker Pelosi and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Congressman Rangel. I think we are making some real steps in the right direction.

Let me quote what the President said because I think he was right on:

Even as we seek to bring about recovery, we must act on

behalf of those hardest hit by this recession. That is why I

am announcing my support for an additional $250 in emergency

recovery assistance to seniors, veterans, and people with

disabilities to help them make it through these difficult

times. These payments will provide aid to more than 50

million people in the coming year, relief that will not only

make a difference for them, but for our economy as a whole,

complementing the tax cuts we've provided working families

and small businesses through the Recovery Act.

I very much appreciate that support from the President.

The bottom line is that this legislation is now in our jurisdiction. My

hope and expectation is that we are going to move it as quickly as possible. With the President's support, we should be able to accomplish that in a short while.

In Vermont, I can tell you there are many seniors making the difficult choice about whether or not to heat their homes or pay for prescription drugs. Those are choices Americans should not have to make. Many seniors are also going to be seeing an increase in the cost of Medicare Part D.

If we do not deliver on this one-time $250 payment, you are going to see millions of seniors with a reduced amount in their Social Security check. That is not acceptable.

I think we are making some progress on this issue. Again, I thank Senator Reid for his strong support, Speaker Pelosi for her support, and most important, the President for his support. Let's get this done on behalf of seniors and disabled veterans. I think we will have done something that is very important.

With that, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, for more than three decades, seniors have relied on a COLA in their Social Security benefits to keep up with their increased expenses. Tomorrow it is expected that the Social Security Administration will announce that for the first time in 35 years, seniors will not be receiving a COLA. Based on the formula that by law they are obliged to use, they came to the conclusion that there is no inflation for seniors and, in fact, the prices for seniors have declined.

In my view, the current formulation for determining Social Security COLAs is wrong in terms of the needs of seniors because it does not accurately take into account their purchasing needs. In other words, if you are 19 years of age and you buy a laptop computer or an iPod or a new cell phone, the likelihood is that prices may well have gone down over the last year. On the other hand, most seniors are not buying iPods. What they are buying is prescription drugs and health care needs, and those costs have gone up.

I have long argued and when I was a Member of the House I introduced legislation with a whole lot of support to develop a separate index for seniors. Be that as it may, where we are right now is that the Social Security Administration will announce tomorrow a zero COLA.

I have some very good news. I have introduced legislation, and I and a number of us have urged the President to be cognizant of the fact that in the midst of this terrible economic recession, we just cannot turn our back on seniors. Many seniors are not only paying increased costs for prescription drugs and for their health care needs, they have seen a decline in their pensions. They have seen a significant decline, in many cases, in the value of their homes. Some have lost their pensions. Basically, we cannot say to them right now that we are not going to reach out and try to help you in whatever way we can.

I am very happy to announce that just this afternoon, President Obama will be supporting support for senior citizens. He will be supporting a $250 payment to disabled veterans and those people who are on Social Security, some 50 million Americans in all. I applaud the President for not turning his back on seniors.

In his announcement, the President says:

Even as we seek to bring about recovery, we must act on

behalf of those hardest hit by this recession. That is why I

am announcing my support for an additional $250 in emergency

recovery assistance to seniors, veterans, and people with

disabilities to help them make it through these difficult

times. These payments will provide aid to more than 50

million people in the coming year, relief that will not only

make a difference for them, but for our economy as a whole,

complementing the tax cuts we've provided working families

and small businesses through the Recovery Act.

That is the statement President Obama is about to release. I thank the President for his support.

Obviously, the ball now comes to our court, and we have to move it forward. I think that in these hard times, when so many seniors are worried about how they are going to pay for their medicine, how they are going to pay for their health care, how they are going to pay to heat their homes in the wintertime, how they are going to take care of other basic needs, it is absolutely imperative we not forget about them.

I applaud the President for his action, and I look forward to working with Members of Congress to pass this legislation as soon as possible.

Madam President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Yes, that is correct.

I do. I thank the Senator from New Mexico for his remarks and Senator Brown for his leadership efforts here. I will say a few words.

