Floor Statements

Mr. President, first let me compliment my colleague from Illinois. He is right that the health care system in this country is in need of repair or reform. He is right also about the people who are out there believing they are insured when in fact they are one serious illness away from bankruptcy.

Ten years ago in Fargo, ND, I met a woman who had $600,000 in the bank. She said she had a job, she had health insurance, and she had equity in a home. Ten years later it was gone. She has a very serious illness. She is a quadriplegic and needs a substantial amount of care, and all those assets are gone. She had insurance and all those assets are gone because her insurance had a cap.

A lot of people don't know that. They say: I have health insurance. Their insurance often has a cap on how much the insurance company will pay in the aggregate, which means they are just one serious illness away from bankruptcy. That is just one among others of the reasons there needs to be some change with respect to the health care issue.

I think this will be difficult. I commend the majority leader for trying to put a bill together. It will come to the floor of the Senate. We will have an opportunity to review it and offer amendments, which is the way it should be. My hope is at the end of the day we will be able to advance the issue of health care and improve the health care system in this country.

Mr. President, I wanted to mention very briefly--and I will speak about this a bit more later--the daily news about the payment of very large bonuses by some of the largest financial firms that received TARP funds or other funds from the Federal Government to try to keep them afloat during difficult times last year. The notices of the bonuses and profits of those firms at this point are very troubling to me and to a lot of other people.

I want to mention that a group of us a while back wrote to the Federal Reserve Board asking the Federal Reserve Board to release information about how much money went out the back door of the Federal Reserve Board when, for the first time in history, they allowed investment banks to come to the loan window of the Federal Reserve Board and get direct loans. For the first time in history, last year, they did that.

Now the question is, Who got money from the Fed's direct window? Under what conditions did they get that money? How much money did they get? A lot of us have asked the Federal Reserve Board to release that information.

Is that information important? It sure is, to me. Are the companies that are now proposing to pay the very large bonuses the same companies that got money out of the direct loan window of the Fed for the first time in history? Probably. What conditions were attached to that money? What were the rates, if any? We would like to know the specifics.

On September 16, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board wrote back to us saying that releasing these names would hinder the Fed's assistance efforts.

That is just a specious argument. The American people's money is put at risk. The American people have the right to know how much money went out that direct lending window at the Fed. We have a right to know-- Members of Congress, the American people have a right to know. The Federal Reserve Board is saying we don't have a right to know and they don't intend to tell us.

I am going to talk about this a bit more later. There was a related FOIA case in which a judge found the Federal Reserve had ``improperly withheld agency records.'' The judge called the Fed's argument that borrowers would be hurt if their names were released--the judge says ``that was conjectural, without evidence of imminent harm.''

Despite the fact that the judge has determined that, we still don't have a release of this information. In a news article of a congressional hearing, it said a Federal official said the Fed was ``giving serious consideration'' to releasing the names of firms that received assistance.

In the same article they quoted Fed General Counsel Scott Alvarez as saying at the hearing:

We would be happy to work with you to establish procedures

for disclosure.

A few days following that a Bloomberg news article said:

The Fed had decided to appeal the ruling that had ordered

the Fed to release the information.

The question is, Why does the Fed believe we and the American people do not have a right to know? It makes no sense to me. I am going to speak about this at greater length later, but, clearly, as big bonuses are going out the back door, don't we have a right to know how much money went in the front door from the Federal Reserve to these institutions? How much, at what rate, and so on? I am going to continue to ask these questions.

Mr. President, I appreciate the courtesy of the Senator from Montana.

The issue before us is very simple. When you have a severe economic downturn of the type we have had, a very deep recession, that is when you try to employ the economic stabilizers that help people who lose their jobs--unemployment insurance. The extension of unemployment insurance has almost always been nearly automatic because everyone understands the urgency of doing it. When many additional people have been unemployed for lengthy periods of time, you try to reach out and help.

The cloture vote tonight is on a motion to proceed, and it so demonstrates the dysfunction of the Senate these days. The motion to proceed is filibustered by the other side when we are trying to help some folks who have lost their jobs. Many have lost hope during a steep economic decline. We can't even get cooperation on a motion to proceed to try to address the extension of unemployment benefits. It is pretty unbelievable to me.

Last fall, I watched some of the same folks who were objecting to that rush to the starting line to see if we couldn't give hundreds of billions of dollars to the biggest financial firms in the country that ran this economy into the ditch--let's give them a lot of money. But you know what, not when it comes to helping the folks at the bottom, those who have lost their jobs.

By the way, last month 263,000 Americans lost their jobs; last month--263,000. Just pick one out of 263,000 and think of somebody coming home from work and saying: Honey, I have lost my job; to say to their husband or wife: I have lost my job. It wasn't because I did a bad job, it was because they cut back at the plant or the office, so now I am unemployed. It was not their fault. The question is, What do we do when this happens? Normally when this happens, we extend unemployment benefits to those who are facing very difficult times.

This is the steepest, deepest economic decline since the 1930s. This country has been in very serious economic trouble for some long while now. It nearly fell off a cliff last October. So this action now should be almost automatic. But nothing, even common sense, is automatic around here because we are now struggling, at the end of today, a Tuesday, to get a cloture vote on a motion to proceed to do something that everybody knows we have a responsibility to do. It is almost unbelievable.

I want to say how frustrating it is that we do not get any cooperation on anything to move forward things that are of an urgent nature. I suppose this is not urgent, perhaps, unless you are

unemployed and trying to figure out: How do we get the money to eat? How do we get the money to pay rent? How do we get the money to provide the funding for the kids to go to school? It is probably not urgent for people who are not in that situation, but if you are in that situation during a very severe economic downturn, this is urgent. We need to extend these benefits.

My colleague from Montana and his committee have worked on this and brought it to the floor. It would have been nice if they had gotten just a little cooperation so we would not have to go through this, file a cloture motion, wait 2 days for it to ripen, then 30 hours postcloture. What is the deal? I don't understand at all. Dig your heels in when it comes to trying to help the folks who need help the most and say the sky is the limit when it comes time to help those who have the most? That turns logic on its head, in my judgment.

My hope is that at 6 o'clock tonight when we vote, we will have the 60 votes. We should never have been put in the position to have to try to break a filibuster on a motion to proceed. We are not even on the bill; it is a motion to proceed to the bill. What an unbelievable lack of cooperation on something that is so essential during a steep economic downturn, to help those whose jobs have been washed away, who desperately need help for themselves and their families. That is what we are trying to do.

I hope that perhaps following the disposition of this--and I hope we will get this done--we will get some additional cooperation on things that really matter.

I appreciate the time given me by the Senator from Montana.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, as the Senate continues to discuss in various ways the issue of health care, I wanted to comment once again on the need, when the health care bill is finally brought to the floor, open for debate and amendment, to offer an amendment, which I and others will do, to address the cost of prescription drugs. One of the significant areas of cost increases for medicine is in prescription drugs.

Prescription drugs are unbelievably important. Many people manage their diseases with prescription drugs that were not available years or decades ago. Those people who are able to access prescription drugs for disease management are able to keep out of the hospital and avoid being in an acute-care bed, which is the costliest form of health care.

I understand the importance of prescription drugs in the health care system. I want us to continue to incentivize the development of new drugs, research and development. We do a lot of that through the National Institutes of Health, and so, too, do the pharmaceutical companies engage in research and development. But even as we do all of that to try to incentivize development of additional drugs and make them available for disease management, it is important to understand that part of the process of trying to put some downward pressure on health care costs is to put some downward pressure on the price of prescription drugs. It is a fact that we pay the highest prices in the world for brand-name prescription drugs. That is just a fact. In my judgment, it is not fair.

