Political Quotes

“The Presiding Officer and I and another 20 or so Senators listened yesterday in the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee to the CEOs of the Nation's six largest banks testify to our committee. Those six CEOs are among--or maybe the six most--powerful business people in America. I look to what has happened to my hometown of Mansfield, OH, and to Zanesville, OH, and Lima and Chillicothe and Portsmouth and Springfield--medium-size industrial cities that 40 years ago were prosperous industrial communities that created and which were the homes of thousands--tens of thousands, really, of good-paying union jobs, allowing people out of high school to go into the plant and make a decent middle-class living, allowing them to send their kids to North Central State or Mansfield OSU or Denison or schools all over Ohio. But in the last 30 or 40 years, we have seen what Wall Street has done. Wall Street has done just fine for themselves. We have seen profits go up dramatically. We have seen executive compensation stratospheric--tens of millions of dollars for most of these CEOs and their earnings every year and their compensation. But we see middle-class wages in places like Toledo and Akron simply flat. And we heard a lot at that hearing yesterday, from these CEOs, about how much they value their employees. Yet not one of these CEOs agreed to remain neutral if their workers want to unionize.…”