Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, later this afternoon, the Senate will consider a piece of legislation to try to create some jobs. I understand that the Federal Government, by passing legislation, doesn't automatically create jobs, although it can in some circumstances. For example, a summer youth program can put some kids to work in the summer if the Federal Government or State government sponsors it. By and large, the private sector creates jobs.

This piece of legislation this afternoon is a payroll tax exemption--trying to encourage small- and medium-sized businesses that are ready to expand and capable to expand--giving them extra incentive to hire people and put them back to work. Section 179, business expensing, is another incentive to business. The highway trust fund extension--we know building highways puts people to work almost instantly. We have plenty of backlog in highway and bridge repair.

This is a piece of legislation that will put people back to work and create the incentives for companies--whether it is highway contractors or small- and medium-sized businesses--to hire those employees. Why is that important? Because we have probably somewhere around 25 million people today who wake up without a job. The hard-core unemployment, as known in the statistics, is about 17 million people. But 20 million to 26 million people are effectively unemployed in this country. They woke up this morning wanting a job and looking for a job but cannot find a job.

I recognize that one of the prevailing moods in the Congress is to do nothing. Those are the two words that best describe what we have seen, particularly from the minority recently, ``do nothing.'' It is a pretty easy position to take, but it is so wrong. Generally, it has always been wrong on the significant issues of the day. If this country doesn't believe that having 20 million, 25 or 26 million people out of work--and they don't believe that is something that is significantly wrong, something that weakens our country, then there is something wrong with their thinking.

This is a serious and urgent priority the Congress must address.

The do-nothing approach to public policy is something we have seen before. It goes all the way back to the basic rights of people--women's rights, civil rights, workers' rights. I have spoken on the floor previously, talking about the struggles to improve in those areas. Those struggles were against those who said let's do nothing. Women didn't have the right to vote for over the first half of this country's existence. They weren't allowed to vote. It took the beating in Occoquan Prison in 1917, when Lucy Burns, at night, was manacled and a chain between her wrists, hung over a cell door, with blood running down her arms all night long; and Alice Paul, a tube forced down her throat, force-feeding, to where she nearly drowned in her own vomit. She and 33 other women were arrested and chained to the White House gate. That is how women got the right to vote in this country. It is not because we had people who said let's do nothing, it is fine that women cannot vote. People pushed back and said what is going on is wrong.

Workers' rights. I wrote a book about the struggle to get workers' rights in this country. I said James Fyler died of lead poisoning. James Fyler was shot 54 times. Why? He felt people who went underground to mine for coal ought to be paid a fair wage. Think of the struggle for workers' rights and civil rights. I served in the Congress with John Lewis in the House of Representatives, who was beaten in Montgomery, AL. He was beaten because he believed one ought to be able to sit at a lunch counter as an African American. In some areas, it was against the law to drink from certain water fountains and ride in the front of the bus. It was against the law to sit at the lunch counter at Woolworth's.

Workers rights, civil rights, women's rights--all these things were struggles. There were those all along the way who said let's do nothing. Today, they say let's do nothing about the fact that 25 million or 26 million Americans are out of work.

By the way, here is a new report that shows that not everybody is out of work. We know that. A lot of people are working. In fact, there is full employment, according to the Northeastern Center for Labor Studies, among those who earn more than $150,000 a year. Their unemployment is 3 percent, but that is called full employment. Not everybody is having trouble. The more affluent Americans have full employment. It is a lot of folks at the bottom who are struggling and getting laid off and are out looking for work. So change is very hard.

The question is, Is this Congress going to do something about it? Does it care about it? In every case, you can go back a century, and the wailing and the whining of those who have opposed everything for the first time and said it can't be done, it will not work, it will ruin our country--they are the ones who dug in their heels and said let's do nothing.

What about today? What is our responsibility today? Well, it seems to me, in this economic crisis--a crisis, by the way, that is not some natural disaster; this wasn't some massive storm that enveloped America, some tornado or cyclone or some massive natural event that occurred. This was an economic wreck that was caused by unbelievable avarice and greed in some of our Nation's largest institutions. There was nearly criminal negligence on the part of regulators who wouldn't regulate. There was shameful, greedy behavior by people at the top of the financial food chain, whose business philosophy was to maximize profits at any cost, it doesn't matter.

