The Way Forward

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I wish to begin by congratulating Senator Mikulski on her continued efforts in fighting for pay equality for women workers. This is a struggle that has gone on for decades. We are making some progress, but we have a long way to go and it is imperative that we pass the Ledbetter legislation.

Yesterday, as everybody in the world knows, Barack Obama was sworn in as the President of the United States. I can tell my colleagues that in my State of Vermont, and I expect all over this country and, in fact, in virtually every country in the world, there was great anticipation and great joy, not only because we have made history in our country by electing the first African American ever elected President, but also because the people of this country demand that we begin moving America in a very different direction than where we have been going for the last 8 years. Unfortunately, as President Obama assumes office, the Congress, the American people, and he are looking out at a set of the most serious problems that our country has faced since the Great Depression. Let me take a very few minutes to give a broad outline of some of those problems and some of the efforts I personally will be making in order to address these crises.

As a result of the outrageous greed and recklessness and dishonesty on the part of a few hundred or a few thousand speculators on Wall Street, our entire financial system is in danger of collapsing. That impacts not only the United States but, in fact, the financial markets all over the world. At this point, the American taxpayer--primarily the middle class--has already put into the TARP bailout some $700 billion, but in addition to that, the Fed has lent out trillions of dollars with virtually no transparency and certainly no accountability. This is a crisis we have to deal with in a number of ways. I will tell my colleagues as somebody who voted against the original bailout and who voted against the second bailout, we have to develop a mechanism that does more than pump hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out Wall Street. This is a difficult issue, it is a complicated issue, but it is an issue that we have to address.

Furthermore, in my view, we need an investigation to get at the root of the problem. I reject the idea, as some suggest, that this was a problem caused by everybody; all of us are guilty in causing this financial crisis. That is wrong. The fact is there are a relatively small number of people--by and large people who in the last 5 to 10 years have made hundreds of millions of dollars; in fact, in some cases have accrued billions of dollars of wealth for themselves, who have operated in utter recklessness and, in my suspicion, in illegal mannerisms in order to make these incredible profits and to bring our financial system to the edge of collapse. We need to know who these people are, how they did it, hold them accountable, and create legislation which makes sure that we never, ever again are placed in the position we are in today.

The truth of the matter is that while the financial crisis of the last few months has exacerbated the economic problems that we are facing as a Nation today, for many years, despite the assertions of the Bush administration, the middle class has been in a significant state of decline, poverty has been increasing, and millions of people have lost their health insurance and their pensions. What is happening today as a result of the financial crisis and the huge increase in unemployment is a situation where when people lose their jobs, they are losing their health insurance; when they are losing their income, they are losing their ability to maintain their homes and they are losing their homes; when they are losing their income, they are unable to take care of their parents, they are unable to send their kids to college, and the dreams many people have fought for their entire working lives are now disappearing. I can tell my colleagues that in the State of Vermont we have received many e-mails and communications from elderly people, elderly workers who have told me that they have spent their whole lives working so they would have a secure retirement, and now that retirement is disappearing with the decline of the stock market. We are in the midst of a grave crisis and we are going to need some bold thinking in order to get out of it.

Not only are we seeing a huge increase in unemployment, people losing their health insurance, poverty increasing, the reality is we continue to have--and we do not talk about this enough--by far the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major Nation on Earth. During my years in the House and my time in the Senate, I have heard some of my colleagues talk about family values. Well, let me say very clearly that having the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world is not a family value, it is a national disgrace. Every psychologist in the world will tell us that when kids grow up in poverty, when kids do not have early childhood education, when kids go to poor schools, there is a direct correlation between that reality and the fact that we have more people behind bars today, more people in jail than any country in the world, including China. How does that happen, that millions of Americans end up in jail more so than in an authoritarian country such as China? If one thinks it does not have a relationship to the high rate of childhood poverty in this country and the fact that we are not investing in our kids, I think you would be wrong.

Last year, we continued the process of seeing a growing gap between the very rich and everybody else. I know this is not an issue that many people in the Congress choose to talk about, but it is an issue that must be talked about, not only from a sense of morality but from a sense of basic economic well-being. In my view, it is not acceptable that the top one-tenth of 1 percent earn more income than the bottom 50 percent. It is not acceptable that the top 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The whole issue of greed is something that we as a Congress and as a Nation have to be talking about. Do people need billions and billions and billions of dollars in personal wealth when we have children in this city and all over this country who are living out in the streets and who are denied basic, decent quality childcare? Is that the kind of Nation that we are about?

