Date: 2002-09-25
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Speaker. I yield myself the remaining time. I would urge the Members to vote no on this legislation because to vote yes on this is to reaffirm the House to do nothing. The fact of the matter is most of this legislation was written before the Enron debacle. Most of this legislation was written because it was designed for the purposes of increasing the contributions that people could make to the 401(k) plans. allowing small businesses to make contributions. to the owners. they would not have to offer pension plans at that point because there is no need for them to take care of their employees. treating executives differently than we treat employees. All of that was already in this legislation. Yes. we had a hearing on Enron and we listened to these employees who were locked into their pension plans. could not sell their stock. This legislation would have those same people. the people who were locked into WorldCom. for whatever it is worth today. requires a 5year phaseout period and then it is 3 years. We would like to talk about how the markets work and how fast they are and how they balance out. Those same people are stuck there today. riding this out as the market dropped to its lowest point in 6 years or in 4 years on the various indexes. They cannot sell that corporate stock because they are locked in. If this Congress really wanted to do something. just free those millions of American workers so they could diversify today. They could get out with what little they have left in their corporate stock. The gentleman from Ohio. in his State they have lost $8 billion in their 401(k)s. In California they lost $18 bil- lion. He is right. those are not abstract figures. That means someone is not going to retire this year who planned on retiring. Somebody is not going to retire next year. I assume my colleague had constituents come to him. like they come up to me and told me how their retirement plans are shambles. how one of the spouses is going to have to continue to work.. They thought he or she would be able to retire. how they now do not have the money to put their kids through school. Yet the Republican plan does not do anything for these people. It does not let them out of these plans. It does not let them put workers on the board. 100 percent of this money belongs to the workers. It is their money. It is in their 401(k) plan. and they will not let them sit on the pension board to discuss information about investments. Finally. they say. well. we give them more investment advice. After all we have learned out of Merrill Lynch. after we have learned out of Citicorp. after all we learned about the huge conflicts of interest about the investment banks and investment advice and touting these stocks. all we have -learned. this bill does not respond to it because it allows those very same conflicts to continue. Wells Fargo now runs an investment fund. Other companies are scouring the landscape to try to buy these mutual funds because annuities are not doing so well. Insurance businesses do not want to be in the business. I know in the financial reform bill we had Chinese firewalls. They all broke down during the nineties. Everybody was doing everybody elses business. We owe it to the public to turn down this bill. and we have to understand the reason the bill has not moved in the Senate is because the Republicans will not accept any worker protections. Yes. they want a bill just like this bill that takes care of corporate greed. takes care of corporate criminality. does nothing for the worker. That is unacceptable to the people in this country. and it should be unacceptable to their elected representatives in the House of Representatives.