Now we find ourselves in a desperate position. Yes, I think we have a foundation where we have found the bottom and are going to try to build from this point on. The question is, How do we move this process along to give hope to people who, at this point, get up this morning and don't have a job? Some say let's work on the faucet--that is what this bill is today, and I will support it. Let's work on the faucet that will put more jobs in this tank. I say also let's work on the drain because you can turn the faucet on, if the drain is wide open you are not going to make much headway. I will talk about the drain, but first I will talk about the faucet.

There is no social program as important as a good job

that pays well. That is why this needs to be a priority with us. It is why we should pass this piece of legislation this afternoon. No, it is not going to fix every issue. I understand that. I mentioned we have full employment with the people on the top. What about the people who shower after work--the people who work hard all day and have to take a shower after work to get rid of the evidence of that work? Well, let's talk about them for a moment. I met with a group of people who were losing their jobs just before Christmas this year--500 people who worked for a company that made one of America's best products. They were told their plant was going to close down--500 of them. Can you imagine the Christmas they spent with their families, because there were no other jobs in that area. Yet 500 jobs is a reasonably small amount of the total number of jobs we have been losing. That describes the drain on this economy of ours with respect to jobs. Let me talk a bit about that.

I am talking about particularly jobs in which Americans make something, produce something. Our manufacturing sector is rapidly losing steam. We have lost 5 1/2 million manufacturing jobs since 2000. We now have 11.7 million manufacturing jobs left. That is the fewest number of manufacturing jobs since the early 1940s. Since 2001, we have seen the closing of 42,000 factories in America. One-third of all the factories that employ over 1,000 people have closed since 2001 in this country. They are gone. Some people blame the workers because they want a living wage. They say: If you cannot compete with 50 cents an hour in China, tough luck, you don't deserve to compete. It is an international economic system and if you cannot compete, that is too bad. That is a pretty ignorant way to look at it. This is a global economy, but who decided, after spending a century lifting standards, requiring safe workplaces, better labor standards, better wages and benefits, that all that should be washed away because we can't compete with somebody who worked for 50 cents an hour, somebody who works in a factory where they live in cinder block, little rooms, with 12 in a room at night, and they work 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day--who decided that ought to be the standard with which we have to compete? That doesn't make sense to me.

I guess there are people who believe that ``made in the USA'' doesn't matter anymore. We don't have to be a country that manufactures. If we don't have a strong manufacturing base, we will not long remain a world economic power. That is a fact. This manufacturing base of ours is being sequentially and systematically destroyed.

We have, essentially, lost the area of producing machine tools in this country. We have lost electronics. We have lost automobile parts. We have lost furniture manufacturing. We have lost telecom. We have lost appliances. I am talking about the manufacture of these things. In 1960, 30 percent of our GDP in this country was manufacturing. Now it is 11 percent. There are 1.2 billion cell phones sold on this planet every year. Not one is made in America--1.2 billion and not one is made in America. We have lost 60 percent of the furniture manufacturing. You don't need to know all the stories, but I have spoken about the one we lost in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania House Furniture, which was an upscale fine furniture company. Governor Rendell did everything he could to stop it from moving to China. They used a special Pennsylvania wood to make this furniture. What they did is closed the plant and shipped the wood to China, made the furniture there and shipped it back and called it American production. The last piece of furniture that came down off the line--for a company that lasted 100 years, making top-of-the-line furniture--the very last piece of furniture, those workmen in that plant turned it over and all the people who worked in the plant signed their names because they said there would not be furniture such as this made again. Their jobs were gone in an instant, and 60 percent of furniture manufacturing is gone.

The list goes on and on and on. Eighty-four percent of the circuit boards, which used to be ours--we developed circuit boards--are now made in Asia. We defend, as all of us understand, our military security aggressively. Do we care about our economic security--that we are hollowing out the manufacturing base of our country? Apparently not.

