Brad Sherman

First, I want to join the gentleman from Illinois in expressing my concern and solidarity with the people of American Samoa at this time.

The overriding message here is this knowledge needs to be made available, and I hope that we do that as quickly as possible.

If Congress doesn't act, maybe that is irresponsible.

I think the only thing irresponsible is to tell the people of the world they are not going to have access to all the knowledge in all the books for which authors cannot be found.

I think the principles of that law, if not directly applicable to copyright, but the general principle of law in my State is that we want unused property and unclaimed property made use of, and we want the ultimate owner to be compensated…

I think we need to take a step back and just think of how wonderful it is that we are going to see 100 million books available in every village on this planet.

September 11 occurred because we, as Americans, were too damned arrogant to realize we were vulnerable and too comfortable to think the unthinkable.

The G-20 will never do this. We have a right to say that you cannot borrow more than a certain amount from Americans as a single financial institution.

We need to design a system for the future that is bailout free.

Let us talk about breaking up those that are too big to fail before we talk about bailing them out.

Too big to fail means too big to exist.

The Federal Reserve is a very powerful government agency exercising government power. The proposal now is to give them a lot more power.

We are going to lose 47,000 jobs if you prosecute.

We have got so many conflicts of interest and so little time.

The only thing perhaps more important than protecting consumers is protecting the Constitution.

Absolutely. And we have had a lot of hearings in this room about rate caps, and sometimes they seem like a good idea, and sometimes they don't.

We certainly all want to make things work better for consumers.

We need to make sure that credit default swaps and similar derivatives are classified as insurance, and are subject to reserves.

We might also look at the civil law to see whether those whose actions have cost us perhaps $700 billion... would be liable to the Federal Government.

I think we were more generous with the workers than we were with the bondholders.

So if the devil wants to join your organization, the only question is, does his dues check clear?

What concerns me is that everyone in this room is just focused on how is it working for corporate America and not what is happened to the economy and the country and what risks have been taken by the taxpayer.

I voted for that, because when I looked at all the ways they could use the TARP money, bailing out the auto dealers seemed to be among the better.

Obviously, saving the auto industry is very important. At the same time, we have to make sure that all creditors are treated according to the law.

I think it's important not who pays the credit rating agency, but who selects the credit rating agency.