Rep. Peter DeFazio: "Today every American who fills up their gas tank is going to pay an extra $.70, Seventy cents per gallon, as a tribute to speculators on Wall Street. That's right seventy cents a gallon is due to hedge fund speculation, derivative and commodities speculation on Wall Street.
It didn't used to be this way. Before Enron, we prohibited this sort of speculation on Wall Street, there was a special law passed for Enron, 'Ken Boy', remember that, George Bush's favorite guy, Enron bankrupt, 'Ken Boy' Lay, who knows where he is now, but the law still lives on. It was changed in Dodd-Frank to give new opportunities for The Commodities Futures Trading Commission to begin to regulate speculation on Wall Street, but the Republicans are fighting tooth and nail against the regulation of speculation on Wall Street.
Today we'll consider a bill that would deprive The Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the watchdogs, of new computers. The Republicans say 'We can't afford 60 million dollars for computers at The Commodities Futures Trading Commission to track a $400 Trillion dollar market', to track track speculators that spent $25 Billion dollars on Super computers last year so they could drive up the price of gasoline and manipulate markets without detection, No, we can't afford that. They've got your back, speculators, the Republicans are with you all the way.
Every American who buys an airplane ticket today, who can still afford it, some, to take their family on vacation, you'll see a little sur-tax on fuel. That's another tribute to the speculators on Wall Street who've unnecessarily driven up the price of oil and gas.
There is, at this point, a surplus of oil and gas in the world, more than we've seen in years. Production is up, demand is down, stockpiles are up, and the price is up, and guess what, the profits at the Oil Companies are up phenomenally and the profits on Wall Street are obscene. Do the Republicans want to do anything about that? No. They would like to distract you. They don't want you to look at who is profiting from your pain and from destroying our economy.
Their generous friends on Wall Street, they are oh so generous at election time to the Republicans side of the isle. The Republicans friends in Big Oil, who are oh so generous to Republicans at election time. 'It's not them! It's, price is driven by supply and demand, if we drill more, drill here, drill now, that'll solve the problem!' It won't solve the problem because the speculators are controlling the market. If we could double US oil supply tomorrow, they'd still be charging us seventy cents or more a gallon through unbridled speculation.
We have an opportunity to reign that in. If we reject the Republicans' proposal today to take away computers and staff from the regulators, to prevent the reforms from going into place, to finally begin to close the Enron loophole created by Republicans, for Republicans and for Wall Street we could, almost immediately, drive down the price of gasoline seventy cents a gallon. Nothing they are proposing can do that. What we're proposing will benefit American families today, the economy, put people back to work, and yeah, unfortunately it will will reign in some of these obscene profits at Exxon-Mobile and some of the obscene profits at Goldman Sachs and other speculators on Wall Street are making today, they might have to go out and make honest loans and earn an honest living instead of gambling.
So it's a pretty clear choice; who are you with? Are you with the speculators or with the American people?"