Mr. President, I add my compliments and gratitude to Chairman Dodd for his unbelievable patience and hard work and the hard work of his staff in trying to come up with a good consensus, finding common ground where we can move forward and…
Mr. President, I add my compliments and gratitude to Chairman Dodd for his unbelievable patience and hard work and the hard work of his staff in trying to come up with a good consensus, finding common ground where we can move forward and address the economic crisis that has hit this country and deal with the consequences we have seen and certainly the ideas we know exist, to be able to solve the problems and move forward, put our economy back on track, put people back to work, making sure we are rebuilding our country in a way that is going to be sustainable, with a good financial regulatory reform initiative that is going to be meaningful.
I applaud his efforts and patience in what he is doing, working with everyone. I certainly add my efforts in trying to work together with others to make sure we can move this bill expeditiously as possible, obviously with the consideration he has given to everyone's concerns and desires to make it a better bill.
Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Connecticut. I am grateful to him for his comments and again grateful for his patience and perseverance in getting something done that is meaningful to all Americans. Arkansans are clamoring for it, and I know others across the Nation are.
The will say about the work of the Agriculture Committee, for all Americans who enjoy nutrition, that comes from the hard-working farm families across this country who produce the safest, the most abundant, and affordable food and fiber. We all have a little bit at stake in that Agriculture Committee.
We appreciate so much working with the Senator from Connecticut. Chairman Dodd has done a tremendous job.
Honoring our Armed Forces
Lance Corporal Richard R. Penny
Mr. President, this week, my home State of Arkansas marks a somber
milestone. Since September 11, 2001, 100 service men and women with ties to Arkansas have given their life to help defend our freedoms in this great country. I rise to honor their ultimate sacrifice on behalf of our Nation.
It is also with great sadness that I pay tribute to the family of LCpl Richard R. Penny, 21 years of age, of Fayetteville, AR. Lance Corporal Penny was killed May 6 while supporting combat operations in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, making him our State's 100th service man or woman to have given his life to help defend our freedom.
Along with all Arkansans, I am grateful for Lance Corporal Penny's service and for the service and sacrifice of all our military servicemembers and their families. More than 11,000 Arkansans on Active Duty and more than 10,000 Arkansas Reservists have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since September 11, 2001. These men and women have shown tremendous courage and perseverance through the most difficult of times.
My father and both my grandfathers served as infantrymen. They served our Nation in uniform and taught me from an early age about the sacrifices our troops and their families make to keep our Nation free. As neighbors, as Arkansans and as Americans, it is incumbent upon us to do everything we can to honor their service and to provide for them and their families not only when they are in harm's way but also when they return home.
While it is important to honor those who have served our country in uniform with words, we must also honor them with our actions. I have consistently supported initiatives that expand the benefits our servicemembers and veterans have earned and deserve. During these tough economic times, it is even more important that we don't shortchange these heroes and their families.
That is why I have authored several bills on behalf of Arkansas's military servicemembers, veterans, and their families. In doing so, I have focused on a number of priorities, including requiring more accessible health care for guardsmen and reservists so they can maintain the medical readiness required to fulfill their mission and also ensuring that future GI benefits for members of the National Guard and Reserve keep pace with the national average cost of tuition, and allowing beneficiaries of the post-9/11 GI bill to use their GI benefits more flexibly to develop skills that are critical to our workforce and our economy and their reentrance into the workplace, and also addressing inequities in survivor benefits for military families.
With more than 600,000 courageous men and women who have returned from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with thousands more on the way, mental health care is an issue that also deserves more attention. I have visited injured servicemembers at Walter Reed and in Arkansas and witnessed firsthand that more and more of our troops are affected by service-connected mental health issues, such as traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. To address this issue, I have introduced legislation to ensure that our troops receive proper mental health assessments before and after they enter a conflict zone.
The issue of mental health does not just affect our troops. With more National Guard and Reserve from our rural communities serving abroad, families have expressed concerns to me about the impact increased military deployments have on other children, and particularly their children, and whether schools have sufficient resources to meet these challenges. To meet these concerns, I have also introduced legislation to increase the number of school counselors, school social workers, and school psychiatrists and psychologists in high-needs school districts, many of which are located in our rural areas all across this great Nation.
All of our veterans, from the ``greatest generation'' to Vietnam war veterans to the new generation of servicemembers in the Middle East and across the globe, all of our veterans have sacrificed greatly on behalf of our country. Although the challenges and needs of veterans have changed over time, one thing remains constant: It is the responsibility of our Nation to provide the tools necessary to care for our country's returning servicemembers and honor the commitment our Nation made when we sent them into harm's way in the first place.
Our grateful Nation will not forget them when their military service is complete. It is the least we can do for those to whom we owe so much.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I rise with great respect for my colleague from Georgia, my ranking member on the Ag Committee, and all his attempts and ideas on how to make our
economy stronger and better. I do rise to speak in opposition to the Chambliss amendment. Again, with the greatest respect for my colleague, the ranking member, he and I and our respective staffs spent several months developing draft legislation in the Agriculture Committee. I am unbelievably grateful to him and his staff as well as my staff. We have made progress. In the end, we accomplished 80 to 90 percent of what is now the Dodd-Lincoln substitute. But as with all policy decisions, some tough choices needed to be made. Senator Chambliss and I simply could not resolve our final differences. We ran out of time, basically, in the committee.
