House Proceeding 02-25-09 on Feb 25th, 2009 :: 0:53:20 to 1:13:20
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Speech By: Joe Sestak

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Joe Sestak: of pennsylvania's 7th

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Frank R. Wolf: congressional district and good americans when i pledge the service and sacrifice of staff sergeant mark j. small will always be remembered and forever honored. i yield back the balance of my time, mr. speaker. the speaker pro tempore: the gentleman yields back the balance of his time. mr. wolf from virginia. without objection, the gentleman

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Speech By: Frank R. Wolf

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Frank R. Wolf: is recognized for five minutes. mr. wolf: today, the state department released its annual human rights report, an exhaustive report which documents the human rights abuses. the report highlights several disturbing global trends in the area of human rights that these trends confirm the continuing

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Frank R. Wolf: need for vigorous united states diplomacy to act and speak out. and yet, americ diplomat, secretary of state clinton on could not publicly oppress the chinese government on the human rights abuses during her recent visit, which begs the question, has the situation improved so dramatically so as to justify

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Frank R. Wolf: real gaiting human rights to the back burner. was last year a banner year for the chinese government earmarked by tremendous reform and freedom. has a new day dawned for the people of china? and the answer is no. we look no further than the state department's own report that came out today that says such notions could not be further from the truth and would

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Frank R. Wolf: be laughable if the reality if the situation wasn't so sobering, a few excerpts from the report. quote, the government of china human rights record remain poor and worse in some areas. it controlled freedom of speech, the press, assembly and movement. they committed killings and

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Frank R. Wolf: torture and coerced confessions and used forced labor. the china eat government increased detention and harassment of dissidents. for people of faith, the situation was grim. the report says authorities disrupted church meetings, retreats, detained, beat, harassed church leaders and members, harassment of

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Frank R. Wolf: unregistered catholic bishops, priests and lay persons continued including surveilnce and detention. this is the state department's report that came out today and yet secretary of state clinton -- north korea, refugee reports thatuthorities stepped up efforts, authorities in china to

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Frank R. Wolf: locate and detain and forcibly return north koreans to north korea basically ghoul augusts. on forced labor it said it is a serious problem. and i'm running on. for tibet, the government's

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Frank R. Wolf: human rights, deteriorated seriously. authorities continued to commit human rights abuses, torture, arbitrary extrajudicial detention and goes on. the list goes on. i marvel that there could be such a disconnect between the systemic documented abuses of

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Frank R. Wolf: the chinese government as stated in the report and the speaking out and the shocking silence of secretary clinton. the chinese government could barely contain their excitement about secretary clinton's silence. ap reported quote, china gave

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Frank R. Wolf: u.s. secretary of state clinton a glowing review and no wonder they gave her a glowing review because she didn't say anything during her visit and she stayed clear of human rights issues. china doesn't want our secretary to speak on human rights and that's the very reason they should speak out.

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Frank R. Wolf: in fact, mr. speaker, silence in itself is a message, not just to the chinese government, but to the chinese people whose struggles are outlined in grim details. martin luther king said and i quote, he said, in the end, we will rember not the words of

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Frank R. Wolf: our enemies, but the silence of our friends. the silence of our friends. for the secretary of state to be silent on the issue the persecution in china, whether it be the number -- can you imagine, mr. speaker, how a catholic bishop or a buddhist

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Frank R. Wolf: monk or a pastor or muslim was came around and said, see, your secretary of state was in town and she never even raised the issue. the way to do this is the way that ronald reagan did it in the 1980's. every time president reagan would go to moscow or whatever, they would spe out on behalf

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Frank R. Wolf: of human rights. our embassies were islands of freedom. and so i ask the secretary to make it clear, is this a retreat on human rhts? did you just make a mistake and the sound of silence is being

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heard and it will haven impact on dictators because they sill see the secretary not speaking out. and on and on and the world will be a much more dangerous place. d with that, i yield back. the speaker pro tempore: the gentlemayields back the

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balance of his time. mr. defazio. mr. broun. ms. foxx. under the speaker's announced policy of january 6, 2009, the gentleman from missouri, mr. akin, is recognized for 60

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minutes as the designee of the minority leader. mr. akin: thank you, mr. and we will try to get started here. if we could get the flip charts

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to stay in place. through the period of the last six years, one of the things we've heard commonly in the media has been the tremendous cost of the war in iraq and that every day we hear there's more and more millions being

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squandered on the war in iraq. so it's an interesting fact to add up all of the spending in the war in iraq and all of the spending in the war in afghanistan and add it together. and what you find is that there is less spending there than there was in the first five weeks of this new year,

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particularly with the new stimulus bl. how is it that we got into such a fix and such a problem that our economy seemed to dictate these kinds of draconian solutions?

