Rebuilding The Economy

Floor Speech

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Thank you.

Madam Speaker, it is a great honor to be here with the other freshmen. We are new to this system, but we are not new to the problems in our districts or in our Nation. We often go home on weekends to spend time in our districts. And what I have found in the district that I represent and the East Bay of California is a lot of pain, a lot of people that are suffering, but are filled with hope with the possibility that things are indeed turning around.

I met a carpenter 2 weekends ago. He is a member of the carpenters union, and he had been out of work for about 8 months. The housing industry had literally shut down, and he had been thrown aside. And he said to me, ``Why can't those bankers make loans to my company? Why can't they do that? They have been given hundreds of billions of dollars, and yet they cannot make a loan.'' One of the things that we have been working on here is to force those bankers to make loans, to use our tax money not for the great bonuses that they are giving themselves this month, but rather to use that tax money to put people to work with loans to this home construction company that this carpenter was once employed by.

Another person that I met in the City of Antioch about 8 months ago was protesting the fact that the loan modification program that had been put through was stalled once again by the bankers. We all know the statistics. A lot of talk, but very few loan modifications. This person had worked as a painter painting houses, had two jobs to support their family, and yet was unable to continue their mortgage when the Great Recession began.

A third person just this last weekend was a heavy equipment operator at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Caldecott Tunnel in Contra Costa County. The heavy equipment operator said, ``Thank God the stimulus is working for me.'' In that project alone, over a $300 million project, the State of California was unable to pay its share because of the downturn in the California economy. So it was the action of my colleagues here, the freshman class plus the other Democrats in this House that voted to pass the stimulus bill, and $197 million of direct stimulus money went into that project, and 6,000 men and women will be employed, and a major commuting backlog will cease.

It is working. The statistics we saw just a moment ago clearly show that with the new administration coming into place, with the stimulus money that was put in place last January, the first vote, supported unanimously by our caucus and opposed unanimously by the other side, that is working. The statistics are clear. We are seeing job declines slowing down, and we will soon see it turn around.

Tomorrow the President will be here speaking to all of us about what we need to do in the months ahead. We need that Jobs for Main Street bill that passed here in December. Get it out there, get it passed, get people to work. We also need to make sure that Wall Street is properly disciplined. If they are going to get those big fat bonuses using our tax money, then we ought to tax those bonuses and put that money back to work with small businesses.

We can do these things. And much has been done. We have seen the turnaround. We have seen the statistics showing that we are on the right track. We will continue that. And for all of us, we have a choice. We can do nothing, and people will be on welfare, people will get the unemployment checks, people will lose their insurance, and we will try to keep them going with COBRA support. Or we can do the jobs program, the stimulus programs, the Jobs for Main Street program. And in doing

that, we will put people to work. They will not be tax takers, they will become taxpayers.

I yield my time.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Well, the gentleman from Virginia couldn't be more correct. I'm a cattle rancher, so you're getting very close to home with the discussion about methane and cow power. It's a reality. It actually is happening in large parts of California. Keep in mind that methane is a greenhouse gas that's over 20 times more powerful that carbon dioxide, so you're getting a twofer here. You're getting an energy source. And methane actually is very similar in chemistry to natural gas, so it is a very, very important thing. It has all of the win-win that you just talked about and it takes care of a small environmental problem when you do this methane production.

So this is another example of the way in which this Congress last year in the American Recovery Act instituted public policies that are a win-win for America. These are long-term investments. More than a hundred, almost $200 million of that stimulus money goes into energy research. We're talking about jobs, researchers in laboratories and the university campuses that are figuring out how to do these things in an efficient and an effective way. In California, we have major research underway in laboratories at the universities that are figuring out how can you use algae to produce fuel. And it's actually happening. Some of that fuel is now being used in jet airplanes, and the Department of Defense is testing the use of that fuel, biofuels of all kinds.

The other thing that's happening here is the notion that energy is a fundamental national security issue. My colleagues, you've already talked about the enormous expense that the energy consumption is bringing to us and the risk that it puts us in when we get the energy from the most dangerous places in the world. Every step we take to conserve and every step we take to use alternate and renewable energy is a step that enhances our national security.

I want us all to keep in mind who was it that voted in the stimulus bill of last year, the American of Recovery Act, for these critical investments. It was our side, the Democratic side, that voted for it. And who voted against it, voted no? It was our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. There is a very clear dichotomy here on philosophy on how to deal with this. Yes, there is a deficit. More than half of that deficit actually occurred during the George W. Bush era in which this Congress was controlled by the other party. I'm being a bit partisan here, but these are the facts.

Now, what was left to us to clean up when President Obama came in? The greatest recession since the Great Depression. The statistics are clear. Look at the job losses, the way they accelerated during the Bush era. And look what happened when Obama and the stimulus package came into place. We saw a reversal of that. We're now building the American economy once again.

One final point, and this was brought up by our colleagues here, and that is the investment in education. This is a long-term investment. Before I took this job, I was a regent at the University of California, and I watched the enormous decline in support to that university. Forty thousand students are not at the State University and the University of California this year. Those are the people that will lead us in the future. They're not there. They will not be available to us. The stimulus package also put a lot of money into the education system and kept the schools open, kept the teachers working.

Thank you so very, very much. I yield my time.

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