The Reform Of Wall Street

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Thank you very much. I appreciate the gentleman yielding this evening and I thank you both for sponsoring this Special Order. Part of our responsibility is to restore trust in the most important financial institutions in our country--restore trust to the American people in those--and to change the laws in order to make sure that that trust in our capital markets and in our banking system is restored. We're a long way from doing that, and financial reform is a part of it. I hope that the bill improves as it moves through the Senate.

The chart that I brought to the floor tonight--and this is just one chart. I would like to put in the Record, CBS News Investigates Goldman Sachs' Revolving Door, with a full list of individuals just from that company. There are many other companies, but the kind of incredible power that they wield in this city.

If you just look at Goldman Sachs and then at people from Goldman Sachs who came to work for the government of the United States in the highest positions, you begin to question whether they were representing the public interest or their personal interest in many of the dealings that occurred on Wall Street.

For example, you have an individual during the last administration that worked for President Bush by the name of Joshua Bolten. He was the President's Chief of Staff during the time when the TARP was voted through this Congress in the bailout in the fall of 2008. He had been the director of OMB through most of the Bush administration. But what a lot of people don't know is that before that he had been the Executive Director of Legal Affairs for Goldman Sachs based in London. That is the bank's chief lobbyist to the European Union. So when you look at the collapse of institutions in Europe, whether it was Dresdner Bank in Germany or Societe Generale, which was a counterparty in the AIG insurance situation, those deals were brokered through London. And there he sat for the whole decade of the nineties, putting together the architecture that then collapsed in this decade.

But he's not alone. It's important that people understand this just didn't start in 2007 or 2008 or 2005. The pieces were put together starting in the 1980s, and then the foundation stones and all the regulatory changes were made that allowed this type of hyperinflation of the housing market and the pyramiding of equity to a point that it simply couldn't hold. These men were a part of that.

If you look at the former Secretary of Treasury in the past administration, before President Obama and during President Clinton, he had come from Goldman Sachs, Robert Rubin, and he was Secretary of the Treasury from 1995-1999, when so much of the deregulation was done. But they all go back to Goldman Sachs. That's the beehive. The bees come out, they go somewhere else, and then they come back. We have to begin to unpeel this and unwind and understand who these individuals are. We heard the name of Hank Paulson, who was Secretary of the Treasury during the period time that the bailout was voted. He was the CEO of Goldman Sachs. So they come in, collect a little bit of honey, and then they go back. What the American people have to understand is what exactly did they do; who made these decisions.

Now, we have over at the Secretary of Treasury the chief of staff to the Secretary of Treasury, Mark Patterson. Guess where he came from? Goldman Sachs. And the recent general counsel from the White House, Mr. Craig, he left the White House. Where did he go? Goldman Sachs.

So it rises above party. We have to stand up for what's right for America, and we have to unwind these private interests that have caused such harm to our country.

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