May 29, 2008

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Congressional Update from Washington
Rome Rotary Club

I am very honored to be in Floyd County at the Rome Rotary Club and the Rotary Memorial Wall that pays tribute to the sacrifice of the men and women from Floyd County in pursuit of freedom and liberty and peace.

I want you to think about something for just a minute. I stand before you today because I’m an elected representative in a democratic country and a free republic. I’m about to give a speech and tell you exactly what I think.

I’m being taped by a press that’s going to write in the newspaper and I have no fear that anyone is going to attack me or put me in jail. On Sunday, I go to the Methodist church, but I could go to the Jewish synagogue on Saturday – it’s my choice. I can hunt and I can bear arms. I have every liberty that any man could possibly have and we all share the same liberty and the same freedom. And do you know why? Because of the ultimate sacrifice paid by thousands of Americans over 230 years to fight for the freedoms and the liberty that we all enjoy.

Today in our audience are Jan and Joe Johnson. Their son, Justin, on April 10, 2004, gave the ultimate sacrifice for the American people and I wish the richest blessings of the good Lord on your family forever for what you have given and done for all of us. Thank you very much.

Trish Benefield is sitting next to them, and Trish is a part of the Silver Star Families. These are the volunteers that go around our country, tending to the needs of the wounded soldiers who come back to America after engaging in conflict around the world. It’s countless volunteers like you, Trish, that make the country the great place that it is. Thank you for what you do.

On this Memorial Day week, it is an honor for me to pay tribute to the United States of America. We’ve already paid tribute to one in terms of Justin Johnson, but just out of curiosity, everyone here who’s a veteran of the United States Armed Forces, please stand up. You deserve a big round of applause. Thank you for your service. And of all those loved ones, husbands and wives, who support and comfort those in our armed services, you also serve the United States of America.

As a member of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, I make an effort wherever I go to tend to veterans’ needs. Before I came here today, I had the privilege of touring the new Veterans’ Clinic that Phil Gingrey and I worked so hard on to make happen for this community. I shook hands with veterans, who for years had to drive all the way to Atlanta to get their services, who now are able to come and get the services here that they so richly deserve.

As a member of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, I try to travel to the American cemeteries around the world to pay tribute to our soldiers who have lost their lives and sacrificed to ensure the liberties of you and me. I’ve been to Carthage, Tunisia, where Patton defeated Rommel and the U.S. cemetery there. I’ve been to Normandy, and to Belleau Wood and to Margraten and to the American cemetery in Paris, as well as other cemeteries around the world to pay tribute to those soldiers, those men and women, who in World War I or in World War II, sacrificed on our behalf.

I’ll tell you two stories on this Memorial Day that hopefully will give you an extra sense of appreciation for the men and women of the U.S. armed services. Four years ago at the U.S. European command in Stuttgart, Germany, I, along with two other members of the Senate, attended a reception to honor a general who was being transferred in to take over the U.S. command in Europe. It was given by the local community because that command is so important to Stuttgart. It was a reception where there were a number of German citizens from the community there along with the U.S. military.

As a member of the Senate, I felt obligated to go around the room and introduce myself, and thank the Germans for allowing the United States to have such a significant investment in that part of the world with our military. I walked up to a group of about five young German men, and one obviously elderly German man. I noticed the younger ones were talking and the older one had a real scowl on his face. So, I walked in to hopefully change whatever the subject was, and stuck my hand out and started talking to them. One of the young men said, ‘We’re glad you’re here Senator Isakson. We were just talking about what a bully the United States of America is and how really, we don’t have them to thank for anything.’

I kind of dropped my head for a minute until this old man who had a pained expression on his face put his finger in the young man’s face, and said, ‘Young man I want you to understand something. You’re right about one thing. We don’t have America to thank for anything, we have America to thank for everything.’ And he described what it was like in Nazi Germany; what it was like when Europe was freed; what it was like when Germany was freed; what it was like when the Nazis were eliminated; what it was like when the Marshall Plan rebuilt the country, and what it is like today to have a partner like the United States of America. And he said, ‘I pay tribute every year at the American cemetery in Germany because I know I would not be here today were it not for the sacrifice of those Americans.’

