Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Adminstration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. I want to thank the ranking member from California (Mr. Farr) for his hard work and Mr. Kingston, the chairman from Georgia, for bringing this bill before us today. And I am really sorry I can't support it. At a time of such instability in the American economy, this committee bill simply further destabilizes one of the most productive sectors of the American economy, agriculture, further, it hurts all Americans who depend on the Department of Agriculture for nutritional support during these hard times that we are experiencing.

This legislation has some of the most destructive sections in it that eliminate, for all practical purposes, the Rural Energy for America Program, that was supposed to take America into a new energy future. It takes the cops off the beat at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to hold Wall Street accountable and clamp down on speculation. We all know that hasn't been happening.

The drastic decrease in the nutrition and commodity supplemental food programs hurt people across this country and with decreases in the WIC program, children will be harmed. They can't speak for themselves here. As well, there is a dangerous directive included in the bill that would further erode the minimal competition in the meat industry in which real competition hardly exists at all. We must defend our farmers and ranchers to be treated on an equal par with the big packers and processors through the grain inspection, packer, and stockyards agency. Later in the consideration of the bill, I'll be dealing with that in a different way.

But let me just say a word about the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The level of funding provided in this bill is inadequate. We all know it's inadequate because of the mess we face in the derivatives market today. The small agency called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission provides a critical bulwark against the gouging of the American people in the type of manipulation, speculation, and outright fraud that led our country into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

With gas prices now rising above $4 a gallon and food prices just skyrocketing, who's really the watchdog in charge of implementing market reforms to protect the consumer by regulating the market to prevent excessive speculation in all fields? I'd hate to think that this bill is being purposefully underfunded to prevent robust regulation of speculation and allow these massive interests on Wall Street--and in the Chicago futures market--to continue doing what they have been doing, and that is gouging the pocketbooks of the American people, whether it's gas prices or food prices or mortgage speculation.

Just to give you an idea, this proposal would not fund the agency to implement reforms contained in the Dodd-Frank bill in a futures market that's grown from $13 trillion back in the mid 1990s to over $600 trillion notional value today. The bill's funding level basically takes the cops off the beat. It takes the watchdogs away. And one might say, the bill gives a green light for Wall Street to harm America again.

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Ms. KAPTUR. In sum, this bill falls far short of what America needs. I mentioned the nutrition programs, and their serious underfunding affecting seniors, children and women across our Nation. I want to thank the chairman for accepting an amendment to restore just $1.3 million to the Rural Energy for America Program, as America struggles to regain our energy independence. But we are a very long way from restoring our liberty. Rural America simply has to be a full partner in this effort. This bill does not do that. GIPSA needs to be strengthened not weakened and the CFTC must be allowed to severely regulate the future markets and clamp down on speculation to prevent another meltdown.

And though we disagree on this bill and its funding levels, I congratulate both the new chair and ranking members on their hard work over the last several months to prepare this bill, though imperfect, and bring it to the floor.

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Ms. KAPTUR. Rugged individualism. Oh, am I glad the gentleman brought that up. Rugged individualism produces a heartless bill like this.

Now, if you look back to why we're in the dumpster economically, go back to the 1990s. Read Alan Greenspan, a great advocate of rugged individualism, and Ayn Rand; right? Just drive them into the ground. Make all of his friends rich. JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley--it's an interesting group of characters up there that took America to the cleaners. They took and outsourced our jobs. Now they took our home equity.

And now, it's getting so bad we even have a bill that's going to take food away from about 350,000 women and children. Now, whose fault is that?

Here's a little note from somebody in my district. She says--she signed up this plate at the food bank, the local food bank. She said: Without help from the food bank, I would be on the streets. I struggle every day to make ends meet so my kids have a place to lay their heads at night. I have a job, but with two kids, it's still very hard. I have a lot of trouble paying rent and bills. I just wish there were more help to parents like myself.

That's from the rural part of my district.

From the urban part of my district, a plate is signed at the food bank: My income is spent on bills, which leaves very little money for me to purchase food for myself and my two daughters.

Now, you know, the majority of people in this House are Christian. And I'm not pushing that, though I am one of them. But the first Beatitude says, ``Feed the hungry.'' It doesn't say ``rugged individualism.''

I'm as individualistic as anybody else in this Chamber, but I'll tell you what. There's a heartlessness that goes with people who take everything for themselves and turn their back on the rest of the American people. So when Big Oil makes record profits and pays no taxes, there's something really wrong. There's something really wrong with the country, and the American people know it.

They didn't clean house here last November because they thought you were better; they just wanted a change. And they'll vote for it again if their lives don't get better. And their lives won't get better unless we fix what Alan Greenspan and Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and the whole rest of those buzzards up there did to this country. And they're taking bonuses. In fact, they're making so much money they take Members of Congress out. You know the average amount of a meal? $193, $193 a plate. These folks, a couple of bucks in a day they spend on food.

So I stand with the American people, not those wealthy interests who took the Nation to the cleaners. You know, those hedge funds? They pay at a 15 percent tax rate.

Mrs. Lummis talked about businesses in her district. They pay at a 35 percent rate. Why don't we hold those accountable up on Wall Street for what they did? Let them pay their fair share of taxes. We couldn't even take one penny of their bonuses, not a penny. This was the most gutless institution.

And I'll tell you what. The real straw that broke the camel's back was 1998 when Glass-Steagall was thrown out, an act that had separated banking and commerce. And you know the name on that bill? There wasn't a single Democratic name. It was Gramm-Leach-Bliley, all Republicans, and they shoved it through this House. I didn't vote for it.

