Political Quotes

“This literally is an issue about Main Street versus Wall Street. This is about whether we are going to help Main Street in tough economics times, or whether we are going to continue to say that Wall Street gets the ear of Congress. I am someone who didn't vote for either of the TARP pieces of legislation. I can assure my colleagues that this legislation is focused at the problem that was caused by Wall Street. Many people across America are asking when we are going to stand up for small businesses in America and help Main Street recover from this economic disaster. How did we get into this situation? We got into this situation when large banks failed because of their active participation in things such as credit default swaps and other derivatives that weren't truly backed by financial commitments and basically became a house of cards, and they brought down our entire economic system. So what was our response to that? Our response to that was to bail out the big banks and give them assistance. What happened to the community banks?”