Tom Harkin

I want to raise my concern today that Mr. Becker's ethics disclosure paperwork has not been updated with the Office of Government Ethics since July 2009.

I am concerned that the Majority has scheduled a vote on Mr. Becker for Thursday.

I'm very proud of you, Mr. Becker, and I'm proud you're going to be on the National Labor Relations Board.

I will be looking for specific assurances with respect to specific statutes and regarding specific limits on the Board's authority.

Serious concerns have been raised by HELP Committee members and the employer community about Mr. Becker's writings.

The NLRB is a small agency, but its mission is a large one, to 'encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and protect the exercise by workers of full freedom of association.'

Give them a better workplace, and you will retain them better.

You get that dollar spending more in our economy than just going overseas somewhere.

If we don't get the votes to pass the debt limit, we are in danger of defaulting, and I don't know what that means.

Our country has never defaulted since the deal was struck with Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.

We need to do something on a permanent basis that we can scale up at these moments.

Thank you, Senator Reed. You talked about the high unemployment among the youth in this country.

Sixteen billion dollars would have done a heck of a lot for schools in this country.

If we were to put money into school construction and renovation, could you put that money to use this summer?

We are keeping schools in session 20, 30, 40--no, 50, 70 years.

I think some direct job creation by Government would be the most cost effective at all.

I ask that Congress move forward with jobs legislation quickly.

The need for ARRA and the inclusion of funding for States was clear.

Policy, frankly, under both Democrats and Republicans, have not put having good jobs, good-quality jobs at the center of economic policy.

I feel passionately about this subject and think that investment in all forms of renewable energy can be key to future job creation.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: attracting them, maintaining them, creating them, and helping those without them find them.

What is even more startling than that is that the upper 0.1 of 1 percent, the upper 0.1 of the top 1 percent, representing about 13,000 households, reaped more than one-third of all the income growth of the last 20 years.

It has got to be done and in a direct investment because the systems are already starved for money right now.

Timely passage of an extension of ARRA's enhanced FMAP and SFSF provisions would greatly assist us in maintaining services.

I have asked Senator Murray to sort of head up our Workforce Investment Act (WIA) reauthorization not on this subcommittee, but on the HELP Committee.