Thomas Foley: “I am chairman of the Travel and Tourism Caucus, and I can underscore the concern in this building today is to get the…”

“I am chairman of the Travel and Tourism Caucus, and I can underscore the concern in this building today is to get the economy moving. Now, I respect the concerns of the other Members of this body who are worried about employees and safeguards for employees. I struggle with those issues, too; but if we do not deal with this issue rather quickly, there will not be employees at all, regardless of the efforts of those to protect them in this bill. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 1,200 points this week. I left my home a moment ago to watch the news out of BWI airport talking about massive layoffs. Wall Street is looking and the major banks around the globe are watching what we do tonight to decide whether any credit will be available for airlines. So we have a real choice here today. We have a choice of helping immediately, move some economic stimulus, loan guarantees to the airline industry or we can sit here and twiddle our thumbs and assume that this will fix itself. Wall Street is saying it will not. I can assure you, based on the economic model that I am seeing in Florida, Hawaii, California, New York, Texas, Arkansas, I do not have time to go over 50 States, but stick around because the economic pain is real, not imagined.”