The Progressive Message
Floor Speech
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Mr. ELLISON. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for recognizing me for this hour.
I am going to speak for a time, and then I am going to yield my time to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Jackson), who has an important message, but I would like to start by just talking to the American people about the Progressive message.
You can sit at your television sets and you can watch this broadcast. For the last hour, what you would have heard is people claiming that you can get jobs by just taking away our health and safety rules, by just getting rid of regulation--and magically, we're going to get jobs. Well, we've had the Clean Air Act in place since the early seventies; we saw record job growth in the 1990s; and we have seen the Bush era, which was when the Republicans had the House, the Senate and the White House--the lowest job era in modern memory. They have tried their way, and they got us into this mess.
I will never forget that it was January 2009 when this country lost 741,000 jobs in that month alone, and the Democrats and President Obama have been building it back ever since.
The Progressive message is about the antidote to that line of argument--that the rich don't have enough money, that the poor have too much, that asking our American corporations to look after health and safety laws is too much of a burden, that we have to sacrifice our lungs so that some multinational can make even more money.
No, no, no.
The Progressive message is where we stand up for small business people, where we talk about the right to organize on the job, where we get into the conversation about civil rights and human rights, where we talk about peace at home and abroad, and where we talk about the importance of protecting our environment.
I want to welcome a great Member from Texas, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who has just joined me for the moment. I thank the gen tle lady for joining me with the Progressive message.
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Mr. ELLISON. I thank the gen tle lady.
In a moment, I will yield to my good friend from Illinois, Jesse Jackson.
But I do want to say that as you talk about the least of these, we are talking about poor folks who need some home heating oil, children who need Head Start; right? We are talking about people who need the SNAP program, the food stamp program. We are talking about students who need some help to be able to afford a college education.
And my question is: Will the rich and the wealthy and the well-to-do of America pay a little bit more to help this happen? Bank of America didn't pay a single penny in Federal income tax in 2009. Boeing, despite receiving billions of dollars in Federal Government contracts every single year in taxpayer money, Boeing didn't pay a dime in U.S. Federal corporate income taxes between 2008 and 2010. Citigroup. Citigroup's deferred income taxes for the third quarter of 2010 amounted to a grand total of zero. At the same time, Citigroup continued to pay its staff lavishly. John Havens, the head of Citigroup's investment bank, is expected to be the bank's highest paid executive for the second year in a row, with compensation of $9.5 million.
ExxonMobil, Big Oil, dodgers, use offshore subsidies in the Caribbean to avoid paying their fair share. Although ExxonMobil paid $15 billion in taxes in 2009, none of it went to the American Treasury. This is the same year that the company overtook Walmart in the Fortune 500. Meanwhile, the total compensation for ExxonMobil's CEO was about $29 million.
Of course General Electric, 2009, the world's largest corporation, filed more than 7,000 tax returns and still paid nothing to America's Government. GE has managed to do this with the aid of a rigged Tax Code that essentially subsidizes companies for losing profits and allows them to set up tax havens overseas.
So let me just say, on behalf of the people who need food stamps, on behalf of the people who need college tuition, on behalf of the folks who need home heating oil because of cold winters, on behalf of the people who are struggling to make it in America today, will our most privileged Americans do anything? The Progressive Caucus thinks they ought to do something.
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Mr. ELLISON. Thank you, Congresswoman.
Let me yield to the gentleman from Illinois who is going to talk to us about infrastructure, very important, putting Americans back to work.
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