Political Quotes

“thank you, and thank you to the Senator from Louisiana and your clarion call to go into battle, to fight for small businesses in our Nation. We all know small businesses are the job-creating factories in America and that if we do not go to battle for our small businesses, that, indeed, we will be in this recession for a very long time, which will be certainly bad for our small businesses, it will be bad for all the citizens who would be employed by those businesses, and will certainly be bad for all those trapped in the deep, long recession. So I thank the Senator for her leadership. Also, I would like to thank very much Senator Cantwell for her outspoken advocacy on behalf of small businesses and on behalf of this effort to provide liquidity; to my colleague from California, Senator Boxer, who got involved very early as a partner in creating a plan to help address this fundamental challenge. That challenge is the small businesses are having their credit lines cut and they are going to their community banks and their community banks are observing that, unfortunately, they are at the leverage maximum allowed under the rules so they cannot do additional lending. So here we have banks that would like to lend. We have small businesses that would like to borrow and be able to put more people to work, to seize opportunities in our economy. But they cannot do it because we have this malfunction.”