Date: 2003-05-14
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Speaker. I yield myself 8 minutes. Mr. Speaker. today we will have a choice about what to do on behalf of Americas future retirees. the employees of Americas corporations and the protection of their pensions. We can do. as has been suggested in the Republican bill. a bill that essentially does nothing for retirees and for employees. What it says is that employees should be offered advice. and then it also suggests that that advice can be conflicted. it can be biased. it can be compromised. because under the current law. if we are given investment advice. we cannot be given conflicted advice. And yet in the wake of Enron and Global Crossing. the answer to the Republicans is to change the current law to allow advice to be given to employees about their retirement futures but to allow that advice to be conflicted. to allow that advice to be conflicted by the very same institutions that just recently settled for $1.4 billion because they had offered conflicted advice and bad advice to their clients. $1.4 billion. that is what those companies agreed to pay. That does not even begin to speak to the hundreds of billions of dollars that the shareholders lost. that employees lost in their mutual funds. their retirement plans because of those conflicts and that essentially criminal behavior. lyes. the deal was struck for $1.4 billion. Now along comes the Republicans 2 years after Enron. and they say we are going to give them the right to have advice. but that advice gets to be conflict. How tone deaf can one be? How shocked will the American public be when they find out they took their retirement plans and put them exactly in the hands of people who just copped a plea for a billion and a half dollars for giving people bad advice. maybe illegal. advice. almost criminal activity. if the Members will. The Republicans answer is to take Americas retirees and turn them over to those firms. One has to fail to understand what America saw after Enron. what they saw after the bust in the stock market of their retirement plans being depleted. the same kind of outrage that Americans felt when they saw the CEOs and executive officers of American Airlines guarantee their pensions at the same time .they were negotiating several billions in givebacks from pilots and flight attendants and workers. They were shocked when they heard this. So shocked and so bad was the reaction. that the CEO of American Airlines had to resign. and they had to give back their compensation package. Delta Airlines. going through givebacks of billions of dollars from their workers. secures and guarantees their compensation and pension for the CEOs. where former Delta executives. corporate executives. write Delta and say it is a shameless act. an embarrassing act that they would do this. And yet today. after all of those actions. after that public response to that failure to protect the employees. the reaction of the Congress is to essentially do nothing. But the Democrats offer a different alternative because I think we are listening to the public and to the employees. Yes. pensions is a dull subject. It has not captured the imagination of all the politicians. But the fact of the matter is it has moved from the back pages of the business section to the cover of every major business magazine and every major business. journal. and Fortune Magazine got it about right and that is the oink factor. How far will these corporate executives go? How far will these pigs go at the trough to grab hold of the assets of a corporation at the same time that they are letting their employees go down the tubes? Yes. it is the oink factor. It is CEO pay. it is guaranteed pension plans. These captains of capitalists. these crusaders of the capitalist system. what do they want out of the system? They want a guarantee that no matter if the company goes bankrupt. no matter if they run the company into the ground. no matter if the company is successful. they want a guarantee that they will be protected financially forever into the future. That is what they wanted at American Airlines. That is what they wanted at Delta Airlines. That Is what they wanted at Enron. 0l 1315 Today. the Republican bill is silent on that greed. on that oink factor. But the Democratic bill offers something different to the Members of this House. who have heard from their constituents about the devastation of their retirement plans. There is none of us in this House that have not gone to a picnic. have not gone to a family gathering. have not gone to a graduation where people have not said that they are postponing their retirement because the retirement plan is not all they thought it would be. who say their spouse Is going to have to work a little longer than they thought. who thought the place they were going to retire to in another State or in the country is not available to them any longer because their retirement plans have been devastated because of the activities of so many corporations. Today we have a chance to takV the oink. to take the oink. out of this pension system. We will be given the opportunity to vote on a substitute to where the problem is when executives loot. as the Delta people tried to loot the pension plan of the Delta workers. but to guarantee and insure their own pension plans. The Republican answer is oink. The answer In the Democratic bill is equity for employees. As the President said at the beginning of the Enron scandal. what is good for the captain is good for the sailor. But the Republicans in Congress do not think so. and the Delta executives did not think so 2 years later. where executives lie to their employees and do not provide full disclosure about what the executives are doing with the corporate assets and with the pension assets. Once again. there is nothing in their bill. just a big oink for those executives. We require full disclosure for those employees. With regard to the conflicts of interest on investment advice. the heart of the Republican bill is to provide that conflicted investment advice to flow to those employees. not independent investment counselors. but the very people who will be earning commissions and fees from the investment of those funds. The question is. are the American public and employees not entitled to better? These are the same people who will allow corporate executives to dedicate hundreds of thousands of dollars to giving investment advice of all different kinds to the executives of those corporations. but do not want to give that kind of advice or help those people out with respect to advice for the employees. Finally. with regard to older workers. now with hundreds of companies poised to move from a defined benefit plan to a cash balance plan. where the shorthand is this. that older workers in their fifties who have been with companies 10 or 15 years stand to lose 30 to 50 percent of their retirement assets. This is not speculation. this is what happened last time they did this. We have a bar on them doing that again. This administration wants to remove that bar. There are hundreds of corporations who are poised to make this conversion. and those employees will lose those pension assets. If you are 50 or 55 years old. there is no place you can go to make that up. But the company thinks that they can loot your pension assets to help out their bottom line. So there is a stark contrast to be offered to the Members of Congress. There is a stark contrast to be offered to the workers of this country about the protection and the security of Americas pensions. about the protection and the security. because that is the issue here today. It is not whether or not employees should have access to conflicted information. That is of no real value to thosQe aiployees.