Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. I want to take a moment to thank Carl Levin for his
friendship. It has been previously noted that Carl is recognized as
having perhaps the greatest intellect in the Senate. Carl has been, for
so many years, a forceful fighter against waste in the military, and in
recent years he has led the Senate in telling us it is absurd that
large multinational corporations are able to avoid hundreds of billions
of dollars in taxes by storing their money in offshore tax savings.

He has been a leader on that and for those of us who are concerned
about the needs of our kids and elderly and infrastructure, all of the
terrible problems facing this country, this is an issue we have to
focus on.

I think Senator Carl Levin has been a Senator's Senator. He has been
a model of what a good Senator should be, and it is not surprising that
people from all political persuasions will come to the floor to thank
him for his service.

Senator Levin, thank you very much for your time.

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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I am going to be brief. The truth is that
the Senator we are honoring right now, Tom Harkin, will go down in
history as one of the great Senators of this particular period in
American history. Not many Senators, if any, have a list of enormous
accomplishments anywhere close to what Senator Harkin has accomplished.

I would like to tell my colleagues a little story. It turns out that
coincidentally, really, I have traveled with Senator Harkin to a number
of places around the world as part of congressional delegations. Like
most congressional delegations, we meet with the leadership of the
country, the President and so forth. But what was interesting in
traveling with Senator Harkin is wherever you go, he gets honored by
ordinary people in those countries.

We went to Vietnam a number of years ago. Many people will not
remember, but the truth is that one of the very first people ever to
expose the terrible prison conditions that the South Vietnam Government
had established was Tom Harkin. So we go there and we meet people who
had been imprisoned in tiger cages, and they said: Senator Harkin,
thank you very much for exposing those conditions and improving our
lives.

There was a very emotional response.

Then I go with him to Ghana, and it turns out that in Ghana and in
countries in Africa, Tom Harkin had been a leader in fighting against
child labor. There were kids 8 or 9 years of age who should be in
school who were out picking crops. And Tom Harkin, working with people
all over the world, had a real impact on getting those kids into
school.

We went to a school, a beautiful school which is partially funded by
the U.S. Government. We have bright kids who are in school, and they
were so proud of the assistance we had given them, where they were in
school and not working in fields.

Then we go to Chile. We go to Chile and we meet with the President of
Chile, all the dignitaries of Chile. Who knew this? We go to Chile, and
Tom Harkin gets an award from the government.

In the very dark days of the Pinochet government, when the
democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, was
overthrown in a violent coup by Pinochet--with, unfortunately, the
assistance of the U.S. Government--and people were rounded up and put
into prison camps and tortured and killed, Tom Harkin goes knocking on
the door to one of the prison camps. He goes knocking on the door--
pretty crazy, but that is what he did. He was met with soldiers with
guns. But he exposed that particular prison camp and played a role in
facilitating the ending of some of the more barbaric actions of the
Pinochet government.

Those are three trips I made with him. That is about all. I am sure
he has gone on other trips. That is a pretty good record,
internationally.

Then, back home, in terms of disability issues, I can remember and
others can remember that 30, 40, 50 years ago, families had kids born
with disabilities, and often those kids were institutionalized, they
were hidden, they were an embarrassment to the family. Something bad
happened; there was a child with a disability--Down syndrome, whatever
it may be. Think about the revolution that has taken place, the
mainstreaming of those kids. I know in Vermont and all over this
country, kids with disabilities who are sitting in classrooms right
now, loved and respected by their fellow students, educating their
fellow students, making them more human, more compassionate. I think
many of us have been to high school graduations where people with
disabilities get their diploma and people stand up and applaud those
kids.

There has been a transformation of the culture in terms of how we
deal with people with disabilities through the Americans with
Disabilities Act. That didn't happen by accident. Tom Harkin wasn't the
only person who did it, but he helped lead the effort here in the U.S.
Congress to say that people with disabilities are part of the human
community and we are going to treat them with the dignity they deserve.

Then we have all the other issues that people have talked about.
Probably nobody in the Congress has been a stronger fighter for working
people and organized labor than Tom Harkin.

I think people come here, regardless of political persuasion, to try
to make a difference and do what they think is right. We disagree about
what is right, but I think when we look at the list of accomplishments
and the enormously hard work that has gone into those accomplishments,
this man, Tom Harkin, will go down as one of the great Senators of our
period.