If anyone in America does not understand what the function of a health insurance company is, let me give you the bad news. If you think the function is to provide health insurance for people, sorry, you are wrong. The function of a health insurance company is to make as much money as it possibly can. Do you know what. They do that very well. We have to acknowledge that. Insurers have increased premiums 87 percent over the past 6 years. Premiums have doubled in the last 9 years, increasing four times faster than wages.

Profit at 10 of the country's largest publicly traded health insurance companies in 2007 rose 428 percent from the year 2000 to 2007, from $2.4 billion to $12.9 billion, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

What we are seeing is that people are thrown off of health insurance because they committed the crime of getting sick, and they cannot get health insurance because of preexisting conditions. Well, that is the bad news. The good news is that CEO salaries are very high, and profits are doing very well.

At the very least--and I speak as somebody who believes in a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system--this country deserves a strong public option to give people the choice about whether they want a private insurance company.

With that, I yield back my time.

Mr. President, I want to use this opportunity to say a few words about an amendment that will be voted on later this afternoon, and it is the Sanders-Dorgan Yellow Ribbon outreach amendment, No. 2601.

Every Member of the Senate knows that we have seen many thousands of soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan and they have come home with post-traumatic stress disorder in very large numbers. They have come home with traumatic brain injury, TBI, also at frightening numbers. The government, in a number of ways, has developed many programs to try to provide help and medical care for these brave soldiers and for their families.

In Vermont, a couple of years ago, we helped establish what I think is an excellent program that many other States around the country are beginning to look at, and the basic premise of the program we have established in Vermont is that while it is enormously important to make sure those who come home from Iraq and Afghanistan get the best services possible, we establish those health care services, those services don't mean anything unless the soldiers are able to take advantage of the services.

Given the nature of PTSD and TBI, that is sometimes, especially for the members of the Reserve and National Guard, very difficult. So you will have instances, especially in rural America, where people will come home from Iraq, they are going to be in emotional trouble, and there are going to be strains and stresses on their families, with their kids. They may be suffering from PTSD, but one of the symptoms of PTSD is you do not stand up and say: You know what, I have troubles and I need help. That is not what you do.

What we established in Vermont was an outreach program which was largely filled with the veterans from Iraq who would go out to the communities and drop in and sit down with soldiers and their wives face to face and just get a sense of how they are doing and through that personal visitation suggest to them that if there is a problem, they might want to take advantage of the services the VA is providing, which in my State are quite good, and to make them aware that it is not unusual, that they are not the only people who are dealing with PTSD or TBI. In truth, this outreach program has been quite successful.

Some years ago, the Congress established a Yellow Ribbon Program which is doing a good job, and the goal of that program is to educate people who come home from Iraq and Afghanistan about the services available to them. But we have not yet funded the kind of strong outreach effort that I believe we need where we are literally sending people out to National Guard families, especially maybe in rural areas, and making them understand that their problems are not unique, that there are services available to help them.

So outreach is the word here. We do it in Vermont in a very informal way, just person to person.

This amendment is $20 million, and the offset comes from the $126 billion in funds in title IX of the bill. It does not cut any one particular account. This $20 million represents a fraction of 1 percent of the entire title.

So the issue here is that we have a serious problem with PTSD and TBI. I think it is terribly important that we do everything we can on a personal level to reach out to the families to get them the services they need. But, once again, you can have the greatest service in the world--I know we are trying. The Department of Defense is trying its best--but those services don't mean anything if veterans don't access them. So the goal is to get people into the services.

I would very much appreciate support for the Sanders-Dorgan amendment which will be coming up in a while.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, my amendment is supported by Senators Dorgan and Leahy, the National Guard Association, the U.S. Air Force Association, and the U.S. Army and Reserve Officers Association.

This is a simple amendment. Many of the men and women are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and TBI. While the DOD and the Veterans' Administration have done a good job in providing services to the men and women, not everybody is accessing the services.

This amendment provides $20 million for outreach efforts so that State by State we can send people out to talk to them and make sure they understand the facilities that are there and available to them to help them with PTSD and TBI.

