Jackie Speier

It is extraordinary, and it is wrong, and the American public is on to it.

It sounds fundamentally undemocratic that you don't have someone independently counting the ballots and that a majority is not required.

Paul Volcker said it very succinctly very recently when he said that the financial demise that we have just witnessed is the result of executive compensation that has been linked to riskier and riskier activity.

Thank you for holding this hearing on the Uniting American Families Act, which seeks to fix a fundamental injustice.

I commend Congressman Nadler and Chairman Leahy for introducing twin bills on this issue.

The move towards replacing State regulatory authority with Federal... is seriously misplaced and misguided.

you should never have been involved in derivatives. It was Glass Steagall that gave you the opportunity to get involved in derivatives.

That would suggest that we should reinstate the Glass Steagall Act, doesn't it?

The distinction that is being made is that these are taxpayer funds that were invested in A1 and A instrumentalities, both notes and bonds, and that these taxpayers should be repaid.

But you have attempted to establish that somehow what happened to Orange County should happen to these jurisdictions.

When you look at what we are asking for here, it is about $1.7 billion nationwide.

The bill deals just directly with losses incurred because of the Lehman investments.

I think those are the tough decisions you have to make every day, and clearly those decisions keep coming.

Let Goldman repay its bailout and use that money where it is really needed, in our local communities.

So much of our taxpayer money in TARP and the bailouts of AIG and others have gone to private institutions.

I feel it is highly inequitable to use TARP funding to shore up banks and to bail out failing corporations but fail to protect agencies' taxpayer dollars.

If I recall correctly, the investments that were being made in Orange County would not be defined as prudent; is that correct?

I did listen to his entire testimony, and my interpretation was that he was suggesting that if Orange County made some bad mistakes and they kind of swallowed hard and dealt with it, then these jurisdictions should do the same thing.

If I could, we specifically don't deal with pension funds. So it is not our intention to see pension funds reimbursed.

We want to make those who were taxpayer entities, local jurisdictions, be able to be made whole with TARP money.

So you are really trying to suggest that their prudent activity was linked to Mr. Citron's very imprudent investment policies.

So you, then, would not be opposed to having TARP moneys being spent to bail out Wall Street companies, but you have an objection to having TARP moneys used to bail out local jurisdictions; is that correct?

The difference is these are taxpayer entities, and we want taxpayer money to be returned to these taxpayer entities.

Restoring the value of these Lehman bonds is perhaps the fastest way to bring relief to communities across America.

The minimal oversight of these products by the FDA poses a significant danger to consumers and is, frankly, an embarrassment.