In this economic recovery bill that was passed, I included on the Senate side something called ``Buy American.'' One would have thought I was exploding all of the relationships that existed around the globe. People here even had apoplectic seizures: What are you doing? Are you trying to start a trade war? No, I was not. ``Buy American'' is perfectly permitted in the WTO trade rules. In fact, Mr. Pascal Lamy, the WTO chief, says ``Buy American meets world trade rules.'' If we had not put a ``Buy American'' provision in so State and local governments and the Federal Government, when contracting to buy steel and to buy products with which to make highways and other items we are investing in, had we not done that, we would be spending our taxpayers' money to purchase from China, to import the steel from China. I thought we were doing that to put Americans back to work. So I put in a ``Buy American'' provision. If you read the New York Times and the Washington Post, you just thought they were having seizures about it. Unbelievable, they say. No, it is not unbelievable to me. If you are going to try to get economic recovery in this country, you do not do that by incentivizing production in China and Japan. By the way, in their programs in China and Japan, they have their own provisions to purchase at home.

Here is the trade deficit we have with the world. This is why I say I support trying to do something with the faucet about jobs, to put more jobs in this economy. I am going to vote this afternoon on the proposal coming before the Senate. But here is the drain. Even as we do that, more and more jobs are leaving this country. Anybody who talks about fiscal policy deficits and is really worried that these fiscal policy deficits are going to sink this country, you can make a case--I used to teach a little economics in college--you can make a case that the fiscal policy deficit is money we owe to ourselves. You cannot make a case that this amount of red--these red lines go down, down, down, $800 billion a year for the last 3 years in a row. That is money we owe to other countries. That is money that will be repaid by a lower standard of living in the United States.

I say to all of those who care about fiscal policy deficits--and I do--you better care about this as well because this is a description of moving American jobs overseas in addition to indebting ourselves deep in debt to especially China, as this chart shows. This chart shows the red lines. This is only China, a country with which we have a $260 billion trade deficit and growing every single year.

By the way, we have with the country of China a reasonably ignorant bilateral which says to China--I am taking one piece of it now--it says: You are ramping up a very large automobile export industry, and we will very soon see Chinese cars on the streets of America. When they come to America under our agreement with you, you have a very large deficit with us, China, so when you ship us your cars--and they are coming--we will impose a 2.5-percent tariff on automobiles from China into the United States. We agree that if we ship cars made in the United States to China, you may impose a 25-percent tariff. A country with which we have a $260 billion trade deficit, we agreed to give them a 10-to-1 advantage on tariffs on bilateral automobile trading. I don't know how other people define ignorance, but I believe that is ignorant of our country's economic interest.

That is the reason I indicated in the economic recovery--what is called the stimulus program--that if we are going to spend money to try to restart this economy, to try to get this engine restarted and put people back to work, we at least ought to have some understanding that the products we are purchasing with that are not purchased from China and Japan, with which we have these very large budget deficits.

Since repetition is so very important here--I received a letter the other day from someone who said: Mr. Senator, if you are, at the end of your third term in the Senate this year, going to leave the Senate, who is going to speak for Huffy bicycles?

I said: I don't know who is going to speak for Huffy bicycles, but I am going to continue to do so until the end of the year because it is a perfect description of what is wrong in this country with respect to this so-called bathtub which should hold jobs but has a wide open drain.

Huffy was an Ohio company. Not anymore. They all got fired, all of them, because all these bicycles are produced in China. Why? Because the folks in Ohio were making $11 an hour and that is way too much money to pay an American worker. I know where they are made now. They are made in China for 50 cents an hour by people who work 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day.

The poignant story about Huffy bicycles is when the last factory closed and the last Huffy bicycle was made in America, all the workers, as they drove out of the parking lot, left a pair of empty shoes in the space where their car once parked. It was the only way they could send a message to the company: You can ship our jobs to China, but you are never really going to fill this space of ours. So no more Huffy bicycles.