My understanding is that this amendment has been accepted. I thank the chairman and the ranking member.

I ask unanimous consent to lay aside the pending amendment and call up my amendment No. 2617

I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Madam President, in recent weeks there has been some discussion about what types of organizations might or might not receive Federal funding. I think that is a very appropriate discussion for this legislation which obviously expends many hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

One of the concerns I have is that a number of the largest defense contractors in this country, it turns out, over a period of years, have, time after time, been involved in illegal behavior. I think the American people and the taxpayers of this country want to know how it happened that year after year we continued to do business, to the tune of tens and tens of billions of dollars, with large corporate interests--in this case, defense contractors--that were then found guilty of defrauding the American people. How many times do you have to be found guilty before we say enough is enough? Let me give you a few examples--really, quite a few--of what I am talking about.

According to the Project on Government Oversight, the three largest government contractors--Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman-- have a history riddled with fraud and other illegal behavior. Combined, these companies, these three companies, have engaged in 109 instances of misconduct since 1995 and have paid fees and settlements totaling over $2.9 billion. Despite this history, these organization received over $77 billion in government contracts in 2007 alone.

Let me repeat. Three major defense contractors--Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman--have engaged, combined, in 109 instances of misconduct since 1995 and have paid fees and settlements totaling $2.9 billion. This is not a videotape on a TV show having some people say stupid things. These are people who have been found guilty of defrauding the taxpayers of this country and have paid fees and settlements totaling $2.9 billion.

Let me give you some specificity here.

The largest contractor, Lockheed Martin, has engaged in 50 instances of misconduct since 1995, paying fines and settlements totaling $577 million. Yet in 2007 it still received $34 billion of government contracts.

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, in 2008 Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company paid $10.5 million to settle charges that it defrauded the government by submitting false invoices for payment on a multibillion-dollar contract connected to the Titan IV space launch vehicle program.

According to the Department of Justice, in 2003 Lockheed Martin paid $38 million to resolve allegations that it fraudulently inflated the costs of performing several Air Force contracts for the purchase and navigation and targeting pods for military jets.

In 2001, Lockheed Martin paid $8.5 million to settle criminal charges that it lied about its costs when negotiating contracts for the repair and restoration of radar pedestals installed in U.S. warships, costing the Navy millions of dollars, also according to the Department of Justice.

But this behavior is not unique to Lockheed Martin. Boeing, the world's leading aerospace company and the largest manufacturer of commercial jetliners and military aircraft, has engaged in 31 instances of misconduct since 1995 and paid $1.5 billion in fines and settlements.

I know people here have expressed concerns about what one group did in, clearly, stupid behavior. But what about a company such as Lockheed Martin which has paid $8.5 million to settle criminal charges? What about companies such as Boeing which has engaged in 31 instances of misconduct since 1995 and paid $1.5 billion in fines and settlements? In 2000, for example, according to the Department of Justice, Boeing agreed to pay $54 million to settle charges that it defrauded the Army by selling it more than 140 helicopters containing defective gears, putting the lives of the men and women in the Air Force in danger. These defective gears resulted in the deaths of at least five servicemen. We are not talking ACORN here. We are talking about $54 million to settle charges and actions that may have resulted in the death of at least five servicemen. How many years does this have to go on before we begin to deal with it? In 2007, Boeing received $24 billion in Federal contracts.

Finally, Northrop Grumman, the third largest contractor, has a similar history, with 27 instances of fraud totaling $790 million over the past 15

years. In 2003, according to the Project on Government Oversight, Northrop Grumman paid $111.2 million to settle charges that a subsidiary overcharged the United States on government contracts; i.e, ripping off the taxpayers. According to the Department of Justice, the Northrop Grumman subsidiary engaged in five separate schemes that increased the cost the Government paid for space projects.

Also in 2003, according to the Department of Justice, Northrop Grumman paid the United States $80 million to settle charges that it overcharged the government and knowingly installed substandard parts in target drones designed for the Navy.

Over and over and over again, year after year after year, the largest defense contractors engage in illegal activity to rip off the taxpayers and, in some instances, put in danger the lives of the men and women in the Armed Forces.