Tom, thank you so much for all you have done.

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Mr. SANDERS. Later today or tomorrow, we are going to be dealing with
the $1 trillion omnibus bill, and I will explain why I will be firmly
voting against that bill.

But before I do, I think it is important to put the budget in the
broader context of what is happening in America. We can't look at a
budget in the abstract; we have to see it in the context. The context
is that right now most Americans understand the middle class of this
country is disappearing.

Median family income has gone down by $5,000 since 1999. Today the
median male worker is making $700 less in inflation-adjusted dollars
than he made 41 years ago. The median female worker is making $1,300
less than she made 7 years ago. Meanwhile, while the middle class
disappears and we have more people living in poverty than at almost any
time in modern American history, the gap between the very rich and
everybody else is growing wider. We have massive wealth inequality in
America. One family, the Walton family, owns more wealth than the
bottom 40 percent of the American people. The top one-tenth of 1
percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of the American
people. Today, unbelievably, 95 percent of all new income is going to
the top 1 percent and corporate profits are at an all-time high. That
is the overall reality of what is going on with the American economy
today. And in the midst of that, we have the budget. So let's talk a
little about this $1 trillion budget and how it addresses or doesn't
address the problems facing our country.

Are there good things in this budget? The answer is: Absolutely. I am
chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, and I want to thank
Chairman Mikulski and others for making sure that our VA gets the kind
of budget they need. Included in that budget, by the way, is also a
provision called advanced appropriations for the VA, which will mean
that in the event of a government shutdown, veterans will still be able
to get the disability benefits they desperately need. And there are
other provisions in there that are very good.

But overall, if you look at the budget in the context of contemporary
American society, this is simply not a good budget. Let me pick up
three points where I have strong disagreements.

I think the vast majority of the American people understand that we
have huge unmet needs in this country. I expect in the Chair's State of
Virginia, in Vermont, and all over this country we all know our
infrastructure is crumbling--our roads, bridges, water systems,
wastewater plants. Our rail system is falling behind Europe, Japan,
China. We have enormous work to be done. The American Society of Civil
Engineers tells us we have to invest $3 trillion into rebuilding our
infrastructure.

In terms of college, we know there are hundreds of thousands of
bright young people who can't afford to go to college. Others are
graduating school saddled forever with these terrible debts from
college or graduate school.

This budget doesn't address those problems. It doesn't address the
crisis of childcare, and the fact that in Vermont and around the
country it is very hard for working-class families to get quality,
affordable childcare.

But what this budget does do--people don't know it--roughly 60
percent of the budget goes to defense spending. It goes to defense
spending. Sixty percent of the discretionary budget goes not to our
kids, not to our elderly, not to students, not to working people, not
to the infrastructure, not to all of the huge unmet needs we face as a
country, but it goes to the military.

Does anyone here deny we need a strong military, a strong National
Guard? I don't. We do. But sometimes, in tough times, you have to make
tough decisions. And I think spending $554 billion on the military is
too much.

I would point out, Mr. President, what I am sure you know; that it is
clear--it has been admitted--that the military can't even audit itself.
We don't even know effectively and appropriately how the military is
spending its money. They do not even have the computer technology to
tell us where they are spending.

What we also know is that cost overruns in the military are
extraordinary. Time after time after time an agreement is reached about
how much a weapons system will cost, and it turns out the contractor
was just joking because there is a huge overrun. And then we have
fraud. Fraud. Virtually every major military contractor has been
involved in fraud resulting in either convictions or settlements with
the government.

So we have folks here who last year were talking about cuts in
nutrition programs, education, health care--you name it, programs that
are life and death for working families--yet when it comes to the
military, we can spend $554 billion. I think that is too much.

Second of all, when you look at the global economy and you look at
our international partners, I find it interesting that every other
major country on Earth provides health care for all of their people as
a right except the United States; yet in terms of their defense
spending, they are spending a heck of a lot less than we are. We are
spending now almost--almost--as much as the entire rest of the world
combined.

So I object in this bill to the significant amount of money being
spent on the military, and I would have hoped there would be more opposition to this large military expenditure.

The second point I want to make, and it has not gotten a whole lot of
attention, is the impact this legislation will have on working people
in terms of cuts in pensions. There are provisions in this bill,
written in secret, which allow significant cuts in benefits for
retirees who are members of multiemployer pension plans.