When a bill does come to the floor, I and a number of my colleagues-- there are over 30 who have cosponsored legislation on prescription drugs--will offer as an amendment the legislation we have drafted together. It has significant safety provisions in it. It would

make the drug supply eminently safer than now exists, requiring pedigrees and batch lot numbers on everything that is produced and distributed so that we can track it. It would be a much more effective way of addressing the issue of counterfeit drugs.

Essentially what we propose is to put downward pressure on prescription drug prices by allowing the American people the freedom to access that identical prescription drug wherever it is sold, if it is FDA-approved, access it wherever it is sold for a fraction of the price that is charged here in the United States.

I have in my desk two pill bottles. They contain the medicine called Lipitor. I have used them many times and ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to use them on the floor.

These bottles are bottles that contain medicine produced in the exact same manufacturing plant. This plant happens to be in Ireland, and Lipitor happens to be the most prescribed prescription drug for the lowering of cholesterol anywhere in the world. More people take this for the lowering of cholesterol than anything else. I am not standing here advertising for it. I am making the point that this is made in Ireland. It is shipped all over the world.

As we can see, these are two bottles that look identical. They contain the same pill in the same bottle made by the same company made in the same plant. This bottle was shipped to Canada. This bottle was shipped to the United States. This is 90 tablets at 20 milligrams. Canadians are required to pay $1.83 per tablet for this drug. Americans--same pill, put in the same bottle, made in the same place, in an FDA-approved plant--pay $4.48 a pill. So it is $1.83 if you buy it north of here, $4.48 if you are an American citizen buying it in the United States.

Is that fair? It is not, in my judgment. It is not only Lipitor; it is brand-name drug after brand-name drug. How does that happen, and how can they make this stick? They do it because under current law the only entity that can import a prescription drug is the manufacturer of the drug. Therefore, if this prescription drug is sold in Italy or Spain or France or Canada--any number of countries--for a fraction of the price, the American people are prohibited from accessing that identical, FDA- approved drug that is sold at half or one-third of the cost in the United States.

With our legislation, we aim to give the American people some freedom--the freedom to access that drug. We establish a system by which they are able to access that FDA-approved drug from a chain of custody that is as safe as the American chain of custody and allow them to import that drug into this country by paying a fraction of the price. This is about freedom. Why would we not want to give the American people the freedom and the advantage of the system of trading?

Some say: You can't do that without limiting the opportunity for counterfeiting. They have been doing it in Europe for 20 years. If you are in Spain and want to buy a prescription drug from France, good for you; it is easy to do under something called parallel trading. If you are in Italy and want to buy a prescription drug from Germany, it is not a problem; they have something called parallel trading. They have been doing it for two decades without any safety issue at all. Yet they say we can't do it here in America? We can't manage something the Europeans have managed routinely for two decades? I think we can. Of course we can.

It is not just Lipitor. I mentioned previously that I was at a farmyard for a farm meeting some while ago. People were sitting around on bales of straw talking, and there was an old codger there. The subject of health care came up.

He said: I am near 80 years old. My wife is about 2 years younger, near 80. She just suffered breast cancer. She has been fighting a battle with breast cancer in the last 3 years.

This, by the way, was in the southern part of North Dakota.

He said: We drove to the Canadian border and then drove across the border every 3 months to buy Tamoxifen for my wife to fight her breast cancer. And the reason we did that is because we couldn't afford it here. We paid about 20 cents for what we would pay a dollar for in the United States for the Tamoxifen my wife needed. We had to drive to the Canadian border and across to buy it.

The fact is, he was allowed to do that because on an informal basis they allow you to bring across on your own person about 90 days' worth of prescription drugs. But for the most part, Americans are not allowed to access those lower cost prescription drugs. They are just not allowed.

Why not give the American people the freedom to access the same drug, put in the same bottle, made by the same company? If that company plant is inspected by the FDA, and the drug itself is FDA approved, why would you prevent the American people from having access to the very marketplace that everybody boasts about as being the free market?

I hear all my colleagues come to the floor all the time and talk about freedom. Yet I have seen some of them vote against the bill that would give the consumer the freedom to access these same drugs in places in the world where it is sold for a fraction of what the American people are charged.

There are 30 of us who have come together to write this legislation. It is a Dorgan-Snowe bill. Myself and my colleague, Senator Snowe from Maine, have worked on this legislation for a long time, as have other colleagues. The late Senator Kennedy was a cosponsor of this legislation. Senator John McCain is a cosponsor of this legislation. Last year, when Barack Obama was a Senator, he was a cosponsor of my bill. So this is a very wide coalition. Senator Grassley from Iowa asked me about this legislation when we came over for the last vote.

This is a very wide coalition of Republicans and Democrats who believe the American people ought to be given the freedom to access these identical prescription drugs that are sold at a fraction of the price in all the rest of the world at a time when the highest prices are charged to the American consumer.

If the goal of health care is twofold--one, to try to put some downward pressure on these relentless cost increases for health care; and, No. 2, to extend coverage to those who do not have it--how could we possibly bring a health care bill to the floor of the Senate and avoid the issue of whether we are going to do something about the relentless increasing march of prescription drug prices? How could we walk off the floor having done health care and say, ``Yes, we did not do anything, however, about prescription drug prices. Yes, we understand it is ratcheting up, up, up, and up, way out of the reach of some folks, but we did nothing about it.''

Some will say: Well, except that there was a deal made in which the White House announced an $80 billion deal with the pharmaceutical industry, and so on, that would have senior citizens buying brand-name prescription drugs in a manner that filled half of the doughnut hole-- that is all Washington jargon--so, therefore, it becomes something that the pharmaceutical industry has contributed to the well-being of senior citizens.

I do not know about all that. I think it was Russell Long who said: I'm not for any deal that I was not a part of. Well, I do not know about what this deal is. I called the White House when it was represented by the pharmaceutical industry that this deal also included the White House's agreement to oppose the legislation I and others are talking about here. I called the White House. Actually, I did not call the physical structure. I called a high official in the White House and asked the question: Was there a deal made by which they would oppose this? And the answer was no, no such deal was made.

So there is a bipartisan group of us who will be here to offer this amendment. I fully expect in the consideration of deciding how to put some downward pressure on the costs of health care, our colleagues will join me and Senator Snowe and so many others in adopting this amendment. At last--at long last--having been fighting this issue for many years, I believe, as we consider the health care bill on the floor of the Senate, we will include something that puts some pressure to bend down or at least to limit the kind of price increases we see every single year on these brand-name prescription drugs.

Let me say again, I have great respect for the pharmaceutical industry. It is looking after its own interests. Good for them. They should. They produce in some cases some miracle drugs, some of it with public funding through the National Institutes of Health, but, however, some of it, perhaps--not ``perhaps''--some of it with their own research and development. I do not want to do anything that interrupts our opportunity to produce these new medicines that will be helpful to the American people.

But I know what will happen. The minute we offer this amendment, we will have people popping up here on the floor of the Senate, and they will say: Aha, what you are going to do is shut down research and development for new drugs. That is what you are doing. You are going to shut down R&D that is going to develop the next miracle drug for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, and so on.

I say, no, that is not the case at all. It is just not the case. In fact, they pay a much lower price for the brand-name drugs, the same drugs we pay for. They pay much lower prices in Europe and do more research and development in Europe than we do here in the United States. So go figure.

It is also the case that the industry spends more for marketing, advertising, and promotion than they do on research and development. If you doubt me, turn on your television set tomorrow morning when you are brushing your teeth and listen to the advertisements. The advertisements say: Go ask your doctor today. Run down to your doctor and ask whether the purple pill is right for you. Or: Didn't you wake up this morning thinking you needed some Flomax? Go talk to your doctor; you must need Flomax--whatever Flomax is.

