David Obey: “these agencies, these regulatory agencies in this bill, are not very well known by the American people, but I think this…”

“these agencies, these regulatory agencies in this bill, are not very well known by the American people, but I think this amendment is consistent with the efforts made by Republican Congresses in the past 25 years to slowly but surely weaken and cripple the ability of regulatory agencies to keep the big boys honest and to protect the little people in this society from abuse and to protect legitimate capitalists from chiseling competitors. If you take a look at what happened to the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, for instance, from 1980 on, the protective capacity of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission was being shrunk at the same time that America experienced the greatest wave of corporate mergers and corporate acquisitions in the Nation's history. The staff of the Consumer Product Safety Commission during that time was cut in half, since 1980. And as I said last night, the ability of the SEC to keep up with its workload was crunched because over that same period of time corporate filings reviewed by the Agency declined from 21 percent to about 8 percent in 2000. That means the rest of the filings never even got a look-see. Now, the Federal Trade Commission: its job is simply to protect the consumers, to protect them against antitrust and a variety of noncompetitive practices. The SEC is charged with the responsibility of protecting investors, so we don't have more Enrons.…”