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[Page: H4401]  GPO's PDF
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   The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Shuster). Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 5 minutes.

   Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, earlier today President Bush gave a major speech on the administration's plan to curb executive greed and corporate misgovernance in our country. This plan could be a tough sell, considering the President's own record as a businessman and his record of regulating industry.

   Shortly after taking office, President Bush made clear how he felt about any kind of government regulation. His first budget proposal contained the elimination of 57 staff positions at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency charged with reviewing his corporate financial problems of the 1980s and reviewing all corporate financial reports today. His Treasury Secretary moved immediately to shut down intergovernmental efforts undertaken by the previous administration to monitor offshore tax havens at the heart of the financial maneuvering that led to Enron's collapse.

   This President let chemical companies write legislation that dealt with arsenic in the drinking water, let insurance companies write legislation about the privatization of Medicare , let the drug companies write legislation that had to do with prescription drug coverage, let Wall Street write legislation to privatize Social Security, and let the banks write legislation relating to bankruptcy. This laissez-faire antigovernment attitude of the Bush administration also created a permissive environment clearly making companies like Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and others believe they could mislead investors with impunity as long as President Bush was in office.

   Even after the Enron scandal was revealed last year, the President proposed a zero-growth budget for the SEC. He supported publicly and aggressively weak pension and accounting reform bills in the House, even though thousands of employees in this country, turning into tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees, are losing their retirements to fraud and mismanagement by the President's friends at Enron and other corporations.

   He refused to support legislation that would close the loopholes that allow American companies to go offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. He has declined to support reauthorization for the Superfund tax, requiring corporate polluters to pay for cleanup of the messes they make. Instead, he has chosen to have taxpayers pay to clean that up. To make matters worse, the President's advocated turning Medicare and Social Security over to the private sector.

   As evidence of this bias in his political contributions from the insurance industry, the President recently endorsed a Medicare prescription drug plan that would be administered by the health insurance industry. This plan undercuts seniors' purchasing power and enables the drug industry to sustain its outrageous drug prices by permitting the continued abuse and manipulation of drug patent laws.

   Why? It just might have had something to do with our committee 2 weeks ago considering the prescription drug bill. The committee chair decided to quit at 5 p.m. so all the Republican members in the committee could troop off to a fund-raiser, a Republican fund-raiser headlined by George Bush, where the chairman of the fund-raiser was the CEO of a prescription drug company in England. That chairman and that company contributed $250,000 to House and Senate Republicans and to President Bush. Other prescription drug companies contributed $50,000, $100,000, and $250,000, while Congress was considering a prescription drug bill.

   No surprise that the next day, when our friends returned to our hearing, that on issue after issue after issue the Republicans voted down the line for drug company interests against seniors' interests.

   The President and his administration have a long way to go to convince the American people they are serious about cleaning up corporate abuses in large American business or even enforcing current law.

   So as the country considers the President's plan for reversing the current trend of corporate greed and misdeeds, I hope my colleagues will understand that I view his conversion from a proponent of laissez-faire economics in letting corporations run roughshod over government regulations and roughshod over the public, his conversion from that to chief regulator and enforcer of these laws with a healthy degree of skepticism.

[Page: H4402]  GPO's PDF

   A famous civil rights leader years ago said, ``Don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you do, and I will tell you what you believe.''

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