My point is, they relentlessly push these medicines at you with unbelievable amounts of advertising. So I would say, how about knocking off a little of that, maybe pumping some of that money back into research? The fact is, the way you can get a prescription drug is if a doctor thinks you need it. That maybe is where the decision ought to be made, not while you are brushing your teeth watching a commercial on television, whether the purple pill would enhance your lifestyle.

So I only say that because I know the pushback when we offer this amendment will be to say: This will injure somehow the opportunity to do research and development. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will not. I want the pharmaceutical industry to succeed. This amendment is not punitive at all. I want them to charge prices that allow them to make profits. I just do not want them to charge the highest prices in the world to the American consumer--to do it over and over. Why? Because they can. Because the American consumer does not have the freedom to access those lower priced prescription drugs in the world economy.

Let me mention something, finally, about the larger area of health care. I held a lot of meetings in August, as most of my colleagues did, I am sure. I had standing room only at every single meeting, and I had people allege that whatever is done with health care will be a bill that will cover health care for illegal aliens, it will be a bill that pays for health care costs for abortions, it will be a piece of legislation that does this and that. It is unbelievable the allegations out there, which have no basis in truth at all.

I am not going to vote for a bill that does the five or six things that most people are alleging the bill would do. But that is not going to be in legislation. This legislation we will consider I hope will be--and if it is not, I will offer to amend it; and if I cannot amend it and cannot fix it, I will not support it. But I believe legislation that will be supported by a good many--perhaps including myself if it is the right kind of legislation--will be legislation that is a serious attempt to try to address the issue of increasing costs of health care.

We spend much more than anybody else in the world on health care. Yet we do not have the results. We rank, according to CIA data, which keeps information on all the countries, 50th in life expectancy. So we spend much more than anybody else in the world and rank 50th in life expectancy. Go figure. There is something wrong with that picture.

The other issue is, a lot of people do not have health insurance because the increased cost of health insurance is running out of people's ability to pay for it.

One other important point is most people who do have health insurance believe: Well, I am set. I am fully insured. In most cases, they are not. In most cases, they are one serious illness away from bankruptcy.

I met a woman in a community recently who is a quadriplegic. About 10 years ago, she had $600,000 in the bank. She lived in a home and had home equity. She had a job and insurance. Ten years later, it is all gone. She is a quadriplegic who has unbelievable needs. She suffered a very serious illness that continues. She has reached the cap on her insurance policy. She is one of those who is a demonstration of being one serious illness away from bankruptcy, even if you have insurance. This country is a better country than to decide that does not matter.

One-half of the bankruptcies in this country are bankruptcies as a result of health care costs. Every single Member of this Chamber goes around their State and discovers there is a benefit being held someplace for somebody who needs a new kidney or somebody who has some other medical difficulty, and they are doing some sort of fundraiser for the community to see. Can they raise enough money for this surgery so this person can get health care because that is the only way they can get this surgery? So they need donations from neighbors. We can do better than that. That is the reason there is an interest in trying to find some way to address this health care issue.

I want to mention one additional point, and that is last evening there was a vote on what is called commonly here the doctors fix. It deals with physician reimbursements. A reporter asked me, as I left last evening: Wasn't this some significant rejection of the health care piece? The answer was no. That vote last evening was not a harbinger of anything. The vote last evening was on the issue of fixing physician reimbursements, but it was done in a way that was not paid for, and a good many Members of the Senate felt that is not the way to do it.

We should--and will, in my judgment--fix this physician reimbursement issue. We must. We cannot have a circumstance where physicians are told: Oh, by the way, in 2 or 3 years from now, your reimbursements are going to drop off a cliff 25 or 35 percent and then we will see you decide not to treat Medicare patients. That will not work. So we have to fix this. But we are in the middle of a very deep hole with very significant budget deficits, the most significant recession since the Great Depression. In my judgment, we cannot just add $240 billion to the Federal budget deficit.

So we will, in my judgment, address legislation with the physician payment issue and fix that issue because we have to, but we have to do it the right way. That is all that vote was. That vote was not a harbinger about how health care reform might be dealt with today, tomorrow, or yesterday. It was just a vote on that issue with respect to the deficit, and a lot of Members of Congress decided, do you know what, let's come back and do it in a different way.

Let me make one final point. The majority leader of the Senate is working, along with many others, to try to combine the best of several pieces of legislation. It is not an easy job. But the fact is, he will bring a piece of legislation to the floor of the Senate. It will be wide open for amendment, and we will have a lot of the best ideas that come to the floor in the form of amendments about how to improve the bill. And that is exactly the way this process will work. I do not think we ought to get ahead of the process alleging this or that. Let's take a look at what this bill does and says and provides. Let's offer improvements where improvements can be made. We will have votes on all of those issues and see if we can do something good for the American people. The American people deserve that.

This has been a tough time with a very deep economic hole we have been going through. Part of the economic distress in this country is to try to decide at the end of the day, the month, or the year: How do I pay this unbelievable increase in my health insurance

cost because I know that and my kids and my family and I need to have health insurance? When you are losing your job and losing your home and losing hope in the middle of a great economic downturn, it is pretty troublesome to discover, do you know what, we probably cannot even insure our family against illness and disease.

We are a better country than that. We can do something here. I understand a lot of people would like to say they want to do something but in reality do not want to do anything. And it is always easier to criticize. It is always easier to take the negative side. But the question is: Can we come together with something positive that advances the interests of this country? I hope we can. And I believe we can if we are thoughtful and work together. So that will be my hope at the end of the day.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, my vote against cloture on the motion to proceed to legislation that would cancel the scheduled physician payment cuts in the Medicare Program should not be read as opposition to the idea of canceling those cuts.

I support canceling the payment cuts for physicians. However, I think that action should be paid for. As it stands, that legislation would have increased the Federal deficit by $245 billion over 10 years. I cannot support that.

Congress has acted to prevent scheduled cuts for 6 of the last 7 years, creating a very large debt burden that becomes harder and harder to eliminate each time a temporary fix is enacted.

Each year physicians face uncertainty as a result of not knowing whether or not their reimbursement will be cut. I support developing a new model that provides stability in Medicare payments.

I am working with my colleagues to find ways to address the Medicare physician payment formula, and pay for the cost of doing so.

Mr. President, tomorrow at the Federal Communications Commission there will be a vote on a proposed rulemaking. It is a rulemaking on something called net neutrality. Let me put that in English, if I might. It is about Internet freedom. I wish to talk for a moment about the importance of this.

One would think, given the reaction by some and dozens and dozens of letters that are now going to the FCC,

that what is going to happen tomorrow is some unbelievable vote on some controversial proposal that has had no discussion. It is not that at all. It is a notice of proposed rulemaking. It is the beginning of a process to describe a rulemaking on what is called net neutrality or the principle of nondiscrimination with respect to the Internet.

I wish to describe how important that is. The Internet is an unbelievable new invention in our lifetime. It was created by the Federal Government. A bunch of scientists and engineers in the Federal Government described this method of communicating one to another with computer technology and it became the Internet. The Internet developed over a number of years in a completely free and open architecture. That meant that anyone could go to anyplace and see anybody on the Internet. So the stories are legend.

It was, I believe, 11 years ago when Larry and Sergey, two young men in college in a dormitory room started a company. They moved it to a garage that had a garage door opener, and it had eight employees, and they had this idea, a new company, a new search engine. It had eight employees and it was in a garage with a garage door opener 11 years ago. Well, now it is called Google.

But it is not just Larry and Sergey having a dream and a vision. It is so many others as well. It is Jeff Bezos who drove to California with an idea and that idea became Amazon.com, selling books, and then selling almost everything. Or it became someone with an idea about having an auction on the Internet, and it became eBay, and most of us know about eBay. Or it became Mark Zuckerberg who had an idea of something called Facebook. Well, I am talking about huge successes. But for every one of those--Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Google--for every one of those large companies that have now grown on the Internet, there are millions of people out there who are conducting a business in their kitchen, in their dorm room, in their garage, because they are the next enterprising person to succeed on the Internet.

