John Garamendi: “Thank you. Madam Speaker, it is a great honor to be here with the other freshmen. We are new to this system, but we are…”

“Thank you. Madam Speaker, it is a great honor to be here with the other freshmen. We are new to this system, but we are not new to the problems in our districts or in our Nation. We often go home on weekends to spend time in our districts. And what I have found in the district that I represent and the East Bay of California is a lot of pain, a lot of people that are suffering, but are filled with hope with the possibility that things are indeed turning around. I met a carpenter 2 weekends ago. He is a member of the carpenters union, and he had been out of work for about 8 months. The housing industry had literally shut down, and he had been thrown aside. And he said to me, 'Why can't those bankers make loans to my company? Why can't they do that? They have been given hundreds of billions of dollars, and yet they cannot make a loan.' One of the things that we have been working on here is to force those bankers to make loans, to use our tax money not for the great bonuses that they are giving themselves this month, but rather to use that tax money to put people to work with loans to this home construction company that this carpenter was once employed by.”