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. it goes back to the carter administration. the idea that some people couldn't get a decent home loan. and so we were going to tell banks that they had to make me loans to people that were riskier and some risky enough that they couldn't make their loan payments .

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now, that started under the carter administration, but over a period of time we then developed a couple of organizations called tically freddie and fannie, freddie mae and fannie mac. and they were not quite private either. their objective was to create an

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innovative finance so that people could afford home loans. and an average person could have a piece of the american people and own their own houses. well, over a period of time freddie and fannie were established and they took more and more different loans, underwrote various loans for people's homes. by the time we got well through

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the clinton years as president, president clinton demanded that the freddie and fannie corporations, if you would call them corporations, had to change their rules. that they had to release more and more loans to people who in effect couldn't pay.

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so the percentage of these loans that were more marginal were increased. in the meantime, you had some other things going on. you had the government policy under greenspan, the federal reserve had reduced the interest rate down to quite low to about 1%. so you had the money being flooded as we moved on with more

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and more very low priced capital at 1%. and so people tended to think, hey, that's a pretty good idea. let's put some of this money in the real estate market because the real estate market started to boom. in fact it was a bubble. and when i came to congress in 2001 real estate was starting to go up. by the time 2004, 2005, most of us around here thought we knew a

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little something about economics were kicking ourselves. how come we didn't buy the very biggest house we could possibly find and let the thing double and then quickly sell it, of course? well, of course, there were a lot of people that were doing that. there was a lot of speculation going on. speculators took advantage of the situation and real estate

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continued to expand and to expand. and in the meantime, what was going on in wall street was the fact that because there really weren't any rules. freddie and fannie were quasi-governmental. it assumed that they were going to back people up and back up these loans. and so it became kind of a free ride, and you had all kinds of

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mortgage brokers traveling around the country saying to people, hey, want to get a loan? w much do you need, half million dollars? fine, i don't really care if you have a job or can't pay it back because i'm going to turn the loan right on over, it's going to go to freddie orphanie or to the wall street market, they're going to chop it up in pieces, repackage and sell it all over the world.

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and so it was one of those situations where we made a very big mistakes in terms of government regulation and we allowed this process to continue to run for some number of years. without the proper regulations and control in fannie and freddie. most people have read and understand that what got us in this recession was the fact that

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we made a whole lot of mortgages being made by the people that couldn't pay those mortgages back. so that's how things got started. now, you say, well didn't somebody figure this out? didn't somebody ring a warning bell or let us know that things weren't -- weren't right way? well, in fact they did. and what you have -- excuse me a

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minute. what you have here, and this is an interesting day to remember, in "the new york times" not necessarily a right-wing oracle, "new york mes" september, 2003. you ve reported there that the president at that time, president bush, was asking for greater authority to regulate

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freddie and fannie because he believed that what was going on woulcause a whole lot of trouble. there are all kinds of mortgages and loans being made where it was not atll clear that people would pay them back. of course, in the past years, many years before when somebody was going to get a home loan you'd go to your local bank and the bank would take a look and say, i'm not going to loan the money if i don't think he can

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pay it back. what we did was we separated the person that was taking that loan, we separated him from the person that was getting the money and the end result was there wasn't any accountability anymore. and so the president said, hey, this is a big problem. so you have september 11, 2003,

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"new york times," the president is saying in there, hey, we need to get some controls on these crazy mortgages that are going on. and he asked congress to take action to regulate freddie and fannie. at that time or a year or so later congress and the house passed a bill to do that. it went to the senate. it was killed by the democrats in the senate.