The question is this: If there is someone in my hometown--and let me describe that someone, because it happened to be someone who is now occupying the home that I grew up in; a very small, two-bedroom home in a small town of 300 people. I had not been back for some long while to see the home. So I knocked on the front door. When the woman answered, I asked if I could see the home that I grew up in, where I spent my first 17 years, and she said: Of course. Come on in. So I came in and she was doing something that I found kind of interesting. She had in the small kitchen on the table a camera, and the camera was pointed at an aperture with an arm and on the arm was hanging a bracelet, a little gold bracelet, and she was taking a picture of the gold bracelet.

I said: What are you doing?

Well, I have a business, she said.

I said: Well, what kind of business do you have?

Well, I sell on the Internet. I purchase jewelry and then I sell it on the Internet.

Sure enough, in the little porch coming into the home she had cardboard boxes and tape and the kinds of things you would do to box something up and send it. Here in this little town in southwestern North Dakota, a town of 300 people, a woman, in the home I grew up in, was running a business.

I said: How do you do?

She said: Pretty well. This income supplements my husband's income. She said: I sell on eBay.

Well, you know what? In that little kitchen, anybody in the world can find her business--anybody in the world can find that business. Why? Because the Internet is open. The architecture has never been closed. The whole notion of the Internet is this notion of freedom, of liberty to go anywhere you want to go. In the last 3\1/2\ years I have written two books and I have discovered in the writing of books how unbelievable the Internet is to be able to go to anywhere in the world and do research. If you want to know something, go there, and nobody is going to stop you from going wherever you wish to go. Put it in a search engine, go find it, and you will find it in some crevice on the Internet. Somebody out there has put it on the Internet for you to see. It is the most unbelievable research tool I have ever found.

So, yes, it is Google, it is Amazon, it is eBay, it is the big companies, but much more than that, it is the backbone that allows people all over this country and the world to do business. Yes, from their kitchen, from their garage. Some of those businesses will grow to become names we don't now know but will, because they will be successful. They will be the next invention, the next opportunity on this thing called the Internet.

Here is the question: The Internet was created under circumstances that required rules of nondiscrimination. For the first portion of its birth and then origin, it was an Internet that was described as a telephone service and it was subject to rules that had nondiscrimination, so no one could discriminate. It was completely open, completely free. Its architecture was available to anyone at any time. Anybody can go anywhere at any time. Nobody has a toll booth, nobody is a gatekeeper. It is completely open and free. The biggest company over here and the smallest enterprise over here--big corporate executives wearing gray suits making lots of money, and two people in a dorm room or someone in a small kitchen in a small town--they are equal. Anybody has access to both sites, or all sites. That is called nondiscrimination and the nondiscrimination rules say no one can set up a barrier. No one can set up a gate. No one can set up a toll booth. Anyone has freedom and access anywhere on the Internet.

That is the way the Internet was developed. That is its origin and that is the way most of its life has existed. Then the Federal Communications Commission came along and said, We are going to redefine the Internet as an information service rather than a telephone service and the result is the nondiscrimination rules fell off the chart because they attached to the telephone service. So some of us have said, Well, we certainly want to maintain and continue nondiscrimination rules. I mean, who would be for discrimination, right? So we want to maintain the nondiscrimination rules. We want to, with what is called network neutrality or net neutrality, restore the nondiscrimination rules and the basic freedom under which the Internet developed in the first instance. That has been our effort. That is what the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is attempting to do. It is to begin tomorrow with a notice of proposed rulemaking. It doesn't mean he is saying, Here is exactly what we are going to do; it is saying, Let's propose a rulemaking and that rulemaking process will allow everybody to weigh in, to make comments, to be involved with the question of exactly what kind of a rule they may or may not write.

I think what the Federal Communications Commission is doing tomorrow is exactly the right thing. I know there are some who are pushing back. In fact, there are some who have said, We want to set up a toll booth. There are some CEOs of some large companies who have suggested, You know what. Those wires belong to us. We want to be able to have some toll booths and so on.

I don't believe they should be able to set up any impediments. By that I am not suggesting they don't have a right to have security for their networks; they certainly do. I am not suggesting they don't have a right to do certain kinds of inspections to make sure that the kinds of things that are prohibited--child pornography and others--are stopped on the Internet. But what I am saying is the architecture under which the Internet itself was created is an architecture all of us should aspire to continue, and that is nondiscrimination rules and transparency. This is very simple. So tomorrow there will be a vote at the FCC. I would say to the chairman of the FCC and to all of the Commissioners that you are doing the right thing by proceeding to make certain that the future of the Internet is open and has free access with nondiscrimination rules and transparency.

Here are a couple of letters I wish to have printed in the Record, if I might ask unanimous consent. One is a letter to Chairman Genachowski and this letter is dated October 19th:

We write to express our support for your announcement that

the FCC will begin a process to adopt rules to preserve an

open

Internet. We believe a process that results in common sense

baseline rules is critical to ensuring that the Internet

remains a key engine of economic growth, innovation, and

global competitiveness.

Let me not read it all, but let me read the final paragraph of this letter:

America's leadership in the technology space has been due,

in large part, to an open Internet. We applaud your

leadership in initiating a process to develop rules that

ensure the qualities that have made the Internet so

successful are protected.

That is a letter from a large group of people who run Internet companies and applications, from Craigslist, EchoStar, Google, Mozilla, Skype, Amazon, Expedia, Netflix, Sony Electronics, XO Communications, Facebook, eBay, and so many others; Twitter, and Meetup, so many different folks who know of what they are speaking. I support this letter and commend it to the Chairman of the FCC. Again, I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, this is a letter from the largest venture capital funds in the country that have made substantial investments in these companies that have helped the Internet grow;

Dear Chairman Genachowski: We write to express our support

for the Commission's ongoing efforts to adopt rules to

safeguard the open Internet. As business investors in

technology companies, we have first-hand experience with the

importance of guaranteeing an open market for new

applications for services on the Internet. Clear rules to

protect and promote innovation at the edges of the Internet

will reinforce the core principles that led to its

extraordinary social and economic benefits. Open markets for

Internet content will drive investment, entrepreneurship and

innovation. For these reasons, Net Neutrality policy is pro-

investment, pro-competition, and pro-consumer.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this letter from the venture capital firms that know a lot about the Internet.

Mr. President, finally, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from the folks who created the Internet. The list is headed by Vinton Cerf, who is often called the ``father of the Internet.'' I know Vint Cerf. He is an extraordinary man. Others signing this letter include Stephen Crocker, David Reed, Lauren Weinstein, and Daniel Lynch: these are all Internet pioneers. They were there at the beginning. They created this unbelievable engine of opportunity for the American people. They write a similar letter saying:

As individuals who have worked on the Internet and it

predecessors continuously beginning in the late 1960s, we are

very concerned that access to the Internet be both open and

robust. We are very pleased by your recent proposal to

initiate a proceeding for the consideration of safeguards to

that end.

This is a letter to Chairman Genachowski from the folks I mentioned. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this letter.

Mr. President, let me finally say this: I understand this issue has been controversial. I and Senator Snowe have worked on this issue for a long while. The only time it has been voted on in the Congress was an attempt by us to add an amendment in a Commerce Committee markup. This was about 2\1/2\ years ago. We had an 11-to-11 tie. Why was there a tie vote? It is a controversial issue, although it should not be.

The basic principle of freedom on the Internet, open architecture on the Internet, the openness with which this Internet was created ought to persuade everyone to say: Yes, let's restore the conditions under which the Internet has always operated, up until recently; that is, nondiscrimination and transparency.

