we are working together here. We have to get this done. It is an international issue now and an international embarrassment for us here in Congress.

This uncertainty and volatility has been driven by unexpected global challenges such as the devastating and ungodly Russian war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic.

with the help and the combined help of our Republican Chairman at that time, Mike Conaway, and Collin Peterson, my good friend Austin Scott, and Chairman Thompson, we stopped it.

We are dealing with an $800 trillion piece of the world's economy here.

We are required by the law now and we are doing this. Dodd-Frank actually required us.

Systemic racism can be eliminated. It can be dealt with. We know how to, but we don't have the will to do it.

I am really worried about China, and right now, people may not know it, but China is the world's largest economy in terms of purchasing power.

We are not going to change and put the smaller and regional banks under the same financial obligation role as large banks.

I think it is very misguided. It works. And you and I worked on this.

And we have been helping them. We have been saving them.

We have to make sure HUD is adequately funded because part of the challenge is that it lacks the technology and staffing, people, that it needs to effectively operate.

We have to draw more attention to helping those people. It is public housing. That means it is congressional housing.

Public housing is how I got my start in politics. I represented all of the basic large public housing in Atlanta as I launched my political career, so I am very concerned about it.

About 10 years ago, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that we in Congress needed to spend $26 billion on construction projects for repairing the nation's stock of aging housing.

This is an extraordinarily important hearing, and because of this fact, China is now the second-largest economic system in the world, next to ours.

Although we have some very starkly different foreign policy and political differences with China, as the whole world knows, this one fact is true: China cannot be ignored as a global power in the global economy.

Protecting our consumers from online fraud and theft has now become the number-one issue facing the security of our great financial system.

We do not need to be dependent on foreign sources of food.

Ninety percent of our food supply, I will say that, again, 90 percent of our food supply in this country comes from 12 percent of the farmers.

The proposals that come before this Committee by groups on the far right and the far left that would effectively disincentivize those farm families to purchase crop insurance are detrimental to the whole ag industry and the food supply in…

one thing we cannot do without is food.

I also want to thank Ranking Member G.T. Thompson, who, as a fellow farmer not only knows the challenges that farmers face personally, but also as someone who is in a critical leadership position.

I want to mention Kiss the Ground, an extraordinary film that opened my eyes to much of what I was only dimly aware.

I want to thank Chairman Scott for having the vision and courage to call this hearing today about what I believe is one of the most important issues of our time.

Our food comes from the soil.