Political Quotes

“Madam President, this is a pretty disappointing thing to see on the floor of the Senate--a discussion about the potential of having unemployment insurance at this point in time lapse, let it lapse during one of the steepest recessions since the Great Depression. Unemployment insurance is not some abstraction when we have 15 million, 16 million, 17 million people who got up this morning in this country and looked for work, people who lost their jobs and then searched valiantly to find a new job and could not find a new job, and so they pay their rent, they buy food, they provide for their children, they buy school clothes with unemployment insurance. We are told: We cannot reach an agreement, so we will just let it expire. We will not extend it. It will be OK. It will be OK for everybody here who gets up and showers in the morning and puts on a nice blue suit and comes to work. There is nobody here who is unemployed, but there are a whole lot of people in this country who are unemployed. If ever there were a need to extend unemployment insurance, it is now. We cannot do that to the most vulnerable people in this country. It is very interesting. It was not too many months ago that there was a proposal on the floor of the Senate: Let's give $700 billion to the biggest financial firms in America to bail them out. They ran this country into the ditch with unbelievable greed and speculation and recklessness.…”