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but in that same article, september 11, 2003, you have the words of the gentleman here in the house now who is in charge of rewriting the rules, and this is what he said about freddie and fannie. these two entities, fannie mae and freddie mac, are not facing any kind of financial cris. said representative barney frank

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of massachusetts, the ranking democrat on the financial services committee. so the ranking democrat of the financial services committee is saying freddie and fannie are doing just fine. september 11, 2003. the president is saying we need more regulation. there's going to be problems. and then congressman frank goes

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on, the more people exager rate -- exager ate hees problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing. certainly this problem was caused by a lack of regulation. it was caused by the democrat party as is reported in this article in "the new york times." now, there are people today who want to say that this is a

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failure of free enterprise. this has nothing to do with free enterprise. this has to do with socialistic government meddling in the real estate market and an unwillingness of the government to be responsible in what the government says it's going to back. what's happened here is you have freddie and fannie that can do

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anything they wanted. and we're supposed to, the taxpayer, you and i, are supposed to back up freddie and fannie when people make all of these lousy loans. well -- so that's the quick rundown on how we got to where we are with the recession. now, when you have a recession there's a couple of di ways to handle a recession, couple of theories.

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one of the theories is what f.d.r. did back in the 1930's. and their idea was if the government spends enough money it stimulates demand and of course everybody's been taught this for years in colleges, economics classes, that if the government stimulates the economy by spending enough money, then it will make the recession go away.

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well, that sounds like a pretty cool idea, doesn't it? the government spends more and more money and the economy's going to get better. the only trouble is if that really worked, where we have the amount of debt that we have at this time and trillions of dollars in debt, don't you think we would have a great economy? and so we have to ask, what is this theory?

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it wasalled kingsianism. he was proposing this idea at the same time that henry morgan that will was making this -- morgan thall was making this proposal -- morganthall was making this proposal. so we had in the laboratory of history of the government spending a whole lot of money to make the economy better. and so we had a chance to do

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that for eight years. and henry morganthau tried that. he appeared before the house ways and means 16939 this is his quotation before the house ways and means committee. we have tried spending money. we are spending more than we

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have ever spent before and it does not work. i say after eight years of the administration we have just as much unemployment as we started and an enormous debt to boot. so this is the author. this is the first guy that tried this theory over in this country. just spend a whole lot of money to fix a recession and he says

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it doesn't work. and you take a look at the numbers and the tremendous amount of joblessness when they started. and when he got all done they still had a whole lot of unemployment going on and he said we tried it and it doesn't work. and yet there are still people that want to hang on to this warmed over kingsian idea and it doesn't wo. and so what does work?

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it's important for us not be negative and say what doesn't work, but what does work and what does work is a more of a supply side kind of model. and we'll be talking about that in a minute. i'm joined by a very good friend and a gentleman who has lived a number of careers in this world, one as a medical doctor.

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a guy with a very bright mind but also a u.s. congressman from the state of and i would yield to the gentleman from the state of georgia, congressman broun. mr. broun: i want to make a couple of comments. we have a recent experiment in this kind of economic theory.

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i think if we lo historically not only did the idea of spending more and more money not work during the great depression. in fact, the only thing that got us out of the depression is cranking up the manufacturing sector. the private manufacturing sector to supply the needs for world war ii. that's the only thing thatot

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us out of the depression. but just want to remind -- i know my dear friend from missouri, mr. akin, had -- remembers just recently the japanese tried the same sort of ilosophy. i don't think it worked there either, did it? mr. akin: well, i appreciate the gentleman and the additional point that you're making.

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i think it's very persuasive point because henry morganthau tried this idea for eight years. it didn't work worth a hoot. that is his words, we have a lot of debt to boot. but in additiowe had the japanese and they tried it and it basically was like taking an entire economic decade out of japan.

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and they had a whole lot of these tax and spend fellows over there in japan, and they just went at it hammer and tongs for 10 years and the japanese economy bumped and bumped and bumped and it could never get off the ground. it's like a plane that didn't have enough propulsion to pull it up in the air. and it was because of the fact that they were sold on this idea

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that if they spend enough money we'll be ok. i'm an engineer by training. they shouldn't allow us in a political body like this. but it reminds someone grabbing on their shoelaces and lifting up and trying to fly around a room. this is just fool lish -- foolishness. our constituents that are out

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there, i think they have to look at this idea and think, what sort of funny stuff are those people smoking up in washington, d.c., to think that when you get in hard times economically that whayou're going to do is spend money like mad? i don't know how many people in my district -- i don't think there's dumb enough that when they are in hard times economically they