The list is endless. Huffy bicycles and Radio Flyer, the little red wagon every child has ridden in, are examples of what we do not make here anymore. Radio Flyer was made in Illinois for 110 years. The little red wagon was made by an immigrant who came to this country who not only loved airplanes--and so he named a red wagon ``Radio Flyer''--but was a very good businessman. Every American child sat in those little red wagons and played in those little red wagons for 110 years, made in America. Not anymore. They are all made in China.

My point is this: I am going to vote for this bill this afternoon. It is the right thing to do. We will have people come here and spread the mantra again today as they have for so many weeks and months: Do nothing. Do nothing. Things will be fine.

Things are not fine. It is our responsibility to do something to address these issues. I want us to do something to try to create new jobs.

I chaired a hearing of the policy committee not too long ago. We had three small to medium-size businesses come testify. All of them were ready to expand and ready to hire new people. All of them were profitable businesses, all of them were ready to expand, and none of them could expand because none of them could find credit from the banks. Think of this: The biggest banks in America are now making record profits. I am talking about the biggest banks on Wall Street. They are making record profits and are prepared to pay record bonuses at a time when small and medium-size businesses that create the jobs in this country cannot find credit to expand even when they are profitable.

There is something wrong with this system. This system is not working. There are a lot of reasons for us to care a lot about what has happened in this country. I regret that there has never been the kinds of hearings with subpoena power that develops the master narrative of what has happened in the last 6 or 8 years that caused this economic wreck. The American people need to know. I understand there is now a commission, but that is not a substitute for what the Congress has a responsibility to do.

In 200 years in this country, we have gone from times when the productive sector--those who produce and manufacture--had the upper hand to other times when the financing sector had the upper hand. More recently, the financing sector has had the upper hand in this country. Manufacturing is an afterthought, and we are losing, losing, losing our manufacturing base.

The financing side, as all of us know, has become much larger. In fact, just about 15, 18 months ago, then-Treasury Secretary Paulson and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board came to the Congress and said: Look, we are facing near imminent collapse of this entire economy. At that time, one of the things they said was that we have too much concentration in the biggest financial firms in the country. Yes, that was true, except, you know what, the concentration is even much greater now, engineered by some of the same people who said there is too much already.

This is not rocket science. Too big to fail meant no-fault capitalism. The biggest financial firms in the country got bailed out. Why? Because it was feared they were too big to fail. I think too big to fail is just too big. This is not rocket science. If you are too big to

fail, you are too big. Yet the very institutions that are too big to fail are getting bigger, not smaller, imposing more risk.

By the way, the biggest ones that are showing significant record profits and ready to pay record bonuses--we are told somewhere around $140 billion to $160 billion--the biggest firms are engaged in the same kind of activity that steered the country into the ditch. We still have the credit default swaps and derivatives out there that represent very substantial risks.

If anybody really wants to understand how this relates, just go to Las Vegas or a casino someplace. Look up and understand what a synthetic derivative means. It means you are buying a credit default swap to insure a bond, except this transition does not relate to anything that is real. It is just a wager. That is exactly what has gone on in this country, unimpeded by regulators who did not look, who were woefully blind, and who boasted about it for some years. Who pays the price for all of that? The 25 or 26 million people who got up this morning and could not find a job. In some cases, they got up on a morning a month ago, a morning a year ago, in some cases 2 years ago, and still could not find work. They are the victims. And the very folks at the top who steered this country into the ditch are reporting record profits. The folks at the top, as I just described with the new study from Northeastern University, have full employment.

It seems to me there is something wrong with this picture. How does one come to the floor of the Senate this evening and say: Let's do nothing. I have an idea: let's keep doing nothing, they say.

We have watched that inaction, and that does not work. The American people deserve better than that. I hope this afternoon we will have most Members of the Senate coming to the floor to say: Let's do something. Let's care today not about the people at the top of the financial food chain who are now making record profits and preparing to pay record bonuses, but let's do something for the folks at the bottom who have lost their jobs--5.5 million manufacturing workers just in the last decade. Let's do something to see if we can find a way to put them back to work. If we do that, maybe we will get a strong vote today for people saying we care about jobs.

We would like to work together--Republicans and Democrats--to get the best ideas both have to offer rather than the worst of each and see if we can advance the economic interests of this country once again.

Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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