There are some interests in this country, I understand, some economic interests that say: No, we don't want that. We want some opportunity to perhaps go a different direction. We had one CEO in this country say: You know what. I want some of these companies on the Internet to pay me for the right to move on my lines. Once that starts, once we go down that road with those who have the muscle or the strength to decide who is going to cross and who is not, who can get by their toll booth and who cannot, then I am telling you there are Larrys and Sergeys in a dorm room out there someplace or a woman in a kitchen with a small business that is not going to succeed. And that innovation, that new company, that new business for this country, the expansion of the Internet and opportunity that comes with it will not exist. Why? Because we failed to continue the open architecture and the basic freedoms on which the Internet was created and on which we still ought to govern the future of the Internet.

What Julius Genachowski, the new chairman, is doing tomorrow at the FCC is exactly the right thing. He is not mandating some specific menu. He is beginning a rulemaking process which, at the end, in my judgment, will result in the restoration of two basic principles: nondiscrimination on the Internet and transparency. Is there anyone who believes those principles are not fair, are not reasonable? I don't think so.

There has been a flurry of protests, an unbelievable dust created by a lot of noise, a lot of crowd noise around this issue. I hope perhaps the chairman and those on the Commission who believe we ought to move in this direction understand there is very substantial support for what they are trying to do. That support exists in a letter I am sending today with some of my colleagues to say that support is here. Work that Senator Snowe and I have done on this issue will be reflected as well in a message tomorrow.

I just want the Chairman to know: Keep going. You are doing the right thing. Don't worry about some of the dust that is out there. Do the public business, do the right thing, and this country will be best served.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, in recent weeks, and especially in more recent days, we have had a lot of discussions on the floor of the Senate by Members about the Federal budget deficit and about fiscal policy. It is a serious issue in my judgment, one to which we have to pay a lot of attention. But some of the discussion on the floor of the Senate has been wrapped in partisan wrapping. The suggestion is the fingers are all pointing to the new President--new because he has been in office only 10 months. Somehow this very deep fiscal policy hole, these very large and growing Federal budget deficits, should be laid at his feet.

The fact is, in my judgment, there is plenty of responsibility to go around on all parts. I am going to talk a little about that. This administration knows it. They have some responsibility. This Congress certainly has major responsibility. The past administration has significant responsibility.

The American people are a lot less interested in who wants to own up to that responsibility than they are about who is going to try to do something to fix our deficit problems. We cannot have deficits that are growing far out into the future. We cannot continue to deliver a level of government the American people are unable or unwilling to pay for without very serious consequences to the American way of life. I want to talk just a bit about that.

First and foremost, the deficits are growing and have been very serious. It is not unusual that in the middle of the deepest recession since the Great Depression we would have growing Federal budget deficits. Why? Because more people are unemployed, out of work. More people need the kind of social services and the stabilizing payments that we do. When people are in trouble and we are in a recession, that increases the spending.

It is also the case that the amount of revenue we expected this year is down about $400 billion because people are making less money, corporations are making less money, less is coming in in tax revenue. So it is not unusual, in the middle of the most significant economic trouble since the 1930s that we have higher spending, less revenue, and therefore deficits that are ratcheting up.

Deficits just by themselves would not necessarily be something that we would object to if the deficits purchase something of great value that was necessary at this moment. Ask this question and I expect the answer is self-evident. What if someone said: You need to spend $1 trillion that you do not have, $1 trillion of deficits right now, but if you do that, if you spend that $1 trillion, you will cure cancer. Do you think anyone would say: No, that is not a smart thing to do. Of course we would do that, because it would promote dramatic dividends for a long time.

But regrettably that is not what this deficit is about. This is not about having done something of significant merit. This is largely a structural deficit in which we have an expenditure base that is growing, and a revenue base that has not kept up, and now it has been aggravated, especially in a very deep recession. When I see the folks on the other side of this aisle come to the Senate to talk about generational theft, and to point fingers at the administration, let me be quick to point out, there is a long history to how we got to where we are, a very long history that does not start at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in January of this year. Let me revisit a little bit of that history, if I might. I am not doing it to suggest that one side is all right and the other side is all wrong. I am doing it because there are people who come to the floor of the Senate seeming to act as if they were exploring the surface of Mars while all of this was going on. In fact, they were not. Many of them were here in this Chamber.

When President Clinton left office in the year 2000, we had a $236 billion budget surplus. That was called the ``unified surplus.'' The actual ``on-budget surplus'' which does not count

the Social Security revenues--and I do not think you should count Social Security revenues--was $86 billion. So when President Clinton left office that year, for the first time in decades we had a real budget surplus, and the expectation was that the on-budget surplus was going to grow to more than $3 trillion in the coming 10 years. That was the expectation. And as all of us know, President Bush came to town. And George W. Bush said: My first priority is to do very large tax cuts for the American people.

I stood here on the floor of this Senate and said: You know what. Let's be a little conservative about this. What if something should happen and we do not have these surpluses? These are only estimates. They are not in our hands. They are only estimates. Why don't we be a bit careful?

The President said: No, we are not going to do that. And most of my colleagues--by the way, the majority of my colleagues--said: No, we are not going to do that. We are going to enact a piece of legislation that will substantially cut taxes, the majority of which went to upper income people in this country.

The benefits to the upper income people in this country--somewhere around 5 percent of the taxpayers--will total almost $1 trillion over the 10 years. The households in the top 1 percent, with incomes over $450,000 in 2008, will on average get a $489,000 tax break over ten years. Think of that. You say: Those of you who are fortunate to earn nearly half a million dollars in this 10-year period, we are going to give you close to $500,000, half a million dollars in tax breaks.

Should that have been a priority? I don't think so. I did not support that. But it was for the President and the majority of the Congress. So the Congress cut the revenue very substantially to benefit the highest income Americans. Then what happened? Well, what happened was we discovered very quickly we were in a recession. In 2001, when President George W. Bush took over, at the end of March, we discovered we had a struggling economy. Then on 9/11 of that year we were attacked by terrorists, and very quickly we were in a war in Afghanistan, and soon thereafter in a war in Iraq.

The President said: Despite the fact that we now are in recession, and had a terrorist attack, and two wars, we are not going to pay for the cost of these wars. We are going to send emergency supplemental requests that are not paid for, and we expect you to support our soldiers in the field.

So nearly $1 trillion was spent on the two wars in the last 9 years. And not a penny of it was paid for. Right onto the debt. Then in the year 2008, our economy fell off a cliff in October. And not surprisingly, having built up a substantial amount of deficits over this period of time fighting two wars, having had a recession, without paying for any of it, having built up these unbelievable deficits, when we fell off the cliff last October into a very significant recession, very deep hole, the Federal budget deficit skyrocketed.

Let me put up a chart of Federal budget deficits. I do this because we are on an unsustainable path. The President knows that. In fact, today the Wall Street Journal talks about the President's plan to tackle the Federal budget deficit. The President understands and I understand, in the middle of a deep recession, as we have got our foot on the accelerator to try to get this economy moving again, you cannot decide to take a lot of money out of the economy. So you could not at this moment decide: You know what. We are just going to collapse all of this red ink immediately. It would be devastating and throw this country into a deep economic tailspin. I understand that.

But here is what we face. We face growing deficits fighting wars. When the President took over, had he done nothing in fiscal year 2009, we would have had a budget deficit, it is estimated, of about $1.3 trillion.

Last fall it was the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, $700 billion. Then when he took over, this President wanted an economic recovery fund. I supported that because I believed it was better to pump some money into the economy rather than risk the economy going into a much deeper economic hole.

But all of that, in my judgment, has put us on an unsustainable path. You see, out in 10 years, this is not sustainable. The President knows that. I have talked to the President personally about it. As I indicated, a story today talks about the President's determination, as the economy strengthens in the coming months, next year to turn to this issue and deal with it and solve it. We do not have a choice.