Let me be clear. As chairman of the committee, I made the decision to move forward with a strong reform bill, a bill that was voted out of my committee on a bipartisan vote. I know to my colleagues the Agriculture Committee derivatives title is the only legislation to gain bipartisan support in this debate. We want to strive to continue in that vein and to work in a bipartisan way to get to a good resolution of something that is going to be beneficial to this Nation, to our economy, and that is going to gain the respect of Americans who have suffered from this financial crisis.
Unfortunately, the amendment being considered today by Senator Chambliss and some of my Republican colleagues does not contain the essential reforms required to ensure the stability of our markets. It creates loopholes and fails to bring the transparency and accountability Americans are demanding of us at this juncture. This amendment would be detrimental to our economy and to our markets.
The derivatives title of the Dodd-Lincoln bill is strong reform. Our bill provides necessary transparency and accountability to our shattered financial markets and regulatory system. Today this derivatives market is completely in the dark with no--I repeat, no-- regulation, no oversight, and no public disclosure. The Dodd-Lincoln bill will bring a completely unregulated market into the light of day for the first time ever. But it is important to point out, it is not regulation for regulation's sake. The steps we have taken in this bill have meaningful issues in terms of what they are dealing with. It maintains a narrow end-user exemption, appropriate restraints on the regulators, where necessary, and provisions that recognize we are competing in a global financial marketplace.
Many have commented about what might happen in these markets, in moving markets overseas. I will address that in a moment. But I believe all Americans are certainly demanding good, sound marketplaces. I think people globally are clamoring for those same types of sound marketplaces.
The facts speak for themselves. The Chambliss amendment does not meet the test of what our markets require. It is a stark reminder that if we do not act boldly in the face of the near collapse of our economy, tragic Wall Street abuses and abysmal regulatory failures, we will all suffer the consequences.
I have a number of concerns with the Chambliss amendment. Clearing and exchange trading is at the heart of reform, mitigating risk, reducing leverage, and forcing accountability on the derivatives marketplace. This amendment would remove the underlying bill's mandatory exchange trading requirement and remove the mandatory clearing provisions. This is not acceptable. We understand and know from our experience with the futures market what the clearing does and the stability it brings to the marketplace. It is absolutely essential.
This amendment removes real-time price transparency to the public. The Dodd-Lincoln bill provides real-time price transparency to the public and to the regulators. Without robust transparency, the markets would not function, and the regulators can't do their jobs. That real- time, 100 percent transparency is what moves these activities into those exchanges, into the clearing that is so necessary to ensure we bring that stability to the marketplace.
Information is power. This amendment will keep this power in the hands of those on Wall Street instead of giving it to Main Street. We have watched as these selected few on Wall Street have maintained their grip on these dark markets and on this information. What have they done with it? They have benefited themselves. It has not produced the kind of benefit across this great country that people in communities in places such as Arkansas and other States could see the benefit of that information because we had no access to it. Shedding sunlight on that, that sunlight, which is the disinfectant we need on Wall Street, is going to be critically important to making sure we are a success, and ensuring that transparency is here is part of what we have done in the Dodd-Lincoln bill.
If we do not capture the AIGs of the world, we cannot claim to have real reform. This amendment would miss many of the largest and riskiest players by narrowly defining both swap dealer and major swap participant and exempting too many market participants. More so, this amendment requires less of the largest, riskiest market participants. They will have fewer business conduct standards, fewer recordkeeping requirements, and fewer regulatory core principles to follow. This amendment also weakens the capital standards in the underlying bill. Customized, bilateral, over-the-counter transactions are less safe than those that are cleared and exchange trading. There is no way to get around that. We should expect more capital to back up those riskier transactions, not allowing the obligation to rest on the taxpayers or on the depositors in these banking institutions.
This substitute misses that opportunity in terms of making sure those riskier tools and those riskier transactions are required to have greater capital backing them as well as greater regulation, which is appropriate for their expanded risky nature.
To the comments of those who have said this is going to be pushed into other markets, into other countries, the American people are demanding stability. Consumers are demanding stability in our marketplaces. Why should we think that other countries are any different, particularly as we have seen what has happened in these other countries?
We can seize this as an opportunity to be a leader globally-- globally--in this world to create sounder markets, stronger markets, not just for us but for the global economy, which we are such an enormous part of now and will continue to be in the 21st century.
I would prefer to see us seizing that opportunity to be a leader in those global economic markets, and I think we should with a good, strong, stable bill that will be recognized by both markets as well as consumers.
This amendment also delays the implementation of regulatory reform for at least a year. The American people are demanding real reforms, and why we would want to delay implementation is beyond me. The time is now. People are wondering why it has taken us this long already to take these actions, and I think it is clear we must get started.
This amendment removes an important provision that would require swap dealers to put the financial interests of State and local governments, retirement plans, pensions, university endowments, and retirees before their own. The stories of abuse in this area are alarming and need to be addressed.