Two years ago, I spoke at the American cemetery at Margraten in the Netherlands, which is probably, even compared to Normandy, the most beautiful place that I have ever seen in all my life. You know a lot of Memorial Days, like this Memorial Day in America, when you go to a U.S. cemetery you will see some Americans, but you don’t really see a big crowd. A lot of times our Memorial Day parades aren’t really as big as you think they ought to be, and I’d like to tell you about Margraten in the Netherlands. There were 17,000 Dutch at the Memorial Day Ceremony at the American Cemetery in Margraten. The Royal Dutch Air Force did a missing man flyover while the 100-member senior Dutch choir sang ‘God Bless America.’ And 17,000 members of that community in Margraten stood at attention and paid tribute to the soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge that saved their country, saved their future and saved their lives.

We are a blessed country because of the men and women who serve us today. We are blessed that clubs like yours have taken the time to pay tribute like you’ve done since 1994 to those from Floyd County who have sacrificed and died on behalf of our country. And with that subject being addressed, and with all the news the last day or so about a book that’s been written by the president’s former press secretary, I thought I’d address our present situation in Iraq and Afghanistan for just a second.

You’re not reading a lot about that in the newspaper anymore, and the reason for that is that most often the news is very, very good. I go to Iraq every year. You know, I believe everything I’m told in Washington, but when it comes to our men and women being deployed in harm’s way, I believe in trusting, but I believe in verifying, and I like to go see firsthand what’s happening on the ground with our young men and young women.

My trip this year was remarkable unlike any other year. I walked in the streets of Baghdad outside the ‘Green Zone.’ Yes, I had a bullet proof vest on. Yes, I had a bullet proof helmet on. But before, they’d never even let us out of the Green Zone.

I walked with a United States Army Colonel making $500 to $1,000 micro grants to refugees coming back from Syria to reopen their bakeries, their repair shops and their clothing shops in downtown Baghdad in a subdivision called Ghazaliya, which is where I happened to be that day. I shook hands with countless soldiers from the United States of America’s Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force, who talked about the pride they had in the provincial reconstruction teams who were rebuilding portions of Iraq that two or three years ago they had fought in hand-to-hand combat and in urban combat against Al-Qaeda operatives.

It’s still a dangerous place. There are still problems. But the sacrifices that have been made in Iraq and Afghanistan of the young men and women of the United States of America have not been in vain and will not be in vain, and we are close to a situation where we will be in Iraq as an invited guest in a democracy in a very dangerous part of the world. And that’s good for America, that’s good for the Middle East, and that’s good for the world. So those sacrifices are already paying a dividend.

And I ask you to consider one other thing. The big test that all of us have had, the big concern we’ve all had is after the sacrifice, after the commitment America makes will the Iraqis really be willing and able to defend themselves and operate as a free, independent country. This year we’ve gotten more indicators that the answer is yes than ever before.

It has gone unnoticed by most, but President al-Maliki, a Shia and the leader of the country, has done two things that demonstrated that Iraq has matured to a country that may be capable of doing precisely that. In Basra when the British left, they were not replaced by American soldiers or coalition soldiers; they were replaced by Iraqi soldiers, and they were Shia Iraqi soldiers who were deployed against a Shia Iraqi population. Two weeks ago, when the Iraqi Army went in to Sadr City and confronted and attacked and started to eliminate Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia army, it was a breaking point for history because a Shia leader of Iraq deployed his Shia military, militarily to fire shots against other Shias, which meant that the importance of Iraq superseded any sect that they might share in Islam, whish is a huge breakthrough for the future of Iraq.