But what brings me to the floor is this discussion by some of our colleagues to say: Aha. Now we have got these big budget deficits. That belongs to the person in the White House. That is President Obama's fiscal policy. It is not. It just is not. This has a long history. It started when this country fought a war without paying for a penny of it, while at the same time enacting massive tax breaks primarily for the richest Americans.

By the way, it is the first time, I believe, in the history of this country that that has happened. And then steering this country into a circumstance where the previous administration hired regulators who were content to be willfully blind and say: You know what. I would like a job. I would like a salary. But count on me to be willfully blind. I will not regulate a thing.

As a result, we had unbelievable things happening in this country. Greed. Unbelievable things. I have given speech after speech about what happened with the subprime mortgage scandal, the Wall Street credit default swaps, CDOs, you name it.

The result was this economy was taken right into the ditch by a bunch of shysters who were making a lot of money. A lot of them left their firms with a lot of money and stuck this country with a big bill, and now we see today they are the ones getting the big bonuses.

By the way, the investment banks that are supposed to be lending money are not lending money. They are trading in securities, making money for themselves. Meanwhile, we have got a lot of small and medium businesses out there that are in desperate need of credit. It still has not all stopped. But the point is, to suggest somehow that this has all happened on the watch of a new President in his first 10 months is ridiculous. We all have a stake in this, and we all have responsibility for it. We are all going to have to start working on it together.

This morning in a meeting I quoted Ogden Nash, who had a little four- line poem about a guy who drinks and his wife who nagged him about it: She scolds because he drinks, she thinks. He drinks because she scolds, he thinks. Neither will admit what is really true, he is a drunk and she is a shrew.

Responsibility on both sides. Responsibility on both sides here for fiscal policy. We all have a stake in this. We all have a responsibility. The question is not having people come to the floor and point fingers at a new President who has been in office for just 10 months. The question is, who is going to come to the floor of the Senate and decide together--together--to try to pull this economy up and out of this desperate condition?

I think we are finally starting to see some improvement here. I understand that we do need to steer toward a fiscal policy that reconciles our revenues and expenditures. Yes, to do that we are going to have to cut some spending. We are. I understand that. I am prepared to do that. However, I do not think we have to do it right this moment while we are still trying to crawl out of an economic hole. But we need to do that.

We also need some additional revenue. I would say to some of my friends here in the Senate who continue to vote against commonsense proposals to get the revenue we need: Help us. When we see U.S. companies that want all the benefits America has to offer them so they can run their income through the Cayman Islands and avoid paying taxes to this government, help us recover those funds.

I have shown the photograph on the floor of the Senate about the Ugland House. I am guessing I have shown it at least a dozen times. When I first showed the picture of this white house in the Grand Cayman Islands on Church Street, a four-story little house, I said it is home to 12,748 corporations. Oh, they are not all there. It is just a lawyer who created a legal address for them at the Ugland House so they can avoid paying taxes.

When I first talked about that, it was 12,748 corporations. I am told now there are 18,857 entities that call that white stucco house in the Grand Cayman Islands home. Many of these companies have set up mailboxes in a tax haven country to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

What about a bank such as Wachovia Bank that buys a sewer system in Germany from a German city? Is it because a bank in America should own a sewer system that they could pick up and bring back home? It is a complex sale-leaseback transaction in which an American bank buys a German city's sewer system, leases it back, and then they get to depreciate it on their American income taxes and save a couple of hundred million dollars in U.S. income taxes. The Wachovia Bank did that.

I have spoken of other corporations that have done exactly the same thing. We are going to have to cut spending, but we are going to have to increase some revenue. How about some help from all of our colleagues who say that sort of thing should stop. If you want everything that America has to offer you, how about paying your fair share of taxes? Most people do. They do not have a choice. They get a W-2, a W-4 form, get a wage, work hard and are exhausted at the end of the day. They have got a job. By the way, in April of each year, they understand they owe something. Yes, to build roads, to build schools, provide for defense, to make sure there are police on the beat, firefighters spending the night in a fire house. They owe something because the cost of government requires all of us to pay something. But some are paying nothing and some of them are the largest enterprises in the country, finding ways to slip through the cracks.

So we need to do a lot of things to fix these Federal budget deficits, a lot of things. It is going to require some courage and we need to start relatively soon.

I wanted to quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt in one of his fireside chats, because there is such a description sometimes of selfishness in our country today, only by some, not the majority. But here is what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said about our country during war:

He said:

Not all of us can have the privilege of fighting our

enemies in distant parts of the world. Not all of us can have

the privilege of working in a munitions factory or a ship

yard, or on the farms or in the oil fields or mines,

producing weapons or raw materials that are needed by our

armed forces. But there is one front and one battle where

everyone in the United States--every man, woman, and child--

is in action. . . . That front is here at home, in our daily

lives, and in our daily tasks. Here at home everyone will

have the privilege of making whatever self-denial is

necessary, not only to supply our fighting men [or women],

but to keep the economic structure of our country fortified

and secure . . .

He is talking about common purpose, the need for our country to come together, to work together. Our history is a long history of supporting the men and women who wear a military uniform. When the Civil War erupted, Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861 to try to raise money for soldiers. The War Revenue Act of 1899 raised funds to pay for the Spanish-American War. The entry into World War I increased the need for revenue, and Congress responded by raising the funds for that war. Even before the United States entered the Second World War, defense spending and the need for money to support the allies led to passage of two tax laws in 1940. In the Vietnam war, there was a surcharge to help pay for it.

I don't come suggesting there is a great appetite to raise revenues. I understand that. I am saying those who come and talk about fiscal policy being a very serious problem are absolutely right. It is one of the most significant problems we face. We are on an unsustainable course. The President knows that. So does the Congress. The President has told me, as he said today in the Wall Street Journal, that he takes this seriously, and it will be at the top of his agenda as we turn this calendar year. I take him at his word. I believe he means that and knows that because we have talked about it. We are going to need help to try to fix this fiscal policy. We cannot continue to see increasing deficits far out into the future. It will weaken the country. Ultimately, it will cause a run on the dollar, with unbelievable consequences for the economy.

This is not rocket science. We understand the consequences of these issues. You go to war and you provide tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens? I don't think so. That doesn't make any sense. Ultimately, you will pay for that with consequences, and we have begun to see it. What I want for our country is to address these issues.

A couple issues that are significant are Social Security and Medicare. We can deal with those issues. We can deal with success. Why does Social Security and Medicare cost us more? It is called success. People are living longer and better lives so it costs us more in Social Security and Medicare. But a country that can't handle success is a country that can't handle difficult problems, let alone the easy ones. I believe we can do that. I believe we can address the big issues of Social Security and Medicare in a thoughtful way. Then we can also decide that budget deficits such as these are unsustainable and have to be dealt with. This is the President's priority. It is our priority. It ought to be a Republican priority and a Democratic priority. Instead of pointing fingers at each other, let's decide to link arms and see if we can find a way to bring fiscal policy under some control.

First and foremost, let's lift the economy out of this hole. I believe we are beginning to see progress there. This was not some natural disaster. This was not a hurricane or tornado or flood that visited America. This was a very serious problem at a time in which regulators did not regulate. They decided not to watch. This country was stolen blind by a bunch of folks who made a lot of money doing it. Now we have to begin to repair and pick up the pieces. That requires financial reform in order to restore confidence in the economy going forward. It also requires, in this Chamber, a fiscal policy that relates to fiscal discipline, to say: We understand we have to deal with spending, and there are some areas where spending is out of control. We have to deal with revenues. There are some areas where additional revenues are needed and some areas where most of the American people pay up while others get by time after time, deciding to have all the benefits America is willing to offer but to pay none of the requirements to be an American citizen. Part of those requirements is for that which we do together to build a great country.

