A Tale Of Two Countries

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, the announcement today that JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in our country, turned a $3.6 billion profit in the most recent quarter brings to mind Charles Dickens' 19th-century English masterpiece, ``A Tale of Two Cities,'' except this is the United States, and it's the 21st century, and it's a tale not of two cities but of two countries.

There is one country where giant banks are making so much money that they are setting aside enough to pay each worker in their investment banking divisions $353,834. That country is Wall Street. The other country is where I come from--Toledo, Ohio--and places like it across the Nation where the majority of the American people live. Toledo, Ohio, where the median household annual income is not even one-tenth of that amount--it's $35,216. It's not even one-tenth as much as JPMorgan Chase is setting aside for bonuses for its investment banking employees.

In one country, banks that are too big to fail privatize their profits. They're taking more, but they socialize their losses, putting their trillion-dollar mistakes on the backs of the American taxpayers. In the other country, which I represent, families that are too small to matter lose their jobs to globalization, and they lose their homes to foreclosure. These same banks finance the outsourcing of their jobs, and they restrict credit to Main Street businesses across our country.

In one country, financial commentators cheer as the Dow Jones Industrial Average goes over 10,000. In the other country, where I live, the unemployment rate is rising, exceeding 13 percent. While housing values fall more than 10 percent in a single year and foreclosures are going up 94 percent, JPMorgan Chase is the top forecloser in the Ninth Congressional District of Ohio, and they don't even show up for meetings with the people being affected. There is something wrong with this picture. There is something really wrong with our country, and there is something really wrong with our economy.

Even one of the Wall Street analysts picked it up today in his comments to the Associated Press, saying, ``Wall Street is picking up quite smartly, while Main Street continues to suffer.''

How can that be? How can the stock market be so oblivious to the pain that American families are feeling? Granted, a rising stock market might help 401(k)s and pension plans and individual portfolios, but not everybody is celebrating. In fact, the majority isn't. Furthermore, how can this stock market rally last when national unemployment is close to 10 percent and, in some regions, far above that? How can the bullish sentiment override the reality in the other America where unemployment and foreclosures have turned the American dream into a nightmare for so many people--for so many millions and millions and millions of our fellow citizens?

Perhaps congratulations are in order to JPMorgan on its quarterly report. I would only ask Chase and the other banks to remember who came to their rescue, because the people who bailed them out, the people in the other America--beyond Wall Street, those people--are still really hurting. The communities that they live in are really hurting. Our food banks are up 53 percent in requests, and donations are down 13 percent. This economic depression is widening across this country, but there are some folks in that other country who don't seem to care at all.

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