I will tell you this, it’s not over, and we will have more sacrifice, and we will have difficulty, but I think you are seeing the beginning of the end of the United States combat engagement, and the beginning of the takeover of the defense of the Iraqi country by the Iraqi military itself. They will need our logistical support, they will need our tactical support, but in the end, in the years to come, the sacrifice that has been given will be rewarded by what American soldiers have always fought for and that is the right for other people to enjoy the peace, liberty, and freedom that you and I are so blessed and lucky to enjoy, and I believe that is what will happen.

Now somebody mentioned tongue-in-cheek what I could do about gas prices, and I said nothing but that’s really not true. I want to talk about what is the number one subject in the state of Georgia today. I’ve done 47 events over three weeks around the state in the last two months when I’ve been home for a week. And in every place without exception when I opened the floor for questions, the first I get is ‘What are you going to do about my gas prices?’ And so I want to share with you what I shared with the President of the United States of America last week in a meeting we had.

Periodically, they’ll have 10 or 12 of us over to talk about what is on our mind, which I appreciate having the opportunity to do, and I’ve always tried not to talk about what is on my mind, but what is on your mind because I’m an extension of you in Washington, D.C. So when it came my turn, I said to the President ‘the number one issue in America is the price of gasoline, and I want to make a suggestion to you. I think it’s time that Republicans and Democrats put aside their partisan differences over energy policy, joined together, and declared war on foreign imported oil.’

In fact, I think it’s time somebody stood up and made a speech just like John Kennedy did about sending a man to the moon and back again to the world to tell the world that the United States of America is going to declare war on imported oil, and within ten years, we’re going to reduce our dependence by 35 percent.. The difference in Kennedy’s admonition to go to the moon and then come back again in the 1960s, which we didn’t know how to do, is we do know how to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of whether we have the will to do so.

It’s important that, as a Republican, I understand that yes, conservation doesn’t mean you can solve the problem, but conservation is a part of the solution and we ought to be promoting it. And Democrats, who tend not to like nuclear energy, ought to understand nuclear energy is not the only solution, but it is the biggest single component of reducing dependence on foreign imported oil and reducing the carbon that we emit into our atmosphere, and it’s safe, and it’s reliable and we know the technology. It’s important for all of us to understand that renewable sources of energy and biofuels and ethanol are very important and that we ought to empower them and that we ought to empower them equally.

Congress should make sure that if we have an incentive for corn-based ethanol, it ought to be matched in its incentive to cellulosic ethanol. It’s a lot easier for us to make ethanol out of old dead pine limbs and pine trees, than the corn we grow which competes with our feedstock and our foodstock. It’s important for all of us that we do everything in conservation to reduce our dependence on energy and shave off our peaks that reduces our dependence on foreign oil. It’s important that we empower General Motors and Chrysler and Ford and Toyota and everybody else to more rapidly bring forward the hybrid vehicles that are so important in reducing our dependence.

We can do it, and I think we’ve reached the tipping point in the United States of America. Somehow you people always used to say ‘what do you think the point is that the American people are going to be sick and tired of the gas prices going up’ and I think three dollars and eighty-three cents was the right number because it seemed like a couple of weeks ago when it hit, that’s when it became on everyone’s mind. The United States of America has many great things going for it, and we are a great country that has proven time and again, decade after decade that we can do anything we set our mind to do. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, more important now than for the Congress of the United States and the President of the United States to join in a united effort to reduce our dependence on foreign imported oil in order to empower ourselves.

And, lastly on that point, you’ll notice that as I went through all those solutions, I never mentioned exploration in ANWR, or offshore. Those are controversial, I think they are important, we ought to do them. It’s ridiculous to sit on a resource that you have and not extract it, and end up paying $127 per barrel to three of your worst enemies: Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. That doesn’t make any sense; we ought to be doing it.

There are a lot of good solutions and men and women of good will in Washington who need to come together and make this the number one priority of the Congress of the United States this year. Because it’s a presidential year, there are a lot of things that just aren’t going to happen because of presidential politics, but there is no excuse for not adopting a comprehensive energy policy that begins the reduction of our dependence on foreign oil and foreign energy.