We had a discussion with Warren Buffett some while ago. I have known Warren Buffett for a long while. He is a very wealthy man. I have great admiration for him. He is the first or second most richest man in the world. He has no pretenses at all. He doesn't look like it. One of the most interesting things he did was take a survey in his office with 40 employees. Voluntarily, his employees described for him what they paid in income taxes and payroll taxes. The combined tax burden of all the employees in the office showed he actually paid the lowest percentage. The world's richest man paid the lowest percentage. His income all came from capital gains, which pays the lowest rate of 15 percent. I believe he said his receptionist pays a higher rate than he does. He said to us: That is wrong. You all ought to fix it.

Good for him. He is a role model in many ways for being able to speak up on these issues. But one of the things he was asked was: What do you think will happen to the economy in the next 6 months? His response was interesting. He said: I don't have the foggiest idea. I don't know what is going to happen in the next 6 months. I don't know what is going to happen in the next 16 months. But I know what is going to happen 6 years from now. Within the next 6 years, you will have an America that is growing and vibrant and healthy, expanding jobs, lifting the middle class. Why do I know that? Because that is what America does. It has always done that. It has created incentives for the hard-working nature of the American people.

Yes, we go through difficult times and troughs and trouble, but this country always picks itself up. I am convinced, while I don't know what is going to go on 6 months from now, I am absolutely convinced that 6 years from now this country will be right back on track and doing just fine, probably well before that.

I have his same faith in the future. I am convinced there isn't anything we can't do. In terms of inventing, we don't have to invent something to find a way to fix what I have described, a fiscal policy that needs fixing. We can do that. That only requires common sense.

The next time one of my colleagues comes out and says: We are in a deep economic hole, and we have all these deficit issues, we would like to point to a President who has been in office less than 10 months as the root cause of the problem, the fact is, this President knows there is a fiscal policy problem. But this problem has been building for a long time. The bubbling up of this fiscal policy dilemma has been with us a long time, and some of the same people who come to point their fingers have a significant hand in creating it.

I will talk about Afghanistan in the next day or two. But those who come to the floor and say: Let's send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, set aside for a moment the merits of that. I am not talking about the merits. But let me say, we are told that sending 1,000 troops abroad for a year costs $1 billion. So the proposition is, if you are coming to say that, you are saying: Let's spend another $40 billion in the coming year. I ask those who do that to tell us how we will spend the $40 billion and how they propose we raise the funding. Because I think it is time, long past time that we decide to fund some of these things. Sending soldiers into the winds of war and deciding we are going to put whatever it costs on top of the deficit is hardly a courageous act.

This country deserves better from all of us, from me, from the President, from both sides in this Congress. All of us have to work together to put this back on track. I am convinced we will. I am convinced we will, in part, with the leadership of this President and, in part, because there are a lot of people of good will in this Congress who understand that this is a serious problem and we need to fix it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to announce that the Committee on Indian Affairs will meet on Thursday, October 22, 2009, at 2:15 p.m. in room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to conduct a business meeting pending committee issues, to be followed immediately by an oversight hearing on Indian Energy and Energy Efficiency.

Those wishing additional information may contact the Indian Affairs Committee at 202-224-2251.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that at 2:15 p.m. today, all postcloture time be yielded back and the Senate then proceed to vote on adoption of the conference report to accompany H.R. 3183, the Energy and Water Appropriations Act; further, that no points of order be in order.

Mr. President, we will vote in about 4 minutes. I want to note that yesterday's cloture vote had 79 votes in favor of cloture. Clearly, there is strong support for this energy and water conference report. It provides an investment in water and energy projects across the country. It is fiscally responsible. It is slightly less than 1 percent above last year's expenditure.

What I wanted to say, however, is we that had to invoke cloture, which took us two days. Even though we had a cloture vote yesterday clearly demonstrating very substantial support for the bill, we have now sat at parade rest for almost 30 hours because someone insisted on 30 hours postcloture despite the fact that we will have a strong vote for this conference report.

The reason for the insistence on 30 hours occurred was because the conference report did not include one amendment that was accepted in the Senate offered by one of my colleagues. I supported that amendment by the way. We were not able to get that through the conference with the House. It urged greater transparency on reports from the Energy Department. I regret that is not in the conference report, but the House would not accept it. Because of that, we have now been sitting around for the better part of a week, 30 hours postcloture.

My point is that we have to get appropriations bills moving. Apparently, it does not mean anything to some people. If their amendment did not get in the conference report, they don't mind holding up the Senate for a part of a week. That doesn't mean much to some people.

I just wish we would have a little more cooperation. The very same people who said we ought to get our work done by passing appropriations bill and avoiding omnibus bills are the same ones who hold up the Senate. If we could get a little bit of cooperation, we could get these appropriations bills completed.

This is a good bill. It makes very significant and important investments all around the country in water infrastructure and energy projects. The fact is, it is less than 1 percent above last year's spending level. No one is going to take a look at this bill and suggest it overspends. It does not.

One of my colleagues talked about earmarks in the bill. The fact is, we can take out all the earmarks, and there are some in here. It is the case that Congress has a role to decide both through the water development authorizing bill and also in the appropriations conference report before us where it wants to invest its money in major water projects across the country. If the Congress decided not to do that, every single penny would go downtown to the agency, and some GS-14 would decide where to do that. All this talk about earmarks is not going to save a penny. The fact is, we have substantially cut back on earmarks and have made them transparent.

My point mainly is that we are going to vote in a minute. We could have voted on this already, but we had to file cloture, then wait 30 hours. It is reflective of what is happening in this Chamber. Regrettably, there is very little cooperation.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for 20 minutes.

Madam President, I know my colleague from South Dakota is waiting. I will try not to consume the entire 20 minutes. But let me first talk about deficit for a moment, since my colleague from Alabama described that.

I do not think there is anyone in here who takes a look at the fiscal policy we are on--and have been on for a long time--and feels very comfortable about it. It is not sustainable and we have to change it. But I do want to say this. It was not too long ago that this country went to war and, at the same time, cut taxes and did not pay for a penny of the war. In fact, even now we have people saying: Let's send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. I do not hear anybody suggesting we pay for that. What is that going to cost?

I will talk next week about my interest in what is happening in Afghanistan. I have been there. I have some real concerns about sending a lot of additional troops to Afghanistan and about our vital national interests. But let me say, whether it is fighting a war or deciding to send 40,000 more troops to another country, it costs money. Is everybody here willing to pay for it? Anybody willing to pay for it?

We have talked about this for years. We are in the middle of a war. We send men and women to the battlefield, and the fact is, not a penny of it has been paid for. In the previous administration, they insisted on tax cuts and pursuing a war strategy in Iraq and sending troops to Afghanistan and not paying for a penny of it. That also results in Federal budget deficits, and we have to resolve them.

The fact is, we cannot continue to describe a level of government the American people are unwilling or unable to pay for, and we have to get this fiscal policy under some control. Republicans

and Democrats together are going to have to reconcile this. We must do it.

Madam President, I came to the floor to talk about something else today. On the way to the Capitol this morning, I was thinking of this: a quote by Will Rogers. I heard on the radio again today that we have a couple things going on. No. 1, we have a whole lot of folks who have lost their home in the last quarter, with a record number of home foreclosures in our country--and then, in the same newscast, $140 billion in bonuses to be paid by the major firms on Wall Street. I am thinking maybe these are two different countries or at least two different economies. Here is what Will Rogers said many decades ago. He said:

The unemployed here ain't eating regular, but we'll get

around to them as soon as everybody else gets fixed up OK.

The unemployed ``ain't'' eating regular, but we will get around to them when everybody else gets fixed up.