Jefferson County, AL, is one of the starkest examples we have. Jefferson County was taken advantage of by Wall Street and is now on the edge of bankruptcy, in part because of a $3 billion derivatives deal on bonds that went wrong. Without any responsibility to those entities, we will continue to see these types of circumstances perpetuated, and we have to stop that.
This amendment creates loopholes and broadly defines hedging. We cannot have a situation where the exemptions swallow the rule. Under this amendment, few will end up being regulated, and we will be back to business as usual, and I think we cannot allow that to happen.
The Dodd-Lincoln bill gives regulators explicit authority to prosecute swaps dealers who are aiding and abetting those who commit fraud using swaps. The Chambliss amendment would remove that authority. The Chambliss amendment also fails to require registered entities such as swap repositories or swap execution facilities to have chief compliance officers, allowing these entities to avoid regulatory compliance and further, again, endangering Main Street investors.
This amendment completely removes an important whistleblower program
for commodities markets. The amendment also removes the underlying bill's additional stronger antimanipulation authorities. The amendment also removes important authority for the regulators to close loopholes and strips key anti-evasion language that would allow the regulators to go after anyone who tries to evade the law.
This amendment arbitrarily moves jurisdictional lines and removes more than 30 years of good-faith agreements between regulators, ignoring the expertise of individual agencies and jeopardizing the ability of regulators to act quickly. This is a dangerous path to go down for the ranking member of the Ag Committee, and I hope we will be able to stop this amendment and continue to work in a way that will bring about the kind of solid regulation, transparency, and oversight that needs to be in this bill.
Finally, the Dodd-Lincoln bill includes important conflict of interest provisions that would allow the regulators to ensure that no market participant unduly influences or monopolizes the market. What does the Chambliss amendment do with this provision? It would eliminate it--in effect, handing more power over to Wall Street.
These changes are simply an effort to weaken the bill and riddle it with loopholes. I understand many of my colleagues are being pressured to take this path. But we must forge ahead and enact meaningful-- meaningful--reform. The American people deserve no less. They have seen what this financial crisis has done to them--in middle America, where they have seen their savings for their children's college funds, their retirement funds, other things put at risk because of risky businesses and risky deals that have happened in a small group of Wall Street banks that have chosen basically to take those risks, with unfortunately, the liability falling on the depositors as well as the taxpayers.
The same claims and worn-out, catch-all defenses of ``unintended consequences'' or ``driving business overseas'' have been used for decades as reasons to weaken financial reform efforts, and critics are using the very same arguments again today. We are here to tackle complicated problems and find real solutions--meaningful solutions-- that will again bring the kind of confidence to the marketplace and consumers we need to be able to strengthen our Nation and our marketplaces and our economy to create the jobs all Americans want to see, and to set the example globally of what good, strong regulations and solid markets can do in terms of growing the global economy.
We certainly should not squander the opportunity for historic reform, nor support any efforts to weaken it. Therefore, I intend to vote ``no'' on this amendment, and I respectfully encourage my colleagues to do the same.
Mr. President, I know I have other colleagues on our side who want to speak on this amendment, and I know there are others on the Republican side. I would encourage all of our colleagues to come to the floor to take the opportunity to speak on this amendment. I know Chairman Dodd is anxious to move the bill, as well as others, and we have a great opportunity here to visit about and debate this portion of the bill, and I encourage my colleagues to do that.
Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I rise to compliment my colleague from Rhode Island and thank him for his hard work. He and his staff have done a tremendous job on the Banking Committee on this particular issue. It has been a pleasure to work with him and his staff and certainly to see the good work they have done, and I want him to know I am grateful to him for his hard work in helping us come up with a good package.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I appreciate all the debate we have had and the discussion. I thank my colleague from Georgia, my ranking member on the committee. He and his staff are a tremendous group to work with. I appreciate all that. I am confident we have worked hard. In the underlying bill we have come to agreement with Chairman Dodd on, we lower the systemic risk by requiring mandatory trading and clearing, which my colleague, Senator Cantwell, did a tremendous job of explaining, bringing that 100 percent transparency to the market with real-time price reporting, protecting municipalities and pensions and retirees, regulating foreign exchange transactions, and increasing the enforcement authority to punish the bad behavior we have seen. To that point, again, I believe not since the Great Depression have we seen such devastating consequences of a banking and financial system gone wrong. It does call us to action.
We are not here to take easy votes. We are here to tackle complicated problems and find the solutions we know are going to benefit all of America. We certainly should not squander that opportunity for historic reform, nor support any effort to weaken it.
Therefore, I certainly recommend a ``no'' vote on the Chambliss amendment and respectfully encourage my colleagues to do the same. Again, I thank my colleague from Georgia for his hard work. We will continue to work together to find the common ground we know is going to be the best place for us to all be.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to vote in relation to the Chambliss amendment No. 3816, at 5:30 p.m.----
With no amendment in order to the amendment prior to the vote; that upon the disposition of the Chambliss amendment, the next two amendments be the Reed amendment No. 3943 and the Sessions amendment No. 3832.