Political Quotes

“Madam President, I come to the Senate floor today to discuss what I consider an often overlooked issue that is of central importance to the well-being of American consumers and our Nation's economic strength, and that is antitrust enforcement. Before I was a Senator, I was a prosecutor for 8 years, and before that, I was a lawyer in private practice. Early in my legal career, my main client when I was a brandnew lawyer was MCI. At the time, MCI was a young, innovative telecom company that was determined to disrupt the telecom industry by competing with first long-distance carriers and then local monopoly carriers. It was exciting for me to represent a company like that. They had a lot of scrappy lawyers who viewed themselves as fighting for consumers to give them some alternatives and lower prices. I remember that at one of my regulatory hearings, I actually quoted the first words Alexander Graham Bell said over the telephone: ``Come here, Watson, I need you.'' But in the Wild West world of MCI, when they were getting ready to relay the first-ever communication between St. Louis and Chicago--which seems odd to the younger pages here--at the time, Bell companies dominated all telecoms, and we only had those old-style telephones and only one company in an area that offered service. So MCI came in to compete by building their own line between St. Louis and Chicago.…”