Well, last year we watched some big shots steer this economy into the ditch. It caused an unbelievable financial wreck. It has had an impact on everything in this country. The fact is, we need to reform the system that allowed that to happen. But--do you know what?--as to the story I heard this morning about $140 billion of expected bonuses to be paid by the top 23 firms on Wall Street, the fact is, less than a year later, after the economic collapse in this country, we see these stories:

The U.S. has lent, spent or guaranteed $11.6 trillion to

bolster banks and fight the longest recession in 70 years.

By the way, ``banks'' here mean the biggest financial institutions in the country.

The Wall Street Journal, August 31 of this year:

Wall Street is suiting up for a battle to protect one of it

richest fiefdoms, the $592 trillion over-the-counter

derivatives market. . . . Five U.S. commercial banks,

including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and

Bank of America Corp., are on track to earn more than $35

billion this year trading unregulated derivatives contracts.

This story is what we have been reading day after day.

Steven Pearlstein: ``The Dust Hasn't Settled on Wall Street, but History's Already Repeating Itself.''

The Wall Street herd is at it again. Even as the cleanup

crew is carting away the debris left by the last financial

crisis, the investment banks, hedge funds and exchanges are

busy working on the next one.

I will go through these in a hurry because there is a narrative here that is pretty easy to see.

The New York Times: ``A Year Later, Little Change on Wall St.''

One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the

surprise is not how much has changed in the financial

industry, but how little.

. . . banks still sell and trade unregulated derivatives,

despite their role in last fall's chaos.

The Washington Post, September 15: ``The Wall Street Casino, Back in Business.''

Wall Street's actual role is more like that of a giant

casino where the gamblers are rewarded for taking outrageous,

unconscionable risks with other people's money. If the bets

pay off, the gamblers win. If the long-shot bets turn out to

have been foolish, we're the ones who lose.

The Washington Post, September 8: ``A year after Lehman, Wall Street's Acting Like Wall Street Again.''

[Wall Street] still operates on the principle of taking

care of itself first, really big and [most] important

customers second, everyone else last.

The Wall Street Journal, August 22: ``Bankers Play Dress Up With Old Deals.''

Irresponsible securitization helped bring the financial

system to its knees. Yet, as banks start to heal, little

seems to have changed. Wall Street has quickly fallen back on

old habits.

The Washington Post, September 11: ``Wall Street's Mania for Short- Term Results Hurts Economy.''

It's been a year since the onset of a financial crisis that

wiped out $15 trillion of wealth from the balance sheet of

American households, and more than two years since serious

cracks in the financial system became apparent. Yet while the

system has been stabilized and the worst of the crisis has

passed, little has been done to keep another meltdown from

happening.

The Los Angeles Times: ``The Financial Meltdown: Crisis has not altered Wall Street.''

Bellwether firms led by Goldman Sachs Group are churning

out mouth-watering profits. Risk-taking and aggressive

securities trading are mounting a comeback. And

compensation--the lifeblood of Wall Street--is pushing back

toward pre-crisis levels.

The Wall Street Journal, October 14: ``Wall Street On Track To Award Record Pay.'' That was yesterday.

Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay

their employees about $140 billion this year--a record high.

. . .

Total compensation and benefits at . . . firms analyzed by

the Journal are on track to increase 20% from last year's

$117 billion--and to top 2007's $130 billion payout.

Total compensation and benefits at 23 major Wall Street firms--this, from the Wall Street Journal--you can see what has happened--2009--a record in the last 3 years. Nothing has changed.

CNN news:

. . . there really is . . . this disconnect still between

what's happening on Wall Street . . . and what's happening

with the every day Joe. We talked about record home

foreclosures once again, as we said these problems with

employment, worries about whether benefits, jobless benefits

are going to continue.

On the flip side, . . . major banks and security firms are

on pace to pay employees $140 billion this year . . . a

record high.

And so it is. It was said once that investment banks are to productive enterprise like mud wrestling is to the performing arts. Well, I don't know, I guess that was tongue in cheek. We need investment banking in this country. It is essential for the creation of capital. It can, working properly, assist this country, and has assisted this country in lifting our economic opportunities.

But we have all too often, in recent years, seen the creation of exotic financial instruments that have almost nothing to do with creating wealth, except for those who trade them and those who created them. That is what steered this country into the ditch. CDOs, credit default swaps, unregulated derivatives, dark money--a lot of people got wealthy trading it. The fact is, it created an unbelievable bubble of risk that began to wind this economy down and finally steered this economy into a serious wreck last fall. The question is, What do we do about that? Well, when you hear on the same newscasts that we reached a record number of home foreclosures and people are still losing their jobs, and then, on the other hand, we see the very same interests that have been at the trough of the Federal Reserve Board for at least $8 trillion, at risk by the taxpayer, in loans and commitments to some of the biggest financial enterprises in the country and then you see $140 billion in compensation and bonuses from those firms? There is something disconnected here.

I want our financial system to work. I am not someone who comes to the floor of the Senate who says investment banks are worthless. That is not my point. We need investment banking. But we also need to understand we cannot take FDIC insured banks, those that are insured by the Federal Government, and decide it is OK if you trade on your own proprietary accounts on risky enterprises such as derivatives. That is all right. That is not all right. They may just as well put a keno pit or a craps table right in the middle of the bank lobby. Just call it what it is. It is simply flatout gambling with the taxpayers' money.

As we end this issue of financial reform, there are a lot of ideas around. What do you do to make sure this does not happen again? I wish to make this point: There is a doctrine called too big to fail. We have seen it in practice in the last year: interests that are too big, banks, investment banks especially, that are too big to fail, and so it is no-fault capitalism. Whatever risks they have taken, whatever losses they have had, the taxpayer picks that up to the tune of $11 trillion in exposure from Federal programs.

Well--do you know what?--when the dust is settled, and whatever is done on financial reform, if we do not address this issue of too big to fail, shame on us. In fact, the very firms that are declared too big to fail are now getting bigger, supported by the Federal government, and that is flat wrong.

Let me quote Professor Joseph Stiglitz:

. . . our bail-outs run the risk of transferring large

amounts of money . . . to those

banks that did the worst job in risk management. . . . In

effect, the government is tilting the playing field--towards

the losers. . . .

Paul Volcker says:

I do not think it reasonable that public money--taxpayer

money--be indirectly available to support risk-prone capital

market activities simply because they are housed within a

commercial banking organization.

The question at the end of the day is, Are we going to

address these things, such as too big to fail and get rid of

no-fault capitalism and see if we cannot push investment

banking to that which it used to be? I hope so. But on today,

a day in which we hear of record home foreclosures and $140

billion in bonuses and compensation on Wall Street, I just

say there is some huge disconnection in this economy of ours

and it is something we ought to care about and something we

ought to do something about.

This country works best when we lift the country, when we expand the middle class, when we have jobs available to people who want to work. There is no social program in this country as important as a good job that pays well. That is what makes everything else possible.

But this question of financial healing--when, first, the healing occurs to those who caused the problem, and the healing occurs in record compensation, $140 billion, at a time when other people are struggling to pay their grocery bills, struggling to buy the medicine they need, struggling to make their house payment because they have lost their job, there is something missing in this country.

My hope is, when I see all these stories about Wall Street--the same old Wall Street, nothing has changed, going right back to the same old risk, right back to the same old risk because they know, they have learned in the last year, whatever they lose, the American people will pick up the tab--this Congress had better say to them: No more, no longer, never again. Too big to fail is a doctrine that cannot continue to live at the Federal Reserve Board or in this government. It is time those at the top at the biggest institutions who take the biggest risks, when they lose--it is time they lose, not the American people.

So we are headed toward financial reform. When that happens, I will be on the floor of the Senate talking about the too-big-to-fail doctrine and how we are going to end it, and quickly.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.