And then Wall Street, oh, my gosh. You talk about rugged individualism. They hurt the Republic. They hurt our country, and they have not been held accountable. George Bush's Chief of Staff, Mr. Bolton, he came from

Goldman Sachs. He was there. He was there in the fall of 2008 when the Treasury was just opened up to them. Isn't that an interesting coincidence? Very interesting when you look back and see what really happened.

I refuse to have the people of my district or any district pay for what they did. I've got people who are lined up in our food banks because of unemployment, and I know who caused it. And I don't have enough power to hold them accountable, but I hope God does, because what they've done is unforgivable. Their rugged individualism is unpatriotic. It is un-Christian, and it hurt this country.

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Ms. KAPTUR. I thank the gentleman. I thank you for yielding. We may not agree on everything, but I think if we agree on some of the history that brought us to this point, maybe we can do something right for the Republic, and certainly for those people who are lined up across this country as victims of the abuse that came from that rugged individualism for which there has been no justice. There has been no justice to this date. What a sad thing for us to say institutionally.

If we look at this bill, nearly half of the babies born in our country rely on WIC, the Women, Infants and Children food program. They are in every district in this country. And I can guarantee you, for all the big shots that cleaned up at the expense of the American people, they've never even been to a WIC site. They've never seen sat with moms. They've never sat with families trying to figure out how they're going to make it from the beginning of the month to the end of the month on the few pennies that they have to live on.

So I think that the sad fact of this bill is that, rather than Big Oil paying their fair share of taxes, rather than us taking those bonuses from those who truly don't deserve them because of what they did to the Republic, for all the tax breaks that are going to companies that are locating jobs overseas and taking our livelihoods away from us, the answer isn't to take food away from those people that are paying the price.

So I want to thank my colleagues, and particularly Mr. Kingston for not objecting, to Mr. Farr for the great job you've done in trying to bring some justice to this bill, and to say, in closing, that there are many people who talk about life. Without decent nutrition, the children who will be affected, the hundreds of thousands of children who will be affected in this bill, their brains won't grow as fast. They won't have the kind of nutrients that produce strong bodies and strong minds for the future.

This is the time to stand up in defense for those who are defenseless. And particularly with this economy, the last place to cut is food. Every Christian in here knows that's true. We need to do better as this bill moves forward.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the bill on final vote, and I thank my colleagues for yielding me additional time.

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Ms. KAPTUR. I rise to associate myself with the fine efforts of Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro and Ranking Member Sam Farr to point out the anemic funding that is contained in the base bill for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Republican bill reduces below the President's request by 44 percent the necessary funding for staff for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and provides significantly fewer resources for the agency to do the job America expects.

Now, why is this important? The CFTC is supposed to regulate betting, B-E-T-T-I-N-G, because really what's going on is all the American people know is a very sophisticated type of gambling that when the bettors lose, rather than absorbing their losses, they come to the American people, but they're very powerful and they create new mechanisms. They create mechanisms. They don't call it betting, but they have a term, ``collateralized debt obligations.'' That gives it a kind of luster. And from that, they might drive a credit default swap.

But in the end, as the book by Joe Nocera, ``All the Devils Are Here,'' recounts what we really have is a Wall Street and a Chicago futures market that has run amok, where market manipulation, speculation, and outright fraud led our country into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

Make no mistake about it: These folks are very powerful, and one of the most important trades involved in this very sophisticated gambling is oil. This particular chart shows the profits being made by the major oil companies and compares the profits in the first quarter of last year to this year. If you look at ExxonMobil, over $10 billion more profits this year than last year. And the list goes on. Whether it's Conoco at $2 billion, whether it's BP at $7.2 billion, these folks are not hurting.

President Obama said, back in April, that part of the oil problem and the gas price problem is speculation. He's absolutely right. Even Goldman Sachs, one of the big beneficiaries of the betting, admits that a huge portion of the increase in the gas price is due to betting. And of all people, the chief executive officer of Exxon admitted in testimony in the other body recently that $60 to $70 per barrel of oil, whether it's $60, $70, $80, $90, $100, is actually due to speculation. So even those involved in it are admitting they're crying for help. So let's give it to them. Let's give them the help they want and desperately need.

This Commodity Futures Trading Commission has been charged with shining a bright light into the dark recesses that Wall Street and the futures markets would love us to ignore. In fact, I think the currency markets actually got themselves exempted, so there's huge sections of trades that are going on in our world today that aren't even the subject, even if we were to have the staffing we need over at the CFTC, that would not be affected by it.

But I ask myself: Could it perhaps be the intent and consequence of this restrictive funding proposal at the CFTC to prevent robust regulation of this market? If we look at what happened with mortgage-backed securities and all the derivatives that flowed from that, we know absolutely for certain that the lack of regulation is the reason for our demise.

We must make sure that the CFTC is able to take on speculation in the markets, and there's no more nontransparent market than this one in oil. So when the American people go to the pump and they cuss, they have to think about this little agency called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that back in 2000 tried to get the right to regulate derivatives, and they were denied that right by a vote right here in the Congress, and most Members had no idea what they were voting on because it was included in an omnibus appropriations bill.

Isn't that interesting? Legislating on an appropriation bill, and nobody found it. Well, they must have a lot of power in order to do that. So if we look at a few years ago when these derivative markets were worth about $13 trillion--now nobody I represent, including myself, can even imagine $13 trillion. But that derivative market grew from the mid-nineties to the present where it was about $40 trillion, and we had 475 employees over at the CFTC trying to figure out what was going on in all these markets. Well, today that market is over $600 trillion in notional value and 15 times more than before, and there's not sufficient staff in order to regulate these markets. It's pretty obvious where we need support in order to rein in these abuses.

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