Let me quote from a recent Washington Post article regarding the
change in this bill:

The change would alter 40 years of federal law and could
affect millions of workers, many of them part of a shrinking
corps of middle-income employees in businesses such as
trucking, construction and supermarkets.

Reuters mentions this:

The centerpiece is a provision that would open the door to
cutting current beneficiaries' benefits, a retirement policy
taboo and a potential disaster for retirees on fixed incomes.

What does that mean? When you go to work for a company, you get
wages, you get benefits, but you also, in some cases, get a promise in
terms of a pension--what you will get when you retire after 20 years,
30 years, 40 years of work. What this bill does is allow companies to
renege on that promise. It is my understanding that, in some cases, the
cuts in pensions could be draconian. I am talking about a 50-percent
cut.

Imagine somebody who has worked his or her entire life, expects to
retire with a certain level of income, and suddenly, after 20, 30, 40
years of work, wakes up in the morning and finds out that promise has
been cut in half. Wow. That is awful. That is totally awful.

I remember back, as the American people do, that Wall Street--the
CEOs of Wall Street--engaged in illegal and reckless behavior, which
drove this economy into the worst recession in modern history,
impacting millions and millions of people's lives. And what happened to
Wall Street? Well, Congress bailed them out. Congress bailed out the
folks on Wall Street whose criminal action caused the recession. Yet
now we have working people who have done nothing wrong except work
their entire lives--10, 20, 30 years--and through no fault of their
own, they are not getting bailed out. They are going to see a 50-
percent reduction in their pensions.

That is unacceptable and that opens--it just opens up a future in
terms of pensions which I think is very frightening for the American
people. So I can't support that provision as well.

The last point I want to make is getting back to Wall Street. In my
very strong opinion, we have reached the stage with Wall Street where
the major financial institutions are just too big, they are just too
powerful. Anyone who thinks that Congress regulates Wall Street has got
it backwards. The reality is that Wall Street, with their incredible
wealth and lobbying capabilities and campaign contributions, regulates
the United States Congress. You cannot see a better example of that
than what is in this legislation.

This is the headline from a recent article in the New York Times:
``Banks' Lobbyists Help in Drafting Financial Bills.''
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
this article.

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Mr. SANDERS. And let me quote from that article:

In a sign of Wall Street's resurgent influence in
Washington, Citigroup's recommendations were reflected in
more than 70 lines of the House committee's 85-line bill. Two
crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with
other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word.

In other words, it is not even Members of Congress writing these
bills, it is Wall Street writing the bills and getting them into this
legislation.

Now what does this legislation do? Well, we suffered the worst
economic crisis since the 1930s because of the greed, recklessness, and
illegal behavior on Wall Street. What Wall Street did is engage in
absolutely reckless speculation, and then the chickens came home to
roost. People could not pay back the debts they incurred on subprime
mortgages, and the entire financial system of the United States of
America and the world was on the verge of collapse. So Congress, a few
years ago, passed Dodd-Frank. It didn't go anywhere near as far as I
would go. I believe we should break up these major financial
institutions. I don't believe you can control them. I don't believe you
can regulate them. They regulate the Congress. But Dodd-Frank took some
steps toward that, and there was one provision I will quote--section
716.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
this section I am going to quote from.

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Mr. SANDERS. This is the title of the provision, 716, that this bill
repeals: ``Prohibition Against Federal Government Bailouts of Swaps
Entities.''
Now to quote from that section:

(A) Prohibition on Federal Assistance--notwithstanding any
other provision of law (including regulations), no Federal
assistance may be provided to any swaps entity with respect
to any swap, security-based swap, or other activity of the
swaps entity.

That is what is being repealed. So Wall Street, as a result of the
work of Citigroup and the other Wall Street companies, can now continue
to engage in reckless derivatives speculation. And when they make a
whole lot of money, they get richer. But when they lose money, because
of the repeal of this provision, it is the taxpayers of this country
who have to bail them out.

Does anybody--anybody--think that makes any sense at all? That is in
this bill.

So for those reasons and more, I would hope very much that the Senate
rejects this agreement and that we renegotiate. No one wants to see the
government shut down, but we must negotiate an agreement that is much
fairer to the American people and to the working families of our
country.

With that, I yield the floor.

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