These are only a few snapshots of what appears to be a culture of fraud and entitlement within the military contracting community. We owe it to taxpayers to begin to get to the bottom of the situation. To reform the culture of greed, of illegal behavior, we have to expose it first. For that reason, I am offering an amendment under which the Secretary of Defense would calculate the total amount of money that goes to companies that have engaged in fraud against the United States and then make recommendations about how to penalize repeat offenders. We have an expression when we deal with criminal justice. We say: Three strikes, you are out.

A lot of these guys are getting a lot more than three strikes. They keep striking out and they come back and get lucrative defense contracts. How many times do they have to strike out?

I hope very much this study will be a first step in the process of cleaning up the world of defense contracting. I look forward to continuing to work to make absolutely sure the money we have set aside for our national defense is, in fact, spent on national defense, on protecting the men and women who bravely serve us in the Armed Forces and is not frittered away on fraudulent bids, illegal behavior, and wasteful projects.

I hope very much that when the amendment comes up, we will have bipartisan support. I cannot understand why anybody would be opposed to having us finally address this outrage. I hope the Senate will pass it.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, let me concur with the remarks of the Senator from Ohio. The letters he is receiving from Ohio are exactly the same types of letters I am receiving from Vermont. The time is long overdue for this Congress to pass real health care reform and join the rest of the industrialized world, which guarantees health care for all their people. I congratulate the Senator from Ohio for his leadership position on this issue.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendments Nos. 2559 and 2601.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendments be dispensed with.

Let me congratulate Senator Casey for that very good amendment. I look forward to supporting it.

Mr. President, I wish to say a few words on amendment No. 2617, which is pending, and talk about why I offered it.

This is a very important amendment. Everybody in the country is concerned that we have today a $12 trillion national debt. Everybody is concerned that this year we will run up the largest deficit in the history of the country. What that means is the taxpayers rightfully and absolutely want to know that the money we expend, whether it is for defense, which is what we are discussing this evening, whether it is for housing, education, any other purpose, they want to know that every nickel of Federal dollars spent is expended as wisely and as cost- effectively as possible. They also want to know that the corporations and the institutions and the individuals who receive that Federal funding are honest and trustworthy in terms of how they can expend those Federal dollars. That is what the people want, and they certainly have every right to those expectations.

Several weeks ago, the Senate voted to prohibit any funding going to an organization called ACORN. That decision was largely motivated by a videotape which showed employees of ACORN involved in an outrageous and absurd discussion with actors who were posing as a prostitute and a pimp. Those employees, appropriately enough, were fired for their outrageous behavior. My understanding is that over a period of 15 years, ACORN received about $53 million to promote affordable housing, encourage voter registration, and other things. I voted against the ACORN resolution, not because I condoned the behavior of these employees or other problems associated with the organization over the years. I don't. I opposed it because we need a process to determine what the criteria are in terms of defunding an organization engaged in improper or illegal behavior.

Frankly, I don't think a videotape on TV is good enough justification. We need a process, and that is what this amendment is about.

The sad truth is, virtually every major defense contractor has, for many years, been engaged in systemic illegal and fraudulent behavior while receiving hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. We are not talking here about the $53 million that ACORN received over 15 years. We are talking about defense contractors that have received many billions of dollars in defense contracts and, year after year, time after time, have violated the law, ripping off the taxpayers big time.

In some instances, these contractors have done more than steal money from taxpayers. In some instances, they have actually endangered the lives and well-being of the men and women who serve our country in the Armed Forces.

Let me cite a few examples. According to the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan, widely respected organization focusing on government waste, the three largest government defense contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, all have a history riddled with fraud and other illegal behavior. Combined, these companies have engaged in 109 instances of misconduct since 1995. This is going back to 1995, 109 instances of misconduct, and have paid fees and settlements for this misconduct totaling $2.9 billion.

Let me repeat that. These three companies--Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman--have engaged in 109 instances of misconduct since 1995 and have paid fees and settlements for this misconduct totaling $2.9 billion. Here is the kicker: Despite violating the law time after time after time, despite being fined time after time after time, guess what the penalty has been.