Since 2000, since the year 2000, nearly 6 million Americans have slipped out of the middle class and into poverty, the median income for working age families has gone down by over $2,300, over 7 million Americans have lost their health insurance, more than 4 million decent paying manufacturing jobs have been lost, and over 4 million workers have lost their pensions. All of those figures will get worse because of the statistics we have seen in recent months because of the financial crisis. The dream of a college education is fading away for many working families in my State and all over this country as college costs go up while incomes go down. We are seeing a situation where hundreds of thousands of qualified students are unable to go to college because they simply don't have the money to do that, and many others are coming out deeply in debt and have to take jobs which they would rather not take in order to pay back their student loans. Meanwhile, in the last 8 years, despite the bailout of Wall Street, with ongoing tax breaks for the very wealthy, and with the war in Iraq, we now have a national debt of over $10.5 trillion.

Another issue this Congress has to deal with is to address the reality that the United States of America remains the only major country on Earth that does not provide health care to all of its people. Yet we end up spending substantially more per capita on health care than any other Nation. But 47 million Americans have no health insurance. Almost 20,000 Americans die every single year because they don't have access to decent primary health care--they can't find a doctor when they need it--and we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

With a new President, with a new Congress, the American people are asking whether finally we will have the courage to stand up to the lobbyists who are outside of this building every single day, who are walking the corridors; can we stand up to the insurance companies, can we stand up to the drug companies so that we finally--finally--will provide quality health care, low-cost prescription drugs to every man, woman, and child as a right of citizenship? Will we have the courage to do that? I certainly hope we will.

As we speak, we are currently involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have cost us not only the lives of thousands and thousands of wonderful young men and women, but they cost us over $10 billion every single month. These wars are also stretching the Army and our National Guard to the breaking point. My hope is that in the next several months we will be developing policy to bring our troops home from Iraq as soon as we possibly can. I hope very much that we will have not only a debate right here in Congress but a national conversation about how we deal with the very difficult issues of Afghanistan.

Despite the reality of global warming, our Nation still, despite decades of talk, has not yet broken our dependency on fossil fuel and foreign oil. In fact, every single year we are spending more than $500 billion bringing in oil from abroad. We have only begun--just begun--to make the advances we need to make in terms of energy efficiency and sustainable energy. As a member of both the Environmental Committee and the Energy Committee, it is my view that we have the potential to create millions of good-paying jobs as we transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. We can do that. We must do that.

As my colleagues well know, the major issue that this Congress is going to be dealing with in the next several weeks is an economic recovery program. I strongly support the basic outlines of that program. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of debate about the details within it and the hope that we can target that money in such a way as to create good-paying jobs as quickly as possible in the most cost-effective way imaginable. What I can tell my colleagues is that in my State--and I expect in the other 49 States in this country--our infrastructure is collapsing. We have roads in the State of Vermont which have huge problems. We have all kinds of bridges that are in need of repair in our small towns. We have water systems that are simply inadequate. We have wastewater plants that need to be rebuilt. All of these are very expensive propositions. So in the stimulus package, my hope is that we are going to put substantial sums of money into rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our water systems. I hope we begin to make the investment we need in public transportation--certainly rural public transportation in the State of Vermont--as one of many needs. If you are a worker in one part of the State and you want to go 50 miles to your job, in almost every case there is no public transportation to get you there. If you are a senior citizen and wish to go to the hospital or the grocery store, it is very hard to get there if you do not have a car. I suspect that is true all over rural America. In addition, our rail system is far behind, where Europe, Japan, and even China are now advancing forward. So I hope for and will support a major increase in funding to create a substantial number of new jobs as we rebuild our infrastructure.

In addition--I know President Obama has been very strong on this issue, and I agree with him--we need to invest heavily in energy efficiency. I can tell you that in the State of Vermont and, again, all over this country but especially in cold-weather States, you have older homes where energy is just going through the roof--literally going through the roof and the windows--because of poor insulation. We can create jobs making our homes, our offices, our schools more energy efficient.

We need to be extremely aggressive, as I mentioned a moment ago, in terms of public transportation.

Also, right now we are on the cusp of major breakthroughs in such renewable technologies as wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass. I suspect that in 20 years, people will see a very different energy system than we have right now. It will be a cleaner system. It will be a system not emitting greenhouse gases.

There is a lot of work that stands in front of us. There was an election in November where the people said: We want change. That is what that election was all about. Unless we are bold, unless we are prepared to take on the big money interests that have dominated legislation for the last many years, there will be a great deal of disappointment all over this country.

Now is the time. There is a lot of enthusiasm in the work President Obama has been doing since he has been elected. There is an enormous amount of hope and confidence in the air that we can move America in a new direction. I hope that with new national leadership, with strong grassroots participation, with a Congress prepared to stand up and take on the powerful special interests that have dominated us for so many years, we can fulfill the faith the American people have expressed in us in recent years and that, in fact, we can move America in a very different direction and become the country all of us know we can become.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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