One other point I want to make. The other big issue we were talking about at our table has been the overall economy, the sub-prime pricing that began hitting us last August and what the future looks like. I want to share with you a couple of thoughts. Thought number one is the Secretary of the Treasury, I think, did a remarkable thing when he saved the Bear Sterns/JP Morgan deal. There are a lot of people who have criticized Washington for providing liquidity to make that deal happen, but let me tell you that if that had not happened, it may have been the first of many dominoes in the investment banking community.

The United States has the best banking system in the world. Alexander Hamilton was brilliant, and those that have followed him as Treasury Secretary and in our Federal Reserve have done a marvelous job to have a transparent, mechanical banking system that has survived very difficult times in the past and will in the future. But there is no accountability and no transparency on Wall Street. The sub-prime prices that we have in my opinion is a direct result of no transparency and no accountability, because basically high risk, high yield, securitized mortgages were rated by Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s as high as A and AA and sold into the world marketplace and the minute those mortgages started to go into foreclosure, which you knew many of them would because they were high risk, those securities became worthless and their yield didn’t mean nearly as much, and those who bought them, many of them hedge funds who borrowed 100 percent of the equity to buy them in the first place, collapsed on their own weight, and that was because no one took the time to look at what was really going on.

That would not have happened in the banking system, but it happened in the investment banking system, so I hope when this is behind us, and I’m not a big regulate guy, I’m not a guy who wants more big government, I’m not a guy who says government can do it better or fix, but I do think an independent pair of eyes over your shoulder and accountability for certain disciplines make for a better system, and I think Wall Street needs that and needs it now. We had the Enron situation, which took place, and the WorldCom situation, which took place, and the overreaction to that was a law, Sarbanes-Oxley, that has gone a lot further than it should have. I’m not suggesting that, but I am suggesting transparency, and I am suggesting accountability like our banking system has. If we do that, we won’t have that type of crisis again. The results of that crisis have been a collapse of the housing industry, a constriction of available credit, and banks having some very difficult times.

But I tell everybody we are very fortunate. Our unemployment rate is five percent which when I went to the University of Georgia in 1966, five percent unemployment was full employment because at any one given time that many people are going to be sick, infirm, or just not working on their own choice. Inflation has bumped up, but it’s still remarkably low, interest rates are very competitive, so the economy has all the indicators that we’ll be okay. We’re just going to be in the soft trough until we absorb the standing housing inventory in major urban centers around the country and until the banks get their feet back on the floor.

Lastly to that end, I want you to support the legislation we passed in the Senate on major government-sponsored enterprise reform, that’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We raised the loan limits, on the two different versions. The House bill raises it to 719,000, the Senate to 550; we need to get it to about $650,000 in terms of conforming limit. We put a lot of money in the modernization of the FHA and we created ability for people in troubled sub-prime loans to re-finance through an FHA-insured loan, providing that the lender who made the sub-prime loan takes the financial hit that in takes in terms of the degraded value of the profit. For an example, somebody bought a house on 100 percent interest-only, sub-prime loan and paid $150,000 two years ago. They are now in trouble and the market has declined and that house is now worth $100,000. If they can come in at FHA and re-finance at $100,000, if the bank or lender that made the loan will eat the $50,000 that they’re going to eat anyway through foreclosure, we’ll refinance them out of a sub-prime debt and into an FHA-insured loan, save that house from being foreclosed on, keep that family in the foreclosure, and really begin to do what is most important, and that is stabilize the base-line values of housing in the United States of America. That decline has caused us a bigger problem in our economy than any other single thing with the constriction of the values of equity.

But again, I end where I started. Thank you for dedicating this plaza in honor of the men and women who have sacrificed from Floyd County in the wars that the United States has fought around the world. Thank you for the contribution you make to our country. Thank you for giving me the privilege to be here today with you.