Here is what the penalty is. It is a pretty harsh penalty. In 2007, their punishment was $77 billion in government contracts. That is a pretty steep penalty, I have to admit, $77 billion. This is not ACORN. They were defunded immediately because of a 2-minute videotape. These are guys who time after time violated the law, ripped off the taxpayers, and their punishment was in 2007, 1 year alone, not $53 million over 15 years but $77 billion in 1 year.

Based on a video on TV, we took away funding for ACORN. What are we going to do with the major defense contractors who have been found guilty in courts of law, not on a videotape, time after time?

Let me give a few specifics so we know what we are talking about. Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the country, has engaged in

50 instances of misconduct since 1995, paying fines and settlements totaling $577 million. Yet it received $34 billion in government contracts in 2007. That is telling them who is boss. That is sticking it to them for violating the law.

Here is the type of behavior we are talking about. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, in 2008, Lockheed Martin's Space Systems Company paid $10.5 million to settle charges that it defrauded the government by submitting false invoices for payment on a multibillion- dollar contract connected to the Titan IV space launch vehicle program. According to the Department of Justice, in 2003, Lockheed Martin paid $38 million to resolve allegations that it fraudulently inflated the cost of performing several Air Force contracts for the purchase of navigation and targeting pads for military jets.

In 2001, Lockheed Martin paid $8.5 million to settle criminal charges that it lied about its costs when negotiating contracts for the repair and restoration of radar pedestals installed in U.S. warships.

But in fairness to Lockheed Martin, we should be clear that they are not the only defense contractors involved in fraud. Frankly, it is endemic in the industry. Boeing is the world's largest aerospace company and the largest manufacturer of commercial jet liners and military aircraft. Since 1995, Boeing has either been found guilty, liable, or reached settlements in 31 instances of misconduct and, as a result, paid $1.5 billion in fines, judgments, and settlements. I am talking about real money.

In 2000, according to the Department of Justice, Boeing agreed to pay $54 million to settle charges that it placed defective gears in more than 140 CH-47D Chinook helicopters and then sold the defective helicopters to the U.S. Army. When one of the gears failed in flight, it caused an Army Chinook helicopter to crash and burn while on a mission in Honduras, and five servicemen aboard were killed. We are not just talking about fraud; we are talking about activities which resulted in the death of U.S. servicemen.

In a report made public this past Tuesday, the DOD inspector reported that Boeing may have recovered $271 million in ``unallowable costs'' from the government. That is this last Tuesday. Still, Boeing received $24 billion in Federal contracts in 2007.

Finally, Northrop Grumman, the third largest contractor, has a similar history, with 27 instances of misconduct totaling $790 million over the past 15 years. It is not just the big three. On June 9, 2004, KBR overbilled for dining facilities by at least 19 percent, according to KBR's own studies, and it could be as high as 36 percent. As reported in its 2005 10-K, the government eventually agreed to withhold $55 million from KBR.

United Technologies reached a settlement amounting to over $50 million.

A few weeks ago the Senate voted to strip funding from an organization called ACORN which received $53 million in Federal funds for a period of 15 years. What do we do with some of the largest defense contractors that have time after time after time been involved with fraud?

I think one has to be pretty obtuse not to perceive that this type of behavior, this recurrent behavior, is systemic in the industry and it is part of the overall business model. Let me add, what I describe now is what these companies have been caught doing. We do not know what they have done in which they have not been caught.

The time is long overdue for us to get to the bottom of this situation. We owe that not only to the taxpayers of the country but to the men and women in our Armed Forces.

For that reason, I am proposing an amendment today under which the Secretary of Defense would calculate the total amount of money that goes to companies that have engaged in fraud against the United States, and then make recommendations about how to penalize repeat offenders. In other words, they have to be held accountable. It is absurd that year after year these companies continue doing the same things--illegal behavior, fraudulent activities--and year after year they keep getting away with it, and year after year they come back and they get hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal funds.

I hope very much this study will receive strong bipartisan support and will be a first step in moving us forward to cleaning up the world of defense contracting.

Mr. President, with that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.