By Sherry Koonce
The Port Arthur News
September 23, 2008 09:52 pm
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By Sherry Koonce
The News staff writer
U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) was in Washington D.C. Tuesday taking up two key financial issues — one directly impacting Southeast Texans, and the other, American taxpayers.
Hutchision is leading the Senate charge to appropriate between $7 million and $10 million in funding for Hurricane Ike recovery. Details of the Ike bill are expected to be considered Wednesday, Matt Mackowiak, Hutchison’s press secretary, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Though the Texas senator sent the majority of her time during a Senate hearing addressing the Wall Street bailout, she did preface her floor speech with concerns about Texans impacted by the hurricane.
“I have been in meetings all morning trying to work through the hurricane relief that is certainly important to my home state of Texas; meeting with mayors of Houston and Galveston as they go to their hearing for oversight for FEMA and disaster relief. I know we are learning much about what can be done and we are doing so much better than any previous hurricane,” Hutchision said in a press release issued from the senator’s Washington office.
Hutchison went on to say she was absorbed in the Wall Street financial crisis that is affecting so many people, jobs, families and lives.
Amid dire economic warnings, Congressional leaders are considering approval of the administration’s emergency $700 billion financial bailout plan for Wall Street.
“All of us are going to be making some very tough decisions this week” she said.
Hutchison said she was looking for a package that protects the American family — those that put their money in a money market fund as well as a bank deposit.
“We need to protect those money markets funds so that no one will lose their life savings because they’re doing what is right for their families to save their retirement or their futures or for their emergency needs. For people to be able to keep their homes,” she said.
Hutchison said the bailout package should ensure that Americans can continue working to pay their mortgages, whether they are current, or are trying to work with banks and mortgage companies to lower or extend interest rates, and have an agreement in place.
The second part of the package should assure that taxpayers have the regulatory underpinnings that would assure they are protected.
“Politics should be thrown out the window right now. We should be talking about what is our role, our fiduciary responsibility as elected officials by the taxpayers and we should be doing it on a bipartisan basis,” she said.
According to the Associated Press, the legislation that the administration is promoting would allow the government to buy bad mortgages and other rotten assets held by troubled banks and financial institutions. Getting those debts off their books should bolster those companies’ balance sheets, making them more inclined to lend and easing one of the biggest choke points in the credit crisis. If the plan works, it should help lift a major weight off an already sputtering national economy.
Separately, the AP reported, investigations have begun for four institutions whose collapse helped trigger the financial crisis. They include, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc., and insurer American International Group Inc.
Still in the preliminary stages, the inquiries will focus on the financial institutions and the people who ran them, according to the AP.
Contact this reporter at skoonce@panews.com.
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