Economic Crisis In America

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. I want to thank Congressman King very much for coming to the floor because we share a concern that goes beyond party. This is so serious for our country, it's serious for our generation, it's serious for the next generation.

If we look at the abuses of the financial system over the last 30 years, let's say, every time something bad happened, the government bailed them out. And then the next crisis was worse than the one before it. I came here during the 1980s. I saw what happened, and I saw a huge debt put on the American people, $140 billion at that point. And rather than strengthening the laws to prevent moral hazard, we loosen them. And then we got a worse crisis.

If you look back to Enron, if you look back to everything that happened during the 1990s, rather than repairing it, what we did was we gave them more latitude--it's inexplicable what occurred--and the moral hazard got greater. And now with this, this is so much larger than the last two crises, and it's a real question as to whether the so-called ``reform'' coming out of the Congress will actually work.

I would like to place in the Record an interview with Professor William Black, an attorney who was recently on television, that I think is very, very probing about the enormous potential here for financial fraud, control fraud, the lack of investigators inside the FBI, and as Congresswoman Speier mentioned, inside of the SEC. And then also an interview with Dr. Simon Johnson of MIT and Mr. James Kwak about what is actually happening in this crisis and how we are not addressing it fully in the reform bills proceeding through this Congress.

So I just appreciate you giving me the opportunity to say that and to say we are in common cause here. I appreciate your comments very much. I am very worried about where we're headed as a country. I see community banks being destroyed in my region. I see these big money center institutions that have been prone to moral hazard having greater and greater authority in our country. And the amount of money they give to political campaigns, and with the recent decision by the Supreme Court to allow endless funding by any group in our political campaigns. Any one of them could wipe us out.

That's not what this country was set up for. We were set up for opportunity. We were set up for the individual to matter, for our communities to matter, for the equity that our people, when they create it in their homes, that they just don't lose it because these people think of some scheme to raid them. And yet that's what we're facing now.

So we have an enormous obligation to educate the American people and learn from them and hear their best advice on how we can dig ourselves out of this hole.

I thank you for allowing me a few moments of your time.

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